Panther in the Sky (56 page)

C
HIEFS AND WARRIORS OF TWELVE TRIBES WENT TO CONCLUDE
the peace treaty with General Wayne the next summer. He stood straddling their lands and all their waterways and main trails, and they knew he would not wait forever for them to decide. He could go and destroy every ear of corn in the Middle Ground this summer if he grew impatient. He had built a huge fort on a branch of the Stillwater River, named Greenville in honor of his old commander in the war. The main Shawnee chiefs who went to Greenville were Black Hoof, Blue Jacket, and Black Snake. Little Turtle went for the Miamis, with his adopted son Wells, the Wild Potato, as his interpreter. Breaker-in-Pieces and Twisting Vines went for the Delawares and Tarhe the Crane for the Wyandots. Tecumseh sent Big Fish to attend and listen and to bring back a true report of everything.

B
IG
F
ISH NEVER RETURNED.

In the Plum Moon, Blue Jacket rode to Tecumseh’s town to tell him what had happened at the council. In his eyes was the look of a whipped man. Tecumseh called a village council to hear him.

Blue Jacket told in detail of the exchange of white peace wampum between the chiefs and the American general. He told of the long days of talk and ceremony and of the measures of whiskey the Americans had given out to mellow the hearts of the embittered chiefs and warriors. He described the enormous fort with its gardens and the general’s huge log house inside, and the great council house outside the fort, where all the talking had been done. He made it clear that such a place could have been built only by much wealth and power. Finally he told of the treaty terms. From the first words, Tecumseh had to clench his jaw to keep from crying out.

“We who marked that treaty,” Blue Jacket said, “promised never to raise the hatchet against the white men again. We promised never again to dispute the Long Knives’ control over the old
homelands. What were Shawnee lands are now white men’s lands. Even this town you have just built is on land now owned by the Sixteen Fires. Only on the other side of the Auglaize River is still the red man’s land.

“In return for those lost lands, the chief of each tribe will be given one thousand dollars each year for his people. Dollars are their kind of wampum. It was not easy for our chiefs to understand the value of those things called dollars, but we were warned that we would need these dollars if we are to live in a country run in the ways of the white men, and I am afraid that is true.

“It was agreed also,” he went on, his eyes dull, voice growing tired, “that all captives held on both sides are to be exchanged. They made your brother Big Fish go back to his native race, and his name is now Ruddell again. But,” Blue Jacket said over the dismal murmur of his listeners, “he told me that he will come back to us some way, that the Shawnee are his people. We who marked that treaty were Black Hoof, and Black Snake, Tarhe the Crane, and Leatherlips of the Wyandots, Twisting Vines and Breaker-in-Pieces of the Delawares. And Little Turtle, who defeated the Long Knife army two years, spoke for peace at last and made his mark.”

As Blue Jacket told all this, he began to fade, and Tecumseh now saw him as he had first seen him four and twenty summers ago: on his elbows and knees in the line of the gauntlet, bleeding under the blows of switches but not crying out. Tecumseh, heart aching, remembered whipping him in his frenzy.

Beyond that Tecumseh could not listen.

The great chiefs Blue Jacket and Black Hoof and Little Turtle suddenly had become, in Tecumseh’s mind, men who were no more. There was no reason any longer even to listen to them. These tired men had given away to their enemies everything. They had made the whole Shawnee world a world that was no more.

Tecumseh, nearly strangling with remorse, thought of the towns—of beautiful old Chillicothe, embraced in a curved bluff beside the green river; of Kispoko Town, where his father had been chief a generation ago; of Piqua Town, his own birthplace, where he had made his Vision Quest so many years ago, that place where these same chiefs had fought so hard and long against the Long Knife Clark; he thought of the deer trails and the hunting grounds whose every hill and valley and spring he had known, of the meadows where he had sat in silent moonlight or watched fireflies twinkle like drifting stars, of islands in the rivers, of the
mounds of the ancient fathers, of bottomlands where he had gazed into cedarwood fires or smoked meat into jerky, of particular caves and trees where Chiksika had sat with him and taught him the Shawnee way; he thought of the great numbers of dome-shaped
wigewas
that had filled the old towns and remembered how they had looked to the returning hunter, all soft gray in the gloaming with fires gleaming warm everywhere; he remembered the smells of Shawnee cake and meat cooking and the murmuring voices of the people who had felt safe and happy in those old towns, a people happy because they were the ancient and great Shawandasse, the South Wind People, the free People. He remembered the drumbeats and singing and the chatter of deer-hoof rattles at the Bread Dance and the Green Corn Dance and the roaring laughter at the Frolic Dances and the ball games. He remembered the feel of mud under his feet at the river’s edge in his childhood, and the sacred mud on his feet in the ceremonies of the spring council, and the old chiefs scattering the sacred tobacco around the ceremonial ground and the altar, and he remembered the power and the spirit whisperings discernible in the mild night air at those ceremonies, back when his People had been strong and proud and happy because they were living as Weshemoneto wished them to live, free, on the land where he had placed them.

And now so quickly all that proud and happy world was gone. That dark-eyed, bitter-mouthed old man Black Hoof had thrown it to the white men in return for a worthless and unholy something called annuity dollars, in return for some peace and safety.

All of it gone! Everything Tecumseh had ever known, everything that had fed his soul! Black Hoof had given that all away! Black Hoof had given away his own soul, but worse, he had given away the soul of his People! Tecumseh’s father and two of his own brothers had died readily and without fear to keep it from being lost. But Black Hoof had given it away!

What would the People become now? Without these things they would be dead even though they kept walking around!

“But not I,” Tecumseh said, interrupting whatever Blue Jacket had been saying. “I signed no treaty, and by the law of our People I am not bound by what you promised the whitefaces. The land and the way still live in
my
heart! These things will keep on living, if I have them in me. I will take them someplace else, and I will keep them alive, somehow, and if the white men come to that place, I will fight them as long as I have a breath, and I will never
grow so old and tired that I will lean back and say, ‘White man, it is yours.’
Never!”

And then, unable to bear any longer the sorrow and shame of the defeated chief, Tecumseh did what he would never have done before.

He stood up and turned his back on him and walked out. Outside the council house, the wind was warm, and clouds were moving past the face of the moon, where Our Grandmother bent over her cooking pot. In the wind there were voices.

Star Watcher went outdoors and gazed at her brother, but he did not see her; he was seeing things from his life dreams.

He remembered the wolves passing with the moons in their eyes. The white dove. The earth trembling. The one-eyed face of someone called Tenskwatawa, Open Door. The young officer beside the Long Knife general, the young officer whose name, Blue Jacket had informed him, was Harrison.
Harrison.

All these things were yet to be. And if they were yet to be, the fight was not over, the Shawnee were not yet dead. Not all of them would stay with Black Hoof and be walking dead men.

Once again it was necessary for the Shawnees to divide, to follow their hearts in two different directions. Tecumseh felt the cold of death coming from where Blue Jacket sat. But no, he thought, taking his
pa-waw-ka
stone in his hand and feeling its heat. No!

I am still alive. I am still Shawnee. All the past of the Shawnees is gathered in my head and my breast. Those who go with me will be given all I have of it, and they will still live, and they will still be Shawnee.

He did not yet know what he would have to do. But it was he who would have to do it. His aching heart pumped his defiant blood as he prayed, despite the tragedy he had just seen:

“The Great Good Spirit favors our People.”

S
TAR
W
ATCHER AND HER LITTLEST DAUGHTER WERE WEAVING
mats for the floor of their house in Tecumseh’s third new town when he came and sat down nearby, as he did often at this time of afternoon. He watched them work and seemed lost in thought.

Star Watcher was twisting the pairs of fiber strands that laced the rows of cattail reeds together, while the girl sorted the reeds and handed them to her one at a time. She would place one reed small end first, then the next one large end first, the next small end first. “If we do not turn them this way and that,” she explained to the little girl, “then the mat would be longer on one side, or it would bulge here and draw up there and not lie flat. Remember?” She had already woven one little bad example to show the child how not to do it. Taught in this way, she knew, the girl would always remember just how to do it.

It was almost dusk and would soon be too dark for any more weaving. It was a time of day Star Watcher loved. The last meal of the day had been eaten and most of the work was done, and the children were tired enough to be most calm and affectionate, and this was true in most of the families, so the noises of the village were low and cheerful.

This was Tecumseh’s third new village because the first, on Deer Creek, had been inside the white man’s imaginary treaty lines, and the second, though west of the line, had proven to be too close; the Long Knife hunters and liquor sellers and spies had come around almost immediately. To them, it seemed, the line was to keep red men out, not to keep themselves in. Tecumseh had told the liquor sellers: “It is only you white men who say there is a line on the earth. If you are the only ones who can see this line, why are we the only ones to obey it?” Then he had fed them and sent them away, telling them that if they came near his village again, he would spill their liquor on the ground, and that if they came back still again, he would spill their blood on the ground.

Star Watcher understood that the treaty made by Wayne and the old chiefs two summers ago was a promise of peace and brotherhood
by both sides. But, like her brother, she sensed that it was just another time like that twenty-five years ago when the line had been a visible one, the Beautiful River, and the whites had started coming across. It would not be long, she was sure, before all the old troubles would build up again. Everything goes around and comes again; like sunrise and sunset, summer and winter, seed and harvest, birth and death, there would likewise be peace and war. She was thinking this and tying off the fibers at the edge of the mat when Tecumseh startled her by saying:

“I have thought long on your words and the words of all the others, and now I am ready to have a wife.”

Such a bittersweetness swelled in her that she did not have any words at first and brought him into the house to give him a tea of sassafras root and maple sugar so she could get her thoughts together. She had expected to be very happy if he ever made this decision. What she could not understand was why she felt sad, too, and even a little angry, but not angry at him. Soon she realized that she was angry at the woman who was to be the wife. Her heart was saying,
This is our chosen one. You cannot care for him as well as I have done.

Star Watcher was sure the woman would be She-Is-Favored, though Tecumseh had not said so yet. Always she had thought that She-Is-Favored would be the best mate he could find. But now all at once she could think of things she did not like so much about her. The young woman was like a bird egg, so full of herself that there would be room for nothing else. She seemed to be as her name implied, so favored that no one was good enough for her.

When I was that young, Star Watcher thought, I was as beautiful as she is, but I do not think I was so full of myself. I do not
think
I was. I hope I was not.

“Is it to be the Peckuwe woman?” she asked finally.

He smiled. “You will be pleased that it is. The things you have said in her favor are true, as I have seen, too. She is strong of heart and quick in her mind, and will be a good women’s chief.”

“A little lazy, perhaps,” Star Watcher said, letting the words slip out before thinking better.

He frowned. “Why do you find a fault, you who have praised her to me? You and Loud Noise always say I should have a wife. When I choose to, you tell me she is lazy. And Loud Noise tells me she is a ball puller! Do you not know your minds?”

“Just a
little
lazy,” Star Watcher said, looking down. “Not enough to bother you, perhaps.”

“Ha! And I suppose just a
little
of a ball puller, not enough to bother me? Our brother is small in spirit, to say such things he does not know.”

She shrugged. She thought about telling him her suspicion that the maiden had once pulled the balls of Loud Noise but decided not to retell an old tale that made Loud Noise seem even sorrier than he did already. “Brother,” she said, “I am very happy that you choose to do this. I will be more pleased than you can imagine, to see you with a wife and children. And I do believe that She-Is-Favored is the right woman.” She was looking up at his eyes now, and her own were shining, and the little wrinkles of smiling radiated from their corners. She put her hand on his wrist and said, “What has made you decide to do this now?”