Panther in the Sky (7 page)

“Yes,” replied Corn Dog, a bleary-eyed neighbor. “That would be a good idea, a new tribe. On the other side of the river.”

Hard Striker was worried and upset, and this joke made him angry, but he did not show it. He told the people: “We got much meat. My own son Chiksika killed two bucks and a doe. In a while we will share meat. Now let me look at my sons. Three of them! Think of it! Ah! Tecumseh, my son! Come up in my arms!” The little boy, home from his aunt’s, was hugging his father’s leg and trying to climb. Hard Striker lifted him and tossed him twice and caught him to make him laugh. Then, still holding him, he knelt to watch the runt baby sucking furiously, making his fierce noises. The other two newborns were asleep, wrapped in a doeskin on the mat beside her.

“I need another teat,” Turtle Mother said wistfully.

“Ha, ha! That would be something! Three of them! Think of it! Where is daughter?”

“She is in the women’s lodge.”

“Ah.” A momentary sadness crossed his face. “She is a woman now. Was she scared?”

“She went happily.”

“Good. She is always happy. May she always be happy.” While he talked and held Tecumseh, Hard Striker with his free hand was pulling down the robe and examining the two sleeping babies. “They look good,” he said. Then to her, with tenderness thickening his voice, he said, “My wife. You become a legend. I have the greatest woman of our nation. Even greater I think than Tall Soldier Woman.” Nonhelema, Tall Soldier Woman, Cornstalk’s sister, was a great female Shawnee village chief. Her town was across the river, on the Peckuwe Plains. “Now let me see this one,” Hard Striker said. He knelt closer to his wife and began to study the suckling infant. His face went grim. Tecumseh sat on his father’s thigh and regarded the baby with equal gravity.

“He does not look promising,” Hard Striker said.

“He is weak,” she admitted. “All his strength is in his mouth.” The fire crackled, and the feeding baby muttered and gulped.

Then Hard Striker asked the awful question, because something was becoming apparent to him even though the baby was cradled in her arm.

“Is he crooked?”

She sighed, bit her lower lip, and blinked. “He is crooked.” And then she rushed on. “No doubt he was crowded in the womb.
But his bones are still soft; surely the cradleboard will straighten his body as he grows!” She had been giving this much thought during the long, sleepless two days since the babies’ birth. She had fingered every inch of the little warped body with pity and agony and fear in her heart, and had come to believe that there was a slight chance he could grow straight and not be forever lame or deformed. He did not have any fused joints, any strange holes in his bones, or any terrible growths or markings on him. He was simply a cramped, spindly thing with a narrow and lopsided head, like a bean. He would not necessarily become a cripple, she believed. But he
was
dubious.

“I should talk with the shaman,” Hard Striker said. He frowned. The Kispoko village medicine man was lacking in wisdom and spiritual power, compared with Change-of-Feathers. He had ideas that were alien to traditional teachings, and many of the women in the sept were afraid of him because of such ideas. One of the ideas he had put forward was that if a baby looked as if it would be crippled, a sufferer and a burden to the tribe, it should be left out to die. The Shawnees never did this, but Turtle Mother knew this shaman sometimes recommended it, and she was afraid.

Hard Striker turned his eyes away from the runt, as if it hurt him to look at it anymore. She saw that look in his eyes and feared what he might be thinking. Her husband had talked often with the shaman and knew that sometimes it would make sense not to allow a certain child to grow up. Animal herds keep themselves strong and healthy, he knew, by weeding out the weak and sick, and the Kispoko, being the warrior sept, should keep itself as strong and vigorous as it could. Still, though Hard Striker understood the sense of it, he was troubled by the idea.

T
HE
K
ISPOKO MEDICINE MAN CAME, AND AFTER LOOKING
thoughtfully at the screaming runt for a long time and then sitting with his eyes shut and a feathered medicine stick in his hands, he rose and went out into the snow. Hard Striker followed him out, and they stood in the cold under the stars. The medicine man began walking among the
wigewas,
and after a while the two men were far enough toward the edge of the town that they could hardly hear the baby crying. It seemed that it would be easier to talk about its fate without its voice in their ears. Behind them, the soft light from fires leaked out of cracks and passageways of the bark huts, making little yellow rays of warmth on the trampled snow. Beyond the edge of the village there lay only frigid
darkness, and Hard Striker could not keep himself from thinking of an infant left to die in such cold and darkness.

He said, his breath condensing in the terrible cold, “I wonder if the cradleboard would straighten him.”

“I fear,” said the shaman, “that he would cry himself to death long before then. And your family would grow sick from lack of sleep. Maybe,” he added after a pause, “your neighbors would try to persuade you to silence him anyway. It is bad for the chief of the sept to have such a troublesome thing in the midst of his own family.”

Hard Striker’s heart was heavy with dread and sadness. It did not seem that the shaman was going to counsel him to let the poor creature live. Hard Striker had been hoping that some hopeful word might come from him.

Now the shaman said:

“I think, though, that it could be dangerous not to nurture an infant born as one of three. That is a sign of much power. It is a great
unsoma,
like the shooting star. Maybe the Great Good Spirit means to test your faith and wisdom by giving you this loud and ugly one.”

The medicine man did not say it to the chief, but he was wondering whether the loud one might even be the work of Matchemoneto, the Evil Spirit, and he feared that great trouble could come to a village where a creature of the Evil Spirit was being raised. On the other hand, to abandon such a creature might bring even more evil upon the town. The shaman had never faced a problem like this, and he was bewildered by it, and it was made worse by being in the family of the chief.

Hard Striker felt that the medicine man might be thinking about Matchemoneto. He had thought of this, too. He had wondered which would be worse, to risk offending the Evil Spirit or to live with a creature of the Evil Spirit in one’s family. Any person in the tribe had his own medicine bag and could, if alarmed by this loud one, make witchcraft against it or against the whole family.

And so now the two most powerful men of the Shawnee warrior sept stood in the dark with the intense cold upon their heads, while pity and fear worked in their hearts.

T
URTLE
M
OTHER SAT LOOKING IN WONDERMENT AT THE
ugly little creature in her arm. It was not nursing now, and yet it was not crying. Its strange little face was for once in repose. It seemed to be asleep. The firelight limned the side of its head.
She could hear footsteps crunching on the snow, coming toward the
wigewa,
just one person’s footsteps. She knew it must be her husband. Her heart pounded with fright as the door flap opened and his hand, then face, then body, slipped into the firelight.

He sat down with his legs folded and held his hands over the fire, his face full of serious thought. But he said nothing for so long that finally she said:

“Do you notice that he has stopped crying?”

“Yes.”

After a while she asked, “What says the shaman?”

“He says that the little one is his own
unsoma.
He says that he should be named Lalawethika.”

“He-Makes-a-Loud-Noise.”

“Yes.”

“And …”

“And the naming day will be in seven days, so we must think of names for the other two as well, and watch for their signs.”

He looked across the fire at his wife’s face now, and he saw that a rill of tears had started down each side of her nose. Her chin was crumpled with crying, but she was smiling, too. Her body began to quake with voiceless sobs.

“I know you were afraid,” he said. “But have the Shawnee ever abandoned their children to the wolves?”

“My husband,” she said when at last she could speak. Her eyes were swimming in tears. “I am so happy.”

T
ECUMSEH, NOW IN HIS FOURTH SUMMER, WAS SQUATTING
in the sunlight with other little naked children watching Chiksika win the arrow-and-hoop game in the meadow when word came about the whiteface.

The hoop rolled fast, because it was thrown by a very good hoop roller named Thick Water, about nine years of age, tall and
long-armed. The hoop was made of limber green hickory with a mesh of willow strips inside. It would be rolled along a smoothed path, and boys alongside the path would try to shoot their arrows through it as it passed. A boy who could put an arrow through the hoop would then get to throw the hoop over arrows sticking in the ground, and he could keep any arrows he encircled with his throw. Chiksika, quick and unerring, had already won arrows from all the players his own age and now was winning them from young warriors, some of them years older. Whenever he won another arrow, he would bring it over and lay it on the ground in front of Tecumseh, who had the honor of guarding them for his big brother. Tecumseh would laugh and clap his hands together, then hunker more protectively over the growing pile of arrows while Chiksika swaggered back out, smiling and sweating, to win more. Such a hoard of arrows was a treasure. It took hours to make an arrow: to find and split and shave down a straight-enough shaft, to trim and attach the right-size feathers, and especially to get or make a good arrowhead. Not many boys, not even many men, knew how to flake flint into arrowheads anymore. For years the tribes had been dependent upon guns bought from white traders or captured in war, and even for the making of arrows, pieces of iron or brass were often used instead of flint, as they would not shatter when they struck a tree trunk or rock. But the metal-tipped arrows were not used in the arrow-and-hoop game, because any boy who had one would not risk losing it so easily.

And so Chiksika was just nocking another arrow to his bowstring, yelling cheerfully, and Thick Water, skinny, brown, and shining with sweat in the hot sunlight, was just getting poised to roll the hoop down the line again, when excited shouting was heard:

“Long Knife! Whiteface!”

At once everyone in the meadow tensed with alarm. Children looked confused and ready to run. Many people came running from the direction of the Scioto-se-pe, pouring out of the willow shade into the sunlight, some carrying clubs and staffs, some swishing willow switches through the air and yelling that a captured whiteface was being brought in to run the gauntlet.

The game players howled with delight and went sprinting off to join the running, shouting people. Chiksika ran to Tecumseh. He snatched up his arrows, crying, “Come! Hurry, little brother!” Tecumseh did not need to be called. He always followed Chiksika whenever and wherever he could. They sped through the sunny
grass toward the running mob, their hearts racing with excitement, yipping and howling. Tecumseh had hardly a notion what this was all about; he was yelping and running only because Chiksika was. His little legs pumped furiously as he tried to keep up, and his heart felt as if it would fly out of his mouth. Another little boy, running in front of him, bits of chaff stuck to his oiled buttocks, tripped and fell, and Tecumseh tumbled over him into the tall grass but scrambled to his feet and kept going at full tilt, his little feet padding on the ground. The air was full of dust and voices. Soon Chiksika had reached the edge of the stampeding crowd, and Tecumseh was still right behind him, charging alongside the welter of skirts, leggings, and bare legs.

Chiksika dodged in through the doorway of his father’s lodge, and Tecumseh tumbled into the gloom after him. A kettle of meat and hominy was simmering aromatically over the cookfire, but no one was tending it. Everyone had left in a hurry. Chiksika dumped his arrows beside a wall and snatched up a long hickory staff. He grabbed Tecumseh’s hand and pulled him out the door, back into the stream of running people, who were heading toward the center of the town.

Beside a brush fence in front of a
wigewa
sat an ancient woman too frail and bent to join the throng, but not too old to shriek encouragement and cackle with the joy of it all. Chiksika skidded to a stop before her, and Tecumseh ran into him from behind. “Old Grandmother,” Chiksika yelled into her ear, “I borrow this!” and he plucked a thin branch out of her fence and thrust it into Tecumseh’s hand, telling the woman, “We will bring it back with whiteface blood on it!” Then he was off again, Tecumseh on his heels.

Now they were going up the wide, packed-earth avenue that led to the grand council lodge, and on both sides of it the people were lining up, laughing, shouting, holding their sticks and clubs and switches, slashing them through the air to hear their vicious sound, hundreds of people of all ages. Most of the men were nearly naked in the summer heat, wearing only loincloths, their bodies agleam with sweat and the oil they put on to protect their skin from insects, the women wearing light frocks of doeskin or bright trade cloth or only small lap aprons. The children cavorting among them wore nothing but oil and dust.

As Chiksika and his little brother ran along the lines of excited people, they saw their mother, holding two of the triplets in her arms, and Star Watcher holding the little Loud Noise, who was crying lustily.

Nearer to the lodge they came upon Stands Firm, the young warrior who was Star Watcher’s suitor. Chiksika and Stands Firm admired each other and often hunted together, so Chiksika sprang into line next to him. They smiled at each other with a happy ferocity in their eyes and whipped their sticks noisily through the air. The shiny metal ornaments in Stands Firm’s decorated ears shook and glinted with his motions. Tecumseh stood between the two youths, hip high to them, full of admiration and excitement but still scarcely understanding what was happening. Stands Firm said: