Panther in the Sky (98 page)

A wordless song in his soul had led him to ride down Wildcat Creek, across the ice of the frozen Wabash, and up the valley to this place. The song, like that of a flute inside his head but unheard by the others, had grown louder and louder as he rode. Now it was more than two hours past the middle of the night. The song had become one single high note. Tecumseh waited, looking down on the Wabash-se-pe, this benign and ancient river that began in the old lost Shawnee land of O-hi-o and curved westward past the ruins of Prophet’s Town and then southward past Vincennes, its waters eventually flowing into the O-hi-o-se-pe and thence into the Missi-se-pe.…

Tecumseh’s gaze went toward the horizon in the southwest, beyond which lay that confluence and the place where he had felt
the Center of Time. And as he looked, he heard the distant wingbeats of the white dove, growing louder and louder.

The horses nearby began to nicker and move restlessly. The rock under Tecumseh’s feet began to tremble, and he heard dislodged fragments of stone begin to fall clattering down the cliff below him.

Now a terrible, deep rumbling rolled up the valley and grew to a roar. Dead trees cracked and fell in the woods below, with crackling of branches and loud thuds. Crows cawed in alarm, and owls fluttered out of the swaying branches and could be seen wheeling over the snow fields. Tecumseh’s chieftains cried out in amazement and reached toward him, to pull him back from the cliff’s edge, but at that moment, as if the whole earth were a rolling wave of water, the ground swelled and surged under them, knocking them off their feet. The horses fell down, whinnying, rolling about, kicking their legs wildly as they tried to get back up. Slabs of stone as big as houses cracked off the cliff and went thundering end over end down the steep slope below, crushing and flattening trees as they went.

The roaring grew louder, and the earth jolted more violently. But Tecumseh alone did not lose his balance. At times all his life he had felt this shaking earth when no one else had, and now it could not buck him off his feet. His chieftains were on the ground, trying to rise, their voices faint and their cries unintelligible in the deafening roar, which sounded like a war, the cracking and breaking of trees like volleys of musket fire, the great rumbles like the thunder of a hundred cannons.

Tecumseh stood with his right hand raised toward heaven and felt the hand gripped in a field of power; it was as if the hand would hold him up even if the entire cliff should drop out from under his feet. Now in the uproar of grating, grinding, and rumbling he heard the high note again, but now it was the shriek of a multitude of ghostly voices, as if the shaking and splitting of the world were opening the graves of all the red men, those buried since the battle, those buried after the great plagues of the white men’s diseases, those buried after the terrible wars with the Iroquois, those buried hundreds of years ago in the big mounds along the riversides; yes, all red men who had drowned when Kokomthena’s grandson Rounded-Side had stabbed the water giant’s belly and flooded the earth; yes, every red man who had ever died since the Beginning was calling up through the cracking earth.

I
N HIS HUT ON
W
ILDCAT
C
REEK
, O
PEN
D
OOR WAS HAVING
his nightmare again, in which Tecumseh had his hair in his hands and was shaking his brains loose. He always woke from the nightmare whimpering or whining, and his wife would sit up and smack him lightly on the cheek until he would calm down and realize he had been dreaming.

But this time when he awoke and cried out, his wife was screaming beside him, and the fire in the center of the hut was sending up showers of sparks as if it were being poked by a stick, and the ground under their bedding was jolting so hard that his head was being snapped back and forth upon his neck, his neck that was still so sore from the punishment Tecumseh had given him. Pieces of bark fell from the roof onto the bed. Open Door looked up through the gaps in the collapsing roof and saw the stars jerking and trembling in the sky. Pottery was breaking in the house. Trees were falling down in the woods nearby. More bark fell from the roof. Some of it had fallen over the fire and now was starting to blaze up.

Open Door yelled at her to follow him out. They tried to get up but were thrown to the ground. At last they crawled out into the snow. The camp was falling apart. Several huts were, like their own, on fire. The people were yelling and crying and could not stand up in the snow. The whole countryside seemed to be lurching, as if the world were coming to an end.

Star Watcher and Cat Pouncing, unable to stand, were kneeling on the snow together, holding hands to keep from losing each other. Star Watcher was frightened, and there were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling with gratitude and joy. Her brother the Shooting Star had indeed known the great truth.

This was at last the sign he had looked for all his life!

F
OR TWO DAYS THE EARTH SHOOK, PAUSED, SHOOK AGAIN.
The air darkened with dust, and the sun grew dull. Houses were wrenched apart; creeks went dry, and streams began flowing where none had before. The water in the Great Lakes swelled and sloshed like water in a jiggling cup. The Missi-se-pe changed its channel in many places, flooding lowlands, raising its bed to the air in great surges. Its muddy waters roiled and bubbled with ooze and in some places even stopped and flowed upstream. In the lowlands near the mouth of the O-hi-o, vast areas of terrain crumpled and changed shape. The land in river bends sank down, and the brown water rushed in, tossing big trees and house timbers and barges about like flotsam. Across the Missi-se-pe from the old
Spanish town of New Madrid, the land upon which Tecumseh had camped on his journey to the south suddenly dropped, and the river water roared into the enormous depression, forming a lake five to ten miles across, filled with seething brown water, with gigantic clouds of mist rising off of it. The frontier was in a turmoil; people and animals were in panic. On the plains west of the Great River, herds of bison were thrown off their feet, scrambled up and stampeded for miles until they were thrown by another jolt. Deer and small animals darted everywhere or stood cowering, their eyes full of fear; some ran until they died.

In the south, the dusty sky was always full of flights of millions of disturbed waterfowl. In the town of Tuckabatchee, Big Warrior ran outside his house and turned to watch it collapse. Everywhere around him, houses were falling down and people were screaming, trapped under rubble and thatch. In Pushmataha’s Choctaw town, walls shook and pots fell over, and he knew at once that all his warriors would be remembering Tecumseh.

T
HE GREAT QUAKING RESUMED FOUR TIMES IN THE NEXT
two moons and was felt every place Tecumseh had ever trod in his years of traveling. Forests lay in tangles. Hundreds of square miles of lowland lay covered with mud and dead fish and debris. Raw earth gaped where once there had been wooded or grassy slopes. And dust blew and settled over the desolation, making the snow dirty and the sun red.

The Year of the Signs was past. Open Door the Shawnee prophet had lost his power and hung about like a pariah dog. But the damage he had done to the cause of the alliance was already healing itself.

And in his heart Tecumseh felt a greater strength and resolve than he had ever felt. A lifetime of soul questions had been answered for him. His face set like granite, he told Star Watcher:

“The Seventeen Fires and Canada are on the verge of war. When it begins, the British will help us regain our homelands. My followers will come back to me to fight the Long Knives. Warriors everywhere have seen the great sign, and they are remembering my words, and they will be coming to join me in Canada. Your husband will be among them, he has promised me. You come, too.”

“Have I not always been with you? Am I not the Watcher of the Shooting Star?”

S
TAR
W
ATCHER HAD FOLLOWED
T
ECUMSEH TO
C
ANADA
with the thought that the Long Knife intruders would be left far behind, that for a long time she would not have to hear the dreadful thunder of guns.

But already her days were troubled by the nearby noise of battle and the worry that her brother and her husband, in the midst of it, might not come home.

What Tecumseh had predicted had come to be. The Americans had declared war on the English king and immediately tried to invade Canada. Their hunger for the lands of other peoples was insatiable.

Now, in the Blackberry Moon, Star Watcher and the women who had come here from the Wabash-se-pe were trying to prepare for the Green Corn ceremony. They had built a Great House and cleared a Stomp Ground here on the Island of the White Trees in the Detroit River. Now they were grinding meal and preparing packets of seeds for the sacred hoop. They had saved some of their own strains of bean, corn, and squash seeds during the flight from Tippecanoe, and every place they moved, they tried to grow at least enough of these sacred plants to harvest seeds for the next year. This had been one of the hardest things for the women to do in the time of the Long Knives, for seed cannot be hurried, but it was one of their sacred duties.

The women worked and worried. Somehow there would have to be a Green Corn ceremony, war or no war. Our Grandmother expected the tribute; she had never said it would be easy every time, but plainly the People owe everything to their Creator. Besides that, the People enjoyed giving the tribute probably as much as Kokomthena enjoyed receiving it.

Tecumseh had assured these worrying women, “We will have our gathering for Our Grandmother. Even General Hull and his
American army will not prevent it. I will stop him before time for Green Corn.”

Everybody, especially the British, had thought that would be impossible. Hull, the American general who occupied Detroit on the American side of the river, had summoned an army of twenty-five hundred and brought them up from O-hi-o even before the war was declared. Then early in this moon he had crossed the river onto Canadian soil at Sandwich and started down the fourteen-mile road toward Amherstburg and the undermanned British post called Fort Malden, intending to capture that fort and the shipbuilding yard below it. It had seemed that there would be no way to stop him. The two hundred Redcoats in Fort Malden had thought they were doomed. It had been expected that the American flag would be on the pole, above the fort by now.

But Star Watcher, from where she sat on the island, could see the British fort on the east bank of the river, and it still had the pretty English flag over it. The British were still there because of what her brother had done, and she was so proud of him that her heart sang as she worked. For with less than two hundred warriors and a small company of Amherstburg militiamen, Tecumseh had done like the wolves around the herd. He had set up a series of ambushes and worried the American army to a halt, holding it there at a safe distance from the fort until a British warship could come in from Lake Erie and command the road with its cannons.

Then, with that uncanny sense of strategy that had gained him the immediate admiration of the Redcoat officers, Tecumseh had crossed quickly to the American side of the river and laid another series of ambushes that had blocked the Americans’ messages and supplies between O-hi-o and Detroit. He had captured important American dispatches and turned them over to the British at Fort Malden. Thus cut off, the American general finally had withdrawn his army from the Canadian shore, and they were now all sitting at Detroit on their own side of the river, surrounded by Indians and cut off from their supplies. What the Long Knives had started as a bold offensive had suddenly become a trap, because of Tecumseh’s actions.

Now as Star Watcher worked, she heard gunfire beginning to pop and rattle, very faint and far up on the other side of the wide river, the noise barely audible in the still, hot air. It was much shooting, and it went on for a long time. Star Watcher prayed for her brother and her husband and all the others as she worked. At one time during the afternoon her heartbeat began racing, for
no reason she knew of, and not long afterward the shooting noises faded as a breeze from the west arose.

W
HEN
T
ECUMSEH AND HIS WARRIORS RETURNED TO THE ISLAND
in canoes that evening, his legging was soaked with blood from a buckshot wound in his left thigh. Once again, as she had done so often in his life, Star Watcher repaired his torn flesh. He could hardly move the stiffening limb, but he was very cheerful. With the help of a few Redcoats, he and his warriors had ambushed six hundred American horsemen who tried to break out of the encirclement of Detroit and reopen their supply route. “We did well this day, my sister,” he said. “They are still caught in their own fort, and they are getting hungry. Ha! They should have stayed in their own country!”