“Black Fish, my brother. May we do great good in this council. May Weshemoneto smile on this town.”
Now Change-of-Feathers took Hard Striker’s hand, and his eyes searched Hard Striker’s face.
“First Warrior! Always I rejoice to see my son the Kispoko, and now on this day, more than ever before.”
“Father, I thank you. When I come through the trees and see this great town, my soul sings as if I were coming home. And now on this day more than ever I am happy to see my wise father and take his hand. You do me honor to come forth and welcome my family.”
“When the flying star went over, I saw in the eyes of a dream that a child was born in its very light. Was my vision true?”
“Exactly. Within the same breath, both came, the star and my son. All my family remarked on it with wonder.”
Change-of-Feathers, plainly much moved, took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder, and tears brimmed in his eyes. He held Hard Striker’s hand fervently in his own. Change-of-Feathers’ hands were soft and loose-fleshed, like his large body, but vibrantly strong, and one felt a living power flowing from their touch. Never a warrior, Change-of-Feathers had an air of gentleness about him, and his face, though manly, was tender and wise and expressive, rather like a grandmother’s. A row of puncture tattoos ran from ear to ear across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Change-of-Feathers went back now to greet Turtle Mother and to look at the infant. He studied it, murmuring something to himself. He put his soft hand on Turtle Mother’s head, then stroked the baby’s brow, opened its eyelids, and turned again to Hard Striker. “My son,” he said, “the coming of the flying star was a good sign for these councils, but it was yet more, because a son was born to our war chief. No other child was born in our nation on that night, from what we have heard.” The people were quiet now, Black Fish and Black Snake standing with them listening, the women and children listening from nearby. A cool breeze sighed in the grasses and the weed stalks in the meadow and shook the feathers of Change-of-Feathers’ staff. “Listen,” the medicine man went on. “It means more than I can yet explain. Eagle Speaker and I have talked of this. Eagle Speaker too had a dream.” Eagle Speaker was a seer, a younger man than Change-of-Feathers and a Bear Walker, one of the Shape Shifters through whom messages were often given to the People. “In the dream of Eagle Speaker, there was a long-tailed star in the sky for a year and then the earth shook, throwing things down. I must go out to fast and listen before I can know all it means. Cornstalk himself wants to know what they mean. He waits to see you in his lodge, and to learn of the child. For the naming of your son, you should know this:
“That passing light was the color of the panther’s eye. Several times our fathers have seen such stars. It is believed that it is the Eye of the Panther that forever moves in the night sky. This child’s eyes have that color.
“You are the chief of the Kispoko, called the Panther sept. You were traveling, passing from one place to another, when it came. That, too, has meaning. We see a panther only when he crosses our path. The panther says, ‘Nila ni tha’mthka: I cross someone’s path.’ And so we call the passing panther Tha’mthka. Think of this. I will tell you more when I can.
“But come. Cornstalk waits to welcome you, and the councils can begin. Hard Striker, my son, I have great joy in the birth of your boy. Great leaders are given to the People in times of the greatest need. By our law, only a Chalagawtha or a Thawegila can be the chief of all this nation, and your son is Kispoko. But in a time of war, the war chief is powerful. The whites will force us to wage war or surrender. A time of greatest need is coming. We shall see. Our lives are in the hands of Weshemoneto. Perhaps he will send this war chief across the path of the whitefaces. Come now.”
Hard Striker, as if in a trance of thought, swung onto the back of his horse, and all the people began moving back toward Chillicothe, following their chiefs and the shaman, the young ones running and skipping, barely aware of all these portents. And as they paraded into the crowded town, Hard Striker was deciding something. He looked over the heads of the people and saw the hazy blue bluffs looming above the town, beyond the river. He saw this with his eyes, but in his soul he was seeing the panther. He had already decided the name he would give his son. Tha’mthka. Tecumseh. The Panther Crossing the Sky. The Shooting Star.
And his daughter. One could change one’s name if another name became more right. Sky Watcher had been a good name for her until now. But she had first seen the shooting star, and she had helped this marked child into the world. She herself was already blessed with uncommon goodness and wisdom, the guardian virtues. She was most important to this child’s life. A truer name for her would be Star Watcher, Tecumapese.
2
KISPOKO TOWN, ON THE SCIOTO RIVER
Spring 1768
SOMETIMES IN SPRING TURTLE MOTHER WOULD HANG THE cradleboard from a limber bough near the garden clearing. Breezes would move the bough and cause the cradleboard to turn slowly and bob gently in the sun-dappled shade, and the baby would see the green of leaves, the golden flashes of sunshine, blue sky, red birds darting, women’s brown bodies bending and moving in the bean fields and vegetable gardens, all this revolving, everything in motion, the colors and the songs and laughter of the women and the twittering of birds sometimes making him squeal and chortle, sometimes lulling him to sleep. Days passed and seasons turned.
Or sometimes she carried the cradleboard on her back while she worked, and here too was motion, motion as she hoed amid the hot, summer-green smell of bean and corn leaves, motion as she pounded grain to meal or scraped hides to make leather beside the door of her husband’s lodge and talked with her daughter or told her stories of the People or sang with her, and the baby knew their two voices among the hundreds of voices in the town, and he was content when their two voices were calm and happy and near. He seldom cried, for the motions and the sounds and the colors of the peaceful days delighted all his growing perceptions. In his soft skullcase moved the surd, formless billows of baby thought, the gradual coalescence of patterns and recognitions, of needs and satisfactions, always with the motions, the nearnesses, the sounds. His mother’s round, brown, dark-nippled breasts hung over him, her hand released him from the straits of the cradleboard, fondled him, cleansed him, and anointed him with oil, delighting his naked skin, and then the oozy nipple would meet his sucking lips, and he would nourish himself blindly like a root in the earth, lulled by the oldest of all the sounds, her pumping heart. If he opened his eyes, he would see her glinting eyes above him, her large hand moving slowly to discourage some buzzing, tickling fly, and beyond, the leaves moving, the clouds moving. Or he would watch his own fat little hand clench and open or experimentally extend a finger at a time, perhaps knowing or perhaps not knowing that it was a part of him instead of one of the familiar moving things of the sensual world around him.
And sometimes the face of his sister, Star Watcher, would move into the round of his little world and loom before him with its white smile and its songs and its cooing and clucking sounds. Her face was as welcome as his mother’s, her caresses as kind, her skin as warm, her voice as musical; the only difference was that her little nipples did not give food.
And he came to know other faces, too: his father’s, usually high above him smiling down, the eagle feather in his hair translucent with sunlight, the silver bobs of his earrings glittering just out of reach, the deep roll of his voice filling the world. And his brother’s face, a different smile, dark hair without a feather or other ornaments, and the funny popping sounds he would make with his lips to start the baby giggling. Still the days passed and the seasons turned.
Then came days when he was kept close to his mother’s skin inside a musky-smelling animal hide, dark with interesting and tickly short hairs on it, and when the robe was opened the air on his skin was cold, a sensation new and needing to be understood. In those days there was always the sharp odor of smoke, and sometimes he would stay enchanted for long time
s by the light and movement of flames, contemplating fire and the moving shadows it made above him, hearing its soft or sharp little sounds. The fire was another familiar to him, always there, moving and making sounds, like another member of this family. Sometimes at night he would wake up, and though he could hear his mother’s heartbeat and her breathing, and feel the warmth of her skin, he could not see her or anyone else in the darkness of their wigewa, no one except the fire. It was always there, though sometimes it would be burned down to silent, shimmering embers, and though it looked different then from the flames, it still had motion and he would recognize it, and make sounds to it, wordless talk in the cold darkness between two warm and living things, baby and fire.
Still the days and nights passed and the seasons turned.
His bones were growing straight in the straight cradleboard. Constrained in it much of every day, his limbs and backbone and the back of his head aligned by its straight wooden back, he was unconsciously being molded into that erect posture that characterized the Shawnees and made them seem an unusually proud and handsome people. Chiksika, now in his thirteenth year, was nearly as tall and straight as his father the chief, whom he emulated in every way. Chiksika and Hard Striker were often gone for many days at a time in the winter, gone together with their horses and guns and bows, just the two of them or with other men of the town, to hunt up or down the river and in meadow-lands to the west and south for meat and hides, leaving Turtle Mother and Star Watcher and the baby in Kispoko Town. Sometimes during their absences there would be howling, shrieking blizzards, and the snow and cold winds would force their way into the bark house. It would be hard to keep the fire alive, and the smoke would blow back down through the smokehole, filling the house, stinging their eyes, and making their throats hurt. During such times there might be much discomfort and distress, the mother and daughter huddling together in robes, trying to keep the baby warm, and they would murmur anxiously to each other about the safety of Hard Striker and Chiksika, who were living out in it somewhere without even a wigewa. The baby could feel their distress as well as he could feel the cold and the smoke, and he would cry a great deal then, his little voice muffled by the robes and the shriek and moan of the snowy gale outside. In this first winter of his life there were several weeks of such white and screaming weather, and then weeks when the wind would stop blowing and the stars would come out, but the still air would be so cold that trees would crack and the snow on the ground would crunch loudly when people walked by outside. The hunters found little during these times or could not travel back to Kispoko Town because of the cold, and some days there was no food anywhere in the whole town, and then dogs and old horses would be killed and divided. Several old people and some children died from the cold and hunger and from sickness brought on by the cold. It was not uncommon in the lives of the Shawnee to suffer like this in midwinter. Some of the people lacked fingers and toes they had lost by freezing in winters past, and there was danger in going outside one’s lodge even to gather wood for the fires.
Sometimes this winter there was nothing for Turtle Mother and Star Watcher to eat for days. This they could bear because they understood and knew it would end eventually, but when a mother has had no nourishment for a long time, she cannot explain to her baby why her milk is not nourishing and why his stomach hurts and he never has the good sleepiness. And he cries.
But sooner or later a hunting party would return over the snowy meadow trail, wrapped to their ears in blankets and hides, their horses snorting frost, and these hunters would raise their cold-stiffened arms and cry a halloo to the village. Venison and bear and fowl, frozen rock hard, would be unloaded from the shivering horses and would be given not just to those hunters’ own families but to whoever was most weakened by hunger in the tribe. If there were five hundred hungry people in the town and one carcass, somehow it would be managed so that every person would receive either a sip of meat broth or a shred of flesh.
But sometimes a hunting party would come in with nothing, nearly dead from exposure, and if they came when the famine was most dire, there might be at most a hunter’s lame, scrawny horse to butcher, and the people would relish a taste of meat, even though it was bad meat, and then with it stuttering and gurgling in their bellies they could smile and hope for another day, for another and luckier hunting party to ride in, for their own husbands and fathers and brothers to arrive, for a warm wind to melt the snow and ice, or for some miracle from Weshemoneto: an elk getting trapped in broken ice in nearby Scippo Creek or the discovery of a part of a beaver carcass unfinished by wolves.
Then at last Hard Striker, Chiksika, and their hunters rode in across the twilit snow, yelling happily for help to unload and distribute the huge, hide-wrapped bundles of buffalo and elk and venison under which their horses were staggering in the deep snow. Soon, then, Hard Striker’s lodge was cozy with the heat from the cookfire and full of the delicious aroma and the flare and sizzle of roasting fat meat and the laughter and the familiar voices, happy, singing, tale telling. The baby was fed broth from a horn spoon and some warm marrow, strange tastes that caused him to look astonished and make serious faces, but then his stomach at last was content, and he went to sleep warmed by his parents’ bodies in their bed. And through the bark walls came the laughter and pleasant voices of the other people of the village who also had been fed.
And so the days and nights passed, and the spring came again. And the baby born under the shooting star, whom Change-of-Feathers had decided was destined to be a war chief of unusual courage and vision, passed from his first year into his second, and then similarly into his third, for it was a brief time of peace, and in times of peace the world rolls smoothly through its rounds, allowing its children to learn and play and become what they may.
3
KISPOKO TOWN, ON THE SCIOTO-SE-PE
January 1771
THIS TIME THERE WAS NO FLYING STAR OVER HER CHILDBED, but once again Turtle Mother’s labors were to produce a birth that the Shawnees would never forget. She was becoming a legend among mothers.
This time, her daughter was not present to soothe her and help her. Star Watcher had just come to the age to be a woman, and the moon had caused her blood to flow down for the first time, frightening her. Turtle Mother, already starting to labor, had explained it all to her and told her to put certain of her belongings into a bundle and go to the lodge at the end of town where each woman had to go when this was happening to her, whether it was her first time or she had been doing it for years. When the blood was coming down, they were not supposed to be touched or smelled, or even seen, her mother told her, except by other women who were bleeding, too. Hearing this, Star Watcher had looked afraid and ashamed. She already knew of the women’s lodge, of course; other girls and women had told her about it, and even her own mother had gone away there regularly during the times when she was not pregnant. But now that it was her own time, Star Watcher suddenly had felt herself to be loathsome. There was a boy in the town, a fine Chalagawtha boy named Wasegoboah, or Stands Firm, who played eyes with her. “Will Stands Firm know,” she had asked her mother, “that I am in the moon lodge? What will he think of me?”
And so Turtle Mother had had to pause in her labor and reassure her daughter. Most girls were taught about the blood moon by their grandmothers, not by their own mothers. But Star Watcher’s grandmothers were dead in the south lands, so now Turtle Mother had to tell her: “There is really no evil in the bleeding time. It only means that your body is old enough to make itself ready to bear children. Men want us to go apart at these times because men cannot understand some things. They are troubled because they smell something. A man fears and hates what he does not understand. He believes game will smell the blood on him, and flee. He believes that if a woman in her moon steps over him, he will become weak. If a man is going to war and his wife has her moon, his war party may be called back.” She chuckled, then groaned and grew tense, then relaxed, and smiled again.
“Sometimes
, women have pretended to have their moon, in order to save their husbands from going to war. That is clever, but it is bad because it deceives the People. There is great medicine in the moons, my daughter, but it is not all medicine. There are many ways a woman can fool a man, by knowing things he does not know. But some such fooling is not right.”
Star Watcher, even in her anxiety, had listened hard to understand all this, and she had tried to understand it in terms of Stands Firm. As if knowing this, her mother had said then:
“If Stands Firm learns that you are away to the women’s lodge, then he will like you even more. He will like you in more ways. He will not be able to help himself.…”
She had paused again and held herself tense for a while as a pain passed through. Then, after a while, regaining her breath, she had smiled a sly smile at her daughter and said to her almost in a whisper:
“Men only think they are in control of things. Woman guides man’s path more than he would ever believe. But a woman who is wise will always let him believe he guides his own path. A woman who brags that she directs him, she makes him very mad. And he will send her apart from him just as if she were in her blood moon.” Turtle Mother’s eyes had glittered with the fun of sharing this great secret, even in her time of strain.
The girl, as mystified by all these strange new confidences as she was by the aches and the moist heat and the tickling sensations in her loins, had looked intently into her mother’s eyes and asked: “How does one come to know these secrets?”
“Where does knowing come from?” Turtle Mother had said. “The secrets are being spoken in your belly now. Is not the closest of the spirits Our Grandmother, Kokomthena, our Creator? And is it not said in Our Grandmother’s very first law that we must be apart from others when we are in our blood moon? Why then do you think this is? Our Grandmother understands men’s minds, for did she not create them?
Panther in the Sky Page 4