Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  As the war chief, Hard Striker should have been exulting with them. But, strangely, his confidence was overshadowed by a dread and a sadness. Perhaps it was because of the unfamiliar tactics Cornstalk was using. Perhaps it was because so many of Hard Striker’s own kin and beloved would be exposed to danger in this uncommon battle. His son Chiksika. His closest friend and subchief, Black Snake. The fine warrior Stands Firm, who, it was understood, would one day be the husband of his daughter, Star Watcher. Too much confidence would put them all in terrible danger.

  Of course it was good to be confident and to hope for an easy victory, as this strengthened the spirit. But even in victorious combats, one must be prepared to see one’s own friends and relatives die around him and to bear the grief after that. He had borne such grief often enough in his years. And if one were the war chief, the weight of all deaths had to be borne upon one’s own soul.

  This was what Hard Striker was thinking in his canoe upon the misty river under a sky full of cold stars, when suddenly, despite the river of hot blood in his veins, he shivered. He turned quickly to look again at his warrior star in the north.

  He could not see it!

  As if it had suddenly burned out, it was not there. The Guide Star twinkled, and the other star on the line with it. But he could not see his own warrior’s star, and his heart suddenly was cold.

  He shut his eyes. When he opened them and looked again, the star was there. But he had failed to see it before, and that was a sign he fully understood. It changed everything.

  Nothing had changed in the world around him—the soft, gurgling, trickling music of the water, the breathing of the paddlers, the dark shapes of the war canoes and rafts, the dark line of the eastern riverbank growing larger and clearer ahead, the glow of the enemy’s campfires downstream—but ice was in his heart, and he understood the sad and glorious meaning of it: that he was to die before this day was through. He had not been able to see his warrior’s star, and that meant he would be gone.

  He would have to tell his son, of course. It was bad luck and unfair not to tell blood kin that such a thing had been foreseen. But it could be a bad thing to tell it, because it might well diminish Chiksika’s spirit before the battle, his first battle.

  So it would be necessary to tell him in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, his heart.

  WHEN THERE WAS BARELY ENOUGH PREDAWN LIGHT TO SEE by, the thousand warriors left their vessels on the riverbank and stole through the gloom of the woods toward the army’s camp and began to form a battle line across the wedge of land between the two rivers. Their deployment was slow and tense, for the morning was still, with no wind to cover the whisper and rustle of their movement through the autumn-dry woods. The ground was rough, studded with mossy boulders and outcroppings, and the trunks of great dead trees lay everywhere. It would provide good cover when the battle began, but now it slowed the formation of Cornstalk’s battle line, and it would not be long before the white soldiers would be rolling out of their blankets and the chance to catch them sleeping would be past. The Indians’ battle line was less than a mile from left to right, so every warrior was hardly an arm’s reach from his nearest comrade, and they could be in sight of each other, even within whispering distance of each other, and this was good. Also good was that the sun would be coming up behind the warriors’ backs and thus would be in the eyes of the soldiers.

  Cornstalk came along the line to the place where Hard Striker had stationed his Kispoko warriors. With him were his sister Tall Soldier Woman, a handsome, rawboned, middle-aged woman a hand taller than most men, and Black Hoof, a mature Chalagawtha warrior chieftain with glittering black eyes. Tall Soldier Woman was the only living woman warrior of the Shawnee nation. It had been a long time since she had been to war, but this was to be an uncommonly important battle, and so she was there, in charge of the warriors of her village. She was armed with a pistol and a knife. Now these chiefs knelt under a huge beech tree with Hard Striker and Black Snake and looked through the graying woods toward the army camp and made their final decisions.

  “They do not stir yet,” said Hard Striker. “If we move forward now, perhaps we can still catch them in their blankets.”

  “Yes,” Cornstalk said. “But listen, we must also consider: maybe they are so quiet because they know we are here, and lie in wait for us. The spies say that their commander is General Lewis. He was in the battle with Braddock, and surely has learned from that to be wily. Therefore I say that we must not rush recklessly into their camp. We must get close in among them with the stealth of the hunter.”

  “I agree,” said Hard Striker. “So our people must be told to stay on line as they move down, with a brother on either hand. And to keep this line even if we are pushed back.”

  Cornstalk nodded. “Above all, we must not allow them to push us back beyond this place. If they did, our line would extend and grow too thin.”

  “And so we must give our men heart to be very strong,” Tall Soldier Woman murmured in her beautiful, low voice, “to be strong even though the battle may be the whole day long. Too many of them believe it will be a quick victory. They might be deceived.”

  “My sister is wise,” Cornstalk said to her. “Now. There is little time. We must tell them this that we have said, and be moving before the sunlight touches the treetops.”

  “Weshemoneto is with us,” Hard Striker said, and all the chiefs touched hands before parting.

  Weshemoneto is with us, Hard Striker had said, even though he knew that before this day was done he would instead be with Weshemoneto.

  On a thong around his neck Hard Striker wore a bone from the spine of a fox. He closed his hand around it. This was his pa-waw-ka, the personal token through which Weshemoneto’s power came to him. It felt now as if it were burning and quivering in his palm. With his eyes closed the chief held it for the duration of four breaths. The smell of dew-damp wood ashes from the soldier camp clung in his nostrils.

  Now he went to his son Chiksika, who was strutting and flexing his muscles behind a big fallen ash tree a few yards away, working his nervousness into a fighting passion. “Come down with me,” Hard Striker said softly in his ear. “I have something you must hear.”

  They squatted beside each other, and Hard Striker put his hand on the oiled braid of Chiksika’s scalplock. First he told him what had been decided about the attack. Then he said:

  “My son, we have a chance to do a great thing here today for our People. Weshemoneto is beside me today, and for as long as I can, I am going to fight much stronger than I ever have before. You must make your name today by being as strong as you can be … because after this day you will have to take my place in our family.”

  Chiksika stiffened and turned his painted face to his father’s in the gray half-light, his mouth open. “Hear me,” Hard Striker hurried on. “Sometime today I will fall and not rise again. I have seen it. Hsh! I will have no protest from you! Wehshe-cat-too-weh, be strong! Live long. Protect your mother and your sister. Raise your little brothers to be great men, so they will always bring honor to our family. Help them to earn their pa-waw-kas as I helped you with yours. Mark no treaties. Promise me!”

  Chiksika nodded. Hard Striker’s eyes were blurred for a moment by tears; feeling his son nod had moved him to an almost unbearable tenderness. He pressed his forehead against Chiksika’s temple for an instant, then pushed him to arm’s length. His hand, still tingling with the power from the pa-waw-ka, gripped Chiksika’s scalplock, and he shook him with affectionate roughness. “This is to be your first day as a Shawnee warrior,” he told him. “Stay beside me. You and I will be deadly. I believe that Weshemoneto means to give me time to do great things today before he takes me off. So please help me, my son. In this great day and for as long as you live. Never disgrace yourself or our family. I charge you never to let the white men rest in our country. Always teach Tecumseh that this is his sacred burden, too. Promise me that!”

  “I promise you that, my father.�
� Chiksika’s voice sounded almost strangled, but Hard Striker could feel through his hand that his son was steady, not trembling.

  “Good! Now, we must go along and tell our people how to fight today. Soon the sun will touch the trees. Wehshe-kesheke, a fine day!”

  7

  KISPOKO TOWN

  October 12, 1774

  TURTLE MOTHER TORE LOOSE HER BRAID AND SHOOK HER hair out so that it hid her face. She ripped open the front of her dress and dirtied herself with ashes and mud and began rocking on her haunches and howling. Tecumseh was terrified. This was beyond his ability to comprehend.

  When the warriors returned from the Kanawha-se-pe, Chiksika had come home covered with bandages, limping, and had gone straight to his mother and put his hands on her shoulders and said something to her. She had shrieked and started this, and it was terrible to be near her. The triplets became so agitated that Star Watcher had to take them from the lodge to the house of relatives in another part of the village. She made Tecumseh follow and help her bring the little ones.

  The whole Kispoko Town had become a terrible place. In many of the houses other women were wailing and keening. It had been raining, and the ground was covered with wet, cold, muddy dead leaves. The air was chilly and misty so the woodsmoke stung the eyes. Bandaged warriors were walking or riding through the streets. Some were displaying the fresh scalps that hung on their rifles and lances, but their faces were grim. Tecumseh led his little brother Loud Noise and trudged through this forlorn scene, scarcely seeing it, his soul still overpowered by the sight and sound of his mother’s grief. He could not understand why his father did not come home and make her smile.

  Later during that strange and terrible day, Tecumseh slipped away from his sister and went toward his home and stood a little way off and looked at the house and listened to his mother’s wailing voice, his whole body shaking with the agonies he felt. Over the doorway of the house now hung a white mourning cloth. He looked at the white cloth and remembered how she had looked: her face hidden in her black hair, her hands tearing open her garment and spreading ashes and dirt on her bosom.

  Chiksika had much to explain to the family. He sat with them in their aunt’s lodge, and while Star Watcher took care of the three little brothers and listened in the shadows beyond the fire, her eyes glinting with tears, Chiksika said:

  “A great war chief is honored by being buried close to the battlefield where he dies. So our father was buried down there, by the Beautiful River.

  “We painted his face black. We put him in a grave in the ground, with bark around him. We sprinkled in the sacred tobacco from the four sides of the grave. He lies with his head toward the setting sun. In the grave there is no stone or metal, as those can strike a fire in the grave. There is a hole in the bark in the end of the grave so his spirit can pass through. That is how our father is buried, and now you can see it in your mind, and know where he is.

  “We came back across the river on the rafts and in the canoes, in the dark after a whole day of battle. We did not win. More whiteface soldiers were coming down, and we did not have enough gunpowder left, and so Cornstalk saw that we could not win in that place. Oh, we had many scalps. Twenty of our people died, but four or five times that many of the soldiers we killed, and surely two hundred of them we wounded. They lay everywhere in the woods crying in their pain. Yes, we did them much more harm. But we did not win. No. We came back across the river with our dead ones and all who were hurt. And then our allies, the Wyandots, the Delawares, and the Mingos who were with us, they chose to go back to their villages rather than fight another battle against the Long Knives.

  “When those allies rode away, there came a darkness over the face of Cornstalk. He did not call them cowards, for they had fought well the whole day. But when they turned to ride the trails to their own homes, they could not look at his eyes.

  “And we buried our dead then, and followed Cornstalk home. All the way there was a thundercloud upon his face, for he had advised us not to go to war, and he had led us only because we had wanted to go. He will call a council of all the nation soon, and from that we will learn whether to go to war again or go ask the white chief for peace and mercy. Do you hear all this, Tecumseh?”

  The boy nodded. He was listening and understanding as well as he could, but the spirits were whirling his head around and making him see things. He was seeing his father in the ground encased in the bark of trees, with his face blackened and his head toward the sunset. He was seeing the warriors who had come to the village with terrible wounds. Some of them had been brought home on litters because they could not walk. Some, like Chiksika and Stands Firm, had come limping. One had walked in without one of his eyes and another without one of his hands.

  And Tecumseh kept seeing his mother and hearing her shrieks. Always she had been calm and happy and clean. Now she had become something else, something as unsettling as the wounded men, because her husband had not come home. Tecumseh said:

  “Will our mother die? Is she dying now?”

  Chiksika leaned over and put his hand on Tecumseh’s neck. “She will not die. The part of her that was our father’s has died and gone to be with him. But the part of her that is our mother stays with us. Now for a year she is not to bathe or change her clothes, nor dress her hair. She will not laugh, and she will stay in the wigewa when the dances are held. Tomorrow all our people will go and give her a Condolence Day, for she was the chief’s woman, and then she will cease to cry aloud. For the rest of the year she will weep only in silence but will remain unkempt. When that year is past, you will then see her as she was before.”

  Star Watcher leaned toward the fire, listening intently to all this. She knew that she would have to do very much for her mother and for the children during that year, and she needed to understand how everything would be. And she kept wondering also about the hurt that made Stands Firm limp.

  “Who will become chief of the Kispoko now? Will it be you?” Tecumseh asked Chiksika.

  He shook his head. “She-me-ne-to, Black Snake. He will now be the war chief of the Shawnees. I am not old enough for that. As for our own family, soon we will move to Chillicothe Town.”

  Star Watcher gasped. “Leave our father’s town?”

  “After this it will be Black Snake’s Town. Chillicothe is the town of Black Fish, the principal peace chief. By the old laws it is the peace chief’s duty to take us as his, and care for us. Everything will be different now, because of the whitefaces. Maybe there will not even be any towns.” He wished he had not said that. It was too ominous. His gaze passed over the little group, his sister and his four little brothers. Chiksika was now the oldest male in the family, and it would be his responsibility to protect them and to hunt meat for them all, and above all to keep his promise to his father. He must raise all his little brothers to be strong men who would bring honor to the family. Chiksika looked at the helpless brood, thinking of this, and even though he hurt in every part and was shaken with exhaustion, he felt his father’s life-power spread in him, and he felt what it was to be his father and to love them as his father had.

  There would be so much to do. This family would require so much of him that he would scarcely have time to be a young man. Though he had fully become a man in these last two days, he was scarcely over being a boy.

  But Chiksika did not resent this burden that fate had put upon his back. His father, Hard Striker, had taught him that the purpose of a Shawnee man’s life is to be worthy of Weshemoneto’s approval, and that worthiness lay in serving the family and the People. Now events had placed him early in that position to serve them, so there was no question in his mind that their needs were above his own desires.

  But if the council chose to continue the war against the Long Knives, he himself might be killed soon, too soon to keep his promises. He would have to talk to Tecumseh soon about those promises.

  CHIKSIKA AND TECUMSEH SAT LATE BY THE FIRE. CHIKSIKA had laced a brown-haired scalp onto a hickory hoop and
was flensing the skin side with the edge of his knife blade. “This,” he said, pointing to the scalp, “is what a white man looks like after he has been made into a good white man. The only good white men look like this.”

  He said that he had killed three white men but had only this one scalp because it had not been possible to get to two of the bodies in the fighting. “Surely there never was such a war before,” Chiksika said. “For the day afterward my ears could not hear anything.”

  “Why do you want the hair of this man?” Tecumseh asked. It seemed strange to him that part of a man was being dressed as one dresses the hide of a beaver or muskrat from a trap. His father had owned many old scalplocks, but Tecumseh had never thought about them very much because they were old and dry. Chiksika said:

  “It is the way to count, and to help remember. There are untruthful men, who would boast that they had killed more enemies than they had. But if they do not have the scalps, they do not have to be believed.”

  “You told me you killed three, but here is the hair of only one.”

  “Those who were near me in the battle know I killed three. I can expect anyone else to believe me only about this one.”

  The brothers were talking softly. Though Chiksika had made a name in his first battle and should have felt triumphant, the emptiness where his father’s life had been was too dark and heavy.

  After a while Chiksika said, “Now listen well, little brother, for I have very important words to say to you, about our father in battle, and about us.”