Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Tecumseh knew that a boy who could neither shoot an arrow nor light a fire would be helpless in life, so he strove patiently every day to help the poor bumbler overcome his natural ineptitude. He coached him, demonstrated, explained. He wished Chiksika could be here to help him instruct. Chiksika was a wonderful teacher. But actually, Chiksika had never been the kind of a teacher to Loud Noise that he had been to Tecumseh. Chiksika was truly embarrassed by Loud Noise and stayed away from him, and tried to pretend he did not exist.

  Besides, Chiksika was not here. He was still away in Kain-tuck-ee with Black Fish and the war party.

  After Boone’s betrayal and flight, Black Fish had waited a long time before setting out to Boone’s Fort; he had waited in expectation of some British cannons. He had known that Boone had gone home to warn the forts, so there would be no surprise, and without surprise it would be important to have cannons. But no cannons had come, and at last Black Fish had led them all away. They had left in a high state of war fever, accompanied by some British captains and interpreters, determined to do great damage to all the white settlements in Kain-tuck-ee even without cannons. But his primary target was Boone’s Fort; it was, indeed, Boone himself. Shawnee law decreed that any adopted outsider who betrayed the People was a condemned man. If Boone could be caught this summer, he would be executed instantly—preferably by Black Fish himself, whose heart he had frozen.

  “Little brother,” Tecumseh said now, sounding more patient than he really felt, “try once more. Listen to me. From the beginning, hold this arm straight. You are strong enough. Draw the string quickly, so you won’t tire your muscles. Do not forget to keep holding the arrow between the two fingers so it will not fall. Here. You are ready now. Try to shoot your arrow as close to mine as you can.” Quickly he put an arrow to his own bowstring and shot it into a patch of bare clay on the opposite bank of the creek, a mere fifteen paces away. “Shoot at my arrow,” he said.

  Tecumseh never really saw what Loud Noise did wrong then. Unsteadily the child arched the little bow. His left arm quivered and bent. The bow sprang back; something broke with a loud, splitting sound. The bow and part of the arrow fell, and Loud Noise spun away shrieking and fell on his knees and elbows. Tecumseh leaped to him and turned his face up. A bolt of shock went through him.

  Protruding from the little boy’s eyesocket was an eight-inch sliver of the split arrow shaft, the feather still hanging loosely on it. The feather was red with blood. Oozing from between the eyelids was a pinkish mixture of blood and fluid from the child’s punctured eyeball.

  The boy screamed and drooled and writhed.

  CHANGE-OF-FEATHERS, THE OLD MEDICINE MAN OF THE Chalagawthas, came with two little bundles and squatted in the lodge beside the shrieking child, whom Tecumseh was holding down by keeping his arms pinned.

  Turtle Mother was already taking the long splinter out of the eyesocket. Grimly, firmly, her own eyes tearing with pity, she knelt over him in the very face of his terrible wails and pulled out the bloody sliver, not too slowly, for that would have protracted the pain, nor too quickly, either, as that might have damaged the eye even more. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. The tough integument of the collapsed eyeball came out of the socket with the wood sliver, though still attached inside by its little muscles and cords, and it made her think of the placental sacs and cords that had been pulled out of her every time she had borne children—yes, when she had borne this poor wretch of a child, too—and the thought twisted her heart. Clenching her jaw, she put two fingers against the integument and pulled the arrow fragment out between them, looked at it a moment, shuddered, and then turned and threw the piece of arrow into the fire. Tecumseh watched her do all this and had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out himself. Loud Noise struggled, but it was easy to hold him down.

  Star Watcher was by the fire, boiling a comfrey mixture in a kettle according to her mother’s instructions. It was very hot in the wigewa, and the women had stripped to the waist and their bodies gleamed with sweat. “Now put the cloth in and take it out and fold it,” Turtle Mother said, not looking up from her shrieking child. She was smoothing his forehead with her hand. It was hard to talk over his screeching. He was crying the way he had done all the first days of his life, that pathetic, desperate noise she had hoped she would never have to hear again. Now Star Watcher came around beside her with the hot poultice and gave it to her mother.

  Turtle Mother pressed the collapsed eyeball gently back inside the eyelids, bringing forth an even louder outburst of screaming, then she put the poultice over the eyesocket and bound it in place with a strip of strouding. Change-of-Feathers remained beside the pallet and watched all this. He said, shaking his head:

  “That eye cannot be made good again. Do not hope for that.”

  “I know, Grandfather.” She had faith in the shaman’s healing powers but knew they could not repair that eye. He had more than once restored sight to blind people, but this eyeball was torn up.

  “You have done well what you can do,” said the old shaman. “Now I will do the rest, with the help of Weshemoneto. All of you go out now.” They looked at each other, then Turtle Mother nodded. Tecumseh looked at the old shaman’s dark eyes, which were nested in wrinkles. The old man’s hair was long and as white as snow. “You go, too, my son,” he said to Tecumseh. “He will stay still for me.” As he said this, the old man passed his wrinkled, dry-skinned, knobby-knuckled hand a few inches above Loud Noise’s forehead, and the child stopped struggling. Even his screams subsided, and he lay whimpering as the women and Tecumseh went out through the low doorway into the late afternoon sunlight. The other boys were sitting on the ground under a tree, their faces streaked from crying. There were villagers standing in the street, waiting to give their quiet consolation.

  For several hours the family waited outside. The old shaman’s voice chanted softly within, sometimes rising into quavery wails. Odors of tobacco and pine needles, and some unfamiliar smell of rot, came from the house. Tecumseh wanted to go away into the woods and be alone, but he knew he should stay with his family at this time. He wondered if his mother blamed him for this in any way. If she did, she did not show it.

  Tecumseh sat trying to remember exactly how it had happened, but he had seen only that instant of the broken tension, and he had seen it only from the edge of his eye. Maybe Loud Noise had drawn the bow too far and caught the whole arrow between the bow and the bowstring, and the tension had split it. But somehow the child had, as always, fumbled what he was doing, and the taut bow had not forgiven his mistake.

  Tecumseh’s heart was heavy and sick. That sorry child Loud Noise, who from the time of his birth had lacked in everything that grows to make a warrior and a good man, now would have still another disadvantage, still another ugliness. In some tribes he would not have been kept alive. Much misery, his own and his family’s, would have been avoided if he had not. But the life of anyone born a Shawnee was sacred. And, as had been said, the child’s strangeness probably foretold some special powers. One had to go on believing in the wisdom of heaven.

  Eventually, then, at dusk, the shaman called the family in. The inside of their lodge smelled musky and tangy, and the boy lay asleep. The shaman said the bad spirits had been exorcised from the boy and chased from the house, and that the eye wound would not rot, and there would be no fever and no more terror. Then he raised a crooked forefinger, placed it on his forehead above his nose, and said a surprising thing:

  “Remember that one eye may see more than two.” Then he left.

  For a while Turtle Mother sat on the floor with her legs folded under her and gazed at the child, her face full of sadness and deep thought. Then she got up and took a bag of corn out of the wigewa and sat down at her hollowed-log mortar, put several fistfuls of corn in it, picked up the heavy stone pestle, and began pounding meal for the family’s dinner. Tecumseh walked out in the village and among the domed houses that were silhouetted against the last trace
s of red in the west. He listened to the murmur of the many voices of the Chalagawthas in and around their homes, smelled their woodsmoke and food, and gazed for a while at the evening star in the darkening sky.

  He was watching the evening star when he heard the shouts from out on the edge of town and then that growing uproar of dismayed voices that had already come to mean more bad words about the white men.

  The bringers of the dark news this time were three Delaware riders.

  First the messengers were given food and water while the people of Chillicothe Town gathered in the council ground in front of the grand lodge. A bonfire lit up the many faces. Star Watcher and Tecumseh had crowded close in front to hear.

  The messengers stood with Change-of-Feathers, who translated from their language.

  “When the sun went black, an army of Long Knives passed through the lands of the Wabash-se-pe and the Illinois. But none of us who live there saw them or heard them.

  “Early in the next moon our brothers the Piankeshaw Miamis saw that the totems of the king of England were no longer on the poles above the forts and towns along the Mother of Rivers. In their place flew the totems of Virginia and the Thirteen Fires. This was seen at Kaskaskia the French town, and at Cahokia, place of the Great Mound, and even at Post Vincennes on the Wabash-se-pe.”

  Star Watcher groped for Tecumseh’s hand and squeezed it in hers.

  These were only names that he had heard now and then, places where Chiksika and other warriors had gone sometimes to get gunpowder from the British. He looked at Star Watcher and saw the fear on her pretty face. He looked around at the other listeners, and the dread he saw in their eyes made him tremble. Most of the people in Chillicothe were women and children and ancients. None of the warrior chiefs was here, not even Black Fish was here to hear this threatening news, which made it more ominous. Now some of the old men wanted to know more. What else did the Delawares know of this? asked Change-of-Feathers. Were many people killed in the battles for those forts?

  “There were no battles,” said the messengers. This answer caused a murmur of disbelief to sweep the crowd, like wind through trees. “Not a person was shot. The Long Knives walked in through the open gates of the forts in the dark of night and surprised and caught everybody while the Redcoats were away at Detroit.”

  The crowd was jabbering now. It was the kind of coup that every war chief dreamed of, the kind that made a war chief’s name a legend. It was the kind of coup that Black Fish had been striving for, season after season in Kain-tuck-ee, without success. Who was this great Long Knife chief, then, who had passed like an invisible wind through the whole Middle Ground and surprised the British? Was it Washington, the principal war chief of the Long Knives? That was the only name anyone knew from the great white men’s war in the east. Was Washington himself now standing like a giant between O-hi-o and the sunset? The messengers replied that it was known not to be Washington, though hardly anything else was known. “His name,” they said, “sounds like this: Korark.”

  Suddenly the hubbub started again, everyone talking.

  “Clark!” Tecumseh exclaimed to Star Watcher. “That was the name of the chief of the Long Knife soldiers in Kain-tuck-ee. Remember? The red-haired one with a loud voice!”

  At once, dreadful imaginings were in every head. If this Clark’s Long Knives were in the west, did that mean they had destroyed Black Fish in Kain-tuck-ee before they went? Nothing had been heard from Black Fish for a long time.

  And so the next morning the old chiefs sent several riders by different ways to find Black Fish in Kain-tuck-ee and take him this news or to bring back news of him. They sent several riders in case some might fall victim to the Long Knives, for if this enemy had been stealthy and bold enough to pass through the Wabash and Illinois lands with a whole army unseen, there very well might be many of them anywhere in the Shawnee lands now! A deep dread, a fear that almost ached, lay over the Shawnee nation.

  It had been proven true again, that the Mukutaaweethe Keelswah, the sign of the Black Sun, was an omen of misfortune in war. Now there would be the fearful waiting, the ominous talk in every household. Turtle Mother became one of the most morose of all and began saying again what Chiksika had once scolded her for saying:

  “Listen. This has become a lost country, a bad place. When the Long Knives were only to the east of us, they pressed on us from the east. When they went into Kain-tuck-ee, they pressed on us from the south, too. Now they are in the west. Will they not press us from there, too? Are we not like the poor animals in a hunting drive? What way have we to run but to Canada? And they are at war with the British, who have Canada. If they get Canada, then we will be finally encircled and trapped, is this not plain to see? Listen! We should ask our chiefs when they come home, if they come home, we should ask them to lead us out and away. This land is no good anymore!”

  No one knew what the Long Knives would do next, and a mystery hung like a haze over all the sunsets.

  Loud Noise for several days whimpered about his ruined eye. But the world had changed as much for the Shawnees as it had for him.

  NOW THE SHAWNEES AT CHILLICOTHE YEARNED EVEN MORE strongly for good news from the south, for the return of the warriors from Kain-tuck-ee. But days went by and they did not return. The People’s anxiety deepened. Now many did believe that Clark’s army had met Black Fish somewhere and killed or captured all the warriors. Now the Chalagawthas watched the bluffs and the woods around the town with a dread of seeing Long Knives coming. At night they slept fitfully and woke up listening for sounds. The horses of the town were brought into a corral at the edge of town with a guard, and the men went to sleep with their guns beside their beds. Boys and men guarded the trails and high places around the town and slept out there without fires, to warn if an enemy came toward the town.

  And then one night, late in summer when the air grew cool after the sunset, something happened that made them certain that the Long Knives were actually near Chillicothe.

  After the middle of that night, the horses began nickering and milling about. The old man guarding the corral rose stiffly in the dark where he had been sitting, slipped his blanket off his shoulders, and began to move along the pole fence, looking in among the horses to determine what was troubling them.

  They were growing more agitated, trying to run in the small compound, some whinnying in fear. Their hooves were thudding on the ground, and the poles of the fence rattled and creaked where their big, powerful bodies pressed against them. In the town, dogs began barking, and then querying voices were calling out. The guard, suspecting that a bear or a wolf was prowling close, crouched and hobbled along the fence, trying to make out an animal’s shape somewhere.

  Suddenly a loud, human-sounding howl tore through the night, coming from the side of the corral nearest the town, followed immediately by the flash and crack of a gunshot. The whole herd of horses, some half a hundred of them, whinnied and thundered off in the other direction. The old warrior raised a cry. “Pe-eh-wah! Pe-eh-wah! Horse stealers!” And while he was giving the alarm and trying to see horse thieves in the dark, the herd was thundering out of the corral in the direction away from town. They were out and going away. Either they had knocked down the fence on the far side, or the thieves had torn it down. The entire herd seemed to be getting away, and there was nothing the old guard could do to stop it. For an instant he thought he saw a man running behind the horses, but there was no time to sight a gun on him—if indeed it was a man—and a shot in that direction would have gone into the fleeing herd anyway.

  Tecumseh and his family had run out of their wigewa following the sound of the shot. They stood outside listening to the distant commotion, the small children clinging to the blanket their mother had draped around herself. Tecumseh’s heart was beating in his throat, and his mouth was dry. He expected to hear a great uproar of combat next, a sound he had never heard but had often imagined.

  But there was no fighting. The horses could be heard thundering away.
Men of the town had rushed out and were talking to the old sentry. After a while it was determined that it had been only a horse theft. Part of the corral rails had been taken down, and a shout and a gunshot had stampeded the horses out. It had not been a Long Knife attack after all. But, said a warrior who had been in the Kain-tuck-ee raids the year before: “That shout that made the stampede, that was the voice of their big man named But-lah. It is not a voice to forget. But-lah stole our horses!” Tecumseh’s scalp prickled.

  The rest of the night, men and boys lay in watch around the town with their bows and guns. Tecumseh stood watch in a thicket near the place where the trail came down the bluff into the town. All night he imagined the giant called But-lah, who could run like a horse while carrying Boone. It took all Tecumseh’s courage to stay by the trail so far from the edge of town. And yet in a way he wanted But-lah to come down this trail. His osage bow was powerful enough to shoot through the heart of the Long Knife. What a great thing he could do for the People if But-lah came by!

  As dawn began to bleach the darkness out of the eastern sky, Turtle Mother and Star Watcher, like all the others, crouched by the door with the little children and waited in silent dread. If the Long Knives attacked Chillicothe, it would be at this hour. Loud Noise, a compress still bound over his eyesocket, was so full of misery and fear that he groaned. His mother stroked his shoulders and shushed him.

  THE SUN ROSE. TECUMSEH IN HIS THICKET STRETCHED AND stood up cautiously. The grass and weeds beside the trail glittered with dew. There was not a person anywhere in sight.

  Soon, a few scouts came out from the town. They spread farther and farther out and finally assured themselves that there was no army of Long Knives nearby. Boys who had been on guard were now sent out to round up the stray horses. All but half a dozen were found. In the morning light the men found, amid the profusion of hoofprints around the corral, the footprints of white men. They were moccasined feet, but with that toed-out pattern that distinguished them from the footprints of red men. One set of prints was huge; here a giant had walked. Tecumseh joined the trackers. In the woods a few hundred paces from the town he found a place where iron-shod horses had been tethered. These tracks led away into the woods, along with the prints of several of the Shawnees’ unshod horses. Here was where the horse stealers had led the six horses away.