Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Tecumseh noticed the white boy Big Fish standing in the margin of the firelight, a white-skinned boy in Shawnee dress, looking strained and afraid. That was no wonder. It had been only weeks since he had been captured in Kain-tuck-ee, and today the white men’s army from Kain-tuck-ee had come and done all this, and maybe he wondered if the People would turn on him and kill him. His foster father Black Hoof was too busy to attend to him now. Tecumseh could almost feel the boy’s doubts, just by looking at him. Big Fish gave Tecumseh a feeble half smile and raised his hand slightly to greet him, and Tecumseh raised his hand in reply. Big Fish then wandered away, looking very lost.

  Now Tecumseh asked a question that had been on his mind. “Brother, what of the man Copper Hair? I have not seen him here.” Star Watcher was now sponging the wound on Chiksika’s shoulder with a steaming cloth. He winced, then said:

  “Such a strange thing! I was going to tell you this. At the end of the battle he came out from some hiding place and tried to run to Clark, yelling a word in their tongue. And a funny thing happened then.”

  “What?”

  “The Long Knives must have thought he was a warrior attacking. They shot him down.”

  Tecumseh groaned. He remembered seeing Copper Hair’s face dead while he talked to him.

  “What, brother?” Chiksika exclaimed. “Do you not think it is funny they shot him while he was escaping to them?”

  Tecumseh was remembering Copper Hair’s secret. He would have liked to tell them that Copper Hair was Clark’s cousin, so they would know how awful this was. But he had promised never to tell—even though it could do no harm now.

  Stands Firm said, in a voice without Chiksika’s mocking tone: “I will tell you something about that, told me by a Delaware who lay wounded near that place. He saw this before he crept away. He said the Long Knife Chief Clark came down there and held that Copper Hair in his arms. And that he wept on him.”

  “Poor brother!” Chiksika laughed. “Now who will you talk to about those book things?”

  15

  A VILLAGE ON THE UPPER MIAMI-SE-PE

  Winter 1780

  “THIS,” SAID BIG FISH, SPEAKING IN SHAWNEE AND PUTTING his finger on Tecumseh’s nose, “is watoanee.”

  Tecumseh sighed and shook his head. He said, speaking English: “No. This is watoanee, mouth! Watsau-thi is nose.” He touched those respective features of the white boy’s face as he spoke them. “And what is this?” He stuck out his tongue.

  Big Fish frowned and thought. “We … we …”

  Tecumseh made his mouth round and then stuck his tongue through, unconsciously hinting.

  “Welonee,” Big Fish cried. “Welonee, b’God!”

  They had been working very hard at this. Each tried to speak only in the other’s tongue when they were having their lessons. Big Fish was quick to understand, but he was also quick to forget. Once Tecumseh had grasped a word in English, he never forgot it. But Big Fish did not remember well without a lot of repetition.

  The hard part had been in teaching things they could not point at or touch. They had been hung up for days on such words as “is” or “may” or “was” or “should,” until they had managed to catch Blue Jacket and persuade him to sit down with them and explain. He knew both languages so well that he was their best resource. But Blue Jacket could not help them very much. He had gotten married to a whiteface captive woman and was trying to teach her the Shawnee language. Blue Jacket had come to hate his old language, and he told Big Fish that he should forget it and told Tecumseh that it was not a worthy effort to try to learn it, saying, “I would rather we drove the whitefaces so far away that we would never hear their tongue again. It is like an obscenity to speak it.” As much as Tecumseh admired Blue Jacket, though, he did not agree with this. He did not argue with Blue Jacket about it, as that would have been disrespectful, but he did believe it would be useful to know the enemy’s tongue.

  Most of all, he was consumed with curiosity about what meanings lay behind the white men’s words. He believed that only in this way could he ever understand why they were so strange in their wants and outrageous in their ways.

  Much of the secret of their souls, he thought, must be in their books, especially the one Copper Hair had said contained words of their god. The Shawnee people tried to be such as they thought their own god meant them to be, and surely this would be the same with the white men. But he could not ask Blue Jacket to help him with the books because of the way Blue Jacket felt. Instead, he was going to try to master the white man’s tongue, and when he had done that through Big Fish, perhaps he could talk with him about God and beliefs, and perhaps Big Fish could even help him learn what Copper Hair had called “read.” It seemed to Tecumseh that the most important word in a language was “why.” And he thought the “whys” of the white men must be in that book with the words of their god.

  STAR WATCHER WAS BUILDING A HOUSE AGAIN, OR, RATHER, rebuilding one.

  The town the Shawnees had come to winter in was an old Peckuwe village on the Upper Miami-se-pe. This town had been almost abandoned when the tribe split apart, and weather and rot had nearly ruined the flimsy bark houses in the many moons since then. Their pole frames had looked like skeletons, the remaining bark slabs like patches of hide hanging on them. Dead leaves had drifted up inside them to cover the broken pottery and utensils; gnawed nutshells and clawed holes showed where animals had sheltered in the ruins.

  When Black Hoof had brought his homeless people here, the women had set about repairing the lodges, peeling bark from trees and stacking it to dry with big stones on top to keep it flat. The warriors and boys had at once set out on hunting parties in every direction, hoping to obtain enough meat to preserve a winter’s supply. The women had planted some seeds in faint hopes for a late autumn that would allow a few crops to mature and had foraged for nuts and berries and fruits and roots all through the late summer and autumn. Men and boys set snares on every trace of an animal path, and people who were wounded or too old to do anything else fished on the banks of the river. It was going to be a hungry winter because of what the Long Knives had done to the crops. Game was scarce in this place because the Peckuwes had lived and hunted here for so many years before. And the Shawnees had expended so much powder and lead in the futile defense of their towns that they had little left for hunting. And now there had come a rumor that another Long Knife army, of two thousand men, was setting out from Fort Pitt to attack what was left of the tribes.

  And so Black Hoof and the other chiefs had resorted to begging. They had a British trader write down a message to Major DePeyster, the new British commandant at Detroit, telling him of their misfortunes at the hands of the Long Knives and of their present state of poverty and begging him to supply them with whatever he could spare. “Father!” the letter concluded. “Here we have determined to make our stand, and wait to hear from you. You must be sensible how you should assist us, having the same enemy as the cause.” This message was sent to Detroit along with an eight-string wampum belt to confirm its authenticity. But the trader advised Black Hoof not to expect much. Detroit itself, he said, scarcely had enough provisions, mostly just Indian corn and vegetables, to sustain itself over the winter, and its forces had been much weakened and demoralized by Clark’s capture of Governor-General Hamilton. Nothing anymore was the way it had been before the arrival of that Clark in the territory.

  Being in fear that he, or another Long Knife commander from Fort Pitt, might strike again, the Shawnee did little to improve the ruined town. And for another reason little was done: this site was to hardly anyone’s liking. It was not a beautiful townsite, as their beloved Chillicothe and Piqua towns had been. The people complained of its poor ground, of its windblown flatness, of the unfavorable terrain, of the old Peckuwe spirits that skulked around it, even of the poor quality of the sunlight that fell upon it, or anything else they could perceive or imagine to be inferior to their old homes. Black Hoof was of course wise enough to understand th
at what was wrong with this place was simply that it was not the other places, that the people were seeing it through saddened eyes and defeated hearts, and that it could therefore never seem right to them, at least for a long while. There was always talk of going back to the old places and rebuilding them, maybe next spring. Matters surely would be better in a year, the people chose to believe, and surely Clark would not come again to attack towns that he had already destroyed. This was the way the Shawnees were talking now. It made Black Hoof sad to hear how low their spirits had sunk, but it was good that they still could yearn for something, even if it was the past.

  IT WAS THE HUNGRIEST OF THEIR WINTERS, AND THE CRUEL gnawing in their bellies was equaled by the hatred for white men that smoldered in their hearts. The warriors warmed themselves on this. Whenever Stands Firm heard a woman trying to quiet a hungry baby, he clenched his teeth and tensed his fists and dreamed of the joy of smashing a white man’s head, and was impatient for spring. The Long Knives had not only destroyed their homes, they had committed the unholy act of wasting corn, beans, and squash, the three sacred sisters.

  The hunters’ guns leaned useless against the poles of their lodges. There was so little lead and powder, and the British had not yet provided them with any.

  A strange thing had been happening for a long time. Many of the warriors and hunters had become so dependent upon their guns that they had lost the stealthy skills needed for bow hunting. Mostly the older men, who had grown up with bows in their hands, and a few of the boys like Tecumseh who had until recently hunted only with bows, could still go out with a quiver of arrows and expect to bring home meat. Many of the young men did not even know how to find good flint or obsidian and knap it to make arrowheads. Once Tecumseh heard Blue Jacket say of this dependency on guns and other iron things: “It is another curse the white man has brought.” When Tecumseh heard this he realized how true it was and how sad. It was like the iron kettles and steel fire strikers the women now used: they thought they had to have them, although a few generations ago there had been no such things. If a woman broke or lost one, she would cry and think she could never start a fire or cook again unless she could obtain another one right away. “To me,” Blue Jacket grumbled once, “it seems that a woman lives only for the day she can go to the British trading post and buy something the traders have made her think it is necessary to have. She would rather show a red blanket of wool than a beautiful doeskin she has tanned herself,” he muttered. The men he was talking to nodded their heads and wondered secretly if Blue Jacket was grumbling about all this because his own paleface wife was asking for too many things. If he hated the whites’ things so much, why had he married a white woman? They smiled. There was not much about Blue Jacket that was amusing. So they liked this.

  IN THIS WINTER, TECUMSEH AND BIG FISH HUNTED TOGETHER on the snowy plains and in the frosty woods when the early morning air was hazy blue and sparkling with rime. Tecumseh helped Big Fish make a strong bow of hickory, showing him how to shave the white wood down to the right shape and steam and tie it to produce the right curvature, and then taught him to make arrows and to shoot them quickly and accurately. Big Fish was already good with a gun.

  Tecumseh loved the bow and took great pleasure in shooting with it. “A bow,” he said, “is a beautiful thing, and does not make a noise like a gun that animals learn to fear and move away from. Best, it is not something that white men made and that only white men can repair.”

  When Tecumseh stood silent in the silent woods, on snowshoes he had made, his feet and calves protected by moccasins and leggings his sister had made for him from the hide of a deer he had killed, his muscles straining to pull the bowstring and a buck or elk just turning its eyes toward him in its last moment of life, he felt that he was like the first Shawnee in the Beginning, and he could almost forget that there were such creatures as white men. Even when Big Fish was beside him, with his strange, pale, freckled face and pink lips, Tecumseh could almost forget the white men, because Big Fish in spirit was becoming the best kind of a Shawnee. He was hardy and bold. He could wade through broken ice in pursuit of fleeing prey and not groan and shake from it. He would not squall in dismay if Tecumseh exuberantly jumped on him and wrestled him down into a wet snowbank; instead, he would laugh and give a fierce whoop or growl like a bear and fight with great energy. In their war games with large groups of boys from the village, Big Fish would always want to be Tecumseh’s subchief, but if the sticks fell in such a way that he was on the other side, he would accept that and fall back on his own wily strategies, and the things he had learned from Tecumseh would make him a more formidable opponent.

  And even in these cold and hungry times, Big Fish seemed to love being a Shawnee. He was happier than almost anyone else in the town—perhaps, Tecumseh would think, because he does not know how much better it was for us in the other times.

  ONE NIGHT IN THE HUNGER MOON, WHEN THREE MILD DAYS had melted all the snow and then a hard cold had come down again to freeze the waters and the ground, and the moon was almost full, high above the bare black branches, sending down so much milky light that they could see their way at midnight, Tecumseh and Big Fish were walking home from a long hunt, walking across the shadow-striped forest floor, their feet rustling the frost-sparkling dead leaves, three rabbits hanging over Tecumseh’s shoulder and a raccoon over Big Fish’s, and Tecumseh was so stirred by the silvery-cold beauty of the world that he asked:

  “Big Fish, do you know anything of the book that has the God’s words?”

  “The Bible?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. We had to read it all the time.” He used the white man’s word “read” even though he was speaking in Shawnee, because there was no Shawnee word for that.

  “You had to?”

  “My father made us read it. Once, for a while, he thought I might become a … preacher.”

  “What is this ‘preacher’?”

  “A, something like a shaman, I think. And a little like a Singer, too.”

  “Did you like to read on this Bible you had to read on?”

  “Oh, some of the stories I liked. A lot of it was tiresome. Who was whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather and all that.”

  “This Bible has stories?”

  “Oh, it is mostly stories. Mostly about Hebrews.”

  “Hebrews?” Tecumseh shaped the word.

  “They were a kind of tribe a long time ago. They moved around a lot, and increased a lot, and fought a lot.”

  “Ah,” Tecumseh exclaimed. “Like the Shawnees!”

  “I guess. They had chiefs. These Hebrew men ran everything. Their wives don’t get spoken about very much in the Bible.” He shrugged.

  “Not so much like the Shawnee, then. Our women speak up. We have women who are chiefs. Tell me, Big Fish, why the Hebrews moved around so much. This is interesting.”

  “Well, there were enemies they had, called Egyptians. These enemies were rich and had big armies.”

  “Ah,” said Tecumseh. “Were these E-zhip-sins white?”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, once the Hebrews were sort of their slaves.”

  “Ah. There should not be slaves.”

  “One of the Hebrew big chiefs was Moses. He led them out of Egypt, and they got across the … the, ah, Great Water, when God made the water separate, and they just walked across on land with a wall of water on either side. That might sound hard to believe, but it’s in the Bible, so it must be so.”

  “Why would it be hard to believe? That is how the Shawnees came to this land. Across a path of land that was made in the Great Water to the west.”

  “You don’t say so! You mean your god parted the waters, too?”

  “In some way. Black Hoof says First Man sang on the other side of the water for twelve days, and then the water parted and the People walked over here on the bottom, and when they looked back, it was water again behind them. It is believed that the Great Turtle that holds the land on his back r
ose up a little and the water ran off and that made the path.”

  “Great Turtle?” Big Fish exclaimed. “You believe that a turtle holds up the land?”

  “I believe what we have been told from the Beginning. We remember it all. We remember it by singing it and saying it. Maybe you remember it by putting it in your God book. Maybe your Chief Moses sang on the other side of the water, and the Great Turtle rose up, but your Hebrews, being white men, could not see the Great Turtle.”

  “Why couldn’t they see it, if the Shawnees can?”

  “I don’t know why not, Big Fish. But I have talked with Boone, and our warriors have talked with many other white men, who all said that they do not believe things they cannot see. They do not believe the spirits that live in things. But yet you believe your God parted the waters, and you have not seen that.”

  Big Fish looked out of the sides of his eyes at Tecumseh as they walked in the moonlight. Never in his life had he been in a conversation like this. He said, “What kinds of things have you seen that I’ve never seen?”

  “For one, I have felt the earth tremble under my feet when no one else felt it. Since then I have been able to sense where it starts, which is out there.” He pointed toward the southwest. “I have not been to the place where it starts, but if I went to that place, even if nothing, not even a tree, stood there to mark it, I would know I was at the place. This is going to be important somehow, but I don’t know yet. That is one thing.”

  “What else have you seen?” Big Fish asked, and now there was a new tone in his voice, as if he were talking with a preacher.

  “In my Vision Quest, I looked at a white bird until it spoke to me, and I could understand what it said to me. Such a bird is one’s Spirit Helper. With someone else it might be a rabbit or a squirrel that becomes a small man in a tree and speaks. It was very important what the white bird said. Often a Spirit Helper will tell you how to heal something. Mine told me something bigger than that.”