Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “What did the white bird say to you that you understood?” Big Fish asked after it became apparent that Tecumseh was not going on with his story.

  “You could not understand.”

  Big Fish got a little angry. “I am a Shawnee, too,” he said. “I am not a white man anymore.”

  “I know, brother. But one cannot understand what another’s Spirit Helper says. You have to find and listen to your own. And its message does not come in words, so I cannot tell you in words, and so how can I tell you? That is all I can say about it. I would tell you more if I could make you understand.”

  “What kind of a bird was it, your Spirit Helper? You don’t see many white birds. Not in the woods.”

  “A sort of dove.”

  “A white dove?”

  “Yes. Most of them are gray.”

  “I know,” said Big Fish. “The only white one I ever knew of was in the Bible. I mean, I guess it was white. I always see it that way when I read about it.…”

  “You see a dove when you read? Are you talking about the pictures that are in a book?”

  “No. No pictures. You just see what you’re reading about.”

  “Do I understand this? To read, you look at the black words on the leaves of the book, but even then you see the white dove?”

  Big Fish thought for a while, then said, “Yes. Sometimes.” He had read a great deal in his life, but he had never even thought of it this way, and yet it was so.

  Tecumseh thought: Then the white people do have some kinds of medicine power. This was the first evidence he had seen of it. He said, “Tell me of this white dove in the Bible.”

  “Noah sent it out from the boat in the Great Flood, to see if it could find land.”

  “So the white man’s book has a flood, too? And you say a dove was sent out to find ’a place to land?”

  “Yes!” Big Fish was growing quite mystified, to find that so many things were the same, even though so much was anything but the same. “It rained for forty days and forty nights, and that made the flood. Is that what happened in your story, too?”

  “Not quite. It happened this way: that Our Grandmother’s naughty grandson, Rounded-Side, who always did what she told him not to do, took his knife and cut open the big stomach of a giant man who had drunk all the waters of the earth, and the water came spilling out, and drowned the earth, and only the good people escaped, in a boat. After a long time Our Grandmother sent a crayfish down in the water to bring up some mud. Then she called a buzzard, and put the mud on his wings, and told him to fly until it dried. When it was dry, the People got on the mud and they live on it because it is the earth.”

  “A buzzard!” Big Fish exclaimed. “What a story that is! My head is going around! And who is Our Grandmother, anyway?”

  “It is a shame Black Hoof is so busy with white man trouble. He knows all this and should tell you, as he is your father. Our Grandmother is the Creator. It is like this:

  “Weshemoneto, in the Beginning, lived above the sun. He was invisible, like wind, but in the shape of a man. He made Our Grandmother, Kokomthena, and gave her the task of creating man, and she did it. Rounded-Side helped her, but only because he was not supposed to. Would you like to see Our Grandmother?”

  “Can I?”

  Tecumseh stopped and pointed into the sky.

  “You mean, the moon is her?”

  “No. But the moon is near her house, close enough that she can use it for her looking-glass. And if you look at it now when it is round, you can see her shadow in it. You see her cooking over a pot. You can see that she wears a short skirt. Also up there you can see the shadow of her little dog, and of Rounded-Side, and of two other grandsons who are Our Grandmother’s Silly Boys.”

  Big Fish suddenly laughed, looking at the moon. “Silly Boys!”

  “Yes. Can you see them all?”

  “Not really. We … the white people, I mean, look for a man in the moon.”

  “A man! Who is that man? Is he a Creator?”

  “No … nobody. Just … I don’t know. I myself never could make him out. But I sure can’t see all those people and dogs, either.”

  “No. You have to look a while, and we don’t have time now. Our Grandmother is through creating things. That happened during the Third Time. We are now living in the Fourth Time, and she does not create anymore. But she does still send messages and wisdom to us when we need to know something.”

  “How does she do that?”

  “Sometimes,” Tecumseh said, “she sends it by one of the Truth-Bearers. These are Tobacco, Sky, the Thunderbirds, the Four Winds, Water, and the Stars. Nilu famu, sacred tobacco, is the principal Truth-Bearer. When Tobacco is placed in the sacred fire, its smoke goes up, carrying the words of prayers.”

  “That’s strange. White people think tobacco is a thing of the Devil. Some do, anyway. Even people who smoke it admit the Devil’s got them.”

  “If a Shawnee thought Matchemoneto was in tobacco, he would not use it,” Tecumseh said with an edge of scorn in his voice. “Anyway, our sacred tobacco we do not smoke in pipes, but put in the sacred fire, as I just told you. The tobacco we smoke is just for pleasure. And I was going to tell you one more way Our Grandmother sends us messages. She tells them to a prophet.”

  “Ah! Prophets! The Bible has prophets, too!”

  “I think,” said Tecumseh, starting to walk along again in the crunching leaves, “that my brother Loud Noise is going to be a prophet. He can still speak in Our Grandmother’s secret tongue.”

  Big Fish looked incredulously at Tecumseh. “Your brother?” Big Fish had already observed to his own satisfaction that Loud Noise was only a crazy pest, a cracked-brain, if anything, more akin to the Devil than to the Creator. But he did not dare say this to Tecumseh, especially not now.

  “Yes. Someday we will see.” Tecumseh could smell woodsmoke now. “The town is just beyond,” he said, pointing ahead. “Sometime I would like you to tell me about this Chief Moses. I am interested in how he handled his enemies.”

  “He had more trouble with his own tribe than he did with his enemies, it seems to me,” Big Fish mused.

  Tecumseh thought of that. He sensed there would be something important for him in the story of Chief Moses helping his people. Tecumseh walked on in the cold moonlight, watching his breath condense before him. He wanted to say something to Big Fish about the books he had but thought that this was perhaps not yet the time.

  But soon, he thought. I waited too long to ask Copper Hair.

  “Tell me something,” said Big Fish after a while. He had been walking along wrapped in thought about all these things he had heard. “That Grandmother’s language your brother speaks …” He paused, uncertain whether he should dare to say this. “Is that all that noise he blows out of his behind?”

  Tecumseh whooped, popped the white boy on the head with his hand, and laughed so loud in the still night that dogs in the distant town started barking. “Big Fish,” he exclaimed when he could finally speak, “you’re a contrary!”

  IN THE SPRINGTIME CHIKSIKA STOOD ON A HIGH PLACE THAT made his heart feel full of power. Five hundred feet below him flowed the Beautiful River, and the Scioto-se-pe ran into it just upstream. The stone promontory upon which he stood was a sacred place, where the shamans of the ancient tribes had held their ceremonies hundreds of years before the coming of the white men. So often they had made great magic here that grass could not grow near the place.

  This great rock projected out from the bluff like the head of a giant raven. Under the overhanging rock there were caves full of the bones and bowls and weapons of the Ancient Peoples. And on the Raven’s Head itself stood a crumbling stone tower that had been used as a signal light by the race of giant white Indians whose ghosts now reigned over all of Kain-tuck-ee.

  From this high place Chiksika could see so far up and down the curves of the Beautiful River that a boat coming into view with the first morning light would still be in view at noon.

&nbs
p; And that was why Chiksika was here. From this height he could see the white men’s big boats, those floating houses of theirs that were big enough to carry even horses and cattle and wagons, when they were so far away they looked like dots on the river. And then he could signal to the warriors where they waited along the shores far below, where they waited near their swift canoes, and tell them what they needed to know to attack the boats when they came down. Since the Long Knife Clark had captured the Middle Ground from the British and destroyed the Shawnee towns, white men had been coming down in hundreds of boats, to get Kain-tuck-ee land. And the warriors, with Chiksika up here as their raven-eyes, preyed on the boats. They took scalps and weapons and powder and lead, and tools and grain and whiskey and horses, all to rebuild the strength of their nation which Clark had hurt so badly. Long ago, said the legends in the Delaware picture-stories, the ancestors of the Shawnees had gone down to the great Falling Water place and killed all the arrogant white giants.

  When Chiksika stood on this high place, he felt that he might be on the other side of the Circle of Time, like those brave ancestors, and it seemed to him that it could be done again.

  THIS SPRING AND THIS SUMMER THE WARRIORS SUFFERED NO defeats, and they wrought much damage on the whites. The Shawnees’ spirit began to heal, and most of the tribe moved back down to the old beloved townsites at Chillicothe and Piqua and planted crops in the same fields the Long Knives had burned. Everybody worked, even boys, to rebuild the towns from the ashes. The crops grew well because of the burning of the fields. The world seemed less bad now. Soon the People could resume their games and ceremonies and the dances and storytelling they so loved.

  Black Hoof was glad for this happiness he saw returning in his people. His noble face was warm, and he talked to encourage that happiness. But behind his glittering black eyes dwelt the realistic mind. He knew that for every boatload of white people his warriors destroyed, ten or twenty more went on unmolested to Kain-tuck-ee. The places that had been forts two years ago and towns a year ago were becoming cities, and where there had been only solitary cabins, there were now towns that would also become cities. A chief could only guess how many settlers had poured into the Sacred Hunting Ground of Kain-tuck-ee this year, but Black Hoof thought his own guess of five to seven thousand was not too large.

  And a place that had so many people, he knew, would be able to raise bigger and stronger armies to fight the red men.

  When the Shawnee nation had divided, Black Hoof had been one of the chiefs who had vowed to stay and defend the homeland forever. But sometimes now he would stand at the door of his lodge and look along the street at the little town of a few hundred bark huts, and he would think how few Shawnees there were, indeed, how few red men, and he would think:

  What will it be to defend our land next year when ten thousand more whites occupy Kain-tuck-ee, and the next year after that, when a hundred thousand more are there, and there will be thousands of them to the west of us in the Missi-se-pe valley, and they keep crowding into O-hi-o from the east?

  And he would sigh. And then a woman and a child would walk up the street on the way to their garden, chatting happily, and they would nod and smile at him, and he would remember how they had looked last fall, crying, fleeing the burning towns. He would smile back at them, as a chief had to do.

  LOUD NOISE WAS FOLLOWING A TORTOISE ALONG THE EDGE of a meadow, watching its ponderous, heavy movements, which were rather like his own, when he heard a deep droning sound nearby. Looking up, he saw dark specks darting in and out of a hole in the trunk of a dead oak. Bees. It was a honey tree!

  At once he forgot the tortoise. Loud Noise was mad about maple sugar and papaws and honey, honey most of all. He would do almost anything, risk any punishment or censure, to steal a little of it from the wigewa of anyone who had some, to dig off a chunk of honeycomb and eat it, even just to stick his finger in and lick it.

  Here, he realized, was a tree with probably handfuls of honey in it, and apparently no one else knew about it. He grew so excited looking at it that he started drooling and his body began to tremble. He edged up close to the tree and determined that the hole would be easy to reach into, if he climbed to a thick old limb that stuck out of the trunk about a man’s height off the ground.

  But as he stood next to the tree, the bees’ drone began to sound very menacing. They shot in and out like little bullets and came so close around him that a few times he could feel the fanned air off their little wings.

  Loud Noise had been stung by bees and hornets a few times in his life, when he had touched or stepped on them unexpectedly, and once he had sat on a wasp in the wigewa, and he could remember all too well the sudden, burning pain of their stings. Quickly he trotted away from the bee tree to a safe distance and stood looking at it, wondering what to do. He was not one of those boys who, like Tecumseh, would bear pain.

  And yet one of the worst kinds of pain he could think of would be the pain of knowing that this honey tree was here and that he could not have the honey, and that somebody else might find it and get it.

  There were two ways the village boys usually got honey. The most reckless of them would simply tear or chop away the wood to enlarge the hole, then reach in and dig out fistfuls of honey as fast as they could, taking the mad stings as the price of the delicious treasure. More cautious boys would build a smudge fire to stun the bees first. A drawback to this method was that first one must bring or make fire; another was that it was hard to smoke out bees in secret. Anyone who tried to smoke a bee tree usually ended up having to share the honey with many accomplices or onlookers who had been attracted by the smoke. The Shawnees had not had much experience with honeybees. It was believed that bees had come to the land only a few generations ago; it was believed they had been brought by the white men, and that they had escaped and found hollow trees to live in all over the land. Loud Noise knew nothing of all this; all he knew was that he was mad about honey, and that he must devise a way to get it all.

  The idea of smoking the bees and attracting everyone’s attention to the bee tree did not seem a much better way to get the honey than the first, terribly painful way, which was out of the question. And so it seemed necessary to think of an entirely new way to get honey out of a tree, and he stood thinking and drooling. He thought of the turtle and wondered if he might somehow make himself a shell of bark or something to protect his whole body from stings. But with such a shell, even if he could make one, and even if he could climb the tree with it, his hands and face would still be vulnerable to stings. No. That would not work. He did not know whether bees could sting through ordinary deerskin clothing but suspected that they could and did not want to test it.

  At last he gave up trying to invent and thought about his brother Cat Follower, and a plan came to mind. It was a plan by which he might have to share some of the honey, but if he dealt properly with Cat Follower, he might not have to share quite half of it, and maybe even less. Loud Noise turned and headed toward the town to find his brother. He found him near the riverbank with some of the other boys, engaged in a spear-throwing game. He got him aside and whispered something to him, and then, acting very carefree and aimless, the two brothers wandered off. They took a long way around in case the others became curious and tried to follow them.

  Cat Follower, of the triplets, was the one who tried hardest to be like their older brother Tecumseh. He was brave and honest. But unlike Tecumseh, he was not especially smart, and Loud Noise often had been able to fool him for useful purposes.

  Now Loud Noise told Cat Follower that he had found a honey tree and that he needed help to get the honey because there was so much of it. It would be their secret, and they could have it all to divide between themselves. “I,” said Loud Noise, “cannot climb as well as you. I am not fast or strong like you. But I have learned to cast a spell over bees so they will not sting. If you will climb to the bee hole, I will put a spell on the bees, and you can gather their honey.”

  Cat Follower
was not a simpleton. He looked warily at Loud Noise and said, “I remember how you made a spell to keep the poison vine from hurting you, and then wiped your bottom with it.”

  “I am older now and better at spells, and this of the bees I am very good at doing. Of course I know that you are not afraid of beestings anyway, and you are brave and do not cry. Think of having half of all the honey from a tree! It will be far more honey than you have ever had to eat! But only I know where it is.”

  Finally, by his flattering appeals and his irresistible descriptions of honey, descriptions that made his own mouth water so that he could hardly talk, Loud Noise persuaded Cat Follower. They went to Star Watcher’s house. She was out. They got a kettle with a handle. Then they went to the tree and looked at it and planned their attack. Loud Noise made up some of his nonsensical words to chant and make the spell. Cat Follower stood, holding his pa-waw-ka in his hand, hardening his courage. Loud Noise himself had never even tried to earn one, and now he hoped that Cat Follower’s token would help him.

  Finally Cat Follower felt ready, and he picked up the kettle and climbed up and stood on the big branch. The bees were in a fury over his presence. Taking a deep breath, he thrust his hand into the hole. He found the big combs before his whole hand and arm became numb from stings. He gouged honey out and dumped it in the kettle. The spell was not working at all, but Cat Follower had started this and mere pain was not going to stop him; it would not have stopped his brother Tecumseh.

  Bees were drumming around him and stinging his entire body, and in particular his face. Everything blurred as his eyes watered and swelled shut. He could not see Loud Noise, who had hidden himself at a safe distance, but when at last the kettle was full he yelled for him to come and catch it. This was the scary part for Loud Noise, but he lumbered to the base of the tree, caught the kettle, and raced away into hiding. He had not, of course, told Cat Follower that he would go and hide. He wanted some time to eat honey before he had to share it with his brother. Loud Noise exulted. Not one bee had touched him! There were a few in the kettle, but they were bogged down and helpless in honey.