Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Then he asked Weshemoneto to tell him, at the proper time, the meaning of the signs.

  19

  MAYKUJAY TOWN

  Summer 1789

  IT WAS EARLY MORNING. A DELICATE MIST WAS RISING OFF the creek, tinged with the first rays of the sun. A heron stalked along in the water’s edge on its stick legs, looking for something to catch. In the grain fields off to the south, songbirds were starting to trill.

  Loud Noise lay on his belly on a robe near the door of his hut with his chin on the back of his hand and watched the path to the creek. His gullet burned with rum.

  Loud Noise had built his hut here, in a boggy bottomland, away from the rest of the town, for one reason. It gave a close view of a quiet green pool of the creek banked with flat, mossy slabs of stone, a little above its confluence with the river. The floor of his hut was usually spongy and damp, sometimes even muddy, and everything in the hut was mildewed and muddy. It was a place of mosquitoes and snakes. The hut itself was so carelessly made and shabby that it could have been taken for a beaver house. Star Watcher, a very good house builder, might have helped him build a neat, snug house, even though she had children to take care of, if he had chosen a more reasonable site. She suspected why he had chosen this place, and she called him a twisted-head. And so he had put the rickety, drafty hovel up mostly by himself, as he had no woman of his own to build it for him.

  He had no woman of his own, and that was his problem. Loud Noise was a young man now, and he had the appetites of three or four men—in his loins and in his guts. But he was as ugly as three or four men put together. Women and girls laughed behind their hands at him and drew away when his one bulging, evil-looking eye stared at them.

  Loud Noise was always conscious of the ugliness of his empty right eyesocket and tended to keep the left side of his face forward and the disfigured eye as obscure as possible, so habitually that his head appeared to be on crooked, and his right shoulder was always aching and hunched. With the prominent left eye he stared at women in rude hunger. Their aloofness angered him, and he hated them even as he desired them.

  Girls grew silly and squirmy when his brother Tecumseh was around. Even Stands-Between, ordinary and undistinguished as he was, could cause some girls to lower their eyes and look coy. But Loud Noise, with his great passions and his feeling that he possessed undetected powers and unappreciated wisdom, only repelled them. He was desperately lonely, and angry. Most of the town’s people were uncomfortable with his presence, his squinting eye, and his curious outbursts of gibberish and laughter, with his dirtiness and gassiness, so it was fine with them if he chose to burrow alone in the distant bog. People were afraid to offend him directly, because he seemed the kind of person who might retaliate with witchcraft. In his hut he sat up late at night, drank trader’s liquor, sang to himself, gorged on food, and grew paunchy. On still nights he could be heard practicing loud belches and windblasts and whooping with drunken hilarity at his more remarkable noises. Unlike most drunkards, he did not wander the town wailing or starting trouble, but entertained himself all night or sometimes tormented himself all night with his strange mind, and slept till midday most days. Hunters seldom took him along because he floundered through the woods and scared away the game. For the great quantities of food he ate, he depended mostly upon his generous sister Star Watcher and her husband. When he did have to depend upon himself, he caught fish, helped himself from gardens or from the tribal corn fields, or sometimes he would trade a drink of liquor for a small hunk of venison or half a turkey from a homecoming hunter. He could eat and digest anything, including unripe corn and vegetables and half-spoiled meat. It was easy enough to get by in a tribe that never let its people starve.

  He lived alone with his turbulent longings, and his bed was spotted with old semen, from his dreams and from the self-manipulations he did in the margins of sleep. Too much of this, according to the precepts, was shameful and soul sapping—so he simply mocked the precepts.

  It was not for the beauty of the creek that Loud Noise had built his shabby hut here, though he would now and then gaze upon this mossy place with such a poignant appreciation of it that his heart would ache and his tears would blur the scene—usually after he had smoked the seed heads of hemp.

  The reason he had built his hovel here was that it was where women and girls came to wash garments and bathe. Here he could lurk in the shadows of his hut, tense and trembling, and watch their naked, gleaming brown bodies in and around the water. With no suspicion that a man was watching, the girls would stoop in the shallows, yipping with shivery voices, and sweep handfuls of water at each other. Long strands of wet black hair would cling to their goosefleshed shoulders and turgid nipples. Women with mature bosoms and powerful haunches would sometimes sit naked on the moss and caress their feet in the water. On hot days there was so much to see that Loud Noise would wish he had ten eyes instead of one.

  Star Watcher suspected him of this spying, and that was why she called him a twisted-head. To see a naked woman was not unusual. Though the Shawnee women were modest, there were times in and around a crowded village when their functions would require them to be partly or wholly nude, and on such occasions nothing was to be made of it. Men bathed in the river, women in the creek, and it was considered uncivil to spy. The women of the tribe were, after all, like members of the same great family. Star Watcher told no one else what she thought her brother was doing. It was embarrassing enough having him for a brother with just his known aberrations; there was no point in calling anyone’s attention to this.

  This morning Loud Noise lay looking out, the smell of his burned-out fire rankling in his nostrils. He had awakened from a rum sleep before dawn. To his delight he had found a few swallows of liquor still in the bottom of his jar and had drunk them to get the ache out of his head, and now as the sun came up he lay there just a little drunk, watching for one particular girl whose habit was to come down to the creek early, every other day or so, and bathe before anyone else had stirred up the silt in the creek. This was a Peckuwe maiden of about his age, tall and straight and graceful, and when she came down to the creek in the mornings she seemed like a doe coming down to drink.

  Now his heart leaped as a light form approached down the path. It was she!

  She glanced at his hut as she passed, but he lay low in the gloom, and if she thought of him at all, she probably thought he was asleep. He followed her with his hungry eye as she went down and stood on the bank.

  Now this girl with the fine-boned face stepped out of her moccasins and stood barefoot on the moss, then removed her little headband and laid it carefully in one of the moccasins. Loud Noise lay trembling, his eye as keen and precise as a hawk’s, watching her nimble brown fingers braid her black hair. She seemed to glow in the sunbeams. And now she crossed her arms and gripped her doeskin dress at the hips and slipped it off over her head. As she stood folding the garment, humming softly, the reflected sunlight off the water playing over her, his desire became too great at last.

  Perhaps if he had been sober, he would have stayed in his hut and watched her, while spilling his seed into his bed. To force oneself upon an unwilling woman was a serious badness, and the family of the outraged one was entitled to take retribution. When Loud Noise was sober, it was fear of retribution, as much as fear of being rejected, that checked his urge to throw himself upon some solitary bather. But he was not sober now, nor was he too drunk to move, and no witness was around, and he knew too that this desirable girl had no dangerous protectors, being the daughter of an old Peckuwe village chief whose two sons had been killed at Piqua Town by the Long Knives years ago.

  So when this girl, whose name was She-Is-Favored, was bending over to place her folded dress upon a dry rock, she heard a whisper of motion behind her and at once felt a strong arm encircle her. She gasped and began to struggle. Something rigid was being thrust at her buttocks, and she heard hard breathing and smelled stinking rum breath. Whoever had her was strong. The girl was scare
d, but more angry than scared. Squirming and twisting to look back, she saw the homely, one-eyed fool, greasy, grimacing with lust, grunting. She was infuriated. If this had been his brother Tecumseh, whom she had seen only once but dreamed of ever since, she might have yielded. It was instead this paunchy stinker.

  Loud Noise, though clumsy, had grown up to be strong, especially when in one of his tantrums or frenzies, and people avoided conflicts with him, as he might go out of his head and strike or strangle with incredible power.

  But She-Is-Favored, like most Shawnee women, who did hard and heavy work from morning till night, was strong, too. And she was as indignant as he was impassioned. She had learned, in the womanly school of the menstrual lodge, how women held their own in fights with their husbands. One way was by pulling hair. She could not reach the hair of this snorting, grunting man who was trying so frantically to penetrate her from behind. But she could do the other thing. Being bent forward like this with her head down, hissing, clenching her teeth, she reached back between her own thighs and with all the strength of her work-hardened hand she seized his scrotum and squeezed, twisted, and pulled as if to tear it off.

  Many of the villagers that morning were jolted out of their sleepiness by what sounded like a wildcat cry down by the creek. As the scream trailed off it was recognizable as a man’s voice.

  And when the first of the people ran down the path with their guns and knives, they were puzzled to see the crazy hermit Loud Noise, stark naked and doubled over with his hands in his crotch, hobbling in through the door of his hovel, keening and groaning.

  The only other person in sight was She-Is-Favored, the Peckuwe maiden, wading into the creek to bathe.

  ON THAT SAME MORNING, FOUR HUNDRED MILES TO THE south, Tecumseh crouched behind a stump and aimed his rifle at a head in a hat just visible above the pointed log pickets of a small fort called Buchanan’s Station. The man in the hat was at the same moment aiming his rifle at Tecumseh. They were fifty paces from each other. Around them at this instant, other rifles were going off, and there was a haze of smoke over the lush spring green of the clearing. To Tecumseh’s right just now, Big Fish was lying beside another stump, pushing a ball down the hot barrel of his rifle with a hickory ramrod. His face and hands were sooty with gunpowder. This had been going on all morning. To Tecumseh’s left, kneeling behind the trunk of a fallen tree, Chiksika was fitting a fire-arrow to a bowstring. Next to him was a young Cherokee whose task it was to prepare the fire-arrows. He had built a small fire. He had rags and twists of tinder and char cloth and a jar of bear oil. He would bind rags and twists of tinder to an arrow shaft just behind the head, soak it in the oil, then light it from the fire and hand it to Chiksika, who would fit it to his bowstring like this, then quickly rise and shoot the arrow at the wood-shingled roof of the blockhouse of the fort or one of the houses inside the wall.

  Chiksika had great faith in fire-arrows. In the six years since the end of the white men’s war there had been no more hope of getting British cannons, so the fire-arrow was the only alternative for destroying forts. But fire-arrows had to be used at short range, and the men in the fort were deadly shooters even at long range. It had taken the warriors most of the morning to get close enough to the little fort for Chiksika to shoot fire-arrows at it. Twice they had rushed toward it, dodging from stump to stump across the clearing, and both times their advance had been stopped by the quick and accurate shooting of the men in the fort. Several Cherokees had been badly wounded.

  The little fort was near the Cherokee villages in the country south of Kain-tuck-ee, called Tennessee, and the sharp-shooting white men who occupied the fort had bothered the Cherokees a great deal. Chiksika and Tecumseh and their little party of Shawnee warriors had joined with the Cherokees to attack this fort, because they had been visiting with the Cherokees and wanted to help their southern brothers solve the problem of the fort. Chiksika took any opportunity to fight white men.

  Chiksika had been fighting with these Cherokee bands for more than a year. He had come down here after Tecumseh’s leg was broken in the hunting accident, and when the leg healed Tecumseh had come back with him. Most of the Shawnee warriors, including Tecumseh, were living with Cherokee girls, and this had bonded them even closer to the tribe. Therefore, although it was a Cherokee matter and the Shawnees would not have had to join in the attack, they had volunteered eagerly. Chiksika had gained as great a reputation for killing white men in the south as he had had in O-hi-o. As he had been doing all his adult life, he was still avenging the death of his father and the burning of the towns. These fire-arrows would burn white men’s towns. To be the man who rose up and shot the fire-arrows was to be in especial danger, because the marksmen in the fort knew where he was, and they tried to fire a volley at him every time they saw him rise up behind the big log. So far that morning Chiksika had hit the fort with ten burning arrows. Three of them had started good blazes, two on a roof and one on the palisade. Men in the fort had extinguished the burning palisade by pouring water down on it. The burning roof had been put out both times by a brave boy who had climbed up on it and beaten it with a soaked blanket. The marksmen in the fort were kept busy pinning down the Cherokee warriors, but they considered the fire-arrows to be an especial danger, and just as Chiksika believed that sooner or later one of his arrows would start a fire they could not put out, they believed that sooner or later they would hit him when he rose with his bow. The dead tree was full of holes from their shooting, and Chiksika had wood splinters in his face and shoulders. The Cherokee who was making the fire-arrows worked on despite the agony of splinters in his eye.

  Now Tecumseh squeezed the trigger of his rifle, and when the smoke billowed away he could no longer see the man in the hat. He yelped with triumph and quickly reloaded. While he was measuring powder from his horn, three bullets hit the stump in front of him, and he was stung by chips of bark.

  Chiksika, seeing that one white man had just fallen and at least three had discharged their rifles, leaped up and drew his bow and sent another arrow in a smoking arc toward the fort. He dropped out of sight, and several more rifle balls thudded into the log. He laughed with delight.

  Chiksika seemed today, as always, to have Weshemoneto’s cloak of protection around him. But Tecumseh was in a state of the most extreme dread and grew cold with fear every time he saw Chiksika fit another arrow to the string.

  Chiksika had had a vision three days ago. He had told Tecumseh about it that night, and it had chilled his heart.

  In the vision Chiksika had seen himself fall before the palisade wall of the fort, shot through the forehead.

  Tecumseh could not disbelieve that dream. His father had had a premonition the day he was killed. So Tecumseh had pleaded with Chiksika not to come into battle at the fort. “You do not have to fight the fort,” Tecumseh had pleaded. “If you have seen that happen to you at the fort, then do not go to the fort.”

  “You do not understand,” Chiksika had replied. “I have seen it happen, and therefore I know I will be at the fort.” Several times Tecumseh had tried to persuade his brother not to join the attack. Finally Chiksika had said, “Brother, I know your heart. Yes. When our father saw that he would die in the battle of the Kanawha-se-pe, my heart was as yours is now, and I wished he would stay back from that battle. But would our father have hung back from his duty as a war chief from fear of such a vision? No. Then would I? No. Listen, my good brother. I have gone into battle many times thinking I would be killed. The only difference is that now I know it. The fear is no greater. I think it is less, because what we fear is what we do not know. Now make me a promise, and if you do, I will tell you of another vision I have had.”

  Tecumseh had lowered his head to hide the grief in his face and said, “I will promise what you ask.”

  Gazing into the fire, Chiksika had said, “Promise me that when I fall, you will not lose heart for the battle.”

  “I promise that. If you fall, I will want to fight harder to avenge
it.”

  “Good. Revenge itself is spit in the wind, that comes back, but Long Knives do not belong here, and you must never stop resisting them. The greatest chiefs will sue for peace with the white men. In dreams I have seen even Little Turtle and Black Hoof and Blue Jacket give up and mark treaties.”

  “No! Not Black Hoof!”

  “Yes. Even he. But in my visions, you always refuse. And thus you become the greatest of the Shawnee chiefs, because you do not turn around.”

  After that talk, Chiksika had seemed serene and almost cheerful. He had repeated the promises their father had demanded before he died and said, “You must promise the same to me. See that our brothers do not disgrace the family or the People. Loud Noise is the dark shadow. He does not have good character. I know I have not been a good brother to him, and I regret it. But you have been. Perhaps you have seen something in him that I in my selfishness did not see. He will never be a warrior. He never even tried to earn his pa-waw-ka. And he was afraid to go out in the night to find a Spirit Helper. He cares little for his honor, I think. But he loves you and admires you, my brother. Do what you can to help him be an honorable man, no shame to us.

  “As for our sister. Always listen to her. She was born wise and grows ever more so. I remember she told me to be merciful to prisoners, but I did not listen until you taught me the same. Tell her I have greater love for her than it seemed. You already know you have no better ally than Star Watcher.”

  That had been their council, the best of all they had shared. And now they were here in front of the fort. The guns of the men in the fort and of the Cherokees around the fort were still banging and filling the humid air with smoke. Chiksika’s last fire-arrow had set ablaze something inside the palisade. Much smoke was rising, and the men inside were yelling to each other. Chiksika was laughing. He fitted another burning arrow to the bowstring and stood up, drawing the bow, the long, beautiful muscles tense in his arms and shoulders, his copper skin agleam with sweat, a fierce, happy grimace baring his white teeth.