Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  He had thought she would laugh or at least smile at this joke. Instead, a soft snore came from her throat.

  She had fallen asleep.

  AS THE NEXT FEW MONTHS PASSED, TECUMSEH SPENT MUCH of the nighttime lying awake beside his sleeping wife. She seemed to need twice as much sleep as he did, but she did not want him to sit up by the fire or go out while she slept. He tried to please her by going to bed when she did, and often she would go to sleep with their soos juices seeping out of her massih and a smile on her face. Then she became pregnant, and even after they stopped copulating she still insisted that he must always be beside her when she was in bed. For a while this great needing of hers charmed and flattered him, and he would lie beside her feeling tender about her tap-a-lot for him and for the baby inside her. But he could not think about those things all the time, and sometimes he would think that this way of hers was a little selfish.

  So now Tecumseh could not go out and seek solitude for thinking, as he had used to, not unless he wanted to hear her complain about being abandoned. And so these nights he lay beside a sleeping pregnant wife and tried to ponder on his dreams and his destiny.

  All the dams against the flood of the Americans were broken, now that the old chiefs and the British had given up. Somehow, according to the signs of his own destiny, he was to build another dam. But how? He was only a warrior chief, of twenty and eight summers, chief of his own village only. He was Kispoko by birth, and by the old law of the People, only a Chalagawtha or a Thawegila Shawnee could be chief over the whole Shawnee nation.

  He did not yet have his answer. But since he had started thinking about floods and dams, he had been considering the Beaver People and the way they dammed a flow. The answers to many things were in the ways of the animals, and even animals that were not one’s Spirit Helper could teach.

  No single beaver builds a dam. But many beavers, working together as if with a single will, build a dam that holds back a large and powerful stream. The answer lay in that single will of the many.

  When Tecumseh was wakeful at night, his wife breathing softly beside him, he would lie looking into fire, or at stars beyond the roof, hearing the river’s liquid song and the owl in the tree and the whippoorwill in its covert, and he would ponder on what needed to be said to make the many wills of the many tribes become the same—permanently the same, as the Beaver People are permanently the same in will—so they could build a dam and stop the flow.

  He could think deeply of these things only at night now. As he had feared, having a wife kept him too busy to think, until she went to sleep.

  Sometimes during the days, Star Watcher would come and try to talk to She-Is-Favored about some of the little things the chief’s wife should be thinking of and doing for the women. She was appalled when She-Is-Favored would say she had no time for this or that, that she was pregnant and too tired, or when she would lean toward Star Watcher with a languid smile and say, “Sister, could you do that for me instead?”

  After this had happened a few times, Star Watcher began to fear that she had served her brother ill by approving of this woman. She began to notice that Tecumseh spent less and less time among the People, that he could not sit by the fire with Stands Firm or other subchiefs in the evenings, that those with problems could not find him out in the village and talk with him.

  She thought: Perhaps he will grow wiser about handling this woman now that she is pregnant and cannot put his will to sleep with her pretty bottom. Maybe he will never make her a good chief’s wife. But he must become a good chief again.

  THE NEXT SPRING BREAKER-IN-PIECES CAME TO TECUMSEH’S town, on his way home from a visit to Black Hoof’s town at Wapakoneta.

  “You would be sad to see him and his People,” the Delaware chief said to Tecumseh. “Some of them wear white men’s clothes. The men are plowing the ground.” Breaker-in-Pieces was a fierce-looking warrior chief with a terrible scar and a missing ear on one side of his head, a man famed for keeping his word. He and his People were under the Greenville Treaty, too, but at least they had not yet begun to live like the white farmers, because they lived farther west, where there was still game.

  Tecumseh shook his head slowly and looked down into the fire. After a while he said, “Do they like being white men?”

  “They have little heart for it. But they try. They still believe Black Hoof when he says it is the only way for them. They try to be white. But for one thing, they do not know how to control whiskey like the white men yet, and there is much whiskey. I think the whites do not eat the corn they grow, I think they drink all of it.”

  Tecumseh looked over at him with pain in his eyes, and the Delaware went on: “They are crazy for it, and they are crazy from it. Anything they have, they give for it. Then they drink till it is gone. They vomit and scream and beat their families, and try to stab their brothers. Then they pass out. They wake up sick, in their own filth, and have nothing left but pain. Then they go to the trader store to get something to live by for a while, and the trader makes them promise him their tomorrows.” He sat quiet, looking down in sadness.

  She-Is-Favored waddled into the house to get a bowl and went out, saying nothing. She would be having her baby soon, and she was not happy with carrying its weight, or the shape of her body, or all the silly talk all the women always had about babies. And she was worried; women always warned her that having a baby hurt worse than anything. Also, she could not understand why the other women did not admire her more than they did, for she was the women’s chief.

  The main reason they did not admire her, even as much as they had used to, was because they could see that she troubled their chief. She nagged Tecumseh about the time he spent with the People’s problems and because he gave to them so much of what he had. “You are the chief, I am your wife,” she would complain, “but almost anyone in our town has more nice things than we have.”

  “What do you need that we do not have?” he would ask her, and she could not name anything they needed, though she could think of many things she wanted. Then she would get angry at him because he could point out the difference between needing and wanting. So she was sullen, even in the presence of their guest. Being of hot spirit, she gave off sparks from her eyes, not tears.

  Breaker-in-Pieces said nothing to Tecumseh about her demeanor. It annoyed him, but it was none of his concern. Now he said, “I am glad my town is farther from the white man’s roads. They do not come so close with their whiskey. Though even there, it disturbs us sometimes. A few of my young men have come to need it.”

  “We have had some trouble with it here,” Tecumseh said.

  “Yes. One day, I fear, it will ruin us all. But I have some distance from it, and from their hunters. Listen. Many of the chiefs have trouble already with the white men who come across the new treaty line and hunt in their country. The whitefaces kill more game than their own hunters kill. Then they leave much of the meat lying for the carrion birds.” He shook his head.

  “And so we see once more,” Tecumseh said, “what the boundaries of a white man’s treaty mean to a white man.”

  The Delaware put his hand on Tecumseh’s arm, and in his scarred face there was an earnest light. “My son, what you do here, we think often of it, we who were pressed down to mark the treaty of Wayne.…” He paused, as if remembering something, then went on: “My villages on the Wah-pi-ha-ni, near the Great Mound—you know the place—this is a good land, my son, fertile, easy to defend, and not so close to the white man’s roads. My People would be pleased if your People came to live nearby.…”

  Tecumseh felt a great warmth. To receive an invitation like this, from another tribe, was an uncommon honor. He lowered his head. “Thank you. My People revere our grandfathers, the Delawares. And you know my belief: we must all be united together as red men, or the whites will scatter us until like dust we will no longer be seen nor be able to see each other. In council next time I will tell my People what you have said.” He paused, then said something he had not
thought he could say. “I understand, Father, the great weight that pressed you down when you went to treat with Wayne. I know that many who put their marks on the treaty withheld their hearts.”

  The old chief nodded. “We grow sick now as we watch the white men come like a flood into the old lands. The boundaries are being forgotten already by the O-hi-o governor. St. Clair has made a new division he calls Wayne County, named for that general, and as I hear this land described, it is far outside their boundaries and into the land of our brothers, even the Auglaize, even to Mis-e-ken, I hear.”

  Tecumseh clenched his jaw. This was no surprise to him, but it churned him inside. For nearly half his life he had been fighting to hold back the white intruders, but it was apparent that the fight had only begun. And now the Delaware was saying:

  “Here is another thing about Wayne. I hear that his aching sickness brought him down and down until, in the last Hard Moon, he died, in a fort in Pennsylvania, on his way home. He was a great war chief, even we whom he harmed must say he was great, but it would have been better if his aching sickness had taken him two years sooner, before he struck us at the Fallen Timbers.”

  “Ahh!” Tecumseh nodded. He sat quiet, remembering what a force Wayne had been in the fate of his People. Wayne had crushed the confederation “under his little finger,” as his boast had said, then had forced the British to withdraw from Fort Miami, then out of Detroit into Canada. The British had been cowardly, and Tecumseh did not feel sorry for them. But their departure boded ill for the red men.

  Wayne had done all that, and now Wayne was no more. His body lay dead in the earth somewhere, but what he had done was still here, and would continue, and in this way his spirit would never leave the red men in peace. “He, like Clark, was a mighty enemy, and he still hurts us,” Tecumseh said. “May there never be another so great.” But as he said this, the other officer’s face came into his mind, the young one who had always been at Wayne’s side. When Tecumseh thought of him, he felt a chill.

  Then Breaker-in-Pieces, as if he had seen into Tecumseh’s mind and glimpsed the young officer’s face there, said, “Wayne’s young chieftain, the one named Harrison. He grows very fast in importance for a man so young. He is now the chief of Fort Washington, by their big town of Cincinnati. He has married a daughter of one of the biggest of the land buyers. This one man, called Symmes, has bought all the land between the Little Miami-se-pe and the Great Miami-se-pe, all the way up to Fort Hamilton.”

  Tecumseh remembered that area well from many hunting trips, and he gasped. “One man buys for himself a whole hunting ground!”

  “Yes,” said Breaker-in-Pieces.

  “And then he says all of it is his!”

  “Yes. And all the white people have to believe him.”

  “And then what does he do?” exclaimed Tecumseh, hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry at such a grandiose illusion. “Does he then tell the Great Good Spirit, ‘You must get off of my land’? Is that what he does?”

  The old chief’s brutal face softened and creased with amusement. “Yes, that is what he says. And from what I have seen of white men’s land, Weshemoneto does leave it. And he takes with him all his creatures, and all that made it good.”

  The two chiefs laughed at this. But their laughter was not light and pleasant. A deep foreboding loomed, and in its deepest shadow lurked the man named Harrison. There was something ominous in this: an ambitious white chieftain, rising fast, and associated by marriage with one of the great land-taking devils. The workings of the white man’s society were an unimaginable mystery, but even from the outside this seemed to portend the worst sort of trouble.

  And then Tecumseh said something that made the Delaware’s eyes widen with surprise. “But the Great Spirit will come back with his creatures and make it a good land again,” he said in a soft but certain voice, “when we return and make the white men leave it.”

  ONE DAY STAR WATCHER MET SHE-IS-FAVORED AT THE spring, where both had gone for water.

  One was not supposed to meddle in another’s marriage, but Star Watcher put herself in the way of She-Is-Favored and made her meet her eyes and said, “Young sister, there is a cloud over your house. I see my brother drawn tight like a bow. This must not be. Are you the wrong woman for our chief?”

  To Star Watcher’s surprise, She-Is-Favored did not shut her out but looked as if she were hungry for a chance to speak of her troubles. “He stays away from the house, with the People, too much,” she said.

  “Yes. Is he not the chief?”

  “Am I not the chief’s wife?” she snapped.

  “Listen. Some think you do not act like it. To both the chief and his wife, there is only the health and happiness of the People. Tecumseh gives all to that. You must, too.”

  “What of my health and happiness?”

  “Sister, you have good health. You have all the food you need, for your husband is the best hunter. You wanted to be the wife of the chief, and you are. You wanted to have babies, and you are going to. If you are unhappy, it must be from holding everything to yourself.” She reached for her hand and told her the old teaching: “When you give from your heart, your heart grows lighter. I hope you will learn the joy of giving from your heart to the People. As the wife of the chief, that is what you are for.”

  But the face of She-Is-Favored did not show that she understood.

  WHEN IT WAS AGREED IN THE NEXT COUNCIL THAT IT WOULD be good to go farther from the white men and become neighbors of the Delaware, Loud Noise was sent to locate a favorable townsite on the Wah-pi-ha-ni, which was the Delaware name for White River. The shaman was always the one who determined whether the medicine of a place was good. The tribe would move after the harvest.

  Through all this planning, She-Is-Favored grew closer to her term and ever darker in spirit. She complained that she did not want to go farther away west from her home country.

  “Just so do we all feel,” Tecumseh exclaimed, “but the whites move us despite our wishes. Do you not remember that half the nation long ago had to move beyond the Great River? Compared with what they had to do, this is not far, to the White River.”

  But she argued and was still arguing when the baby started to come down. Then she stopped complaining long enough to groan with the labor. Tecumseh sent for Star Watcher to help her. His sister acted very happy for him, then told him to go someplace else. “For once she will not want you right here,” she said. “So go, and enjoy your freedom to walk around.” He went, but his mind was in a turmoil.

  She-Is-Favored had ruined for him the proud, tender anticipation of fatherhood. Their marriage had become a relentless, unwanted burden because of her selfishness, her unwillingness to give any time or attention to the People. Many spoke of her as a nosy-mouth, which was their word for a gossip. She had not had a smile for him in months. After a hunt she would insist that he not give so much of the meat or so many of the skins to the old people. But she would not even tan the skins he did keep for her. She was a spoiled woman who would not listen to teaching and seemed not to want to understand anything important, and Tecumseh feared that their child would grow up in a house of silent thunder and become unhappy. Maybe she would choose to leave him and return to her Peckuwes. Probably that would be the best thing. But then what about this baby?

  While he was pondering this problem, he was also beginning to watch for any sign of the baby’s unsoma. He watched the sky and birds; he listened for sounds. As the wait went on there was nothing remarkable. The day was oppressive and still; nothing moved or announced its singularity. The sky was overcast but with no feel of rain, and thus there were not even any shadows to make suggestions.

  At last an old midwife came to tell him the child was born and well, and was a boy, and She-Is-Favored was also well.

  When Tecumseh went into the wigewa, the room still full of the moist musk of childbirth, she actually smiled at him, and he wondered if mothering might soften her, make her more giving, as motherhood tended to do. Perh
aps his worries about the marriage had been unnecessary. She lay bared to the ribs, the dark, almost purple, animallike little creature squirming on her arm. Her breasts were swollen large. Tecumseh knelt and put his hand on her forehead. Her hair was damp. He looked closely at the baby, smiling with tender wonderment at all its tiny perfections: jointed fingers no bigger than flower buds, ears no wider than a man’s thumb, the little sprig of a passah-tih between his legs. Here it was as from the very beginnings, and for this moment Tecumseh did not worry that it was not a good time to be born. The baby outfaced all portents. The pungent room was a sacred place.

  “Thank you for what you have done,” Tecumseh said.

  She let him press his cheek against hers and felt the wetness of a tear.

  WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR THE BABY TO BEGIN SUCKLING, Tecumseh was there watching. Having seen no unsoma sign yet, he had been idly thinking that somehow the infant might acquire a name associated, like his own, with the Panther.

  It was night. Now the child, as if suddenly finding the milk-turgid breast beside him for the first time, squirmed violently, grabbed for it with both hands, and tried to stuff the whole mammary into his gaping mouth.

  Tecumseh laughed. “He should be called The-Panther-Seizes-His-Prey!”

  And so that—Neh-tha-weh-nah or Cat Pouncing—became the baby’s name.

  SOON THE MATERNAL LANGUOR WORE OFF, AND SHE-IS-FAVORED began using the baby to put more pressure on Tecumseh. Now that she had gone to such effort to bear him this perfect baby, she did not feel obliged to do much of anything else, even though she was up and about. And she mentioned many pretty little things she had long wanted from the white men’s store near the Auglaize: a new mirror, a certain kind of earbobs which, she thought, would delight the baby as they dangled from her ears above him … The list of wants grew every time she spoke.