Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “I have told you that this will be the year of the sign. It will be the year when the nation of red men is complete. The long star is in the sky, going toward the south. The squirrels listened to the Master of Life and fled toward the south. Everything on the earth is getting ready. All creatures except the white men know that this year the red men are to be as one, and that the president of the Seventeen Fires will then have to be honorable with us, and stop what he is doing. This is the most important thing that ever shall have happened among the red men. Not Cornstalk, not Chief Brant, not Pontiac, not Little Turtle in their old greatness ever did a thing that was this important to the red people. You, my brother, have become the greatest of all the leaders. As such, you will have to show more patience and wisdom than any red man ever has, and you probably will be tested very hard by Harrison while I am gone. Listen:

  “It will surely take me six or seven moons to do what I have to do in the south. In all that time, everything we have here will rest in your hands. I feel that Harrison will seek an excuse to destroy it while I am gone, and if I did not have to go to the south now, as the signs direct me, I would not leave this place. When I go to see him, I will try to put him at ease. But if in my absence he demands anything, you might have to give it. If he gives you an insult, you might have to eat it. And listen, now: If he does come up the Wabash-se-pe with his army, you must not fight him, but take the people up the Tippecanoe and hide them until it is safe. Remember, my beloved brother: If he burned this town, we could build another. But never again could a confederation like this be rebuilt. Do I have your sacred promise? Will you live up to my trust, knowing that the fate of all the red people depends upon doing so?”

  “My brother, you have my sacred word.”

  “Neweh-canateh-pah Weshemoneto, the Great Good Spirit favors our People.”

  “Weshecat-welo k’weshe-laweh-pah, let us be strong by doing right.”

  THEN TECUMSEH WENT TO SEE STAR WATCHER AND CAT Pouncing. He told his son, “While I am away, I want you to go and seek your Spirit Helper. It is a hard and frightening thing to do, but your life will be blessed when you have done it. Promise me that you will try to do that, and I will be happy as I travel.”

  Looking frightened, the boy replied, “I promise, Father, I shall try.”

  Then Tecumseh said to Star Watcher, “Good sister, great love I have for you. I will be away from here for as much as half a year, and this is a terrible time to be gone because of the Long Knife Harrison. He wants any excuse to blow us away like leaves.” She nodded her graying head, then looked straight into his eyes, her face resolute. He told her of the promise he had extracted from Open Door, then said, “Our brother has become a great man, and we know he has done much good for the People. But he is like a stone house built in a marsh, so great a weight upon a character of muck. I wish my trust could rest with him as easy as it does with you. How I wish his heart could be as strong and true as yours!

  “Our brother listens to your wisdom as to no one else’s. Help him stand by his promise to me. If Harrison provokes him and he swells up, remind him of what I said to do. Use your voice in the women’s council to hold this town safe.

  “Now here is something I have done. I asked Charcoal Burner to stay here and be a second chief in my absence. I beseeched him to use all the same cautions, and to be a steadying hand. Charcoal Burner wanted to go to the south with me but said he will stay here and do this. He gave me his pledge that he too will always counsel Open Door to restraint. With you and Charcoal Burner on either side of our brother, I have less fear of leaving. Now, listen:

  “I am going to stop at Vincennes on my way down the Wabash-se-pe, and will try to put Harrison to sleep. I will tell him the truth of my going, so that he will know I am not here planning war. I will ask him again not to let white people move into the treaty land until I have talked to the president of the Seventeen Fires, and I hope he will grant me that promise.”

  “Are you going to talk to the president, then?”

  “When the five southern nations have joined us, I think, it will be a good time to go and talk to him. Then we will be so strong that he must listen to us. We shall see. The tomorrows are in the management of the Great Good Spirit, who will tell me what to do. This is the year of the great sign. We must all do the best that is in us, and thus we can turn the fortunes of our race.”

  She gripped his hands in both of hers. Her hands were work-hardened and as strong as a man’s. Then she spoke of something he had known she would say. “When you are among the Muskogee, you will see if our mother is well?”

  “I will find her.”

  “Do you think she would want to come back and live her last years among us?”

  “I will ask her that. She was bitter when I saw her last. And what made her bitter has grown much worse since she left us. But with the years she may be serene in her heart and say yes.”

  Star Watcher drew his hands toward her and put her cheek against them and was silent for a while, and they could feel goodness and strength flowing between them. “I wish,” she said, “you could take your son with you, so that she might see him.”

  “I will try to bring her back here to see him, and to see your own children. Going there will be too dangerous a trip to take a boy. We will pass through many whites, and then among many red peoples who have been our enemies. I hope to make them our friends.”

  “Then,” she said, “until you have won them, may the Great Good Spirit shield you with his hand.”

  GOVERNOR HARRISON WATCHED WITH SATISFACTION, EVEN with delight, Tecumseh’s departure down the Wabash with the twenty-four elegant warriors of his bodyguard, their canoes filled with weapons and ceremonial objects.

  And the populace of Vincennes then watched with great relief as the rest of the Indians, in canoes, on horseback, and afoot, struck their camp north of the town and started back up the Wabash toward their own village on the Tippecanoe, their dust and their voices lingering in the hot summer air after them.

  The governor’s second council with Tecumseh had been mere formality. Neither had said anything new, and neither had conceded anything. Harrison had not let himself be disarmed by Tecumseh’s personality this time, but neither had there been any anger shown on either side. Each had been merely playing for time.

  Harrison was delighted not only because the Indians were gone and the townspeople could breathe easy, but because he knew the most formidable opponent of his plans would be far out of the way in the south for a long time, which would make everything so much easier. He could not have asked Tecumseh to do anything so convenient. And now Harrison penned another letter to Secretary of War Eustis, reporting on the council and stating his own intentions:

  The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash, and in a short time hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan, and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purpose. He is now upon the last round to put a finishing stroke to his work. His absence affords a most favorable opportunity for breaking up his confederacy. I hope, that if I can move against Prophet’s Town before his return, then that part of the fabric which he considered complete will be demolished, and even its foundations rooted up.

  I remain, Sir, Yr. Mo. Obt. Svt.,

  William H. Harrison

  The sunlight gleamed on Thick Water’s muscular shoulders as he stroked tirelessly with his paddle. The green water of the O-hi-o-se-pe gurgled under the bark hull of the canoe, and a warm breeze came pouring up the wide river between the far, dark g
reen bluffs, into the faces of the paddlers of the three canoes.

  Tecumseh’s heart was high with joy and eagerness and with the sheer thrilling spaciousness of the broad river. Through the canoe’s bark and its frame wherever he touched it, and through the paddle with which he stroked the water, he sensed the life of the water and its relentless, seeking flow, and the invisible ooze of its bottom, and all the slick and scaly and shelled creatures that lived in it, the watersnakes, eels, mussels, turtles, the fish, from the tiniest minnows to the great barbeled fish the size of a man. For now his mind was clear of the tense, imageless, spiritless kind of thought one had to use when arguing or dealing with white men, and everything was alive, round, full of the Great Good Spirit. This warm wind blowing in his face was the very breath of Weshemoneto; this river was a flowing vein of Weshemoneto; the sun over his head was the eye and mind of Weshemoneto. Tecumseh himself was a part of the Being; there was no boundary, his skin was no boundary, between it and himself; he was as dissolved in the universe as a drop of his sweat would be in this river; to be was to pray; to exist was to understand everything. Soon this great vein called the O-hi-o-se-pe, or the Spehley-weh-se-pe, in his people’s tongue, would flow into that greater one, the Missi-se-pe. He knew that when the canoes turned southward around the next bend, the Missi-se-pe would lie open and vast before them, and the water would be more yellow and full of dangerous currents and powerful swirls where the two great waters rushed together; he could see it already as he had seen it from up on the bluffs when he was a younger man. He looked up to the bluffs on the right and saw the place where he had recklessly chased the bison when he was half the age he was now. Yet he was the same young man still. Years did not pass but rolled around to the same place, and all times were now; as he looked up at the bluff there thundered the same herd still, and there rode Tecumseh still, swiftly among them. The rumble of their running and the yipping cries of his fellow hunters were in his ears, the dust and musk in his nostrils, the surging motion of the horse between his knees—and the sudden falling and the snapping pain in his thigh.…

  And the great shaking!

  Even in the smooth-gliding canoe now he could feel that shaking of the earth, the hint of the great sign to come. Now he was seeing in the other direction across the Round of Time, as if he were in its center looking first toward the arc called Yesterday, now the other way toward the arc called Tomorrow, as if he were, as he had felt before, over the very center of the Round of Time, and he saw the earth shaking, saw the trees falling, houses tumbling; he saw dust and heard roaring in the sky; he felt the flow of the river reverse itself and go the other way; he saw the long-tailed star in the sky, but now it was in the other quarter of the sky and going away, and it was also the white dove flying away across the river, as he had seen it go once before when he had stood upon that bluff.

  Then he could see it no more, just the water swirling where he had lifted his paddle, just the curving insides of the canoe, the parfleche bags, the guns, the folded blankets, Thick Water’s muscular, gleaming shoulders and shaved head and feathered scalplock right in front of him, and the paddles of the other warriors dipping. And now Thick Water turned with a happy smile on his face and cried:

  “There!”

  The others all cried out and laughed, and excited cries came from the other canoes. Before them now, between the bluffs, spread so vast an expanse of water that the land beyond it was a line that looked as thin as one hair. The Missi-se-pe!

  The banks of the O-hi-o-se-pe widened and widened and then slipped away behind the swift canoes. Here the wind was stronger; here the waters roiled and mixed, and the surface was dimpled with little whirlpools. Dark, dead trees bobbed and moved swiftly in the flood, coming down on the muddy water. The canoes went skidding with the powerful confluence.

  Tecumseh remembered when he had been a boy and had put dry seed pods of the bean tree into the swift waters of a brook and watched them go sliding down the current between the stones, the seeds like little men in a canoe. It was like that now. And the warriors laughed and exclaimed about this swiftness, and paddled hard, and watched to avoid the floating trees that could tear up the bark of their frail vessels. Such a water! So vast and wide and deep, flowing down the very middle of the land! For a while it was too great upon Tecumseh’s senses, and he could not think well yet upon what he had just seen in his soul. But this boiling confluence under the canoes, here above the Center of Time: he could feel the canoes drawing still closer to the Center; he could feel the great sign waiting far below the ooze of the riverbed, and he knew that he would soon understand it all; all the signs of his lifetime would soon reveal their meanings to him. For three and forty summers he had been as worthy as he had known how to be, and now the long star was in the sky somewhere, and surely the Great Good Spirit would let him know! Surely his few transgressions would have been forgiven, and Weshemoneto would deem him worthy of the great knowing!

  That evening Tecumseh’s canoes came ashore on a brushy, silty bank on the east side of the Missi-se-pe below the confluence. Two miles away, on the dusky west shore, a wisp of smoke could be seen against the afterglow of the setting sun, smoke from the place that had been a Spanish town the last time he had seen it but was said to be an American town now. A few faint, distant lights glowed over there as the dusk deepened.

  When the canoes were on the shore and the camp was being made, Tecumseh went around the perimeter as he always did, noting the best areas for defense and flight in case of an attack. The white men controlled this river now. The Shawnees who lived near the mouth of the Wabash-se-pe had said they saw a white men’s boat as big as a council lodge float down the O-hi-o-se-pe three moons ago, not one with the white wings on it, but one with a chimney that gave off a great amount of smoke. That boat had made a strange, ugly noise and had churned the water white. It had scared the children.

  A little way below the confluence, Tecumseh’s canoes had passed the dark mass of a ruined fort, a fort that the Long Knife Clark had built during the war between the Long Knives and the British. It was abandoned now, rotting and overgrown with brush, and Tecumseh had thought:

  Someday, if the Master of Life helps us to finish this great work, all the places of the Americans will be like that, empty and rotting, even their cities, and there will be no more smoke boats or wing boats on the lakes or the rivers, and our People will hunt happily and freely over all this land which was ours, and will forget the fear and sadness we have known for a generation. There will be only raccoons and chipmunks and snakes living in the forts that Clark built.

  Clark.

  Tecumseh looked across the river to the darkening sky over the western country and thought:

  Now the governor of that land over there is named Clark. The young brother of the old Long Knife Clark. The Clark who is the governor there now is the one who crossed the Shining Mountains six years ago and went to the Western Sea.

  The Long Knives had truly crossed this whole immense land. There were some living over there now. Not many yet, but a few, trading furs, making treaties.… Boone, it was said, lived in a big house far up the Missouri-se-pe now; But-lah Kenton, it was said, had bought a great piece of land right over there, somewhere near those distant lights.…

  There were Shawnees over there, too, those who had left O-hi-o thirty-two years ago to escape from Clark’s Long Knives, and now another Clark was the ruler of the lands where they lived.…

  “Great One,” Tecumseh murmured, raising his eyes to the sky over the great river, “guide me. Show me what I must do to stop the intruders, to turn them back before they fill up the world! Reveal to me now the meaning of the great sign, so that I shall be ready and know what to do!”

  THAT NIGHT HE SLEPT ON THE RIVERBANK OVER THE CENTER of Time, and in his sleep all the things passed again: the white dove crossing the sky with thundering wings, the face of He-Opens-the-Door, the four wolves following in the shadow of the dove with moons in their eyes, the green eye of the Panthe
r in the Sky, the bundle of red sticks, and then the great shaking and jolting of the earth straight below, the river flowing upstream, the dust and smoke rising over the whole Middle Ground, the horsemen coming toward him through yellow light …

  When he awoke the sky was growing light. The Missi-se-pe gurgled and whispered a few yards away. The long canoes lay on the shore. All was still. His warriors were sleeping in their blankets all around, except for Thick Water, who sat on guard with a blanket across his shoulders and a rifle on his knees, a gray sentinel in the river mist.

  He smiled at Tecumseh, seeing him awake. Tecumseh smiled at him and sat up.

  “We must move now,” Tecumseh said. “We have to go to all the towns of the southern nations before the sign comes, and it will come sooner than we had thought. We have only four moons in which to do all we have to do!”

  Thick Water’s eyes widened, and the other warriors, hearing this, sat upright. “Wake, and hurry!” Tecumseh told them with a thrilling urgency in his voice. “At last it has all been told to me, and I know!”

  Thick Water leaped up, heart pounding. He understood and was amazed. Weshemoneto’s revelation of when and how he would shake the world had happened in the soul of his leader during the night, and most amazing to Thick Water was that he himself, sitting guard, had heard nothing but the gurgle of the river and the cooing of a dove, had seen no light but the stars above and that Long Star of the Year of the Sign!

  33

  VINCENNES, INDIANA TERRITORY

  September 26, 1811

  THE DRUMMER BOYS OF THE FOURTH UNITED STATES INFANTRY Regiment began a long, chattering roll on their instruments. It was a brave, thrilling sound to the ears of the people of Vincennes, who for three years had lived under the imagined threat of an Indian massacre. The crowds lining the street shivered at the sound, and when General William Henry Harrison rode up on his light gray mare alongside the columns of troops, wearing a fringed calico hunting shirt over his uniform, glanced left and right with those piercing eyes, drew his sword—not a ceremonial sword this time, but a big, curved, razor-edged man-killer of a cavalry saber—and raised it in front of his face in a salute, the crowd broke out in huzzahs, their eyes shining with exultation.