Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “No!” shouted one of the Kickapoo chieftains, actually shaking his hatchet before Open Door’s face. “We are through with all this, with starving in your town while you get us in trouble with the Long Knives! We put our families in your hands, and now the Blue-Coat army is this close to them! Listen! You can hear the women and children crying with fear! I, for one, am going to take my people to the safety of our towns, at once. Will I pause long enough to kill you for what you have done? My brothers’ bodies are being mutilated in the army camp now! I should kill you for killing them! But rather will I let you live, cast out of your importance, to slink around the edges of the towns like a beggar dog, crying over your guilt for the rest of your years!”

  “Loud Noise,” snarled a Shawnee man who had long known him, contemptuously using his old name, “if you want to finish the Americans, perhaps you should go over to their camp by yourself and thunder them with your Thunder-Sucker! Perhaps you should blow them away with the gas of your bowels!”

  The worst had happened, and Open Door sat looking down, a sheen of sweat on his ugly face, his heart breaking.

  He had fallen to what he had been before.

  AND SO IT WAS THAT, WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER, THE two mightiest forces in the Middle Ground licked their wounds under a drizzling sky and tried to direct themselves toward their futures.

  In his muddy, trampled, bullet-riddled, blood-soaked oak grove, Governor Harrison put his exhausted troops to the most dismal sort of hard labor, digging mass graves for sixty dead soldiers, a large proportion of whom had been officers. They laid them in rows, covered them with earth and then with piles of deadwood, then set the wood on fire to hide the signs of grave digging. Other soldiers were put to work with axes and shovels to build the breastworks they should have built the evening before. Harrison was afraid that the Indians, who had fought with such unexpected recklessness and perseverance, were not through and would return under cover of darkness, either this evening or, more likely, on the dawn of the morrow. One mortally wounded warrior was dragged into the camp and questioned about what the Indians intended to do, but he said nothing; he knew nothing. Harrison tried to learn from him whether Tecumseh had led the Indians’ attack. The wounded Indian shook his head and answered that Tecumseh was not back yet from the south and warned Harrison that he had better watch out when he returned.

  In their moments of leisure between grave digging and defense building, the troops diverted themselves by sniping at the warriors who had been posted to watch the camp and by scalping and flaying the corpses of the forty warriors they found lying on the ground or in hastily scooped graves around the perimeter. As forty scalps would not go far among several hundred soldiers, most of the scalps were divided among comrades. One scalp, cut into quarters, decorated four rifle barrels the rest of that dismal day. Fingers, moccasins, bracelets, ears, foreskins and scrotums, and strips of skin went farther, however, and hardly a man of that army had to go home without a souvenir. When finally discarded, the Indian corpses were mostly bloody, flayed lumps of carrion. As for noncarnal trophies, there were thousands of arrows, which lay and bristled everywhere.

  Across the brown fields toward the Tippecanoe, Star Watcher witnessed the dissolution of the holy town. Warriors, tribal units, families, many orphans and widows, trailed out from the sprawling town all day, walking, riding, pulling their goods and their wounded brothers on travois drags, dispersing along the muddy trails up the Tippecanoe and across the prairie, swinging far out to skirt the army camp, going home in profound sorrow and anger. A few men were burying six warriors who had died since the retreat to town. Many of the bands of embittered warriors, burning with frustration and vengeance, went out vowing to kill every white man and burn every white man’s house they saw on the way. By his invasion, Governor Harrison had kicked open a dormant hornets’ nest, and the settlers were in more danger than they had been in since the Greenville Treaty of seventeen years ago. Tethered to a stake in front of the council lodge, Open Door sat awaiting a decision about his fate. He understood that had he not been the brother of Tecumseh, he would have been burned at this very stake by now.

  Charcoal Burner and Black Partridge, a Winnebago, had tried desperately to persuade the warriors to remain nearby, perhaps to make a new camp across the Wabash-se-pe and await Tecumseh’s return from the south. Only a few had decided to stay, some forty young warriors who were still fervently devoted to Tecumseh, who still vaguely yearned toward his beautiful dream of red brotherhood and victory.

  And even as the others rode out, taking with them their shares of the harvest that had been cached in the woods, Charcoal Burner would stop them, and take them by the hand, and say:

  “Go, then, as every man must follow his own heart. You have been a good and brave friend of the People. But remember as you ride away from here, brother, it is not Tecumseh who has betrayed you. Watch for his sign, for it will be soon, and when it comes, start for Canada, as you were told, and we will all be together again, to finish with the Long Knives at last!”

  A few of them on hearing this tightened their hands on his, and their eyes brightened. But many shook their heads or became angry, or simply looked at him as if he were a pitiable fool, dropped his hand, and urged their horses out of this nearly deserted, once sacred town where hundreds of voices once had prayed and rejoiced in unison. Star Watcher was once again fleeing into winter, from still another doomed town.

  ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 8, THE DRAGOONS MOVED out of the army camp and rode cautiously toward the distant gray huts of Prophet’s Town. Scouts had reported that the town looked vacant.

  The dragoons did not feel much like going there. They had spent a miserable and virtually sleepless night in their fortified camp, exhausted from the battle and all the burying and barricade building. Following the orders of the general, who had in their opinion become cautious rather late in the game, the army had bedded down in darkness, without campfires, and hungry, as the cattle had run off in the battle and there was only a little flour left. Then they had been kept awake by the cold and rain and by jumpy sentries who shot at sneaking forms in the woods. Daylight had revealed that the sneaking forms were only abandoned dogs from Prophet’s Town, come to feed on corpses.

  When the dragoons entered Prophet’s Town, the only living creature they found, other than curs, was an ancient woman too feeble and sick to travel. The great Shawnee holy town was hers now. Their enthusiasm now revived, the soldiers ransacked the town for souvenirs. From one wigewa they confiscated a few new British-made muskets, still wrapped in oiled strouding, as evidence to support the governor’s eternal suspicions. They found five thousand bushels of corn and beans hidden in the woods nearby and burned all except enough to supply them on their march back down the Wabash. They dug up six fresh graves in the town and scalped and stripped the corpses. Then they set fire to hundreds of the huts, whose seasoned bark and poles made a spectacular conflagration. The dying warrior who had been questioned by Harrison was brought to what was left of the town and placed in the care of the dying old woman.

  The next day, with its groaning wounded stacked in twenty-two groaning wagons, General Harrison’s army began its trek back down the bank of the Wabash. The governor himself, never comfortable with the coarse frontier camaraderie, found himself an awfully lonely and disconsolate victor as he rode along at the head of his weary army.

  He did not look forward to what his political opponents would be saying about his many casualties—particularly all those officers, most of whom were from influential families.

  And then there would be the reaction, which Harrison could fairly predict, of President Madison, who never for a moment would have condoned this invasion.

  Harrison knew he was going to have to do much explaining.

  TECUMSEH STOOD IN THE ASHES OF HIS LODGE, HIS WHOLE body trembling.

  All around him were the ashes and blackened poles and broken pots and tools of what had been the sacred town. Old snow was melting, and its
patchy whiteness made the blackened ruins look even more stark and dismal. A piece of deerhide with burned edges swung slowly from a scorched door frame in the dank wind. His warriors, who had traveled thousands of miles through the pines and live oaks and deltas and swamps of the south with him, dancing full of fire, who had gone into Florida and then up into the mountains with him to the Cherokees, then west again to the Missi-se-pe and into the council houses of the Osages and Missourias, often dreaming along the way of home and rest at Prophet’s Town, now stood in a cluster at a distance from him, watching him, their faces dark and grim. His mission to the south had failed, thwarted by the old chiefs there who were just like the government chiefs here. He had aroused thousands of young warriors, but only thirty Creeks had come back with him. And finally, returning across Illinois in the icy winds of winter, hungry, he had hoped to find solace at last among his united People here in this town; he had dreamed of succotash cooking in his sister’s kettle and of the comfort of the sacred flames in the fire-ring of his own lodge, here, this very spot.

  Now instead he stood here in the cold ruins, trembling. But it was not the cold that made him tremble.

  All around in the ruins he could hear the silent voices of the warriors who had died trying to protect their home once again from the guns and torches of white invaders. For the sixth time in his life his town had been burned, the sacred harvest burned, the People scattered, hungry and without shelter as the winter came down from the north. He heard the groans of the dead coming up to him from the acrid wet ashes of the holy town, and as he sniffed and listened, his hatred hardened in him; any last fragment of sympathy or pity he might have felt for any American became like a flake of frost. Any notion he had kept of going to the president blew away in the cold wind. He held his hand on his pa-waw-ka stone for warmth, for the power to rebuild all this that had been destroyed by that deceitful white man, whom he now knew he should have killed in his own yard at Vincennes in that long-ago fit of fury.

  From now on it would be nothing but war, a war of vengeance. He turned his face up toward the low gray clouds and swore it to the Master of Life.

  Harrison, the still, chill voices of the dead shrieked from the ashes in the snow. Harrison did this to us!

  CHARCOAL BURNER HAD BEEN WATCHING FOR HIS RETURN. He rode up and dismounted to stand before him. The wind blew the hawk feather that was attached to his fur hat and made it swivel. The two chiefs stood amid the snow and desolation and looked at each other with love and sorrow.

  “Come, Father,” said Charcoal Burner. “We have made a camp on Wildcat Creek.” He pointed southward across the river.

  He told Tecumseh what had happened, as they rode out of the ruins and down the valley. He told how he had tried to stop it but with downcast eyes admitted that perhaps he had not tried hard enough. Tecumseh did not hold him to blame for it. He said, “So you did not kill Open Door for this?”

  “No. Only because he is your brother.”

  “You should have. He has undone the work of Weshemoneto himself. What was built over many years and tens of hundreds of miles, with the help of the greatest medicine, he ruined in one night.”

  “I could not kill your brother, Tecumseh.”

  “Rather you had. Now I will have to see his face.”

  Star Watcher and Cat Pouncing came and embraced him. Then Stands Firm held her a long time. Tecumseh told her of their mother’s death. She nodded, shut her eyes, and trembled. Tecumseh asked his son if his Spirit Helper had come; the boy shook his head.

  The warriors who had not deserted came out to greet Tecumseh. There was joy in seeing him, but pity, too. He smiled at them all with an affection they could feel, but he did not stop yet to talk with them. He walked grimly to a hovel that Charcoal Burner had pointed out to him. Inside in the smoky gloom Open Door sat. His hands were bound behind him, and his neck was tethered to a post. His face brightened for a moment when he saw his brother, but when he saw the storm of anger and contempt in his face, he cringed.

  “Stand up,” Tecumseh commanded, and as Open Door struggled to his feet, Tecumseh pulled his knife out of the little sheath that hung at his chest.

  “Tecumseh,” Open Door breathed, looking at the knife. “I am your own brother.”

  “No. No longer.” Tecumseh flicked the knife forward, and Open Door gasped and flinched.

  But he was still alive. Tecumseh had only severed the tether. Now he stepped behind his brother and cut the thongs at his wrists, and Open Door’s eye began to fill with tears of hope and gratitude. He brought his trembling hands around in front of him and began rubbing his wrists, looking at Tecumseh, his face expectant and his slumping body like a question. At last he said in a half-choked voice: “What have they told you?”

  “The truth,” Tecumseh said, sheathing his knife.

  “The truth is that the war chiefs wanted to attack, and they forced me to help.”

  “How could they force the man who holds the powers of Weshemoneto?” Tecumseh said with sarcasm. “No. The truth of how your selfishness for glory ruined the faith of a People hungry for faith. Of how you snatched a victory out of their hands and put it in the hands of the white governor. Of how you betrayed me and all your red children.”

  Then, his teeth bared in rage but his eyes full of the tears he never permitted himself to shed, Tecumseh reached up slowly with both hands as if to cup Open Door’s face tenderly in them.

  But instead, both hands grasped the hair above the wretch’s ears. And with such force that he groaned with the exertion, he jerked Open Door’s head back and forth, from side to side, shook him as if he would tear his head from his body, shook him with all the strength of his powerful arms and shoulders, until Open Door’s teeth clashed together and chipped, shook him until his feathered turban and his scalplock tube flew off and his earbobs jangled against his gorget, shook him until his brain felt loose in his skull, shook him until blood from his nose and mouth were spattering them both, and finally until the hair came out of his head into Tecumseh’s hands.

  And as Open Door crumpled to the floor, Tecumseh turned his back on him and went out, panting from the exertion. He stood outside in the snow for a minute, all his warriors looking at him silently, the sixty followers remaining out of thousands.

  Open Door’s wife came waddling from somewhere, head down, eyes averted, she herself a dweller in disgrace, and ducked into the hovel to see what her husband would need.

  After a while Tecumseh’s fists at last unclenched, and the handfuls of black hair fell on the white snow.

  Inside, Open Door’s wife could be heard clucking and cooing over him.

  THE LONG-TAILED STAR HAD PASSED FROM THE SKY. THE Year of Signs, which had begun with floods and squirrel migrations, was soon to close. Winter lay upon the land. The tribal chiefs who had accepted bundles of red sticks from Tecumseh now threw away the last stick. Even those whose faith in the Shawnee prophet had been blown away by the tragedy at Tippecanoe, even those in the south who had spurned Tecumseh’s pleas, even those west of the Missi-se-pe who had felt too remote from the problem of white invasion to rise to his call, still found themselves unsettled and anxious, watchful for the great sign of which Tecumseh had spoken so ominously, so certainly. Smoke rose from snow-dusted wigewas and tepees into the night sky. And in virtually every Indian dwelling from Canada to Florida, from New York to the Dakotas, the men were tense, frightened, worried. Some former followers of the Shawnee brothers were eager for the sign, because they did not like living without hope after having lived with it for a few years. And even those who scoffed at talk of the great sign were always thinking of it. Far to the south and southeast, Pushmataha the Choctaw, Big Warrior of the Creeks, Junalaska of the Cherokee, who had all resisted his war talk, lived in a quiet dread. For if the great sign came as Tecumseh had predicted, how much influence over their young warriors they might then lose!

  One man who had never heard of the great sign was lying awake and restless, full of anxiety. All
night he had heard the clock strike the hours; the last tolling had been two o’clock.

  Governor Harrison had been in a turmoil since his invasion of the Indian country. The people of Vincennes and the new settlers in the edges of the treaty lands had at first given him a hero’s welcome. But then the critics had set upon him. He was expecting to be called to Washington at any time to defend his actions before President Madison. Here in the Ohio watershed were many influential men who kept protesting about his folly. Even many who had been in favor of the invasion criticized his conduct of it. Why hadn’t he attacked at once? Why hadn’t he built breastworks around his camp? Among the most outraged was the prominent Kentucky lawyer Humphrey Marshall, whose brother-in-law, Colonel Daveiss, had not come back from Tippecanoe. Marshall was as prodigious a writer as Harrison himself, and he seemed determined to kill the governor with his pen and in his epitaph label him an unlawful aggressor against a small, peaceful nation. In recent weeks Harrison had been parrying with his quill as vigorously as he ever had done with a sword. Harrison had complained on paper:

  My personal enemies now unite with the British agents in representing that the expedition was entirely useless and the Prophet as one of the best and most pacific mortals—a perfect Quaker in principles.…

  Now, lying restless in his bed and thinking of all their calumny and of the letters and letters of explanation and rebuttal he still had to write, he flopped over from his side onto his back, angrily rearranging quilts and blankets, making the bed shake under his lurching movements.

  But when at last he fell still and stopped shaking the bed, the bed began shaking him.

  TECUMSEH STOOD ON THE STONY PROMONTORY UPON WHICH Open Door had stood praying over the battle so many weeks ago and looked over the wedge of land below, where a hundred men had died in a battle that should not have been fought. The battleground was easy to see this night; its trees stood out dark against the starlit snow on the marshes and grasslands around it. Near Tecumseh stood Charcoal Burner, Seekabo, Stands Firm, Black Partridge, and the bodyguard, Thick Water. In the evening Tecumseh had told them: “It is the night for the great sign. Come with me.”