Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  A wordless song in his soul had led him to ride down Wildcat Creek, across the ice of the frozen Wabash, and up the valley to this place. The song, like that of a flute inside his head but unheard by the others, had grown louder and louder as he rode. Now it was more than two hours past the middle of the night. The song had become one single high note. Tecumseh waited, looking down on the Wabash-se-pe, this benign and ancient river that began in the old lost Shawnee land of O-hi-o and curved westward past the ruins of Prophet’s Town and then southward past Vincennes, its waters eventually flowing into the O-hi-o-se-pe and thence into the Missi-se-pe.…

  Tecumseh’s gaze went toward the horizon in the southwest, beyond which lay that confluence and the place where he had felt the Center of Time. And as he looked, he heard the distant wingbeats of the white dove, growing louder and louder.

  The horses nearby began to nicker and move restlessly. The rock under Tecumseh’s feet began to tremble, and he heard dislodged fragments of stone begin to fall clattering down the cliff below him.

  Now a terrible, deep rumbling rolled up the valley and grew to a roar. Dead trees cracked and fell in the woods below, with crackling of branches and loud thuds. Crows cawed in alarm, and owls fluttered out of the swaying branches and could be seen wheeling over the snow fields. Tecumseh’s chieftains cried out in amazement and reached toward him, to pull him back from the cliff’s edge, but at that moment, as if the whole earth were a rolling wave of water, the ground swelled and surged under them, knocking them off their feet. The horses fell down, whinnying, rolling about, kicking their legs wildly as they tried to get back up. Slabs of stone as big as houses cracked off the cliff and went thundering end over end down the steep slope below, crushing and flattening trees as they went.

  The roaring grew louder, and the earth jolted more violently. But Tecumseh alone did not lose his balance. At times all his life he had felt this shaking earth when no one else had, and now it could not buck him off his feet. His chieftains were on the ground, trying to rise, their voices faint and their cries unintelligible in the deafening roar, which sounded like a war, the cracking and breaking of trees like volleys of musket fire, the great rumbles like the thunder of a hundred cannons.

  Tecumseh stood with his right hand raised toward heaven and felt the hand gripped in a field of power; it was as if the hand would hold him up even if the entire cliff should drop out from under his feet. Now in the uproar of grating, grinding, and rumbling he heard the high note again, but now it was the shriek of a multitude of ghostly voices, as if the shaking and splitting of the world were opening the graves of all the red men, those buried since the battle, those buried after the great plagues of the white men’s diseases, those buried after the terrible wars with the Iroquois, those buried hundreds of years ago in the big mounds along the riversides; yes, all red men who had drowned when Kokomthena’s grandson Rounded-Side had stabbed the water giant’s belly and flooded the earth; yes, every red man who had ever died since the Beginning was calling up through the cracking earth.

  IN HIS HUT ON WILDCAT CREEK, OPEN DOOR WAS HAVING his nightmare again, in which Tecumseh had his hair in his hands and was shaking his brains loose. He always woke from the nightmare whimpering or whining, and his wife would sit up and smack him lightly on the cheek until he would calm down and realize he had been dreaming.

  But this time when he awoke and cried out, his wife was screaming beside him, and the fire in the center of the hut was sending up showers of sparks as if it were being poked by a stick, and the ground under their bedding was jolting so hard that his head was being snapped back and forth upon his neck, his neck that was still so sore from the punishment Tecumseh had given him. Pieces of bark fell from the roof onto the bed. Open Door looked up through the gaps in the collapsing roof and saw the stars jerking and trembling in the sky. Pottery was breaking in the house. Trees were falling down in the woods nearby. More bark fell from the roof. Some of it had fallen over the fire and now was starting to blaze up.

  Open Door yelled at her to follow him out. They tried to get up but were thrown to the ground. At last they crawled out into the snow. The camp was falling apart. Several huts were, like their own, on fire. The people were yelling and crying and could not stand up in the snow. The whole countryside seemed to be lurching, as if the world were coming to an end.

  Star Watcher and Cat Pouncing, unable to stand, were kneeling on the snow together, holding hands to keep from losing each other. Star Watcher was frightened, and there were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling with gratitude and joy. Her brother the Shooting Star had indeed known the great truth.

  This was at last the sign he had looked for all his life!

  FOR TWO DAYS THE EARTH SHOOK, PAUSED, SHOOK AGAIN. The air darkened with dust, and the sun grew dull. Houses were wrenched apart; creeks went dry, and streams began flowing where none had before. The water in the Great Lakes swelled and sloshed like water in a jiggling cup. The Missi-se-pe changed its channel in many places, flooding lowlands, raising its bed to the air in great surges. Its muddy waters roiled and bubbled with ooze and in some places even stopped and flowed upstream. In the lowlands near the mouth of the O-hi-o, vast areas of terrain crumpled and changed shape. The land in river bends sank down, and the brown water rushed in, tossing big trees and house timbers and barges about like flotsam. Across the Missi-se-pe from the old Spanish town of New Madrid, the land upon which Tecumseh had camped on his journey to the south suddenly dropped, and the river water roared into the enormous depression, forming a lake five to ten miles across, filled with seething brown water, with gigantic clouds of mist rising off of it. The frontier was in a turmoil; people and animals were in panic. On the plains west of the Great River, herds of bison were thrown off their feet, scrambled up and stampeded for miles until they were thrown by another jolt. Deer and small animals darted everywhere or stood cowering, their eyes full of fear; some ran until they died.

  In the south, the dusty sky was always full of flights of millions of disturbed waterfowl. In the town of Tuckabatchee, Big Warrior ran outside his house and turned to watch it collapse. Everywhere around him, houses were falling down and people were screaming, trapped under rubble and thatch. In Pushmataha’s Choctaw town, walls shook and pots fell over, and he knew at once that all his warriors would be remembering Tecumseh.

  THE GREAT QUAKING RESUMED FOUR TIMES IN THE NEXT two moons and was felt every place Tecumseh had ever trod in his years of traveling. Forests lay in tangles. Hundreds of square miles of lowland lay covered with mud and dead fish and debris. Raw earth gaped where once there had been wooded or grassy slopes. And dust blew and settled over the desolation, making the snow dirty and the sun red.

  The Year of the Signs was past. Open Door the Shawnee prophet had lost his power and hung about like a pariah dog. But the damage he had done to the cause of the alliance was already healing itself.

  And in his heart Tecumseh felt a greater strength and resolve than he had ever felt. A lifetime of soul questions had been answered for him. His face set like granite, he told Star Watcher:

  “The Seventeen Fires and Canada are on the verge of war. When it begins, the British will help us regain our homelands. My followers will come back to me to fight the Long Knives. Warriors everywhere have seen the great sign, and they are remembering my words, and they will be coming to join me in Canada. Your husband will be among them, he has promised me. You come, too.”

  “Have I not always been with you? Am I not the Watcher of the Shooting Star?”

  PART THREE

  35

  BOIS BLANC ISLAND, ONTARIO, CANADA

  Summer 1812

  STAR WATCHER HAD FOLLOWED TECUMSEH TO CANADA with the thought that the Long Knife intruders would be left far behind, that for a long time she would not have to hear the dreadful thunder of guns.

  But already her days were troubled by the nearby noise of battle and the worry that her brother and her husband, in the midst of it, might not come home.
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  What Tecumseh had predicted had come to be. The Americans had declared war on the English king and immediately tried to invade Canada. Their hunger for the lands of other peoples was insatiable.

  Now, in the Blackberry Moon, Star Watcher and the women who had come here from the Wabash-se-pe were trying to prepare for the Green Corn ceremony. They had built a Great House and cleared a Stomp Ground here on the Island of the White Trees in the Detroit River. Now they were grinding meal and preparing packets of seeds for the sacred hoop. They had saved some of their own strains of bean, corn, and squash seeds during the flight from Tippecanoe, and every place they moved, they tried to grow at least enough of these sacred plants to harvest seeds for the next year. This had been one of the hardest things for the women to do in the time of the Long Knives, for seed cannot be hurried, but it was one of their sacred duties.

  The women worked and worried. Somehow there would have to be a Green Corn ceremony, war or no war. Our Grandmother expected the tribute; she had never said it would be easy every time, but plainly the People owe everything to their Creator. Besides that, the People enjoyed giving the tribute probably as much as Kokomthena enjoyed receiving it.

  Tecumseh had assured these worrying women, “We will have our gathering for Our Grandmother. Even General Hull and his American army will not prevent it. I will stop him before time for Green Corn.”

  Everybody, especially the British, had thought that would be impossible. Hull, the American general who occupied Detroit on the American side of the river, had summoned an army of twenty-five hundred and brought them up from O-hi-o even before the war was declared. Then early in this moon he had crossed the river onto Canadian soil at Sandwich and started down the fourteen-mile road toward Amherstburg and the undermanned British post called Fort Malden, intending to capture that fort and the shipbuilding yard below it. It had seemed that there would be no way to stop him. The two hundred Redcoats in Fort Malden had thought they were doomed. It had been expected that the American flag would be on the pole, above the fort by now.

  But Star Watcher, from where she sat on the island, could see the British fort on the east bank of the river, and it still had the pretty English flag over it. The British were still there because of what her brother had done, and she was so proud of him that her heart sang as she worked. For with less than two hundred warriors and a small company of Amherstburg militiamen, Tecumseh had done like the wolves around the herd. He had set up a series of ambushes and worried the American army to a halt, holding it there at a safe distance from the fort until a British warship could come in from Lake Erie and command the road with its cannons.

  Then, with that uncanny sense of strategy that had gained him the immediate admiration of the Redcoat officers, Tecumseh had crossed quickly to the American side of the river and laid another series of ambushes that had blocked the Americans’ messages and supplies between O-hi-o and Detroit. He had captured important American dispatches and turned them over to the British at Fort Malden. Thus cut off, the American general finally had withdrawn his army from the Canadian shore, and they were now all sitting at Detroit on their own side of the river, surrounded by Indians and cut off from their supplies. What the Long Knives had started as a bold offensive had suddenly become a trap, because of Tecumseh’s actions.

  Now as Star Watcher worked, she heard gunfire beginning to pop and rattle, very faint and far up on the other side of the wide river, the noise barely audible in the still, hot air. It was much shooting, and it went on for a long time. Star Watcher prayed for her brother and her husband and all the others as she worked. At one time during the afternoon her heartbeat began racing, for no reason she knew of, and not long afterward the shooting noises faded as a breeze from the west arose.

  WHEN TECUMSEH AND HIS WARRIORS RETURNED TO THE ISLAND in canoes that evening, his legging was soaked with blood from a buckshot wound in his left thigh. Once again, as she had done so often in his life, Star Watcher repaired his torn flesh. He could hardly move the stiffening limb, but he was very cheerful. With the help of a few Redcoats, he and his warriors had ambushed six hundred American horsemen who tried to break out of the encirclement of Detroit and reopen their supply route. “We did well this day, my sister,” he said. “They are still caught in their own fort, and they are getting hungry. Ha! They should have stayed in their own country!”

  “Tell her the other good thing,” said Stands Firm, who was as happy as Tecumseh.

  “Yes! We learned that some Redcoats and warriors have captured the American fort at Michilimackinac. Oh, yes! These Long Knives may soon be very sorry they wanted war. When more British come from the east, we will turn the Americans on their heads!”

  She smiled as she tied the poultice against his thigh. “While you were gone,” she said, “a hundred more of your warriors came across the river. They came from the Illinois and said they have been seeking you since the earth shook.”

  “Good! All is growing again as in the dream. Have you nearly finished mending that leg, my sister? I want to go and welcome them!”

  Only Thick Water was solemn. Star Watcher knew why. She told him, “Brother, do not be angry with yourself. If you stopped every ball that is shot at Tecumseh, your beautiful wife would be a widowed woman now.”

  Tecumseh turned to his bodyguard, smiling broadly. “Yes! You would be so full of holes your hide would not hold hickory nuts!”

  Thick Water finally smiled.

  WHEN GENERAL ISAAC BROCK STOOD UP IN THE BARRACKS headquarters to greet Tecumseh, his short, shining blond hair almost brushed the ceiling, and for a moment Tecumseh remembered that day nearly four decades ago when he had been awed by his first sight of a Redcoat. The Shawnee’s eyes widened at the imposing, bold look of this new ally. Brock was a hand’s width taller than Tecumseh, brawny and big-boned and erect, and his clean scarlet coat and white breeches fit him like skin. It was his face, though, that most heartened Tecumseh: the direct, friendly blue eyes, massive brow, and resolute mouth.

  Brock, who was the lieutenant governor and military commander of Upper Canada, got an equally good first impression of Tecumseh. Even though the Shawnee limped slightly from the wound in his thigh, he was as graceful and poised as any lord. And in his face Brock recognized something that others saw in Brock himself: the open amiability of one who has no weaknesses to hide.

  The Indian agent Matthew Elliott, who had ushered Tecumseh in, now said, “Here, sir, is Tecumseh, chief of all our Indian allies. He wished to be presented to you right away.”

  Brock stepped forward, beaming, and gripped Tecumseh’s hand strongly, saying, “The fellow who saved this fort from the Yankees! Yes! Welcome indeed!”

  Brock had arrived only two hours ago, in darkness, leading a flotilla of bateaux and rowboats that had come nearly the whole length of Lake Erie to bring three hundred Redcoats of the Forty-first Regiment to this threatened part of Canada. The boats had been rowed nearly a week along the storm-beaten north shore of the lake, a grueling voyage that had sickened and weakened all the troops. But within one hour of landing, Brock had shaved, dressed in a fresh uniform, called a meeting of the officers of Fort Malden, and gone over the whole crisis with them. Here he had learned the details of Tecumseh’s astonishing upset of the American invasion.

  Now he praised Tecumseh lavishly and was introduced to Charcoal Burner and Black Partridge. Having been told already of the abstinence of Tecumseh and his people, Brock did not offer them liquor, though his own officers were by now warm and aromatic with brandy in celebration of Brock’s miraculous arrival. Already flushed to the jowls was Colonel Henry Procter, the portly officer in charge of Fort Malden. Procter was one of those haughty officers whose manner revealed a contempt for savages. He had barely condescended to thank Tecumseh for saving his fort. Tecumseh did not like Procter, either, and was relieved to see a man of Brock’s caliber here at last.

  Brock pointed to the large silver medallion, stamped with the profile of King George III, that Te
cumseh wore hanging by a wampum string on the breast of his plain deerskin tunic and praised him for his dedication to the Crown.

  But Tecumseh had not come for praise, nor to make a social call. He had come to propose something he considered necessary and to see whether the British commandant was the sort of man who would be up to doing it. His first appraisal of Brock’s strength and character was encouraging, so he went directly to the point:

  “Father, it would be a very good thing to capture Detroit, and it should be done now.”

  Brock’s blond eyebrows went up, but his face at once was suffused with delight.

  “My thoughts exactly!” It was, indeed, something Brock had pondered that evening after hearing the summary of conditions. The dispatches and letters Tecumseh had captured gave evidence that General Hull was indecisive and terribly afraid of Indians—particularly the hordes of Lakes warriors he expected to sweep down since the fall of Michilimackinac—and that his officers had little faith in him. Brock was in command of a very small force, with a thinly populated province to protect against the enormous manpower and resources of the aggressive Americans, and therefore he had vowed to the Canadian government at the outbreak of the war that he would “speak loud and look big.” Such a bold move as the capture of Detroit had thus presented itself to his mind, but he had not yet formulated a plan for doing it, nor had he even mentioned it to his officers. But now here was this intense, audacious Shawnee chief who had perhaps a thousand warriors under his command and who had already proven himself an uncommon strategist. “Will you sit down with me, Chief, and let us talk about how we might take Detroit away from the Americans?”