Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Tecumseh’s eyes for a moment looked like a madman’s. “Warburton! Procter gave me his promise we would have a fort here and fight the Americans at last! Has he lied to me? You heard me tell him that if he ever lied to me, I would cut off your end of the wampum belt!” Tecumseh was all but grinding his teeth and was ready to ride back across the bridge and lead his warriors away and throw Procter and his army to the Long Knives. Pounding his fist on his knee in frustration, he swept his gaze around in the dusk. It would have been a strong place for a defense, if it had been made ready, and there had been days and days of time to make it ready. But now there was no time. The Long Knives were less than half a day’s march behind. Tecumseh groaned. “Warburton! I wish I had never listened to Procter! Everything he promises blows away like smoke!”

  Now many of Tecumseh’s chieftains and bodyguards had come across the bridge to join him in this confrontation and were gathering around. Among them came Colonel Elliott, hitching along on foot, his face red with exertion and anger. Panting, he looked up at Warburton in the rain and tried to say something, but then broke into abject weeping before he could sob out: “Colonel, do something about this disgraceful rout! I will not by God sacrifice myself!”

  Warburton could do hardly anything. Dusk was deepening. He sent a company of grenadiers a mile down the river toward the enemy, to form a picket line on the north bank. Tecumseh had managed at last to contain his own fury and was calming his chieftains, trying to persuade them not to desert their allies just because of Procter’s confusion. He counciled with them quickly, and they agreed to stay at the Forks until the next day and make an ambush at the bridges, to slow the American advance and allow the refugees a few more hours of safe flight.

  “Your soldiers should be on that side of the river with my warriors,” he told Warburton. “Harrison comes on that side.”

  Warburton replied with more firmness than he felt, “I’ll not move them over, Chief. I must stay on this road, if I’m going to the missionary town.”

  “Then go!” Tecumseh snarled. “Go on up and leave brave men here to fight your enemy for you! Let your soldiers sleep safe on this side of the river! My red men will stand with me tomorrow and meet Harrison, without your cannons or your soldiers! Get out of my way!” He rode a few paces away, then wheeled and came back, an indistinct shape in the early darkness. “Colonel Warburton, I know you are a brave soldier. I wish you, not Procter, led your army. I know you must be ashamed of how he always runs backward, like a crayfish.” Then he pressed his horse’s flanks with his heels and galloped away across the resounding planks of the bridge.

  THAT NIGHT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE TECUMSEH FELT age in his bones as he lay on the damp ground and tried to sleep. His wakeful mind prowled every quadrant of the world around him like a night cat: Harrison’s relentless army to the west; to the east Procter lying probably in a warm bed with his wife while his misdirected army slept cold, hungry, and disorganized in many places along the river Thames; to the north, winter coming down from the severe lands of the Eskimo people; to the south, the long-lost homelands of the Shawnee now full of square farms and noisy cities. Tecumseh’s prayer thoughts then visited the warriors sleeping around him in the wet woods, the refugees a short way up the road, his brother and sister and son among them, and the scouts who had stolen down the riverbank in darkness to prowl the edges of the Long Knives’ army camp. His People. His homeless red People. And his heart ached, and his bones ached. It was not until he held the little bag with his pa-waw-ka stone in his hand that Weshemoneto told him to sleep.

  THE WOODS WERE DRIPPING WHEN TECUMSEH AWOKE IN HIS damp blanket before daylight. Voices were talking low all around, and footsteps stirred the sodden leaves. He heard someone breathing very close by and sat up quickly with his knife drawn, casting off the blanket, scattering the leaves that had fallen on it. A man’s figure crouched in the near dark just an arm’s length from him. His mind at once filled up with the plight of the day; he had allowed no fires in the camp overnight, lest Long Knife scouts might creep upon them, but now here was somebody.…

  The crouching man cleared his throat, and then he knew it was Thick Water, just Thick Water watching over him. Now with his quick heartbeat subsiding, Tecumseh was annoyed with himself for not being the first awake. He had slept like an old man with nothing to do, and hundreds of his warriors were already up, moving about in the foggy drizzle, gnawing their last cold shreds and crumbs of food, waiting, praying, readying their weapons for the big ambush. As Tecumseh stood up, stretching his stiff muscles, Thick Water stood up beside him, and his familiar voice, with its cheerful tone, said, as always, “How shall we begin the day, Father?”

  It was such a strange thing about this man Thick Water. All day long he was a somber, serious, intense man; the only time his voice and face were cheery was the waking hour, when everyone else was drugged with sleep. Once Tecumseh had asked him about that peculiarity, and Thick Water had replied with a shrug: “Am I like that? Then it must be that I am pleased to see you wake up, Father.” And so for a moment on this dire morning, Tecumseh was stirred deeply with care for this brave, selfless man who had made himself Tecumseh’s very shadow. There would be surely a severe battle this morning, a battle that would accomplish little besides slowing the enemy. Thick Water was always too quick to put his life at risk, and Tecumseh wished he could somehow spare this beloved man from harm, somehow make him return to his woman and children beyond the great lake. Any life lost today would be wasted.

  Thick Water asked again, “How shall we begin this day?”

  Brushing and adjusting his clothes, Tecumseh replied, “Bring me Charcoal Burner, O Shawawa-no, Winipegon, and Black Hawk, and we will lay out our ambush. Then I will go up and hurry the women and children on their way.”

  HE ASSIGNED MOST OF THE WARRIORS TO THE WEDGE OF land formed by the junction of McGregor’s Creek and the Thames and told the chieftains to burn the two bridges. Then he selected scouts to send down the Thames to relieve the ones who had watched Harrison’s camp overnight.

  “Father,” said a boyish voice beside him. It was Cat Pouncing. Until now he had been with Star Watcher and the families. “Let me go with them,” the boy said. “With the scouts.”

  Tecumseh was astonished and alarmed. He wanted to tell his son that it was too dangerous. But for the first time ever, there was resolve in the boy’s pretty face, fire in his eyes. Tecumseh in a flash of memory saw a day some thirty summers ago when he, at that same age, had bolted from battle to dump his waste in the woods.

  He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and, trying to hide the terrible poignancy he felt, replied: “Yes. Go, then. Be brave, my son, but not rash. A dead scout cannot tell what he saw.” Then he added the same special instructions he always gave his scouts. “Shoot only to protect your life.… But if you can sight on Harrison, kill him, for that would save the People.” Then, praying silently for their safety, he watched them trot down the trail toward the bridge, until they were out of sight in the foliage. “Come now,” he said to Thick Water, a bittersweet ache in his breast, “we need to rouse the families and make them move on.”

  Even as they rode up the trampled trail in the gray light of dawn, they found stragglers who had simply dropped from the column the previous evening and sheltered in thickets. They had to bestir these and herd them along. Tecumseh’s heart was beginning to race now with anxiety, with the desperate need to get these feeble stragglers to safety, to protect his People and yet to return to the Forks before Harrison’s Long Knives got there.

  The Long Knives! How often they had scattered the women and children and elders like autumn leaves! He wanted to hurry back to the Forks. There, he kept imagining, there the Master of Life might place Harrison in front of his rifle. He envisioned the figure on horseback that always came at him in his dream, the figure in a tall hat.… I want to kill Harrison! he thought wildly as he urged the stragglers along toward the pall of smoke that marked the refugees’ campgrou
nd.

  Hundreds of gaunt wretches lay scattered about a weedy, brushy field, sheltered under any hides or rags or blankets they had been able to hang up. Many still lay exhausted in their bedding or squatted around fires trying to make a morning meal out of anything. Some were boiling roots with scraps of rawhide in kettles. Others were cracking nuts or leaching acorn meal. Some had obtained the half-spoiled head and entrails of a cow slaughtered by the British and were roasting shreds of this pungent offal over the flames. They came calling and crowding toward him as he rode up.

  Star Watcher came forth from under a crude shelter made from skins thrown over bowed saplings. Her clothes were mud-stained, but she was as always erect and elegant, with bright beads around her neck, with the red thumbprints on her brown cheekbones, with the straight white teeth in her smiling mouth. Open Door too came hurrying through the smoke, his sleep-puffy face full of anxiety. Everything about him looked wretched and scruffy, as in the old days before his greatness.

  “My sister, my brother,” Tecumseh told them, “you must make these people leave here at once and go on toward the Christian town. Do not allow them to lose each other or fall behind anymore, as did these! I know they are tired and sick, but you must move them as fast as they can go. If one cannot walk, put bundles off a horse and put him on. The Long Knives are close behind! I am going down to the Forks to sting them hard and delay them. But I cannot hold them back very long, for the Redcoats have fled with their rolling guns. Get these people as far from danger as you can.”

  Star Watcher’s brow furrowed with an expression of despair, but only for a moment. “They are so weak and slow,” she said. Tecumseh reached down and took her hand and said:

  “If you push them hard, you can reach the missionaries’ town tomorrow. Brother,” he said intensely, turning to Open Door, “I will tell Elliott to find the food officer named Bent and make him give you food for them. I will tell Ironside the same. Maybe you will see Bent before they do. If you do, make him give food! Listen to no lies or excuses! Make him give them enough!”

  “Yes,” Open Door replied, drawing himself up tall. “I shall make him listen!”

  “Some families are with Colonel Warburton on the other side of the river. Maybe they are safer. But the Long Knives come on this side. So make the people walk!” A wistful smile softened his features for a moment as he looked around the wretched camp and back to her. “You have always had so many children to care for, my sister; even I was one of them, do you remember? But never so many as now.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated the hundreds of refugees. “Tanakia, my good sister, my good brother. Farewell!” Then he turned the horse and lashed it into a gallop back toward the fork of the river.

  THE WARRIORS HAD NOT BEEN ABLE TO BURN THE BRIDGE over McGregor’s Creek; everything was too wet from the days of rain. So they had used poles to pry up all the planks and had thrown them into the creek, leaving only the spanning timbers. The other bridge, the one across the Thames, had caught fire, by some better luck, and was burning slowly, with much smoke. Other columns of dark smoke still climbed into the gray sky downriver, where the retreating Redcoats had set fire to abandoned supplies the day before. Tons of valuable tools and munitions had been lost because of General Procter’s confusion and his inept assignment of boats and wagons. Now the last of Warburton’s Redcoats had marched away up the road on the north bank toward the Christian town, and even the rumble and rustle of their going was fading away, and only Tecumseh’s warriors were here to defend the Forks at Chatham.

  Tecumseh posted himself in the brush near the huge trunk of a fallen beech tree, facing the creek at the road. As the noise of the Redcoat army grew fainter and fainter upstream, that of the Blue-Coats grew louder and louder below. The spanners of the bridge reached across from the road on that side of the creek to the road on this side. Wisps of smoke still rose from the ends of the timbers, where the warriors had tried to burn them.

  The last few Shawnee scouts emerged from the foliage on the other side, one by one, running crouched. Several scurried down into the creek and waded across, but Cat Pouncing came straight up the road and ran across the creek on one of the beams with the sure balance of a panther on a limb, his smile showing white in his dark face, a boy showing his prowess even at this critical moment, and the sight of him stirred Tecumseh’s love for his Shawnee people as nothing had for a long time. He called his son to him and squeezed his arm.

  “Their horse soldiers come first, Father. The walking soldiers are being put in an angle where the streams flow together.”

  “Good, my son. How do you like the look of our enemy?”

  “They are beyond counting. And they make such a noise moving!”

  “Such a noise! Now go back out of harm’s way. You are young.”

  “I want to fight them, Father.”

  Tecumseh thought. Here on the point by the broken bridge would surely be the heaviest fire. “Go, then, to South Wind, down there,” he said. That would put his son closer to the road of retreat. “I am proud of you, my son. And I rejoiced when I saw you returning safe up that road.” When the boy left, his eyes were bright.

  “I think I saw General Harrison among those horse soldiers,” reported another scout, one who had fought at Tippecanoe and knew Harrison by sight. “But he was too far to shoot.”

  “Ah!” Tecumseh’s eyes flashed. “What color horse?”

  “White, Father, with black legs.”

  “Then go tell our shooters. Who kills Harrison will have a great name forever.”

  Tecumseh grew impatient as he listened to the approaching rattle and rustle of the cavalry and tried to penetrate with his eyes the woods on the other side, anxious to see the horsemen on the road. But the Americans, who had been ambushed too many times along this road, did not come galloping recklessly up to the bridge. Instead, a few mounted scouts and skirmishers were seen passing through the undergrowth on that side, reconnoitering. Then there was a long stillness before the movements could be seen again, and suddenly the whole woods over there seemed to be moving. When a large number of the horse soldiers had emerged into the open near the bridge, Tecumseh cocked his rifle and searched intently among them for the face of Harrison, for the white horse with black legs, but he did not see them. The American officers wore tall, cockaded beaver hats and long frock coats, and Tecumseh knew that these were the Kentucky mounted militia. How many of these he had killed in years past! The worst of the Long Knives! The town burners, the woman slayers!

  Soon there were many Long Knives in plain sight, and musket fire erupted all along the Indian line, accompanied by their fierce yodeling and a shower of arcing arrows. At once the Americans returned a lively fire, then turned, rode back into cover, and dismounted to set up firing lines.

  Tecumseh still had not seen Harrison. So, saving his rifle load in case his yearned-for target should appear, Tecumseh darted along his lines of warriors with Thick Water on his heels, directing them, inspiring them with his voice, which issued clear as a trumpet call from his deep chest. They needed great spirit to stay here on the line, because the enemy’s musket balls and buckshot were spattering through the brush like a hailstorm. Many of the warriors were already bleeding from the wounds of small shot and splinters. Some lay twitching and writhing, until their comrades came and carried or dragged them back to safety. A few lay crumpled in their coverts, dead.

  Then, within minutes after the shooting started, the Americans rolled two cannons up into place beyond their end of the bridge. Warriors who feared nothing else feared the rolling guns. When the cannons fired with their yellow flashes and smoke clouds and their head-slamming noise, everything in their way lurched and flew apart in splinters and clods, dust, shreds, and bark chips, and any warrior who was not hit by some of these flying bits or by the grapeshot itself knew that Weshemoneto was protecting him.

  As always, Tecumseh’s clarion voice and boldly visible figure attracted more than his share of the enemy’s fire. But his motions
were so quick and darting that riflemen could not sight on him. And as for the random shot flying all about, he seemed always to have the guidance of the Master of Life in keeping out of the way. He had passed unscathed through so many bullet storms that Thick Water sometimes believed he was unkillable. To be his bodyguard during a battle was of course to be in the way of everything that was shot at him, so Thick Water himself was thought to be charmed as well.

  Suddenly Tecumseh’s eye caught a glimpse of gold braid on a horseman on the far side. An elegant officer in top hat and gold-faced frock coat was looming in the smoke, sword raised high, boldly maneuvering along behind the firing rank on a capering white war-horse with black legs. Tecumseh’s heartbeat quickened, and he brought his rifle to bear on the officer, who surely was Harrison. In the smoke with his tall hat, this was the figure that had rushed upon Tecumseh time after time through the mists of his dreams!

  But when his sights were on him and his rifle cocked, Tecumseh heard the officer’s voice and saw his face and even at this distance and through the smoke saw that it was not Harrison at all, but a younger, prettier officer. In this moment’s hesitation, Tecumseh’s target disappeared into the distant thickets.

  So now Tecumseh despaired of getting a shot at Harrison, who probably was somewhere in the rear, safe among his Blue-Coat soldiers. Without killing Harrison, the warriors could not hope to have a victory here at the Forks of the Thames.

  If only Procter had stayed here with his cannons!

  This thought rose again and again in Tecumseh’s boiling mind, distracting him, souring his soul, making him hate his ally Procter as much as he hated his enemy.

  Suddenly such a fusillade of fire came from across the creek that the warriors had to hug the ground to avoid the lead storm. And then under its cover, fifteen or twenty soldiers emerged from the cloud of gunsmoke and plunged down the far creek bank and waded into the water. Within the time of a few breaths they had rooted themselves under the near bank, almost under the muzzles of the Indian defenders—a precarious perch, but one that made them a worrisome presence. Some of Charcoal Burner’s warriors tried to go to the edge of the bank and dislodge them but were driven back by another fusillade.