Panther in the Sky

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Tecumseh felt in his sinews all the strength of the panther. He felt as if he could leap over horses. Boughs and branches slashed at him as he sped after the retreating riders.

  An officer in a top hat was spurring a big horse and waving a sword, trying to rally the milling riders. Tecumseh pulled from his belt one of the little pistols Brock had given him. The moment he fired it, the horse reared; the ball hit the officer’s thigh, and he lurched in his saddle but did not fall. Then a horse with no rider ran between them before Tecumseh could shoot the officer with the other pistol.

  His warriors had followed him into the very midst of the Kentuckians now, yipping and sprinting, leaping and slashing, dragging them from their saddles, driving them back onto the meadow and into the edge of the swamp. Horses shrieked and stumbled, bloodied by arrows and lances. Their riders, trying to shoot from their maddened horses, blundered into each other’s way but were easy prey for the agile warriors. Triumph and gratitude sang keening in Tecumseh’s soul; the power of the Master of Life, the righteous power, was pouring into his warriors, and Harrison’s arrogant Long Knives were falling back, confused, afraid. Tecumseh howled and laughed and struck with a tireless arm. The handle of his tomahawk was sticky with blood. Thrilled by the sound of his joyous voice and the sight of his brutal charges, his warriors found more courage and strength in themselves than ever before and charged with him, hearts ablaze.

  But when the horse soldiers were at last driven back upon their own advancing ranks, they could be pushed no farther. They became a wall of pistols and swords and rifles and flailing hooves, and the shouts of their officers rallied them. Now the warriors began edging back toward their thickets, sidestepping, covering each other, picking up their wounded as they yielded the ground, pausing to scalp soldiers.

  When they were back in their coverts they turned, reloaded, and resumed the deadly fire that had first broken the charge. Tecumseh was everywhere, praising them and exhorting them to be strong and shoot well, to save their People. A messenger came down from the right, saying that the Ojibways had struck the lines of walking soldiers so hard that they were fleeing in a panic and the warriors were chasing them. “Weh-sah!” Tecumseh cried. “We will have this day yet!”

  But here at Tecumseh’s front the horse soldiers kept coming. They seemed to be without number, and they were not frightened now, but brave and crazed. They kept spurring their big horses, crowding closer to the thicket, not trying to ride into it but firing in with their rifles and pistols, howling their vengeance cry, milling and trampling in the haze of gunsmoke, the agitated mass of them crushing closer and closer on the edge of the thicket. Tecumseh saw Charcoal Burner and Black Hawk off to the right, fighting like demons. Stands Firm was still at his side.

  Tecumseh remembered that he had heard no cannon fire, and now stray bullets were spitting through the woods from his left, where the Redcoats were. In a moment a Shawnee messenger ran over from the British sector, sent by Billy Caldwell. He said the British lines had given way at once before the charge of the mounted Kentuckians, that some Redcoats had fled in the woods and the rest were throwing down their muskets and walking out with their hands up. The cannon soldiers had fled without firing the six-pounder even once, and the Americans now had the gun.

  “And Procter?”

  The messenger pointed up the road toward Moraviantown. “Gone away. He scolded his soldiers one time for running, then he outran them.”

  Tecumseh shouted, a wordless bellow of outrage.

  So now he had horse soldiers around on his left flank, too. That was the result of it: where five hundred Redcoats were to have held, the Indians were left to fight alone, as usual.

  Quickly Tecumseh turned again to his warriors, who were howling and fighting with unabated vigor, still shooting horsemen out of their saddles. But now some of the Americans were dismounting and fighting afoot, taking cover in the weeds and pouring bullets into the thicket. There were so many hundreds of them, and they came faster than they could be shot down. Some had penetrated into the thicket and were fighting with pistols and swords, grappling with warriors, clubbing them with rifles. Others, still mounted, were spurring their horses right in through the undergrowth, their mighty horses crashing through the branches, wild-eyed and snorting, their mouths foaming and bleeding from the bits, into the gaps where warriors had fallen.

  Tecumseh raised a pistol and shot one of those soldiers in the face, then ran along the line calling for some of the warriors in reserve to go and form a line on the left where the British had been; Blue-Coats were already starting to appear in the woods over there. Stands Firm was still with him, but stumbling and panting.

  Then, through the roiling, choking gunsmoke, Tecumseh saw a huge, blood-smeared white horse with an officer on it, that familiar, tall-hatted figure from the dream, his face and his clothing drenched with blood, crashing closer through the brush, coming around the root bole of a fallen tree, filling the daylight with his silhouette. Suddenly sure that Harrison was just before him in the thick smoke, Tecumseh raised his rifle and cocked it. He pulled the trigger.

  For a moment he could not see through the smoke of his own rifle. Then he saw that the bleeding horse had half collapsed, pinning its rider’s leg against the tree. With a joyous shout Tecumseh dropped his rifle, snatched his tomahawk from his belt, and sprang toward him.

  He saw two things as he leaped through the air. The bloody face was not Harrison’s face.

  And this officer who was not Harrison had a pistol in his right hand. Smoke blossomed from the pistol. Everything disappeared in a red flash. Then there was half darkness, as on a day of Mukutaaweethe Keelswah, the Black Sun.

  Stands Firm howled with agony when he saw Tecumseh tumble in front of the bloody officer. He tried to run to him. He must touch him with the ramrod four times, the sacred number. In life there were four seasons, four winds, four ages of a man. The four touches would make him live. He had said so. Stands Firm knocked two soldiers aside as he struggled toward his fallen leader. But then something exploded by his ear and he stumbled, seeing nothing but redness, and the last thing he felt was something long and sharp passing through his body from back to front.

  TECUMSEH OPENED HIS EYES AND SAW FALLEN LEAVES. HE tried to shout for his warriors to be strong. Blood spewed out of his mouth and reddened the leaves on the ground. He called for Stands Firm, but the name only gurgled in his throat.

  He tried to rise from the ground but was too heavy, and the effort made more warm blood gush from his mouth and nostrils, bathing his hands red. When he took a breath his throat was filled with blood, as if he were drowning in it, and it made him choke and cough, and he was bubbling deep inside his chest. He was dizzy and seemed to be hearing a blizzard with women’s voices lamenting in it. He turned his head to look for Stands Firm but could not see him in the swirl of smoke and shadow, which now was starting to fade from yellow to blizzard white.

  He wanted to see Stands Firm, but the fading shadows were tilting and whirling now and disappearing in the blizzard of whiteness; all the lamenting voices in the blizzard wind were blending into one high, keen note. He felt out of control of himself, that awful feeling he had had the one time he had drunk rum. He was growing cold in the center. He rolled onto his side and groped into his tunic for the pa-waw-ka. Its bag was sticky with blood in his palm, but it gave warmth. The whiteness receded a little, and he could see shadows and moving shapes. At last he saw Stands Firm. He was lying a little distance away. A soldier had one foot on his back and was trying to pull out the bayonet he had stuck through him. Stands Firm was dead with the ramrod still in his hand.

  It did not matter about the ramrod anyway. Even if Stands Firm could have reached him and tapped him with it, it could not have made him get up and go on. If he was dying, he would die. That about the ramrod had been the only untruth he had ever told his warrior chieftains. If he had not told them he could rise from death and fight on, how would they have had the will to fight today?
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  The ramrod was nothing. But no longer would Star Watcher have this good husband, and Tecumseh was sorry for her.

  My poor People, he thought. What will become of my poor People?

  Then all the noises and all the violent motions faded into the blizzard, and the weight of the burden lifted off of him. The blizzard white was the white dove flying upward before his eyes, leading him. At each side of him was a handsome warrior dressed in only a dark blue breechcloth and moccasins glittering with stars. They rose, one holding him by each arm, following the white dove, into a perfect silence.

  The two sky warriors carried him between them to the fork in the Road of Stars.

  Then he was walking by himself in a beautiful and misty land of green meadows and corn fields and gigantic elm trees and blue streams where herds of bison and elk stood in dewy grass as high as their shoulders, and multitudes of rainbow-shimmering birds veered through the sky. Chiksika was hunting in a meadow and smiled and waved at Tecumseh. At the end of the road was a large town of gray bark wigewas in a wide river valley, between bluffs gushing with springs. His father and mother were waiting for him, and he could see them in the clear, bright light, sitting before their lodge. They were young, and Tecumseh was a boy. He was sitting before them, and his father was saying to him:

  “You were born under a great sign, the sign of the Panther leaping across the sky. To be born under a great sign means that you will have a great thing to do, and your life will not be easy.”

  “WE MAY NEVER KNOW,” GENERAL HARRISON SAID THE next morning, speaking to the officers and scouts who stood with him looking down at the mutilated corpse of an Indian. It was all the general could manage to say at this moment because he was on the verge of having to vomit. Young Captain Perry stood with them, and though he was miles from his fleet, he looked seasick. Acres of woodland and thicket and swamp were trampled and blood-spattered, littered with smashed hats, broken weapons, and torn paper powder cartridges.

  Scores of soldiers were claiming that they had either killed Tecumseh or witnessed his death, though hardly any of them would have known the chief if they had seen him. There were only thirty-three Indian corpses on the battleground, and not enough was left of them to tell which one, if any, had been the chief. The soldiers had come out on the battlefield early this morning and had taken everything from the corpses, even some of their skin.

  Yesterday evening John Conner had said he was pretty sure this body now lying at their feet was Tecumseh’s, and Anthony Shane had said the same, as had some captured British officers. But now neither they nor Harrison nor Simon Kenton could tell enough from the blood-encrusted lump of flayed meat to verify it.

  Harrison had walked all over the battleground and had looked down at each corpse and had thought that surely he would feel something, some intuition if nothing else, that would tell him when he stood over the right body. How could the entire identity of such a splendid enemy, a man whose face had been visible in his memory’s eye for two years, just vanish?

  Some of Congressman Johnson’s troops were swearing that they had seen him kill Tecumseh with a pistol beside the fallen tree, but Johnson was lying in the hospital tent with five bullet wounds and unable to make such a claim or come and point out a particular carcass. Johnson had never been acquainted with Tecumseh before, so how could he know, anyway? Or how could his men? Some other witnesses had said they saw Colonel Bill Whitley and a magnificent-looking savage kill each other simultaneously with pistols. Others said they had seen a soldier pin the chief to the ground with his bayonet. Tecumseh seemed to have been killed two dozen times on this field yesterday. But now in broad daylight no one could say surely, “There he is.”

  Though Harrison had won a major battle and captured half the British force in Upper Canada, he felt troubled and hollow. These damned frontier brutes who made up his army had fought well with their usual swashbuckling bravery, but as usual they had lost control of themselves after tasting blood; some of them had torn on up the road and sacked and burned the missionary town and hurt innocent Indians there.

  But in mutilating these corpses here on the battlefield, they had done their worst mischief, in Harrison’s mind. Now he could not say for certain whether Tecumseh was dead or not. Harrison knew his old anxiety would be with him until he was sure Tecumseh was dead. And now he could not be sure. So for now in his reports to the government he would not make such a claim, only to have it refuted someday when Tecumseh showed up alive on still another battlefield. Harrison had learned the hard way, after Tippecanoe, not to exaggerate his claims of what he had done against these Shawnees.

  The only things that made him feel reasonably sure Tecumseh had fallen were the sudden cessation of the chief’s great voice and the curious way the battle had ended. One minute the Indians had been fighting with stubborn ferocity. But after that voice had fallen still, the resistance had simply melted away.

  IN ANOTHER PART OF THE BATTLEFIELD, CANADIAN FARMERS were digging graves for Indian corpses. They had been called together for the task by Benjamin Arnold, the mill owner. Arnold was grim and silent. The sight of the American militiaman and soldiers prowling the field like buzzards picking away at the dead warriors disgusted him more than anything he had ever seen in his life. He believed the Indians’ statements that his friend Tecumseh was dead. But he had not seen his body on this field, and he was thankful for that.

  One of his grave diggers threw a shovelful of dirt, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then paused to watch some Kentuckians cutting and then strenuously pulling skin off the thigh of a dead warrior. The grave digger spat in their direction and said, “Workin’ hard, aren’t you, boys?”

  “Damn right, Canajun! This here Tecumsey’s tough as an ol’ tom turkey!”

  “I hate to dash y’ down after all your hard labor, lads, but you aren’t skinning who you think you are.”

  A soldier snickered.

  “I reckon when we get back to Kaintuck, won’t nobody know no difference!”

  Epilogue

  ON THIS SIDE OF THE CIRCLE OF TIME A VILLAGE NEAR LAKE ST. CLAIR

  October 6, 1813

  ON THE MORNING WHEN THE AMERICANS WERE PEELING carcasses at the Thames River battleground, four Shawnee warriors many miles away were peeling slabs of bark off a large elm. The tree was very hard to peel. The bark squealed and groaned as if the living tree were in pain.

  Two hundred paces away, warriors and chieftains were digging a grave, using none of the iron tools of white men. They dug with elk-bone hoes in the rich ground beside a creek, under a tree they had aligned with other landmarks. They had made a pledge among themselves. They would never forget where the grave was, and no white man would ever be told of it.

  In a wigewa off from the edge of a village, Star Watcher knelt on a reed mat on the floor beside the naked body of her brother. Her gray hair was unbraided and hung about her head and shoulders, hiding her face. She washed off his red and black war paint and the dried blood from his mouth and chin. She squeezed the cloth in a kettle of warm water, and then she began washing and rubbing off the encrusted blood that covered the deep chest. In the thick muscle near his left nipple were a puckered, black-edged bullet hole and three small buckshot holes. She washed the wounds gently, as if they might hurt. Upon her heart was a weight so heavy she could hardly draw breath. She remembered how, when he was newborn, she had helped wipe the slime of birth off his tiny body. She remembered how, when he was a boy, she had washed the cuts and gashes and splinter gouges that he got in his rough play, and that he had never cried or even whimpered. She could still see some of those little scars on his hairless bronze skin and could remember how he had gotten each one, and the sight of each little scar gave her a sweet pain.

  And there were the bigger scars.

  She cleaned the dark-scabbed wound in his left arm from the battle two days ago at the Forks and the hard-ridged shot scar in his leg from the battle at Monguagon a year ago. And she washed his sinewy legs, the straigh
t one, then the crooked one broken in a bison hunt on the prairie near the Mother of Rivers half a lifetime ago.

  Weshemoneto may help a man escape death many times, she thought. But he does not let a man live forever in one body.

  And as she washed his skin she was remembering too the many wounds she had washed and healed on the beloved flesh of her husband, Stands Firm, in the years of his life. The sweet and bitter burden grew still heavier on her heart. Her husband’s body still lay wherever it had fallen on the battlefield far away.

  At nightfall yesterday after the battle, Charcoal Burner had stolen in among the American sentries on the battlefield with two warriors, and they had gone to the place by the big fallen tree where they had seen the bloody officer kill their chief. In the black night they had found Tecumseh’s body by touch. Through the greatest stealth and effort, they had carried his body off the battlefield from among the sentries, outside the glow of Harrison’s hundreds of campfires, hearing in the distant camp the thousands of Long Knives laughing and singing in celebration of their victory. Charcoal Burner and his warriors had carried the body of Tecumseh a long way through swamps and dark woods to their horses. They had tied his body across the saddle of his own white horse and had ridden the rest of the night to this town, the town of a tribe that the Americans supposed was neutral in the white men’s war.

  They had not been able to find the body of Stands Firm. If they had, Star Watcher could not have prepared it anyway because Stands Firm had been a Chalagawtha Shawnee, and she, his wife, was a Kispoko. So now she touched her husband’s body only in her memory while she washed her brother’s body with her hands.