The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Hunters coming in with so much meat they wanted to rouse the whole village? That was Maconakwa’s hopeful first thought, and when she heard a yipping like coyotes, she thought that might be it. Men were like boys when they had something to show off. But then she heard a word of the yipping: “Wapsituk!”

  At that, her heart jolted. The hoofbeats were closer, coming from upriver, and the next words she distinguished were “Soldiers coming! Up! Run!”

  The two women looked at each other for an instant. Their gift of a good moment was over. They turned and grabbed their daughters, shook them rudely into wakefulness, and told them to get dressed. Maconakwa heard Minnow exclaim: “Soldiers coming in winter?” Dressing Yellow Leaf, Maconakwa babbled prayers.

  But the next sound to come was a blaring, piercing song high in the cold air outdoors, a sound they had heard from the fort or from armies coming along the riverbanks so long ago. It was that signal thing the soldiers blew: a bugle.

  Its echoes hung in the air while the naked girls scrambled for their dresses. Minnow grabbed her knife. And just as the two women and their daughters flung back the door flap and ducked out into the bright cold, a howling din of male voices—it sounded like hundreds of them—arose from the upriver side of the village, and the ground shuddered with hoofbeats. Women and children, many of them naked, came sprinting through the snow from that direction, screaming and yelping in panic. From behind them erupted a sputtering and cracking of gunshots. Splinters of wood and bark spun off the lodges and trees, and bullets whined and sang everywhere. Children tumbled in the snow and sprang up and stumbled on. Calling to Cut Finger, carrying Yellow Leaf, Maconakwa ran toward the river, clutching a blanket in her other arm. She saw blood drops in the snow. A naked old woman trying to crawl. Two or three saddled Indian horses without riders were trotting in confusion among the dwellings, shying and rearing in fear of the running people and the whining, whacking bullets.

  She almost ran into a Miami man who was standing in the lane aiming his musket—at her, it seemed at first, but instead, over her—in the direction from which she had come. Just as she passed him, he fired, and her ears hurt and she smelled the powder smoke. Two more of the village men, one an elder, one hardly more than a boy, in nothing but breechcloths, stood aiming their guns back in that direction. Still running on the packed snow now on the slope toward the river, Maconakwa lost her footing and fell hard, wrenching her arm as Cut Finger tumbled over her. Picking up her screaming little girl and rising, she looked back and saw the horse soldiers coming at full tilt through their own gun smoke, and she had never in her life seen so many bluecoats at once; the whole glaring white sunrise landscape was sundered by their mass silhouette, pearly sky above, snowy earth below, a moving wall of horse soldiers between, so many they were engulfing the low, domed wikwams, overrunning the brown bodies of the women and little ones who ran too slow and too late to get out of their way. She knew there were no more than ten or a dozen Indian men in the town, and they were falling before the soldiers’ guns.

  The horsemen were close enough that she could see their shouting faces and their shiny black plumed helmets. Minnow and her daughter were nowhere in sight. Maconakwa’s heart was slamming in her breast and she was so full of terror that she was hot even in the frosty air. She and Cut Finger ran through the shallows, breaking thin ice, and clambered through deep snow up the other bank, grasping at the roots of cottonwoods and sycamores. A woman with gray hair fell on the slope in their way, dropping the crimson blanket she had been holding around her. Maconakwa took hold of one of her arms and yelled to Cut Finger, “Help the grandmother!” One on each side, they hauled her up into the brush. She was heavy and groaning and they saw that she was leaving blood in the snow. Maconakwa put her blanket around the woman, noticing a bullet wound low in her back, then darted back down the bank to grab up the woman’s red blanket. She gripped a sycamore root to keep from sliding back down to the water’s edge. The horse soldiers were still milling and bellowing and shooting on the other bank. She felt a stinging jolt in her hand. A bullet had barked the tree root right beside it. She clenched her teeth. They were shooting too close to her children. She heaved herself up to the top of the bank again, dragging the red blanket.

  Now some of the soldiers had ridden down and were breaking the shelf ice, starting to wade their horses across. A warrior’s gun banged just above her and a soldier fell backward over the rump of his horse. He was in midstream, one foot still caught in a stirrup, and the horse was lunging in the water, dragging him. But then several other soldiers yelled and fired their guns. Bullets sprayed snow all around her and she felt one whip through her hair, and the warrior above, who had just raised his powder horn to reload his musket, lurched backward and fell in the snow. Cut Finger was still kneeling by the old woman and crying, her face contorted in terror.

  “Daughter! Get hold! Pull!” Maconakwa grabbed a fold of the blanket in which the old woman was lying and Cut Finger grasped the other side and they dragged it with the woman’s weight along the snow, deeper into the thicket. She slid out of the blanket and was lying naked and bleeding in the snow, and so they turned back for her. But now the old woman seemed to be conscious and was trying to get up, so they whipped her own red blanket around her and helped her stand, and they limped away downstream through the snow away from the thunder of gunshots and the din of soldier voices. Looking back through the leafless branches, Maconakwa could see a few plumed helmets as some of the dragoons forded the river, but most of them were still up on the far bank. They were throwing the bodies of dead Indians into the water. Part of the army seemed to be going on down the river toward the other villages. One of those was the village of Silver Heels, who was not only neutral in the war, but a friend of Harrison’s, and had tried to keep his warriors from joining Tecumseh.

  As they limped and dragged on through the snowy bottomland with the wounded elder, seeing other fugitives from the village running or trudging along, generally northwestward and downstream along the bottomland, the army noise still roaring a few hundred paces away, the terrible piercing of the cold began to penetrate where only terror had been felt before, and Maconakwa realized that there was as much danger from freezing to death as from being killed by soldiers. Most of the people were barefoot, some dressed or muffled in blankets, but many were stark naked and bleeding. She wondered whether this old woman would live, and whether many others were back there lying hurt and freezing in the snow, and whether she would ever see Minnow again, and whether her husband and many of the other hunters had been near enough to hear all this uproar. Surely any men who were out hunting within half a day’s distance must have been able to hear this and would be coming back this way to help their women and old ones and children. But of course, she thought with an almost bottomless dread, many of those hunters had headed out eastward in the past days, going upstream into the less populated country, which might mean they had already fallen into the path of this army. Her own husband had gone that way.

  She groaned, and tried to hold Yellow Leaf close for warmth.

  Downstream from Metosinah’s Town were several bigger Miami towns, including Deaf Man’s and Osage’s, closer to the Wabash Sipu. Probably that was where the army was going: to burn the bigger towns. That could mean that if she ever got home to her own town, it would be no town, just ashes and embers. And even if her beloved husband Deaf Man were still alive, where would she ever find him if they had no village to go to?

  This seemed like the end of everything. But one could not just stand in the cold and die. There were villages downriver whose people needed to be warned if they hadn’t heard already. There was food to be foraged and shelter to be made for these who were naked in the cold. This old woman needed a bullet hole healed if that could be done, or a proper burial ceremony if not. Deaf Man needed to be found if he was still alive. And this girl Cut Finger had to be protected from the things Minnow said soldiers did to pretty girls. And Yellow Leaf had to be kept alive.
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br />   One could not just give up and be a leaf blown by the wind.

  The old woman somehow kept on her feet, stumbling along, slow and heavy. Maconakwa and Cut Finger trudged on with her until the middle of morning, when at last some boys came up the river from one of the lower towns with a short string of horses and bundles of blankets. The fastest runners fleeing from Metosinah’s Town had warned the other villages that a huge riding army was coming down one side of the river and cold, hurt people were coming down the other. Maconakwa helped the boys put the wounded woman up on a horse, and a boy led the horse back down. The boys asked if there were any others farther back who needed help, and Maconakwa said, “Surely so. But go with care. Some soldiers were crossing the river and may be back there following us.” She saw that these brave boys had no guns, only their bows. Shivering violently with the cold, she asked about Deaf Man. He had not been seen since his hunting party left. She asked if there were any warriors down in those towns to meet the army and defend the towns. One boy said:

  “Some hunters heard the war and they are coming in. But the towns on that side of the river, everyone has fled and crossed to this side. Chief Wildcat and Chief Silver Heels are calling hunters in, but there are few.” He pointed downriver. “The hunting camp just around that bend, many of the women and children are there. They burn fires to get warm before they freeze. Go on, aunt. May your path be smooth.”

  “Thank you, young one. May your path be safe.”

  As they went on, more quickly now without the old woman, they followed the hoofprints. Here and there Maconakwa saw frozen blood drops in the snow, maybe from the old woman, maybe from others. There were many footprints, many of bare feet. She and Cut Finger had gotten moccasins on before fleeing from Minnow’s lodge but their feet were utterly numb, and the thought of bare feet in this cold, crusted snow was so pitiful to think of that her heart ached for those whose toes showed in the prints.

  But for us with moccasins, she thought, it is good the cold is deep. Our moccasins would be wet otherwise and we would have no toes tomorrow.

  Thinking this, she tucked the blanket closer around Yellow Leaf.

  She could not hear the army anymore. There were no gunshots, no bugles. But soon she saw rising from above the trees on the other side of the river great billows of dark smoke and even flakes of soot. Over there would be Silver Heels’ Town, she guessed. A little farther on, as she and Cut Finger hobbled and clumped along on their deadened feet, both inside the same blanket, they saw more clouds of smoke rising and knew the soldiers had reached towns farther down and torched those too. She could hear distant shouting, soldier yells, but no gunfire. The reason, she presumed, was that the people had fled those towns before the soldiers reached them.

  “Those people were not even their enemies,” she said between chattering teeth. “Tecumseh warned them right. Friendly or not, if you are red, the soldiers will burn you out. Look,” she said, pointing to the right. “We must stop now and do that.” There were other refugees halted here and there in little groups, sitting and kneeling and rubbing each other’s feet vigorously. And so she and her daughter found a fallen tree where they could sit. She pulled off Cut Finger’s moccasins and began rubbing. Her hands were so numb she could hardly feel the feet. After a while her hands were painful and tingling as the blood moved through her fingers, and she could tell that the girl’s poor feet were as hard and stiff as clubs. She rubbed until she was gasping with weariness. She and Minnow had not cooked or eaten this morning, and she felt hollow and shaky from hunger as much as from cold. “Do your feet feel anything yet?”

  “They hurt,” Cut Finger said in a quaking voice.

  “Good. What hurts is not dead.”

  Then Cut Finger rubbed her mother’s feet until they hurt. Maconakwa watched the girl’s breath come out in frosty clouds. While her feet were being rubbed she nursed Yellow Leaf under the blanket, which stopped her whimpering and shivering.

  “Now,” she said, “we must go on. That camp is not far. I see smoke that is not from towns burning.” She thought: I have seen so many town burnings I can tell one kind of smoke from another.

  In the refugee camp Maconakwa and Cut Finger dragged firewood and patched wounds and sheltered Yellow Leaf, and watched fearfully for the bluecoat soldiers to appear through the white bright haze. These people here were helpless. She prayed the hunters and warriors would arrive here first.

  By afternoon the hundred hunters who had been close enough to hear the dawn gunfire had raced in from their hunting to gather with the chiefs of the destroyed villages. Deaf Man was not with them.

  By sundown the ones who had not heard the shooting but had seen the smoke from the four burning villages had arrived, and warriors from the big Miami villages downstream had come up. Now the men with guns, Miami and Lenapeh together, numbered about three hundred. Deaf Man and his hunters trotted in at dusk. They had had to swing wide outside the valley to avoid the army, which had stopped after burning the fourth village and gone back upriver to Silver Heels’ Town to make camp there in the ruins. The army was making a fort out of logs and limbs. Palonswah’s scouts had seen all that and described it. The army had many guards posted outside the fortifications, and huge fires were burning inside the breastworks. It had grown still colder, and the soldiers, it could be hoped, were suffering very much. They probably were wishing they had not burned down the town, so they could have had snug wikwams to stay in, with hearth fires inside.

  The scouts said the horse soldiers numbered eight or nine hundred. It was a huge army to have come here so far into the country in the snow. It was too big an army to attack with three hundred warriors and hunters, even men as vengefully furious as these, who had in one day changed from neutrals or friends of the Americans to bitter enemies. Three hundred warriors could not expect to defeat three hundred entrenched soldiers, and certainly not three times that many. It would be foolhardy to try to get revenge by attacking the eight or nine hundred soldiers now. It would be better to wait a few days until Tecumseh came down with his six or seven hundred warriors, who were somewhere in the Wabash Sipu valley. He could join with them and destroy this army that was so far from any fort. It would be easy, with Tecumseh, and messengers had already been sent to find and summon him. Tecumseh would be glad to find all these neutral Mississinewa warriors suddenly converted to his side.

  That was the argument for waiting, and some of the chiefs used that argument.

  But there was a more desperate argument for not waiting:

  It could take several days to find and bring Tecumseh. In those days this army might turn and continue on down the river and destroy all the rest of the towns all the way to the Wabash Sipu and burn what little food was left—not much, after Harrison’s raids at harvesttime.

  But the strongest argument of all for not awaiting Tecumseh’s help was that the army had rounded up about forty or fifty women and children in its morning attack and was holding them hostage in the center of its camp. If everyone waited till Tecumseh could come, the soldiers might kill them all or rape them or take them away with them back to their forts in the East.

  There was no hope that three hundred warriors and hunters could defeat so many horse soldiers. They had already agreed on that.

  But, some warriors and chiefs insisted, three hundred warriors might be able to break in through one side of the army camp, rescue the women and children, and get back out.

  Maconakwa, shuddering and almost faint at the edge of this hurried war council, heard that. She was almost certain that Minnow and her daughter must be among those captives. Since the first minute of the raid, she had not seen them. They had not showed up at the hunting camp where the refugees had come. They might have been killed by the soldiers or frozen to death in the flight, but most likely they were among those captives.

  She looked at her husband, Deaf Man. He was there close among the village chiefs and leaning far in, and there was cold fury in his eyes. She looked at him and again thanke
d the Creator that he was alive.

  But she heard him vote yes, attack the army before daybreak and get our people out! And she knew that though he was alive tonight, he might not be tomorrow.

  * * *

  The glow from the soldiers’ bonfires in the ruins of Silver Heels’ Town could be seen from the war camp here.

  It would require great courage to attack so many soldiers with so few warriors. It would require great fortitude to survive such a terribly frigid night without homes to sleep in. And so great heaps of firewood were brought into the war camp to make a huge bonfire for a war dance.

  The drums beat and the howling warriors danced around the blaze for hours into the evening. They mimed stalking, springing upon the enemy with tomahawks raised high, lunging from a crouch with lances, pointing guns, bending bows, killing, killing, stooping to take scalps, and with each imitation felt the power come into them to do the real deeds to the whites in the morning. They yelped and sang the fearsome tremolo war cry, casting demonic shadows in the light of the roaring bonfire whose sparks swirled up in red smoke toward the stars. If the soldiers’ firelight could be seen from here, this firelight could be seen by the soldiers, and surely the soldiers in their camp up the river would be able to hear these screams and war cries across that distance. It was certain that the soldiers would be more and more afraid the longer they saw this glow in the sky and heard this howling and, especially, the vibrant war cry that had not been heard for so long.

  In the meantime, if the warriors had not had the great bonfire to dance near, they might have frozen to death, this night was so cold.

  One of the dancers was the French-blood youth Brouillette, who had caught and held the eye of the girl Cut Finger last year at Spring Council. This boy Brouillette had never fought before. He would become a warrior at daylight because every able man and boy would be needed. Young Brouillette looked splendid as he danced, his deep eyes ablaze, his jutting cheekbones striped with war paint.