Panther in the Sky (2 page)

O
NCE AGAIN THE
P
EOPLE WERE FLEEING ON A ROAD OF
hunger.

Through the foggy autumn woods a brown river flowed westward, and along its south bank the gaunt families slogged eastward. Their voices murmured in a dozen Algonquian tongues, though mostly they were silent, turned inward upon their misery and fear. They numbered more than twenty hundred, women and coughing children and ancients, most afoot, a few on horseback and travois, strung out more than two miles along the mud-clogged road. Their feet slithered and sucked in the cold muck.

So many times Tecumapese, whose name meant Watcher of the Shooting Star, had fled like this with her people ahead of the armies of the Long Knives. The first time she had been a young woman, not yet a mother. Now she was fifty-five summers of age, and in her own memory this was the seventh flight. It always happened in the autumn. The American armies always drove them out at harvesttime, making them face winter without food or shelter.

Cold rain had fallen for six days while the Redcoat army of their allies the British retreated along the lakeshore and then up this river road. The wheels of their cannons and baggage wagons and the hooves of their horses and beef cattle had churned the dirt road into ruts of mud. And now the Indian refugees came following, carrying sodden bundles, their blankets and clothes ragged, drenched, and soiled, their leggings soaked through and clotted with mud. Half were barefoot; the mire had swallowed their moccasins.

Through the murmur and hush of their slow passage purled the crying of hungry babies, and that was the sound that most tormented Star Watcher.

The leaves of the big oaks, elms, and beeches all around were
gold, the maples and sumacs were vermilion to livid. When a gust of cold wind stirred the fog, showers of rainwater and yellow leaves would come down. It was the time of year when a woman’s heart was meant to be absorbed in the harvest and the yield of the hunt, in corn parching and bean shelling, in acorn gathering and walnut breaking, in drying venison and buffalo meat over smoky fires, in rendering bear oil and tanning hides.

But the autumn colors were not in the heart now, only in the eyes. The leaves that had fallen had been mashed and trampled into the mud with the blackened old leaves of other years. Once again because of the Long Knives there would be no harvest.

Star Watcher sat on her mare in the chilly morning air looking back for stragglers as her people stumbled by. Her brother Tecumseh had put upon her the burden of keeping the people together and hurrying them on. Upon the shoulders of their younger brother, the Prophet, he had put the task of leading them to the town of the Jesus Indians, where they might find food and shelter. And upon himself Tecumseh had taken the warrior’s task of defending the rear, of harassing and delaying the Long Knife army like wolf pack around bison herd, to give the helpless ones and the ponderous Redcoat army time to move ahead up the river to a defensible place. With less than a thousand warriors he had slowed the advance of General Harrison’s four thousand Long Knives. But still the Americans came on and were perhaps not more than five miles behind now, and the people could not be allowed to fall behind or sit and rest. But some had strayed aside or fallen down and gotten lost, and one of the lost ones was her own grandnephew.

Star Watcher was a strong, erect woman whose graying hair hung down her back to her waist in one thick braid. On each russet cheekbone was the thumbprint of red paint with which the Shawnee women of all ages marked their faces. She wore a beaded deerskin dress and leggings, with a damp red woolen English blanket drawn around her shoulders. She was handsome, queenly looking, mother of many: of the children of her own loins, of her little brothers whom her mother had left with her, and of many more whose mothers and fathers had died by the guns and diseases and whiskey of the American white men. And now she was also the mother, as Tecumseh had joked grimly to her yesterday, of all these exhausted and homeless ones, the families of his warriors.

“Go on, old Grandmother,” she coaxed. “Go on, sister. Hurry on. The town of the Jesus Delawares is near ahead. Hurry on.
Be strong!” Her searching gaze fell upon a Peckuwe Shawnee woman she knew. “Sister,” she called. “Have you seen today the little boy of Nehaaeemo?”

The Peckuwe woman, who was leading a small child with each hand, shook her head, scowling, and called back: “I have my own to take care of on this hard way we go! Am I to look out also for half-bloods whose mother lets them stray?”

Star Watcher’s dark eyes flashed, and her lips set firm. She kneed her mare and rode as skillfully as a warrior in among the people and halted the horse in the woman’s way, stopping her. She leaned down close to the woman’s startled face. Her breath came in white puffs in the dank air as she spoke, voice quick and low: “Listen to me with all the power of your attention. We speak of a good little boy whose mother goes mad in her head with worry, a woman who has too many children to hold one by each hand like you. Nehaaeemo is of my own blood. Do not speak with a knife tongue of her or of a lost boy. When the road is hard we must say soft words to each other. Did not Our Grandmother Kokomthena, the Creator, give us this as one of the Rules of Living?”

The woman, now looking at the ground, nodded. “I swallow my bad words.”

“Weh-sah,
good,” said Star Watcher. “Now, go along. I know you are tired and your little ones have short legs, but you must hurry on.”

“Yes,” said the woman, who now looked up with tears in her eyes. “And I pray the little boy will be found. I shall watch for him with my own eyes.”

Star Watcher smiled at her and nodded, then turned her mare and rode back among the stragglers, shepherding them. How many had strayed off to lie down and rest? What would happen to them when the Long Knives found them? From nearly thirty years ago she could remember seeing a Kentucky horse soldier with a sword chase and hack seven women who had fallen behind in their flight from Maykujay Town. She gazed back down the river and shuddered with fear and hatred. It was quiet back there now, the frightening quiet the prey listens to when it knows it is being hunted. This quiet was in a way more fearsome than the battle thunder of yesterday, when Tecumseh and his warriors had fought the Americans all morning at the Chatham bridges on the Forks of the river Thames.

For thirty years her brother had been fighting to save his people’s world, and though this now seemed a hopeless time, so had
the many other times when he had turned like a trapped panther and torn his pursuers apart. He had come to be the chief of chiefs, loved and trusted by many peoples, the last free chief, the one who would not sign treaties with the Americans, the one who saw far ahead.

It was now just as it had been most of her life, the People fleeing, the war chiefs protecting them—except that now they were not in their homeland anymore. Now this river alongside the retreat was not the Scioto-se-pe or the Miami-se-pe, or the Wabash-se-pe or the Maumee-se-pe, those clear green rivers of the Shawnee homelands, but a muddy river with a British name, in a northern land, home of Wyandots, Ottawas, Ojibways, Potawatomies, not of Shawnees.

Suddenly, above the drone of voices, shouting arose and cries of “Tenskwatawa! Father!” Star Watcher turned and looked upstream and saw her younger brother, the Prophet, riding back toward her from the front of the column. She reined her mare around and stood waiting for him, dreading that he was bringing word of some new trouble ahead.

Tenskwatawa, whose name meant He-Opens-the-Door, rode close to her, a long cloak draped behind him, his many-colored turban pulled down as usual on the right side to hide his blind eye. The cold, wet weather was making his nostrils leak mucus onto the silver ring in his nose and into his mustache. Open Door was not a good rider, and Star Watcher sighed with fond pity as the great shaman of the Shawnee nation hauled at the reins and conducted a grunting struggle to guide his horse, while people scurried to get out of his way. Everything he did had always been like this. He was a legend of awkwardness. Considering what a blundering fool he was, it was a miracle how much he had done for the People.

“Sister,” he panted, “we in front saw the smoke from the Jesus town! We are almost there!”

“Weh-sah!
That will give the People strength of heart. But you, brother, you should have ridden ahead into the town, to prepare for us, and sent a rider back to tell me.”

“Ah … yes.” He squinted his good eye, realizing that he had made a typical error of judgment. Then he said, as if to justify himself, “I came to tell you, Nehaaeemo is in the worst of grief for her little son George. She wails and dirties her face with mourning, and will listen to no word of hope—”

“Listen!” Star Watcher interrupted him, turning to look toward
the rear. People down the road were shouting. Her face brightened when she heard the name they were calling.

Around a bend far down the road Tecumseh came riding into view surrounded by people on foot and followed by a horde of mounted warriors. She first discerned him at this distance by the great curved white plume in his headdress. Some of the people on the road in front of him were women and gray-hairs. Some children and feeble elders were being helped along, even carried, by warriors. Star Watcher knew what this meant. Tecumseh and his fighting men had been gathering up the stragglers and lost ones as they came along. Star Watcher remembered one of the teachings she had given him over and over when he was a boy growing to warrior’s age: “Always protect the People. That is all a warrior is for.” And he had lived by that.

Now Tecumseh had seen her, and he raised a hand and called out in his mighty voice that could be heard over multitudes and distances. He rode out from the others and came ahead at a canter on his muddy white horse.

It was then as he drew closer that Star Watcher saw two things at once, one of which gave her joy, the other terror.

He held a child on the saddle in front of him: the little lost boy, son of Nehaaeemo.

But Tecumseh’s face was painted as she had never seen it before, red on one side, black on the other. War and death. She felt a chill pass down from her scalp through her neck and bosom, and her heartbeat quickened, aching. She kicked the mare’s flanks and hurried down the road to meet him. Open Door followed. Many people were shouting, some wailing. When she was close to him she saw the whiteness of his beloved smile, shining through the terrible red and black. How all the People loved this brother of hers and depended upon his strength and vision! But she was bound to him as no one else was. She had been as much mother as sister to him; her very name had been changed at his birth to show that she was a watcher over his life.

He reined in and reached and squeezed her hand, then Open Door’s hand. Then he dismounted and lifted the dirty, frightened little half-breed boy down from the saddle, grimacing with pain. She saw that there was a bloody bandage on her brother’s left arm. “Here is this little one,” he said. “He was beside the road, crying and hungry. Take him to Nehaaeemo and tell her to guard her children better than she has done.”

Star Watcher slid down from her saddle, drew the sniffling child close to her hip, and sheltered him in her blanket. She
looked at Tecumseh’s slit, bloodstained left sleeve and the seeping poultice rag bound around his upper arm, then at his face, half red, half black, her eyes asking questions. But he said nothing about that. He was tense with haste, like a drawn bow. “We will meet the Long Knives today in the way I have yearned to meet them,” he said. “The British general can run no farther and has promised to stand with us this time and fight them with all his power. We will have his cannons and his Redcoats to help us, and this time we will draw back no more. Here today we will defeat the army of my great enemy Harrison, or here we will leave our bones. I told General Procter that if he puts his tail between his legs and runs away again, my warriors will walk away from him and leave him to the bayonets of the Blue-Coats.

“My brother, my sister, here is what you must do about the Sacred Bundle, and about our grain seeds.…”

As he instructed them about those irreplaceable belongings of the tribe, his chieftains and warriors began riding up. Star Watcher looked first for her husband, Wasegoboah, Stands Firm. He was a gray-hair, but still brawny and quick and always near Tecumseh, one of the thirty longtime followers who had designated themselves the protectors of his life.

Her husband dismounted and came to stand near her, looking at her intently. She smiled at him, but he did not smile. In the intensity of his eyes there was something so terrible, so full of pain, that she wondered if he had a wound somewhere. He stood beside her, his arm touching hers, but did not tell her anything, even when she probed his face with her eyes. His look and silence filled her with such dread as her brother’s red and black war paint had done. As a gust of cold wind blew more yellow leaves down all around, there seemed to be a mournful death-moan inside her head.

Tecumseh was saying now, his eyes gleaming with passion:

“Today every breath I draw will give me strength to kill Harrison. Weshemoneto, the Master of Life, will put into my hands the fate of this evil man who has done more than anyone to ruin our People!” He turned to mount his white horse, but then paused and returned to Star Watcher. He gripped her wrist in his hand, which, for the first time in her memory, felt cold. He looked straight and deep into her eyes, and his hard face went soft. The lines of the angry frown vanished from between his brows for a moment, and she could see his eyes again as she had seen them long ago before they had ever been angry: large eyes, eyes that had seemed to try to draw forth the meaning of everything they
saw, eyes of a hazel color flecked with green and brown, unlike any others ever seen in this dark-eyed family. Old Change-of-Feathers, who had been the principal Shawnee shaman when Tecumseh was born, had explained that the child’s eyes contained the light of the Eye of the Panther, the shooting star that had gone over when he was born, and how well she could remember that, the greatest omen she had ever seen. Now Tecumseh murmured, so softly that only the familiar movements of his lips told her what he was saying, one of the rules of Kokomthena, Our Grandmother, that Star Watcher herself had taught him over and over when he was a boy:
“Weshecat-welo k’weshe laweh-pah.”