Panther in the Sky (36 page)

“Right here is where we captured Boone and his salt makers. This very place.” He pointed, smiling, along the riverbank. “There, you see, is the salt lick where they were. Ha, ha! That was a good day!”

This was the first cheerfulness Chiksika had shown for several days. That memory of a triumph five years ago was better than this present expedition, which had so far been a dismal failure.

The fording place was full of horsemen crossing the river toward the northeast. Most of them were Old Moluntha’s Maykujays and other Shawnees. But there were also British Redcoats and some Rangers in their green coats. The horses splashed through the shallows, the spraying water glittering in sunlight. A few of the warriors and soldiers had bloodstained bandages.

The party, numbering about two hundred and fifty, was retreating toward O-hi-o. They had failed after a two-day siege to capture a fort called Bryant’s Station, near the big town of Lexington. Messengers had escaped through the besiegers’ lines, and the British commander of the force, Captain Caldwell, had grown afraid that Long Knife reinforcements would arrive. And so this morning he had lifted the encirclement, and the retreat had begun. It had been a sorry campaign, one that had increased Chiksika’s scorn for the leadership of British officers.

Tecumseh, though still too young at fourteen to fight as a warrior, had come on the expedition with the camp followers. There were several of them, wives, lovers, and children of the British and Canadians. Caldwell’s own wife was an Indian woman, a Shawnee. From hills and woods out of gunshot range, Tecumseh had been able to observe for the first time an attack upon a Kain-tuck-ee fort. It had been thrilling at first, all the shooting and smoke, the warriors darting from stump to stump to get close to the walls, the shouted commands, the vocal taunts between the attackers and the defenders. But nothing decisive had been done,
and it had grown frustrating just to watch as the hours wore into days. Tecumseh, eager to see the massacre of the Jesus Indians avenged, could hardly bear to see the attack so mired down. Though his only knowledge of war had been the mock battles of his boyhood and the things Chiksika had told him, he had seen several opportunities not taken: feints, the use of fire-arrows, tunnels. Captain Caldwell had not done any of the bold things that could have been done. And then finally he had fled at the mere thought of enemy reinforcements. It was no wonder Chiksika was so disgusted.

Now as their horses splashed through the shallow ford toward the dark green hills on the other side, shouts from the rear of the column turned their heads. In a moment, one of the trailing scouts came galloping his horse into the river, calling out that Long Knives were coming.

Chiksika’s eyes were suddenly flashing. He cried, “Come, brother!” and whipped his horse to speed to the head of the column with the messenger.

The messenger’s horse was dancing around as the scout told what he had seen: many mounted militia soldiers, following fast; he had seen them at a distance of perhaps two miles. Captain Caldwell, his worst fears realized, looked scared and confused. But Old Moluntha seemed delighted. So was Chiksika. He pointed up into the ravines ahead, crying: “Up in there! A perfect trap! We should hide up in the woods there and ambush them when they cross the river!” Girty told Caldwell it looked like a good plan and added that there really was no alternative. Gone
from the
chieftains’ faces was the sullen disappointment they had displayed since the retreat from Bryant’s Station; they were eager to meet their pursuers. “Now we can catch them outside their burrows!” Chiksika exclaimed, and Tecumseh remembered when Black Fish had said the same thing so cheerfully.

Captain Caldwell, though not so eager, answered yes and acted quickly. He turned and shouted orders to his Redcoats and Rangers. Moluntha, though old and wizened, still had a powerful voice, and he sent his warriors up the ravine to lay the ambush.

“Now, brother,” Chiksika exclaimed, gripping Tecumseh’s arm, “go up on the ridge. Take the white men’s women and children up there out of the way of harm. Hurry them. There is not much time! I think this will be a good day after all! Ha!”

With the English he had learned from Big Fish, Tecumseh was able to herd the camp followers toward the high ridge, leading them up the ravine, which branched and rebranched. Everywhere
around them as they went panting and clunking up the draw with their baggage and cooking pots, warriors were dismounting and melting into the terrain. Below, the river flowed over the fording place. The last of the trailing scouts came out of the woods on the other shore and dashed across the ford.

The scene fell into silence. Locust calls spun out. Tecumseh secured his mount to a sapling and clambered up onto a big, mossy fallen log to watch down the ravine. For a while there was no sound but the drone of insects and the anxious voices of the camp followers. Tecumseh lay with his bare chest on the mossy bark. He picked a wood tick off his sweaty arm and flicked it away.

Now he could hear hoofbeats on the other side of the river, and his heartbeat quickened. He watched the place where the road came out of the woods.

Soon the white men began riding out of the trees, their rifles across the pommels of their saddles. They rode to the bank as if to come straight across the ford and up the ravine into the trap, and Tecumseh’s heart now pounded against the tree. There were so many of them! They kept riding out of the green woods and onto the riverbank. They were all dressed in gray and brown and tan. In the still, hot summer air their voices and the sounds of their movements rose up from the valley, a great rush of noises: horses snorting, iron-shod hooves on gravel, men yelling questions and replies.

Near the river’s edge one of the leading figures, in tan hunting shirt and black hat, had raised his hand and signaled for a halt, and he was scanning the ridge and ravines. Then he yelled something, and Tecumseh recognized the voice at once:

Boone!

Tecumseh felt a rush of confused emotions. At the first sound of that voice his heart had leaped up in pleasure, because this man once had been his foster brother, Sheltowee, the Big Turtle. But Boone had betrayed Black Fish, and thus he was hated and marked to be killed, and Tecumseh was sure that every Shawnee warrior lying down there in ambush had recognized his voice and noted him as a special target. It would be terrible to see Sheltowee killed, but then this was no longer Sheltowee, it was Captain Boone, who did not belong in this sacred Kain-tuck-ee hunting ground and who had ridden out here with all these Long Knives to chase and kill red men. There was no other way to consider it now.

Boone seemed to be arguing with other white men, who were
gathering around him on their agitated horses. The horses wanted to go to the water and drink, but the Long Knives were holding them back and having their council with Boone. The whole army was backing up behind them on that riverbank; some were still coming out of the woods on the road.

Tecumseh remembered that Boone was not a man who could be easily trapped. Maybe Boone sensed the danger that lay in the ravines across the river from him.

In half of his heart, Tecumseh now was willing Boone to forget his caution and cross over; in the other half he was remembering Boone smiling at him from across a campfire and wishing he would turn back.

Suddenly one of the white men, a bold-looking figure on a big black horse, snatched off his hat, waved it, broke away from Boone, and rode down into the river, yelling in a loud, snarly voice as he came. Many of the white men then howled and spurred their horses and rode in after him.

They were coming now. Tecumseh gripped the bark of the log. They were splashing across the ford like a hundred unthinking herd animals and riding straight for the ambush.

Boone, on his rearing horse, was shouting angrily at them and waving his hat to try to summon them back, as were some of the others. Then, as if to get ahead of them and turn them back, he kicked his horse and galloped into the ford with them, a young man riding at his side.

For a few tense moments then the white men were swarming noisily across the bottomland and up the ravine, straight into the trap. More than a hundred were across, and a few were still riding out of the woods on the other side, when the wooded hillside exploded in a storm of gunfire and smoke, shouts, tremolo war cries, and the whinnying and screaming of wounded horses. Soon the ravines were full of drifting smoke, through which Tecumseh could barely glimpse flashes of a great confusion. In the bottomland below the ravine, riderless horses were bolting back toward the river, running into the riders still coming up. Men were running for cover or standing and shooting and shouting until they fell.

It went on and on. Of the white men in the river, some were trying to turn their horses and flee while others were trying to rush forward into the battle, and these were colliding with each other, shouting, many falling off their horses and floundering in the water. But it was down in the wooded ravines out of Tecumseh’s sight that the uproar was most terrible.

And then after a while—only a quarter of an hour had passed since the shooting erupted, though it had seemed to be a day—the bottomland and the river itself were full of desperately retreating whites, limping, dragging, or carrying each other, bawling for help, trying to catch runaway horses by their bridles, some turning to shoot back up into the woods as they retreated. The war cries in the woods were shrill and triumphant, and pitiful were the screams of the dying Long Knives.

C
HIKSIKA’S EYES WERE ABLAZE
. T
ECUMSEH RODE BESIDE HIM
along the Warrior’s Path toward the Beautiful River in the twilight and listened to him as he told of details of the great victory. Chiksika himself had three fresh scalps at his belt and not a scratch on him. He was nearly bursting with triumph but still seething with anger at the British captain. “We might have chased them down into the river and wiped them out to the last one,” Chiksika said. “But Captain Caldwell was afraid still more pursuers might come.”

He had called a retreat after the whites had been routed, and the warriors had reluctantly given up their carnage.

Boone had escaped, through hundreds of bullets; his God apparently had put a cloak of safety around him, and he had staggered to safety, carrying the body of his own son. “Now Boone feels what he once made Black Fish feel,” Chiksika gloated. “The death of a son. Ha! All things come back around!”

The Shawnees had never had a bigger victory over the Long Knives. They had killed seventy and wounded more than that—all fighting men, no women and children. It was more rich with glory than if they had merely captured Bryant’s Station. Perhaps now those poor foolish murdered Jesus Indians could look down from whichever heaven they had gone to and see that for once there had been justice done on the earth below.

T
HREE MOONS LATER
B
LUE
J
ACKET GALLOPED INTO
C
HILLICOTHE
on a spent horse, and his face was full of storm. He took no time to answer the men and boys who ran out in the cold to greet him, so they knew without a word that something was very bad. Blue Jacket rode straight to Black Hoof’s lodge and said as he leaped off his horse:

“Clark comes with his big army again.”

Black Hoof was not surprised. His face set in sadness, in resignation.

“It has taken me a long lifetime to learn what the old men said at the beginning: Revenge is never satisfied.”

T
ECUMSEH CROUCHED BEHIND A BOULDER AND LISTENED TO
the distant rustling and crushing of dry leaves as the horse soldiers approached. As he checked the priming powder in his flintlock for the fourth or fifth time, he saw that his hand was trembling. He tried to will it to be steady but could not. The awful thing had happened, the thing every boy worried and wondered about as he grew closer to the warrior’s age: he was scared, very scared.

Maybe if he had not had to face the enemy until he was sixteen or seventeen, his courage would have matured by then. But he was not yet quite fifteen, and the scarcity of warriors had made it necessary for some his age to help the warriors defend against Clark. Though he had been in the presence of the enemy at Chillicothe and Piqua and Blue Licks, he had not been there facing the Long Knives as a warrior on the line. Sometimes in those past years he had been scared, in a way, but he had been eager to do something. Now he was at the test, and he only wanted to be away from it.

The rustling of the leaves down on the riverbank grew louder. His hand kept trembling, and he was ashamed of it, and he hoped that his brother Chiksika, a few feet away, could not see it. And now as the warriors crouched waiting in the cold, stark woods watching for the Long Knife soldier-scouts to ride into close gunshot range, another part of Tecumseh’s body seemed ready to help shame him:

Unexpectedly he felt a powerful need to move his bowels and to make water.

This was a terrible onslaught of betrayals by his own body, this body that had always been so strong and healthy and quick to serve him. He had feared that his will might falter in the face of death but had not worried about the body in which it dwelt. But now this. How could he possibly fight well and shoot straight while having to hold his hands steady and his openings shut?

“Brother,” Chiksika’s voice said softly beside him. “
Weshecat-too-weh,
be strong! You are now
nenothtu,
warrior!”

Tecumseh nodded. He barely glanced at his brother, not wanting him to see the fear that was surely showing in his eyes. Chiksika was crouched there lithe as a great cat, his cheekbones and chin painted as usual in yellow, the one eagle feather sticking up from his scalplock. Chiksika had fought so many times since that
day eight years ago when he had first gone into the big battle beside their father Hard Striker. He had never told Tecumseh anything about being scared.

I am unworthy, Tecumseh thought. He did not want this first chance to prove himself the great warrior of the signs. All he wanted to do was go back to a safe, hidden place and relieve himself and stay hidden until this was over.