Panther in the Sky (10 page)

He thought. Then he said, “Yes, but they will not win. Because we are better, and we are right. I have told you how we slaughtered the British soldiers in the woods at the head of the Beautiful River in the Long War. They do not know how to fight in the forest.” He talked low, not wanting the children to awaken to this kind of talk.

She said, “I do not want my son Chiksika harmed or killed. Nor do I want that for you.…”

“Then do not speak the words of it. That is bad medicine to speak of it.”

“But you must know how much I do not want that.”

“So this is what you will tell the women to say? That we should cringe before the Long Knives and let them infest our sacred lands?”

She stared at him. Her breast was on his arm, and he did not want to die. But he wanted to do right.

Finally she said:

“Because I honor you,
wahsiu,
I will not speak out against what you want to do. But listen. If my son dies, if the Long Knives win and then come here to harm my children or molest my daughter, perhaps I will be bitter with you forever.”

A
PULSATING SCREAM PIERCED THE STILLNESS OF THE NIGHT
. It was taken up by hundreds of other voices, which swelled to such a shriek that Tecumseh felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. A hide-covered drum beat like a huge, fast heart, and the flames of a bonfire soared higher than the roof of the council lodge. All the people of Kispoko Town were gathered around the council ground. In the center were the bonfire and a war post.

The post was a peeled log as thick and tall as a man. It had been painted red, and it stood there, as yet untouched but nonetheless the focus of everyone’s attention.

The drumbeats went on like a pulse after the scream had died down. Then the line of warriors shuffled out into the center. The chatter of deer-hoof rattles tied to their feet and ankles joined the rhythm of the drum; then the ululating war cry rose again, pouring from their throats.

The line of dancers was long. There were several hundred of them, their faces and naked bodies painted in colors, shining in the firelight with oil and sweat. They stepped high, touched their toes to the earth, and then thumped their heels down, their sinewy bodies arching, then crouching, their knives and tomahawks glinting in the light of the blaze. Their eyes were bulging, crazed. At first the dance was a pantomime of stealth, as they stalked their enemy. Then it built in passion and noise. They leaped, swung, and twisted their bodies in the motions of combat, chopping and stabbing the air with their weapons, repeating and repeating the war cry.

Chiksika had told Tecumseh that when one reached this stage of the dance, one could see his enemies before his eyes, and thus one was striking and slicing not the empty air, but the vision of the enemy. One can sometimes feel the blade hit flesh, he had said. And if one feels the blow like that, it is a sign that when the real battle is fought, the blow will actually cleave enemy flesh. Therefore one must dance with the utmost exertion, even to the point of exhaustion, with the heart full of fire, in order to make the enemy’s vision appear. To do the war dance with half a heart, Chiksika had said, was to go half-prepared into battle.

Chiksika now was second in the line of dancers. Before him was Blue Jacket, formerly the white youth who had been whipped in the gauntlet. He was a promising warrior now, as much a Shawnee at heart as Chiksika. They were transported. The war post had become a whiteface soldier in a scarlet coat. Blue Jacket and Chiksika circled close around the war post, war cries tearing their throats; they dodged and spun as they closed upon it. Blue
Jacket leaped high, and with a lashing blow as quick as the strike of a snake he struck the blade of his tomahawk into the very crown of the red post. Then Chiksika’s blade stuck beside it.

Outside the circle of firelight, Tecumseh yelped. He had seen blood spurt from the post.

T
HERE WAS NO MOON, BUT IN THE STARLIGHT
H
ARD
S
TRIKER
could see the other war canoes and the rafts moving alongside through the mist on the surface of the great river, every vessel loaded with as many warriors as it could carry without sinking.

They were now in the middle of the river. Hard Striker was in the prow of a large canoe. The whole sky was brilliant with stars. The water of the Beautiful River gurgled under the bark hull of the canoe.

As he always did the night before going into battle, Hard Striker looked up to try to see his warrior’s star. Long ago when he was a young man courting Turtle Mother in her Creek village, he had learned from the Creeks their belief that the soul of every warrior was guarded by a particular star. She had pointed out to him which star was his own, and since then, as war chief of the Shawnees, he had lived and fought under one of the two stars that lined up with the Guide Star of the North. Now he had to turn in the canoe and look back over his shoulder to see the star. He looked at it for a moment and then returned his gaze to the river. His hand on the prow of the canoe felt the rub and flow of the water against the hull, as if the canoe were a living thing swimming on the living water. He could feel too the living strength of the eight paddlers whose strokes drove the vessel toward the east shore, closer and closer to the enemy’s camp. Hard Striker now was thinking of the plan of the battle.

It was to be a battle plan unlike any he had ever followed. It was Cornstalk’s plan, for Cornstalk at last had agreed to lead the
tribes against the Long Knife army. So many of his people wanted to fight the white men that Cornstalk had agreed, but with reluctance. Since it was Cornstalk’s war plan and Cornstalk was a brave and intelligent chief, it probably was a good plan, though it was not the red man’s usual way of fighting.

Usually a war party would make a surprise raid upon a force or a town it could surround and then, if resistance became too great, would withdraw and await a more favorable chance. This time, though, there would be no better chance. The whiteface army camped at the mouth of the Kanawha-se-pe was now about the same size as Cornstalk’s force, ten hundred men. But in a few days it would be three times larger, because the white chief Governor Dunmore was coming down the great river from Fort Pitt with a much bigger army. And so Cornstalk had decided to engage this smaller part of the army before the two parts of the white force could unite. If the attack succeeded, there would be many captured guns and powder horns with which to arm more warriors for war against the other part of the army, which was still far up the river.

The enemy camp was on a wedge of land where the Kanawha-se-pe flowed into the O-hi-o, a mile downstream. From here in the middle of the great river Hard Striker could sometimes see the glimmer of a far-off bonfire, a tiny light like a spark that would then vanish in the blackness of the shoreline forest. Above the wedge of land there was a faint glow of firelit smoke from the campfires.

Cornstalk’s plan was to place a line of warriors across that wedge of land, from the O-hi-o to the Kanawha-se-pe, before daylight. This would trap the soldiers on the point of land so they could not retreat. Cornstalk had learned in the Seven Years’ War between the British and French that if white soldiers were crowded into tight places, they could be annihilated by warriors shooting from cover around them. If Cornstalk’s ten hundred warriors could advance down the wedge undetected before daybreak, they could crowd the white soldiers into just such a tight place.

It did seem like a good battle plan. With Cornstalk’s Shawnees were some Mingos, Delawares, and Wyandots. If these allies could do to this army what the red men had done to the British army of Braddock nearly twenty years before, then there was a chance to stop the other part of the army and save the Indian towns. If this battle failed, the Shawnee nation would be left with two unbearable choices: surrender to the Virginia governor, on
the white man’s terms, or destruction of the villages and crops in the face of winter.

And so this day would be a great and important day. This would be as important as any battle the Shawnee men had ever fought in all their history since the Beginning. Hard Striker prayed as the vessel moved through the starlit mist of the river. He prayed that the Long Knives would be caught by surprise, that in their confusion they would get in the way of each other’s guns, that they might even be overrun while still in their blankets. They had no suspicion that Cornstalk was crossing the river. The rafts and pirogues and canoes were silent. Some of the chiefs were so sure it would happen this way that they were already exulting.

As the war chief, Hard Striker should have been exulting with them. But, strangely, his confidence was overshadowed by a dread and a sadness. Perhaps it was because of the unfamiliar tactics Cornstalk was using. Perhaps it was because so many of Hard Striker’s own kin and beloved would be exposed to danger in this uncommon battle. His son Chiksika. His closest friend and subchief, Black Snake. The fine warrior Stands Firm, who, it was understood, would one day be the husband of his daughter, Star Watcher. Too much confidence would put them all in terrible danger.

Of course it was good to be confident and to hope for an easy victory, as this strengthened the spirit. But even in victorious combats, one must be prepared to see one’s own friends and relatives die around him and to bear the grief after that. He had borne such grief often enough in his years. And if one were the war chief, the weight of all deaths had to be borne upon one’s own soul.

This was what Hard Striker was thinking in his canoe upon the misty river under a sky full of cold stars, when suddenly, despite the river of hot blood in his veins, he shivered. He turned quickly to look again at his warrior star in the north.

He could not see it!

As if it had suddenly burned out, it was not there. The Guide Star twinkled, and the other star on the line with it. But he could not see his own warrior’s star, and his heart suddenly was cold.

He shut his eyes. When he opened them and looked again, the star was there. But he had failed to see it before, and that was a sign he fully understood. It changed everything.

Nothing had changed in the world around him—the soft, gurgling, trickling music of the water, the breathing of the paddlers, the dark shapes of the war canoes and rafts, the dark line of the
eastern riverbank growing larger and clearer ahead, the glow of the enemy’s campfires downstream—but ice was in his heart, and he understood the sad and glorious meaning of it: that he was to die before this day was through. He had not been able to see his warrior’s star, and that meant he would be gone.

He would have to tell his son, of course. It was bad luck and unfair not to tell blood kin that such a thing had been foreseen. But it could be a bad thing to tell it, because it might well diminish Chiksika’s spirit before the battle, his first battle.

So it would be necessary to tell him in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, his heart.

W
HEN THERE WAS BARELY ENOUGH PREDAWN LIGHT TO SEE
by, the thousand warriors left their vessels on the riverbank and stole through the gloom of the woods toward the army’s camp and began to form a battle line across the wedge of land between the two rivers. Their deployment was slow and tense, for the morning was still, with no wind to cover the whisper and rustle of their movement through the autumn-dry woods. The ground was rough, studded with mossy boulders and outcroppings, and the trunks of great dead trees lay everywhere. It would provide good cover when the battle began, but now it slowed the formation of Cornstalk’s battle line, and it would not be long before the white soldiers would be rolling out of their blankets and the chance to catch them sleeping would be past. The Indians’ battle line was less than a mile from left to right, so every warrior was hardly an arm’s reach from his nearest comrade, and they could be in sight of each other, even within whispering distance of each other, and this was good. Also good was that the sun would be coming up behind the warriors’ backs and thus would be in the eyes of the soldiers.

Cornstalk came along the line to the place where Hard Striker had stationed his Kispoko warriors. With him were his sister Tall Soldier Woman, a handsome, rawboned, middle-aged woman a hand taller than most men, and Black Hoof, a mature Chalagawtha warrior chieftain with glittering black eyes. Tall Soldier Woman was the only living woman warrior of the Shawnee nation. It had been a long time since she had been to war, but this was to be an uncommonly important battle, and so she was there, in charge of the warriors of her village. She was armed with a pistol and a knife. Now these chiefs knelt under a huge beech tree with Hard Striker and Black Snake and looked through the graying woods toward the army camp and made their final decisions.

“They do not stir yet,” said Hard Striker. “If we move forward now, perhaps we can still catch them in their blankets.”