Panther in the Sky (13 page)

Tecumseh smiled at this. His father had often told him that the Kispokos were the best of all warriors, and this was the reason why. Rounded-Side had made them that way.

“Our Grandmother then gave a Sacred Bundle to each sept,” Turtle Mother said. “In each bundle there is some of the flesh of the Great Horned Serpent. And though that flesh has been there for hundreds of hundreds of years, it is still fresh, and seeps blood. Anyone who has been present on occasions when the bundles are opened will tell you that is so, that they saw it themselves. There will come times when you will see for yourselves. Now, in the Sacred Bundle of the Kispoko, she put something special. Do you know what that was?”

“Feathers from the Thunderbirds,” said Tecumseh. He knew that the Thunderbirds were the terrifying but good forces that guarded the door of the house of Heaven. Their beating wings made thunder, their flashing eyes made lightning. But the Shawnees knew that the Thunderbirds were good powers, and that was why they had no fear of storms, as some people did.

“Yes,” Turtle Mother said. “Feathers from the Thunderbirds. And also an ancient tomahawk, with a head shaped like three leaves. Our Grandmother then told us what she had been thinking about while she rested. She taught us how to take care of ourselves, how to hunt, how to build houses, how to find Spirit Helpers, who would teach us how to make sick people well. She taught us how to have ceremonies and dances to entertain her and honor her, and how to be good and worthy. She gave each sept its song to sing, and she gave us the
Kweh-tele-ti-weh-nah,
which are the Shawnee laws we live by.

“And,” Turtle Mother said now, with a strange catch in her voice which, had she not been in mourning, someone might have supposed to be a hidden chuckle,
“this
time Our Grandmother remembered to give them their genitals, which they found to be very interesting.”

T
ECUMSEH RAN BETWEEN THE LODGES, HIS MOCCASINED
feet rustling the fallen leaves, carrying his hickory bow in his left hand and a bloody rabbit in his right. His face, a face almost beautiful in the symmetry of its features and the smoothness of its coppery-brown skin, was alight with a dimpled, white-toothed smile and a glitter of triumphant excitement in the hazel eyes.

Never had the boy seen anyone, even Chiksika or any grown hunter, shoot an arrow more swiftly and surely than he had just done.

Now he ran dodging among the bark houses and cookfires, springing over stick fences and startled dogs, toward his family’s
wigewa,
his spirit nearly bubbling over with the desire to tell about it. He felt the rabbit’s swiftness in his own legs now; as he sprinted through the town he
was
the rabbit. The men had always said that when a worthy hunter kills an animal, that animal’s own kind of power goes into the hunter, whether it is the strength of
a bear, the fleetness of a buck, or the noble courage of an elk. Not all men agreed that a rabbit was enough of an animal to give its spirit to a hunter; some said the Keepers of the Game did not deal in the little spirits of rabbits and squirrels. Some said rabbits and squirrels did not even have spirits, but not many people believed that. Most people believed every animal, no matter how small and weak, had a spirit. The squirrels, in fact, sometimes showed that they were controlled by very powerful spirits and even carried omens. Tecumseh was not old enough to remember it, but when he was a baby there had been a great migration of squirrels. Hundreds of hundreds of them had rushed southward through the forests as if in flight from doom, and many of them had drowned in the Beautiful River when they tried to cross it. Sometimes small animals would do such unusual things, said the shamans, and bad events usually followed.

Whatever the truth was about the spirits of small animals, Tecumseh now felt the rabbit’s swiftness and power in his own legs, and he sprang with a happy whoop over a pole fence near his home, and in his memory he saw again what had happened: the rabbit springing and dodging through the dry weed stalks and over a fallen log, a blur of brown and flashing white. And Tecumseh himself running in the same direction over the field, swinging his bow around, aiming it ahead of the rabbit and letting the arrow go with a sinewy
twung!
Oh, if only Chiksika could have been there to see that miraculous shot! The story of it was desperately wanting to be told, and already Tecumseh could see the astonishment and approval in Chiksika’s face. And so now Tecumseh sprinted toward the door of his family’s house like a rabbit about to dive into its burrow.

When he burst in through the low doorway the dim interior was dense with woodsmoke and steam and body smell. Beyond the flames of the fire in the center of the room his mother knelt naked, her brown shoulders agleam with oil in the beam of daylight from the smokehole above, and Star Watcher bared to the waist in the steamy room, stood over her, picking and pulling at her mother’s wet, tangled, black hair with a horn comb. Tecumseh had lifted the rabbit high to announce his feat but was stopped in confusion by this scene.

His mother, wincing from the pull on her hair, squinted at him through lanky wet strands, her teeth showing either in a grimace or a smile. He could hardly remember how she had ever looked with a smile.

“Little brother,” Star Watcher said, “go out.”

“I shot this,” he blurted. “I shot it running! Where is Chiksika? What are you doing?”

“Go out,” she repeated in a high voice. “Come home when the sun is down.” And then Tecumseh heard a sound he had not heard for a year: his mother’s laughter.

“Good, my son, my hunter!” she said, and her laughter was music. “We are proud of you! But go out for a while. It is time for me to become clean and be as I was before.”

Tecumseh stood with his mouth open for only a moment; then he understood, and his heart leaped from one joy to another. He started as if to go to her and fling his arms around her, bloody rabbit and all, but Star Watcher hurried to him and put her hand firmly on his shoulder and told him again, “Go out. Be happy about this day, and come back when we are done.”

“Where is Chiksika?” he asked. He was glowing warm all through, and he wanted to be near his big brother and share all this with him. Much of the dark cloud seemed to be off of the world today, and the boy felt the way he sometimes did when he heard the stories of the old bright days of the Beginning.

“Your brother,” she said, “is at the council lodge with Black Fish and the men. Some English soldiers are in the town.”

“English?” He felt a chill in his scalp. He knew English were white men. But his sister was smiling and for some reason did not seem alarmed that white soldiers were here.

“Chiksika will tell you. He knows more. These English want to be allies, they say. Go now.”

Now almost dazed by the whirl of good events of the day and the fearsome thought of white soldiers in Chillicothe Town, Tecumseh turned to go out, to go and find Chiksika. He heard his sister laugh behind him.

“Little brother,” she said, “you can leave the rabbit here for me to cook. You don’t have to carry it everywhere!”

When he ran off in the direction of the council lodge, he had his bow and quiver, though not his rabbit. The rabbit did not matter so much now. His head was too full of other things. It did seem that he should have the bow, because of the white soldiers. Just in case.

The packed ground of the street was hard and dry. There were no clouds in the sky, and in the sunlight the yellow-and-red leaves, those that had not yet fallen, were waving, trembling and hanging on against a cold breeze. Most of the adults walking or standing outside their lodges had blankets drawn around them. The cold air was fragrant with hardwood smoke and the aromas
of roasting meat and baking Shawnee cake. From the end of the street where the council lodge stood came the drone and jabber of many excited voices, and he could see that a large part of the town’s population was there near the lodge. When he had gone out early this morning in the cold half-light to hunt, there had been no one outside the lodges, except here and there a woman squatting or a man facing a tree, making steamy water. He had hunted a long time this morning among the corn and bean fields and in the meadows along the river, and he had gone south among the trees and fields of the bottomlands below the town, among the hundreds of dead, gray trees whose bark had been stripped off to cover the
wigewas
of the town; then he had moved up the slope toward the woodland hills and had stalked around a large, trickling spring where he had hoped to find some animals drinking.

Springs of water were among the greatest blessings, and towns were always built where good springs were. Tecumseh knew he had been born right beside a spring, near Piqua Town. He had heard that story often enough, the story that a star had gone over the moment he was born. He remembered his father telling him that the star meant he was to be very important to the People someday, somehow. Other people told the story often, too. Sometimes when people would tell that story they would say it with the same tone in their voices that they had when they told the creation stories, and it would seem strange to realize that they were talking about him. Those were magic stories, about great powers and vast skies and bright waters, and most of the time Tecumseh did not feel there was much magic in the world. There were the usual people saying and doing the usual things, always the sad and angry talk about the coming of the Long Knives; always the women were hard at work in the fields or the houses; always the men went out on the long hunts, or to the councils, or sometimes to war. To live was hard and often uncomfortable. Sometimes one’s eyes were red and sore from smoke, or one’s skin itched from insect bites or the poison plants, or one’s hands and feet were so cold they stung, and often in the winter one’s belly would be empty for so long that it would hurt, and one’s arms would feel so weak from hunger that they were hard to lift. And often there would be the long funerals for people who had died, those long funerals in which one would have to behave in just such a manner and do just such a thing and walk in just such a line, every moment for days, though one would rather run or hunt or play or listen to storytellers. Life was a hard and stark
thing, and often if there was magic at the funerals, it was the cautious magic required to satisfy the departing spirit and to keep out of its way until it had entirely left the village and gone on by one of the Roads back to the Creator. There were many rituals the living had to do when a corpse was going to the grave.

But sometimes, when one least expected it, there would be some
good
magic: something Cyclone Person would whisper in the treetops; or something a raccoon or fox, standing nearby and unafraid in the woods, would say with its eyes; or something little Loud Noise would say in Our Grandmother’s tongue but was understandable anyway—at least understandable in the heart.

And there was the magic in the dreams. Once, when Tecumseh had carelessly, sleepily, lain down with his head toward the west, lying as the dead lie in their graves, he had had a death dream, a dream in which huge-headed men had come riding swiftly, screaming, through yellow smoke, to kill him. From that dream he had leaped into wakefulness, sitting up in his bedding with a slamming heart, and had seen first the shimmering coals of a night fire with the dim shapes of beloved friends sitting around it looking at him. Though he had not been able to see their faces, he had known they were beloved friends. And then they had faded, and he had seen shimmering coals still, but this time in the familiar firepit of his own mother’s lodge, with the usual shapes of his mother and sister and little brothers all asleep. He had known then that he was truly awake, that he had been in two dreams, one deeper than the other. The next day he had told his mother about that dream, and she had told him that he had dreamed of his death because he had slept with his head toward the west, as the dead do, and that probably he had nearly gone away in his sleep. She had seemed very frightened, telling him this. She had warned him many times since not to go to sleep that way again.

And then one day not long ago, while traveling with Chiksika to Piqua Town, Tecumseh had been standing in the woods near that spring where he had been born, and through his feet suddenly he had felt the earth trembling. Though he had seen nothing change on the earth in his real eyes, though he had seen no trees move or even a leaf stir, he had felt through the soles of his feet that the deep earth was unsteady, and it had made him lurch and almost fall down. With his real eyes he had seen only one sign of what was happening: the water from the spring had appeared to be running backward for a moment, running uphill toward
its source. Then it had stopped and run as before, and he had become steady again.

It was said that sometimes the Great Turtle that holds up the Earth gets restless, and when it does the world trembles and waters act strangely. It was, in fact, the Great Turtle who had made it possible for the People to come to this land; the Turtle had moved, and a sea of water between this land and the Old Land had run off so that the People could cross over. Then the Turtle had settled back, and the sea had filled up again. That had happened long before the memory of anyone now alive, but the story of it had been brought along through the ages by the tribal Singers.

When Tecumseh had told Chiksika about the trembling earth and the spring water running uphill, Chiksika had told him that no one else in Piqua Town had felt the earth tremble. No one in the town had lurched or staggered, except the usual men who bought rum from traders. Chiksika then had looked at him with strange eyes and said, “It is good. Sometimes you will feel and see something no one else does. Remember that is your gift. When it is time for you to understand what they mean, the meaning will come. But if you are ever to understand them, you must always try to be worthy of your gift. If you ever fail to be worthy, the Great Good Spirit will never reveal what these signs mean, and they will only trouble you, and you might go crazy from them.”