Panther in the Sky (22 page)

Suddenly the hubbub started again, everyone talking.

“Clark!” Tecumseh exclaimed to Star Watcher. “That was the name of the chief of the Long Knife soldiers in Kain-tuck-ee. Remember? The red-haired one with a loud voice!”

At once, dreadful imaginings were in every head. If this Clark’s Long Knives were in the west, did that mean they had destroyed Black Fish in Kain-tuck-ee before they went? Nothing had been heard from Black Fish for a long time.

And so the next morning the old chiefs sent several riders by different ways to find Black Fish in Kain-tuck-ee and take him this news or to bring back news of him. They sent several riders in case some might fall victim to the Long Knives, for if this enemy had been stealthy and bold enough to pass through the Wabash and Illinois lands with a whole army unseen, there very well might be many of them anywhere in the Shawnee lands now! A deep dread, a fear that almost ached, lay over the Shawnee nation.

It had been proven true again, that the
Mukutaaweethe Keelswah,
the sign of the Black Sun, was an omen of misfortune in war. Now there would be the fearful waiting, the ominous talk in every household. Turtle Mother became one of the most morose of all and began saying again what Chiksika had once scolded her for saying:

“Listen. This has become a lost country, a bad place. When the Long Knives were only to the east of us, they pressed on us from the east. When they went into Kain-tuck-ee, they pressed on us from the south, too. Now they are in the west. Will they not press us from there, too? Are we not like the poor animals in a hunting drive? What way have we to run but to Canada? And they are at war with the British, who have Canada. If they get Canada, then we will be finally encircled and trapped, is this not plain to see? Listen! We should ask our chiefs when they come home, if they come home, we should ask them to lead us out and away. This land is no good anymore!”

No one knew what the Long Knives would do next, and a mystery hung like a haze over all the sunsets.

Loud Noise for several days whimpered about his ruined eye. But the world had changed as much for the Shawnees as it had for him.

N
OW THE
S
HAWNEES AT
C
HILLICOTHE YEARNED EVEN MORE
strongly for good news from the south, for the return of the warriors from Kain-tuck-ee. But days went by and they did not return. The People’s anxiety deepened. Now many did believe that Clark’s army had met Black Fish somewhere and killed or captured all the warriors. Now the Chalagawthas watched the bluffs and the woods around the town with a dread of seeing Long Knives coming. At night they slept fitfully and woke up listening for sounds. The horses of the town were brought into a corral at the edge of town with a guard, and the men went to sleep with their guns beside their beds. Boys and men guarded the trails and high places around the town and slept out there without fires, to warn if an enemy came toward the town.

And then one night, late in summer when the air grew cool after the sunset, something happened that made them certain that the Long Knives were actually near Chillicothe.

After the middle of that night, the horses began nickering and milling about. The old man guarding the corral rose stiffly in the dark where he had been sitting, slipped his blanket off his shoulders, and began to move along the pole fence, looking in among the horses to determine what was troubling them.

They were growing more agitated, trying to run in the small compound, some whinnying in fear. Their hooves were thudding on the ground, and the poles of the fence rattled and creaked where their big, powerful bodies pressed against them. In the town, dogs began barking, and then querying voices were calling out. The guard, suspecting that a bear or a wolf was prowling close, crouched and hobbled along the fence, trying to make out an animal’s shape somewhere.

Suddenly a loud, human-sounding howl tore through the night, coming from the side of the corral nearest the town, followed immediately by the flash and crack of a gunshot. The whole herd of horses, some half a hundred of them, whinnied and thundered off in the other direction. The old warrior raised a cry.
“Pe-eh-wah! Pe-eh-wah!
Horse stealers!” And while he was giving the alarm and trying to see horse thieves in the dark, the herd was thundering out of the corral in the direction away from town. They were out and going away. Either they had knocked down the fence on the far side, or the thieves had torn it down. The
entire herd seemed to be getting away, and there was nothing the old guard could do to stop it. For an instant he thought he saw a man running behind the horses, but there was no time to sight a gun on him—if indeed it was a man—and a shot in that direction would have gone into the fleeing herd anyway.

Tecumseh and his family had run out of their
wigewa
following the sound of the shot. They stood outside listening to the distant commotion, the small children clinging to the blanket their mother had draped around herself. Tecumseh’s heart was beating in his throat, and his mouth was dry. He expected to hear a great uproar of combat next, a sound he had never heard but had often imagined.

But there was no fighting. The horses could be heard thundering away. Men of the town had rushed out and were talking to the old sentry. After a while it was determined that it had been only a horse theft. Part of the corral rails had been taken down, and a shout and a gunshot had stampeded the horses out. It had not been a Long Knife attack after all. But, said a warrior who had been in the Kain-tuck-ee raids the year before: “That shout that made the stampede, that was the voice of their big man named But-lah. It is not a voice to forget. But-lah stole our horses!” Tecumseh’s scalp prickled.

The rest of the night, men and boys lay in watch around the town with their bows and guns. Tecumseh stood watch in a thicket near the place where the trail came down the bluff into the town. All night he imagined the giant called But-lah, who could run like a horse while carrying Boone. It took all Tecumseh’s courage to stay by the trail so far from the edge of town. And yet in a way he wanted But-lah to come down this trail. His osage bow was powerful enough to shoot through the heart of the Long Knife. What a great thing he could do for the People if But-lah came by!

As dawn began to bleach the darkness out of the eastern sky, Turtle Mother and Star Watcher, like all the others, crouched by the door with the little children and waited in silent dread. If the Long Knives attacked Chillicothe, it would be at this hour. Loud Noise, a compress still bound over his eyesocket, was so full of misery and fear that he groaned. His mother stroked his shoulders and shushed him.

T
HE SUN ROSE.
T
ECUMSEH IN HIS THICKET STRETCHED AND
stood up cautiously. The grass and weeds beside the trail glittered with dew. There was not a person anywhere in sight.

Soon, a few scouts came out from the town. They spread farther and farther out and finally assured themselves that there was no army of Long Knives nearby. Boys who had been on guard were now sent out to round up the stray horses. All but half a dozen were found. In the morning light the men found, amid the profusion of hoofprints around the corral, the footprints of white men. They were moccasined feet, but with that toed-out pattern that distinguished them from the footprints of red men. One set of prints was huge; here a giant had walked. Tecumseh joined the trackers. In the woods a few hundred paces from the town he found a place where iron-shod horses had been tethered. These tracks led away into the woods, along with the prints of several of the Shawnees’ unshod horses. Here was where the horse stealers had led the six horses away.

Among the few warriors still in Chillicothe were some good trackers. Five of these men were sent to follow the spoor of the horse thieves, with a warning not to let themselves run into an ambush or an army of white men.

After the trackers had ridden out, Chillicothe settled down to an uneasy but ordinary day. Lookouts were stationed outside the town, and Tecumseh again was one of them. With great willpower he kept himself from falling asleep. When he would begin to slip away into a dream, he would see a giant white man, But-lah, and would be wide awake again.

Turtle Mother and Star Watcher and scores of other women spent the morning in the gardens and corn fields. There were vegetables and beans ready to be harvested; some of the strains of sweet corn were ready for picking. Later in the day, moccasins and clothes and shelters had to be made or mended for the coming cold season. They did this work, but they did it with partial attention. The women in the fields and at their sewing kept raising their heads to watch the bluffs, to watch the road, either for soldiers of the Long Knives or for the return of Black Fish’s warriors, or for the return of the trackers, who might overtake the horse thieves at once, or days from now, or not at all.

Star Watcher tried to talk to her mother about the harvest, about the clothing, about the triplets. But Turtle Mother had hardly anything to say. In her face there seemed to be more anger than fear. So Star Watcher finally fell silent and daydreamed, as she worked, about Stands Firm.

The sun went down with everybody still half watching, and the people slept restlessly again that night. The next day was much the same. The day after that there was still no news, and
by the next day the tension had eased, and only now and then did the people stop in their work, or the children in their play, to scan the horizons. A cold wind had risen, and the sky was cloudy. There were rain showers for a part of one day, and then the weather grew mild again.

On the sixth day a boy came running into the town from the southeast, running as fast as he could and shouting:

“They come! They caught the horse stealer! He is But-lah! A-hi-ee!” Shrill, fierce cries answered from the town. “Get switches!” the boy cried, now jumping up and down in his excitement. “Everybody! They want everybody to whip the horse stealer!”

The people needed no urging. It was not just another horse thief, it was the giant Long Knife called But-lah, the friend of Boone, the man who had saved Boone’s life in that long-ago incident at Boone’s Fort. They were going to see for themselves this legendary enemy, and they were going to get to punish him for coming and scaring their town and stealing horses. Everyone would be able to tell, from this day on, of striking a blow at the famed white warrior But-lah! “My club hit him here, on the back of his neck, and made him stagger,” they would be able to relate, even to their grandchildren, or, “My switch drew blood on his white shoulders!” Or, “He was a huge man, yes, as mighty as you have heard, but my stick made him cry out!”

Tecumseh had heard the commotion from the woods north of the town, and when he ran into the street he saw that several hundred people were already lined up along the way to the council house, slashing the air eagerly with their switches and staffs and clubs, laughing and cheering and watching the trackers come with their prisoner toward the edge of town. They were in a state of uncommon excitement and were murderously joyous. They had been worried for a long time about their sons and husbands and fathers who were away at war with Black Fish. They had been afraid of the Long Knife army and of its appearance in the west, and they had been outraged by the audacity of horse thieves who had come near their most populous town. Now they would be able to vent some of their fear and anxiety upon this white warrior who was more than just a man, who was a symbol of the most terrible aspects of the white men. As Tecumseh wedged himself into a place in line, a fresh-cut switch of limber ash in his hand, he was hearing some of the details of the capture:

“They tracked them all the way to the Beautiful River!”

“They killed one of the thieves and caught this But-lah!”

“They got all of our horses back, and the horse thieves’ horses, too! Ha!”

“They were bold to come here, but they will learn not to do it again!”

“Not to steal Shawnee horses! Ha, ha!”

“Oh! Look at him!”

“Big!”

“There is a man big enough for Tall Soldier Woman! Ha, ha!”

Here and there in this brave joking and boasting Tecumseh could hear the shrillness and tremor of fear. Sometimes people got hurt in the gauntlet line. Now and then a mighty warrior or soldier, tormented and defiant, would strike or kick someone who got too close, even snatch a club from someone and fight back. This one was a mighty warrior. He was a man who had run like a horse even while carrying Captain Boone in his arms. Now he would be coming down this line, which was mostly of boys and old men, women and girls, and he would be passing within inches. Yes. There was some danger that even among these hundreds, this one enemy warrior might be able to hurt somebody. It was just enough of a possibility to make some of the people nervous even in their fierce anger.

The white man was being stripped of his deerskin clothing now. Tecumseh, who was closer to the start of the line than to the finish, was able to see clearly that this was a bigger and more powerful man than he had ever set eyes on before. His shoulders were enormous, and every muscle, from the thick chest muscles to the long muscles on the front of his thighs, was lean and hard under his skin. His face and his huge hands were as coppery brown as an Indian’s, but the rest of his body was pure white, except where bruised and reddened with small wounds inflicted by his captors. It was plain that he had not been treated gently on his trip back from the Beautiful River. His hair was long, light brown and sun-bleached. He did not look the least bit afraid.

A drum thumped at the council lodge, and the rangy warrior standing by But-lah swung a staff, striking him so hard across the back that the blow was audible even over the drone of the crowd. And with that blow, which would have felled an ordinary man, the prisoner bellowed, sprang forward, and came bounding up the line with such speed that most of the blows aimed at him missed, and many barely managed to flick his back and shoulders as he shot past. When But-lah, now looking as large as a horse, loomed abreast of Tecumseh, the boy swung his stick with all his might. In that instant he heard the man’s breath slumping in his
wide chest like the breath of a galloping horse, heard the bare feet pelting the ground, saw the strong teeth bared in a grimace and the ferocious blue eyes slicing into everyone ahead.