Panther in the Sky (26 page)

“Yes. In that and in quietness the bow is superior. And it is
better in my heart to shoot the bow. But some of the white man’s things it profits us to use. Iron kettles and axes. And the gun.”

“And what about the
livres?”
Tecumseh asked. “What about their little black language on the white rag leaves? Would this profit us to use?” He had been thinking of the books even while learning the use of the gun.

“I think not,” Chiksika said after a moment of hard thinking. “It is surely bad medicine to trap words out of the air like birds and imprison them on rags. Maybe that is one reason why the whitefaces are so bad. Because they do that. Think of doing such a thing to words!”

Nevertheless, Tecumseh hoped he would see Blue Jacket soon. He wanted to talk to him about the
livres
and the rag leaf language in them. He could not stop thinking of them.

A
T A PLACE WHERE A DEEP CREEK EMPTIED INTO THE
M
IAMI-SE-PE
, Tecumseh knelt with his new rifle ready. To his left and right were more hunters, some with bows, some with guns, listening to the oncoming cries and clacking sticks of the women and children who were driving the game toward them. Chief Black Hoof had told the men with bows to shoot first, so the noise of guns would not scare the animals back toward the game drivers too soon.

Now the rustlings of the animals could be heard coming closer as they fled before the noise of the drivers. The hunters were very tense. Soon everything would be happening very fast.

Black Hoof, successor to Black Fish, had organized these game drives, in which almost everybody in Chillicothe was taking part, because the coming winter promised to be very harsh and because individual hunters had not been able to bring in much meat. By the deep burrowing of mammals and the early departure of the blackbirds, the old men had foreseen that the cold would come early and be hard and long. Already the leaves were almost all gone off the trees, blown away by north winds, at a time when the hills usually were still cloaked in gold and scarlet.

Between the days of these game drives, boys were out everywhere along the animal paths, setting snares and making deadfall traps, while old men and women fished with hooks and spears and with barb-tipped arrows attached to fishing cord. The harvest of corn, beans, and squash had already been done, and women and girls were foraging in the woods and marshes for nuts and wild grapes, for berries, for arrowleaf and red sunflower roots, for anything that could be preserved and eaten.

Birds were darting everywhere now, stirred up by the oncoming disturbance, their beating and whiffing wings adding to the storm of noises.

A blur of brown showed in the thicket at the upper edge of the sloping meadow. A young buck deer bounded into the open, swift and handsome. Then it staggered and tumbled with three arrows sticking in it. Two does sprang into the clearing almost at once. Tecumseh heard the soft twang of several bows and the hiss of arrows, and one of the does fell. The other darted in a frantic zigzag flight down the meadow with arrows dangling loosely from two reddening wounds, one in forechest, one in haunch. Tecumseh saw Thick Water rise from a hummock of yellow grass with bow already fully drawn and let fly an arrow that went into her flank and made her spin sideways, her nose pointed at the sky. Another arrow from somewhere sank deep behind her shoulder, and she fell to her knees and then toppled out of sight in the grass.

Through all this there had been no gunshots and no voices except those of the women and children driving the game, still growing closer through the woods above the meadow. As they drew nearer, the brush and grass began shaking with the movement of many small animals. Rabbits came bounding through, and scampering squirrels and lumbering raccoons. A bobcat leaped into the clearing and stopped in a crouch, its ears flattened against its skull, turning, seeing or sensing the men along the edge of the trap. Just as it appeared ready to turn back toward the women, the first gunshot banged; the cat leaped ten feet into the air with a yowl and fell thrashing.

That gunshot, and others that now followed it, threw the frightened animals into a frenzy; they were going in every direction, and soon it became easier to club them or catch them barehanded than get any kind of a shot at them. Tecumseh, still feeling awkward with a firearm and afraid that a shot anywhere would hit some darting hunter, was about to drop the gun and plunge into the melee with a stick, when he heard men yelling,
“Makwa! Makwa!”

A large, dark form came loping into sight from his left.

It was a black bear. He saw a red tongue and long white teeth, a thick body of dusty black fur. Finding itself in the midst of men and gunshots and seeing the river downslope at its right, the bear veered toward the water, barreling past Tecumseh and behind him.

Heart pounding, the boy spun about and pointed his rifle at
the fleeing form. Other guns were banging very close by, and he saw the bear twitch and stagger as it ran. Nothing happened when Tecumseh pulled the trigger, and he realized that he had forgotten to cock the gun. Pulling the hammer back with a shaking hand, he fired a shot that he believed hit the distant bear, and then he ran down the hill after it. Many men and boys had forgotten the small game and were pelting after the bear, whooping and shooting.

The bear died in the edge of the river, his blood leaking out of several bullet holes and staining the green water. No one hunter could boast that the
makwa
had been his kill, but the joy was great, for even a young bear like this would yield much fat meat and oil for the hard moons ahead.

S
TAR
W
ATCHER HAD LIVED THROUGH TWENTY AND ONE
winters and knew the feel of the hard season’s approach. But this year a chilling dread began to build in her even before the first freeze. She could see it in the people and the animals. And then came the winter that the People would never forget. It made them remember what the elders had said: that the evil medicine of the white man had made this a bad land. When the snows came they kept falling on old snows and never melted. For three moons the ground was covered. Lakes, then even streams, froze to the bottom. Trees cracked like gunshots in the night. In the daytime the weak sun shone through a violet haze of frozen air and woodsmoke. The snow was carved into sharp edges and curves by knives of wind, and the crust of it squeaked and groaned under the footsteps of wood gatherers and tore up the snowshoes of the hunters. Few hunters could go out, and some who did never returned. Horses froze, starved, or died of thirst. The meat obtained in the great fall hunts had been far too little and was gone soon, and the people grew gaunt. Days would pass when there was nothing but crumbs and husks to eat or leather to chew. That winter even the little glutton Loud Noise grew scrawny and so dull from misery that even his imagination slept. Sometimes an ice-hard carcass of a dog or horse or wolf would be dug out of the snow, and there would be something in the stomach for a while longer. But on many mornings some person too weak to struggle with firewood or tend a hearth would be found in a cold
wigewa,
frozen stiff in bed. Departing spirits were heard moaning in the winds. Medicine bags and
pa-waw-kas
were handled in the cold lodges, and there was an unspoken mourning for the bountiful ways of the Time Before.

Half the Shawnees were gone away to a strange land, and this place seemed to be dying. The sun seemed farther away every day; the very fire of life was ebbing.

One night in the depth of the Hunger Moon, Star Watcher lay in a nest of hides and blankets with Tecumseh and the triplets and watched a star in the cold sky wink and waver above the smokehole of the
wigewa.
They all slept crowded together now, to get warmth from each other, like a covey of quail. Before they had begun nesting together like this, Kumskaka, Cat Follower, had awakened one morning with three toes frozen and a leg so badly cramped that he could not walk for several days. Except for Tecumseh, the brothers seemed to want only to hibernate. Loud Noise was so reluctant to leave the bed that he would lie trembling with bladder full, and then sometimes in the dim margin of sleep he would dream that he was urinating in a rain puddle or on tree roots, and when the others woke they would find themselves chilled, their wet bedding frozen under them. And there would be all the trouble of that.

This night Star Watcher lay awake thinking of two things: of her faraway mother and of the fire in the fire-ring. She yearned for her mother, whose strong presence she now imagined had been the source of the warmth that was gone from this
wigewa.
Though it had been her mother’s choice to leave this land, Star Watcher now felt that she herself should have kept her from going, or gone with her. It seemed to Star Watcher now that if she had agreed to go with her mother, the rest of the children would have gone, too, and the family would be together someplace where it could not be this cold. Of course, Chiksika would not have gone. And if he had not gone, probably Tecumseh would not have gone, either. But she and the triplets would now be with their mother, and it would be a warmer place, there where the white man’s evil medicine had not yet killed the sun.

But then Star Watcher remembered that most important thing. She was Watcher of the Shooting Star, and Tecumseh was the Shooting Star. It was meant that she would be where Tecumseh was.

Still, it seemed to her that a great wrong had been done when the family divided itself, and that this slow killing cold was the punishment. She had put Stands Firm, a Chalagawtha Shawnee, above her own family, by choosing to stay where he was. Surely this was a great wrong, though she had meant to do no wrong. She lay wondering whether her mother blamed her for this wrong, which she was only now beginning to perceive.

And Star Watcher was afraid to go to sleep now because the fire in the
wigewa
might go out. One other night it had burned out while she slept, and in trying to start it the next morning with flint and steel, she had become so shaky and numb with cold, and her hands so stiff, that she could not make an ember, and she had cried, and finally Tecumseh had gone out into the blizzard to borrow coals from another house.

If I go to sleep and this burns out, she told herself, we can get coals from someone nearby to start it again in the morning.

But, she began worrying then, if everyone thought that way, all the fires in all the houses might burn out while everyone sleeps. And we could all be dead in our beds as hard as ice like those we find. Or we could all be too cold in our hands to start another fire.

She lay thinking this, and the thought grew larger in the night, and it seemed now that she might be the only guardian of the life fire of the Shawnees on this silent, bitter, frozen night. She was very tired. She watched the star through the smokehole, wondering if the sun would eventually shrink to that size and let the earth freeze.

The flames flickered out while she was not thinking of them. Cat Follower moved in his sleep and put his face against Star Watcher’s shoulder. With his warm breath comforting her, she went to sleep.

And while she was asleep Tecumseh slipped out from the robes into the frigid air and laid more sticks and chunks of wood on the shimmering coals, and with a slab he scraped up ashes to bank a core of coals alongside the blaze, a core of coals that would still be alive in the morning even if the flames went out. Then he slid back into the body warmth of his family under the robes, and held his
pa-waw-ka
stone, and thought what his father Hard Striker had so often said about life being a fire inside.

L
OUD
N
OISE PEERED OUT OF THE DARK
WIGEWA
TOWARD
the fireglow of the stomp ground, hearing the music of the Singer, the drum, and the rattle shaker, and he giggled. He had been mad at his sister at first, but then he had started thinking of how to get even and now was delighted with the idea that had grown in his head. They might make children stay away from the nighttime stomp dances, but he would make them sorry. He would just have to stay awake until the time came.

Oh, it was so funny what he was going to do! Every time he thought of it, he giggled again. Finally his brothers had asked him what he was thinking, and he had brought them in on it.

He had wanted to watch his sister Star Watcher do the frolic dance, because he knew that tonight she intended to get Stands Firm for good. It would have been something to watch her do that. Besides, Loud Noise, like most children, liked to get in on the grown-ups’ dances and caper around with them, imitating them. He thought it was unfair that he was not allowed to. When the adults danced and celebrated the return of life in the world, they were happy, happy as children were supposed to be, and he felt it was his right to be happy then, too. But the Mask Spirit Man would come around dressed in his deer suit, wearing a carved mask with bulging eyes and carrying his bag of snakes, and he would scare all the children away from the stomp ground and tell them they had better go home or he would put their hands in the bag with the snakes.

Tonight when the Mask Spirit Man had pranced toward the triplets with his bag of snakes, Loud Noise had done what seemed to be a bold thing. He reached toward the bag and cried, “Give me a snake, then!” While the Mask Spirit Man was standing there surprised with his bugging eyes and trying to figure out what to do about this, Star Watcher came running over, dressed in her lightest, softest dress for the dance, her eyes full of anger, and scolded:

“You three go home and get in bed where you belong, or I’ll get a berry switch and scratch your legs!”

Although Loud Noise had learned the interesting secret that the Mask Spirit Man really carried only tobacco in his bag, not snakes, he was afraid of the berry switch, because his mother and sister had used it on him in past times when he was really bad, and Loud Noise feared pain. So he left the stomp ground with his brothers, but not without a defiant parting gesture.