Panther in the Sky (28 page)

Later in the day, when both side walls were up, poles bent into curves were laced onto the walls to frame the roof. These curved poles contained a tension that made the whole frame very strong, so strong that the sweating women could climb upon the frame as they built it.

They finished the frame that afternoon, but the boys still had to keep pounding and peeling the log, because more strips would be needed to secure the bark slabs and woven mats that would cover the frame. Sometimes the young women who were helping Star Watcher would have to leave to attend to their own chores, but other women, young and old, came to help. Some brought mats, or reeds to make mats; some brought pots of food or chunks of maple sugar for the boys to eat as they worked. The building of a house was a hopeful and joyous thing. And to the house of the much admired Star Watcher, and her esteemed warrior husband and her star-marked brothers, many of the people wanted to add something.

At the end of that day, Tecumseh went to the river and bathed, sluicing off the pungent wood sap and the wood fiber that clung everywhere on his sweaty skin, and picked minute splinters out of his hands. Then he went up through the town toward the little old
wigewa
where he and his brothers still slept and would sleep until their new house was finished. Clean and tired, he went up the lanes of Chillicothe Town, through the appetizing aromas he had known all his life: stews, Shawnee cake, roast bird and squirrel, fermented breadwater. He knew the various smokes, of maplewood, hickory, red cedar wood, kinnick-kinnick, and tobacco. The sounds of the hundreds of people were like a comforting music—the sounds of their working and their games, their voices laughing or singing or scolding. To be in the midst of the People was to be secure. Every winter survived made the presence of the People more comforting, and that hardest of all winters, whose memory was still fresh, had made the oneness ever sweeter. Outside, the world was dangerous, harsh, lonely. Tecumseh had never in his life been entirely alone outside the enveloping care of the People.

Soon, though, he would be. When his sister’s house was finished, Tecumseh would have to go out alone in the wilderness naked and unarmed on his Vision Quest. It was time. The shaman, Change-of-Feathers, had encouraged him to do it this spring, being certain that special meanings for the People would
be revealed in the vision of the boy who had been born under the sign of the Panther Star. This was a most uncertain time for the People; Change-of-Feathers believed that much of the guidance for the Shawnee nation would come through this boy’s Spirit Helper.

Tecumseh faced the coming quest with both eagerness and dread. Most boys were a year or two older before anyone urged them to do it. The subtle pressure put upon him by the elders seemed to be a part of that special burden of his, that burden of duty his father had told him of so long ago. Tecumseh walked up through the sunset-flooded town of his People with a bittersweet anxiety in his throat.

W
HEN
S
TAR
W
ATCHER NEGLECTED TO FEED
T
ECUMSEH WITH
the other boys this morning, and they all looked so strangely at him with their mouths full and the breadwater drooling from their lips, he had the same feeling of emptiness on the outside of him as inside. Belly hunger was not a new feeling, but to be alone, to be left out of the circle of care, was something he had never known, and he realized that the Vision Quest would be an even more forlorn ordeal than he had believed.

He could already feel how the black paint on his face set him apart from everyone. It was only soot and bear grease, and he had smeared it upon his face this morning at the beginning of his fast, but, like a mask, it made him something other than he had always been. It was even worse than a mask; when you wore a mask, you became someone you had not been before, but when you wore the mask of black, you became no one. People, your own people, were not to see you. The black told them that nobody was there where you stood, so they would not speak to you or offer you food or water, for who would offer anything to a nothingness?

“I go now,” Tecumseh said, his heart chilled and aching. He rose and went to the door, but Star Watcher did not answer him or even look his way. Loud Noise looked at him and started to say something, but she shushed him and said, “Finish, little brother. Our Grandmother says not to waste food, remember?”

“I never waste food!” he retorted, then silenced himself by cramming another spoonful of the pale pulp into his mouth. It was true that Loud Noise never wasted food. In fact, if anyone else left food, Loud Noise saw to it that it did not go to waste. Tecumseh knew that his sister had said that only to draw the
boy’s attention back into their circle, away from the black-faced nothingness that was setting out from the
wigewa:
himself.

And then the people he passed in the town, who usually had smiles and greetings for this star-favored boy, looked through him, too, and said nothing to him, and by the time he left the edge of Chillicothe to go into the woods, he felt excluded from the bigger circle, the circle of the People, as well as from the circle of his family.

Now he was as empty as a living body could be, empty so that there would be nothing in him to keep the Spirit Helper from approaching. He had no food in his belly, no clothing, no fire striker, no weapon. He was as close to being a spirit himself as a person with a body could be, and if in the next four days a Spirit Helper chose to approach him in the wilderness, it would be as if it came to a nameless, unformed, undressed spirit, a babe. That was the way it was supposed to be, and he knew that was the way it was supposed to be, but he had not expected to feel this way, so utterly outside.

What Tecumseh did not know was that Star Watcher and everyone else who, without looking, had seen him go, prayed that he would be safe in the wilderness and that a very good Spirit Helper would approach him. He only thought he was outside their circle of care.

Tecumseh swam across the Miami-se-pe north of Chillicothe and climbed into the woods on the high bluffs on the other side. Something was supposed to tell him where to go to wait for his Spirit Helper, but for a long time his soul was so desolate that he perceived nothing, and he just walked. He was a lone creature in the woods without family or tribe, and he grew more and more timid, like a deer or a rabbit. Much later in the day when he heard some hunters approaching, going toward the town, he did not want to see them look through him, because that was too painful to bear again. And so, like a deer or a rabbit, he darted into hiding from the hunters. They passed near his hiding place without seeing him, which was what they would have done even if he had not hidden.

The hunters who passed beyond the foliage were his friend Thick Water and a Chalagawtha youth also just coming of warrior age. They were on foot. Thick Water carried a large rabbit, and the other carried a turkey. The dead animals left a musky odor that Tecumseh could smell long after the sound of the hunters’ footfalls had faded away. He wondered what Thick Water would think if he knew he had hidden from him and watched
him go by. How many animals must watch us in the woods, he thought. Some are probably watching me now. Though I am a nothing.

He stepped out and, for no conscious reason, chose to go along the way from which they had come, to follow their trail backward. For a while he could smell the lingering animal musk. When it became too faint to detect, he went on along their trail, keeping to it by the traces they had left: a moccasin print, a bit of turkey feather, a drop of rabbit blood. It was the first time he had ever followed a spoor in the other direction. He felt as if he were moving the other way on the Circle of Time, that somewhere ahead of him he would find them killing the rabbit and the turkey. It was contrary to the usual way of things, so it seemed to be the way he should go in an occasion like this, when all experience was upside down. There was said to be powerful medicine in all that was contrary. Sometimes the spirit of the Trickster could be heard chuckling among the other sounds of the world. The Trickster was always around, always foxlike and mocking, always making contrary things happen and then laughing at what he had done. Often the Trickster seemed to be inside his brother Loud Noise.

By the middle of the day, Tecumseh had reached the place where the turkey had been shot, a small glade where the ferns were marked by gouts and spatters of dried blood and had been trampled down by the hunters’ feet. Here a turkey hen’s life had ended. He saw the story of her death in his mind. Then he had to choose whether to follow the turkey’s trace backward along the Circle of Time or the hunters’. It seemed he should follow theirs, so he looked about until he found the place where they had knelt to shoot and where they had approached the glade from the west. By the middle of the afternoon he had gone on a curving course through woods and meadows and was on a grassy hill that he knew to be about half a day’s walk straight north of Chillicothe. He had come by this hill sometimes while riding with Chiksika between Chillicothe and Piqua. On the other side of the hill, he knew, was the trace between the two towns. Here on this hill he found the place where the rabbit’s life had ended: another spray of dried blood, more footprints. He seemed to feel the rabbit’s spirit in the air about this place.

If he kept tracing the hunters backward, he would return to Chillicothe, whence they had set out on their hunt. So he crossed the hill and went instead along the road toward Piqua.

At dusk he was in a place he knew well. Hardly aware that
he had come so far, he had found the spring near Piqua beside which he had been born. Something had drawn him to the place where his life had begun. He had never heard of anyone standing vigil for his Spirit Helper at the place of his own birth. But had he not been going backward on the Circle of Time? It seemed to him that this was the place where he was meant to come; he had not come here by trying to come here.

The only trace of the hut he had been born in was a weathered post of black locust wood; Chiksika had told him that was the old center post. Everything else had fallen and rotted away in the twelve years of his lifetime.

He sat on the moss beside the spring, and its trickling and burbling sang to torment his thirst. But he was not to drink, though he had traveled all day in the heat. He had crossed creeks, but his moccasins and breechcloth, all he wore, had dried on him. For a while he rested comfortably as the sun went down, its rays peeping through the darkening foliage. But having fasted all day and walked so far, he had nothing in him to fuel his body, and by the time the woods had darkened and the mosquitoes were humming all around, his skin was cold and he began to shiver. He closed his right hand about the little
pa-waw-ka
stone in its tiny bag that hung from his neck, and asked Weshemoneto to fan the fire inside him, and felt the warmth holding in his center. Then he tried to ignore the biting mosquitoes and to empty his mind and calm his heart, so that if a Spirit Helper approached in the darkness, it would not sense a turbulence here and veer away. Change-of-Feathers had advised him of all this.

Through the long hours of darkness he sat, hearing but trying not to listen to the creakings and whirrings of the night insects, trying not to let the assertive hoots of the barred owl or the monotonous whistle of the saw-whet tell him bad things. Now and then, as the world moved around the Circle of Time, a star would show through the high black canopy of treetops, then disappear, and Tecumseh would be tempted to move his head this way and that till he could see the star again. It was something he had done countless times while lying in his bed: looking up through the smokehole, trying to watch a particular star while his mind went everywhere, until the turning of the world would move that star away from the smokehole. But now he was not supposed to yield to the temptation of watching stars and thinking; he was supposed to sustain that still, empty readiness that was the prayer for a Spirit Helper.

Through the night it was hard to keep from thinking about his
hunger. And it was hard to keep from being alarmed by rustlings he heard in the darkness around him. He had, as a hunter, trained himself to listen to sounds in the woods and concentrate upon each noise until its characteristics told him what kind of bird or animal was stirring nearby. But now he had to unlearn all that, to make himself
not
perceive and identify but instead to listen with his soul only, for something from the Messengers. But it was hard not to be alarmed. When one was light-headed from hunger and weariness in the dark, one heard noises grow closer and louder; a mouse could sound like an opossum, an opossum like a bear. Many a boy who had considered himself brave had broken his vigil and fled homeward in blind panic at the approach of a raccoon. Sometimes, Change-of-Feathers had said, this panic was caused by the Trickster, whose laughter could be heard behind the fleeing boy.

After the middle of the night, or so it seemed to be, Tecumseh thought he was seeing a bluish glow in the corner of his vision. There was no sound, but he thought he could feel some sort of buzz or vibration in the still air. He felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck and tried to look toward the glow. But it seemed to move farther to the right as he looked right. Sometimes it would seem to be moving around in front of him, but then when he would try to see it, it would again move to the edge of his sight, and he could not even be sure he had seen it. It did not behave like anything of the touchable and visible world. Whatever it was, it was of the spirit world.

In his memory of stories and legends there was only one glowing blue spirit: that shape assumed by a Bear Walker when he left his body lying somewhere and roamed through time. Once, Chiksika had told him, once when Eagle Speaker had left his body, people had seen the glowing, shimmering blue shape of a bear move on all fours in the vicinity. It had passed into the night woods, fading. Before the next dawn, it had been seen returning to the place where Eagle Speaker’s body lay. Then it had vanished like an extinguished flame, and when the sun had come up, Eagle Speaker had awakened as from a deep sleep, saying he had been far away on the Circle of Time and that he had seen things that were yet to happen, things that he could not yet speak of because people were not yet ready to understand them.