Panther in the Sky (4 page)

When Turtle Mother had begun having the pains of birth, the family had been on the trace to the main Shawnee town of Chillicothe, on the Miami-se-pe. Cornstalk, the nation’s principal chief, had called for a council of all the Shawnee septs to be held there, to talk about the problem of white men.

As chief of the Kispoko, or warrior, sept, Hard Striker would be a most important member of the council. Though he was known throughout the nation as a fair and far-seeing man, and his opinions weighed heavily even on matters that had nothing to do with war, this council was sure to have much discussion of war, because the white people were becoming very troublesome. For years they had crowded the Shawnees off their lands farther east, until the nation had congregated here in the O-hi-o lands above the great Speh-leh-weh-se-pe, the Beautiful River—the O-hi-o-se-pe, as it was called by most peoples. On the other
side of the Beautiful River lay the Sacred Hunting Ground of Kain-tuck-ee, where all tribes could hunt but none could live, because it was a land occupied by the ghosts of a giant race, whom the tribes had massacred there hundreds of years before. The Algonquian nations all hunted there, but primarily the Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. This had been the way of Kain-tuck-ee through many ages. Kain-tuck-ee was a sacred and bountiful and lonely land; because it was empty of people, it was full of game.

But now an evil thing was being done about Kain-tuck-ee. White men were counciling with the Iroquois, ancient enemies of the Shawnees, trying to buy Kain-tuck-ee from them. The Iroquois neither lived nor hunted in Kain-tuck-ee and thus had nothing to lose by selling that land to the white men, as the white men in their cunning well knew. The whites were also trying to buy parts of Kain-tuck-ee from the Cherokees, who lived southeast of it. If the white men tried to settle in the Sacred Hunting Ground, surely there soon would be war with them. Already white hunters and settlers were intruding on Shawnee lands near the head of the Beautiful River, despite treaties that were supposed to keep them on the other side of the mountains.

And so the matter of the council was very much on Hard Striker’s mind. But for this moment, he was trying to concentrate upon the important thing that was happening here in the circle of his family in a clean and quiet place under the stars; he kept the power of his thoughts directed to his wife, Methotasa.

Her name meant A-Turtle-Laying-Her-Eggs-in-the-Sand. That had been the
unsoma
seen at the time of her own birth, the sign seen in a sandy creekbed far to the south, in the Muskogee land. Turtle Mother was a Creek woman, warm and fertile like her homeland beside the Tallapoosa. And as the turtle lays her many eggs, so would Turtle Mother bear many children, as the world and seasons rolled round and round and the stars turned slowly above.

The world was good, so very good. And to be born a Shawnee was the best fortune in this good world. The Shawandasse, called the South Wind People because of their origins in those warm lands, were the happiest, bravest, and most honorable of all people, and the Kispoko, his sept, were the bravest of all the Shawandasse. Of course other tribes and septs believed that about themselves, but Hard Striker knew it was true in the case of his people. In his mind there was nothing wrong in the entire circle of the world—except the one great trouble.

The coming of the white men.

For as long as Hard Striker could remember, the whites had been like some distant, rumbling thunder from the east. They were a strange, greedy people, takers of everything, bringers of noise, drunkenness, and disease. Since before the time of Hard Striker’s grandfather the Shawnee people had migrated, trying to keep a distance between themselves and the whitefaces. Sometimes it had not been possible to keep a distance. The Shawnees had been caught between the French white men and the English white men in one of their wars a few years ago, and that was when Hard Striker had been hit by an English musket ball. Again in a few more years there had been more trouble with the whites, and Hard Striker had gone with Pontiac, the Ottawa, to fight the Englishmen.

That had been five years ago. Now the white people were still coming, until by now they had disturbed even the oneness of the Shawnee nation.

For now some of the chiefs—including Cornstalk, the principal chief—had come to believe that the whites could never be held back and that the Shawnees should make peace with them and stop trying to hold them back. The white men, because of their superior numbers and weapons and tools, presumed themselves to be a superior race, and some chiefs were beginning to believe this themselves and were ready to let them have their inevitable way. But Hard Striker had seen enough of the whites to believe that his own race was superior to them, both in body and spirit, and he meant to plead in the council at Chillicothe that a superior race, particularly one that stood right in the eyes of the Master of Life, should never have to bow down and lick the feet of an inferior race, no matter how rich and numerous they were. The saddest sight Hard Striker could remember was that of the great Pontiac giving up his struggle two years ago and signing a peace treaty with the white men. Hard Striker was never going to put his mark on a treaty. He was going to remind all the chiefs in the council that Weshemoneto, the Great Good Spirit, had put this beautiful land here for the red men and would not like for them to yield it to intruders who had not stayed on their own land beyond the Eastern Water. Hard Striker did not mean for his son Chiksika or his daughter Sky Watcher, or this child now being born, or any child yet to be born, in his family or in his tribe, to grow up like scavenger dogs in a world ruled and ruined by greedy, smelly, diseased whitefaces. And he would use the greatest force of his mind and tongue to keep the nation from being wedged apart by them.

In the shadows within the shelter, Turtle Mother clutched the post and strained once again and felt the great slow mass stretching her. But it was coming now. At last it was coming down, and her body was giving it away to the world. Sky Watcher was saying nice things to her, and the midwife’s hands were under her, ready to help the baby come out. Turtle Mother yielded everything at last and felt the immense relief, the pricklings and twinges inside. The grimace of pain melted from her face, and with a serene smile she looked down for the first sight of this new life she had made. There were flashing aftershocks of pain still, and sliding, oozy sensations in her loins, and warm smells of blood and slime and excrement coming up, and the midwife lifting and pulling away the gleaming creature, and then the birth sac, and talking in a soft, urgent voice, while Sky Watcher crooned happily and readied a bed of clean hides spread over a cushion of boughs. As Turtle Mother reclined with a long sigh, Sky Watcher helped the midwife clean the slime off the infant. Then they laid the little hot blob of life upon Turtle Mother’s bosom between her swollen breasts. She moved gentle hands over the infant, feeling it in the darkness for any faults. The baby was still on its cord. She explored the little damp groin and said in a breathy whisper, “There is his little
passah-tih.
Go tell your father it is a son.”

Sky Watcher stooped to go out, then paused and gasped.

The sky above the stark treetops was suddenly filling with a greenish light; it was like the night lightning on a horizon, except that it was not a flash, but a growing light. “Ai!” she cried, pointing up. Her father and brother were just looking up. And as they gaped at the sky, seeing the stars fade in the strengthening light, something shot over, something like a fire-arrow but much more intense, and yellow-green like the eye of a panther, streaking southward. Though it was silent, it seemed to hiss on the brain, to sizzle over the uplifted eyes.

Hard Striker and Chiksika had risen by the fire-ring with their mouths open, watching the thing pass beyond the silhouetted branches of the leafless treetops. Turtle Mother where she lay inside the shelter did not see the thing, only the brief, strange glow outside the door.

For a moment then as the darkness and the stars returned and the warm yellow light of the campfire replaced the cold green light of the sky, nothing was said. The apparition with its tail of stardust stayed in their minds, making them dumb, until Hard Striker at last closed his mouth and drew a slow breath and turned to his son, eyes glittering, and exclaimed:

“It is the
unsoma!”
His gaze fell upon Sky Watcher poised in the entry of the shelter. “Daughter! You saw it!”

“Yes! And Father, a son is here!”

“A son! Ah-i-ee! Oh, what a man this will be, with such a sign as that! Ah!” He raised both hands toward the place where the light had gone, hands trembling with the unspeakable wonder of it.

Inside the shelter, Turtle Mother placed the baby on the robe beside her and raised herself on an elbow. Now the midwife gave her a strand of boiled sinew, and Turtle Mother looped it around the umbilical cord and tied it tight. Then a hand’s width from the knot she took the tough cord between her front teeth and severed it with a sawing bite, the taste of the fluid in her mouth. The child’s limbs twitched, and a high, pure, quavering wail came forth.

“Now, sister,” Turtle Mother murmured to the midwife, “when the sun comes up go and bury the sac beyond three creek valleys or more.”

The midwife gave a sly smile. It was a secret among women, kept from husbands, that there would be a year free from pregnancy for every stream that flowed between the birthplace and the discarded sac. Turtle Mother loved children, but she did not want pain like that again for a long time.

Sky Watcher came back in and moved to sit in a way so she could hold her mother’s head in her lap. “Mother,” she said, her voice breathy with awe, “it was a green star! A sign!”

Her mother nodded, her eyes glittering. The infant, lulled by Turtle Mother’s familiar heartbeat, stopped crying. “Now,
wahsiu,”
Turtle Mother called softly. “Husband, come now and see your son, born under a sky sign. He is ready.”

Hard Striker pulled his knife from the sheath that hung from his neck and bent over to run the blade through the flame. It was a fine, long knife with a narrow blade made even more narrow by years of sharpening. A French officer had given it to him years ago during the war with the British. In those years Hard Striker had taken many scalps with this knife, three of them the scalps of English soldiers he had killed, two the scalps of white intruders since that war. Whenever he held the knife, his hand would cause his soul to remember. All the sharp warrior memories lived in the knife: the eruptions of gunfire and smoke in ambushes, howls and hard blows in sun-dappled green woods, pounding heartbeats, hot blood spurting on moss, the feel of this knife cutting scalp to the hard skullbone …

But this same knife he now passed through the flames with tenderness in his heart, for this was also the knife with which he skinned and cut meat to feed his family and with which he did the sacred family thing he was about to do now.

With the blade purified he went into the dark shelter and knelt beside his wife. He pressed his cheek against hers, and with a swollen heart he murmured to her of his great esteem and gratitude. She breathed on his eyelids, smiling. Then he sat back on his heels, and she lifted the baby to him. He cradled it on his left forearm. Sky Watcher held up a clay-bowl oil lamp, and in its tremulous light he looked down at the wriggling baby and inspected it, his eyes soft in his hawklike face. He studied it from its damp black hair and its tiny nostrils to its sprig of a penis and the miniature fingernails and toenails. The little mouth, shapely as a flower bud, was already alive with sucking motions. Sky Watcher uttered a little musical laugh of sheer delight. Hard Striker chuckled. “
Weh-sah,
good!” he breathed. He murmured to it:
“Neequithah,
my son,” Then he placed the infant on its back on his wife’s arm and leaned over with his French knife. He took the end of the umbilical cord between his left thumb and forefinger, feeling the wonderful strangeness of it, which was unlike any of the animal tissues a man ever touched. He put the sharp edge of the blade to the cord, just outside the threadknot, and gently sliced off the loose end. He leaned back and looked at it. One end had been severed by her teeth, the other by his knife. When it was dry, he would put it in his medicine bag, where ten years ago he had put in that of his daughter and twelve years ago that of his first son. He looked at his wife’s tired, beautiful face for a long while. Chiksika had come in and was looking over his father’s shoulder. Now all the little family of Hard Striker was in this tiny, warm space under a bark roof beneath the white stars, and it was the center of the world.

“When we go to Chillicothe,” he said, “we will speak at once to Change-of-Feathers.” Change-of-Feathers, Old Penegashega, was the chief medicine man of the Shawnee nation, an ancient who had lived through many years of the past and seen still more years into the future. “I yearn to hear what he will tell us about the
unsoma
that crossed the sky.”

Turtle Mother nodded, her eyes intense. Then she looked down at the infant by her breast. She knew that a great sign always foretold a remarkable life, and that a remarkable life was most often a hard life. “Yes. Yes,” she said. “I tremble to think of what it must mean!”