Panther in the Sky (88 page)

The sunlight gleamed on Thick Water’s muscular shoulders as he stroked tirelessly with his paddle. The green water of the O-hi-o-se-pe gurgled under the bark hull of the canoe, and a warm breeze came pouring up the wide river between the far, dark green bluffs, into the faces of the paddlers of the three canoes.

Tecumseh’s heart was high with joy and eagerness and with the sheer thrilling spaciousness of the broad river. Through the canoe’s bark and its frame wherever he touched it, and through the paddle with which he stroked the water, he sensed the life of the water and its relentless, seeking flow, and the invisible ooze of its bottom, and all the slick and scaly and shelled creatures that lived in it, the watersnakes, eels, mussels, turtles, the fish, from the tiniest minnows to the great barbeled fish the size of a man. For now his mind was clear of the tense, imageless, spiritless kind of thought one had to use when arguing or dealing with white men, and everything was alive, round, full of the Great Good Spirit. This warm wind blowing in his face was the very breath of Weshemoneto; this river was a flowing vein of Weshemoneto; the sun over his head was the eye and mind of Weshemoneto. Tecumseh himself was a part of the Being; there was no boundary, his skin was no boundary, between it and himself; he was as dissolved in the universe as a drop of his sweat would be
in this river; to be was to pray; to exist was to understand everything. Soon this great vein called the O-hi-o-se-pe, or the Spehley-weh-se-pe, in his people’s tongue, would flow into that greater one, the Missi-se-pe. He knew that when the canoes turned southward around the next bend, the Missi-se-pe would lie open and vast before them, and the water would be more yellow and full of dangerous currents and powerful swirls where the two great waters rushed together; he could see it already as he had seen it from up on the bluffs when he was a younger man. He looked up to the bluffs on the right and saw the place where he had recklessly chased the bison when he was half the age he was now. Yet he was the same young man still. Years did not pass but rolled around to the same place, and all times were now; as he looked up at the bluff there thundered the same herd still, and there rode Tecumseh still, swiftly among them. The rumble of their running and the yipping cries of his fellow hunters were in his ears, the dust and musk in his nostrils, the surging motion of the horse between his knees—and the sudden falling and the snapping pain in his thigh.…

And the great shaking!

Even in the smooth-gliding canoe now he could feel that shaking of the earth, the hint of the great sign to come. Now he was seeing in the other direction across the Round of Time, as if he were in its center looking first toward the arc called Yesterday, now the other way toward the arc called Tomorrow, as if he were, as he had felt before, over the very center of the Round of Time, and he saw the earth shaking, saw the trees falling, houses tumbling; he saw dust and heard roaring in the sky; he felt the flow of the river reverse itself and go the other way; he saw the long-tailed star in the sky, but now it was in the other quarter of the sky and going away, and it was also the white dove flying away across the river, as he had seen it go once before when he had stood upon that bluff.

Then he could see it no more, just the water swirling where he had lifted his paddle, just the curving insides of the canoe, the parfleche bags, the guns, the folded blankets, Thick Water’s muscular, gleaming shoulders and shaved head and feathered scalplock right in front of him, and the paddles of the other warriors dipping. And now Thick Water turned with a happy smile on his face and cried:

“There!”

The others all cried out and laughed, and excited cries came from the other canoes. Before them now, between the bluffs,
spread so vast an expanse of water that the land beyond it was a line that looked as thin as one hair. The Missi-se-pe!

The banks of the O-hi-o-se-pe widened and widened and then slipped away behind the swift canoes. Here the wind was stronger; here the waters roiled and mixed, and the surface was dimpled with little whirlpools. Dark, dead trees bobbed and moved swiftly in the flood, coming down on the muddy water. The canoes went skidding with the powerful confluence.

Tecumseh remembered when he had been a boy and had put dry seed pods of the bean tree into the swift waters of a brook and watched them go sliding down the current between the stones, the seeds like little men in a canoe. It was like that now. And the warriors laughed and exclaimed about this swiftness, and paddled hard, and watched to avoid the floating trees that could tear up the bark of their frail vessels. Such a water! So vast and wide and deep, flowing down the very middle of the land! For a while it was too great upon Tecumseh’s senses, and he could not think well yet upon what he had just seen in his soul. But this boiling confluence under the canoes, here above the Center of Time: he could feel the canoes drawing still closer to the Center; he could feel the great sign waiting far below the ooze of the riverbed, and he knew that he would soon understand it all; all the signs of his lifetime would soon reveal their meanings to him. For three and forty summers he had been as worthy as he had known how to be, and now the long star was in the sky somewhere, and surely the Great Good Spirit would let him know! Surely his few transgressions would have been forgiven, and Weshemoneto would deem him worthy of the great knowing!

That evening Tecumseh’s canoes came ashore on a brushy, silty bank on the east side of the Missi-se-pe below the confluence. Two miles away, on the dusky west shore, a wisp of smoke could be seen against the afterglow of the setting sun, smoke from the place that had been a Spanish town the last time he had seen it but was said to be an American town now. A few faint, distant lights glowed over there as the dusk deepened.

When the canoes were on the shore and the camp was being made, Tecumseh went around the perimeter as he always did, noting the best areas for defense and flight in case of an attack. The white men controlled this river now. The Shawnees who lived near the mouth of the Wabash-se-pe had said they saw a white men’s boat as big as a council lodge float down the O-hi-o-se-pe three moons ago, not one with the white wings on it, but one with a chimney that gave off a great amount of smoke. That boat had
made a strange, ugly noise and had churned the water white. It had scared the children.

A little way below the confluence, Tecumseh’s canoes had passed the dark mass of a ruined fort, a fort that the Long Knife Clark had built during the war between the Long Knives and the British. It was abandoned now, rotting and overgrown with brush, and Tecumseh had thought:

Someday, if the Master of Life helps us to finish this great work, all the places of the Americans will be like that, empty and rotting, even their cities, and there will be no more smoke boats or wing boats on the lakes or the rivers, and our People will hunt happily and freely over all this land which was ours, and will forget the fear and sadness we have known for a generation. There will be only raccoons and chipmunks and snakes living in the forts that Clark built.

Clark.

Tecumseh looked across the river to the darkening sky over the western country and thought:

Now the governor of that land over there is named Clark. The young brother of the old Long Knife Clark. The Clark who is the governor there now is the one who crossed the Shining Mountains six years ago and went to the Western Sea.

The Long Knives had truly crossed this whole immense land. There were some living over there now. Not many yet, but a few, trading furs, making treaties.… Boone, it was said, lived in a big house far up the Missouri-se-pe now; But-lah Kenton, it was said, had bought a great piece of land right over there, somewhere near those distant lights.…

There were Shawnees over there, too, those who had left O-hi-o thirty-two years ago to escape from Clark’s Long Knives, and now another Clark was the ruler of the lands where they lived.…

“Great One,” Tecumseh murmured, raising his eyes to the sky over the great river, “guide me. Show me what I must do to stop the intruders, to turn them back before they fill up the world! Reveal to me now the meaning of the great sign, so that I shall be ready and know what to do!”

T
HAT NIGHT HE SLEPT ON THE RIVERBANK OVER THE
C
ENTER
of Time, and in his sleep all the things passed again: the white dove crossing the sky with thundering wings, the face of He-Opens-the-Door, the four wolves following in the shadow of the dove with moons in their eyes, the green eye of the Panther in the Sky, the bundle of red sticks, and then the great shaking and
jolting of the earth straight below, the river flowing upstream, the dust and smoke rising over the whole Middle Ground, the horsemen coming toward him through yellow light …

When he awoke the sky was growing light. The Missi-se-pe gurgled and whispered a few yards away. The long canoes lay on the shore. All was still. His warriors were sleeping in their blankets all around, except for Thick Water, who sat on guard with a blanket across his shoulders and a rifle on his knees, a gray sentinel in the river mist.

He smiled at Tecumseh, seeing him awake. Tecumseh smiled at him and sat up.

“We must move now,” Tecumseh said. “We have to go to all the towns of the southern nations before the sign comes, and it will come sooner than we had thought. We have only four moons in which to do all we have to do!”

Thick Water’s eyes widened, and the other warriors, hearing this, sat upright. “Wake, and hurry!” Tecumseh told them with a thrilling urgency in his voice. “At last it has all been told to me, and I know!”

Thick Water leaped up, heart pounding. He understood and was amazed. Weshemoneto’s revelation of when and how he would shake the world had happened in the soul of his leader during the night, and most amazing to Thick Water was that he himself, sitting guard, had heard nothing but the gurgle of the river and the cooing of a dove, had seen no light but the stars above and that Long Star of the Year of the Sign!

T
HE DRUMMER BOYS OF THE
F
OURTH
U
NITED
S
TATES
I
NFANTRY
Regiment began a long, chattering roll on their instruments. It was a brave, thrilling sound to the ears of the people of Vincennes, who for three years had lived under the imagined threat of an Indian massacre. The crowds lining the street shivered at
the sound, and when General William Henry Harrison rode up on his light gray mare alongside the columns of troops, wearing a fringed calico hunting shirt over his uniform, glanced left and right with those piercing eyes, drew his sword—not a ceremonial sword this time, but a big, curved, razor-edged man-killer of a cavalry saber—and raised it in front of his face in a salute, the crowd broke out in huzzahs, their eyes shining with exultation.

There were shouted commands. The legs of the infantrymen, in tight, buttoned leggings of gray wool, began stepping in unison, and the regiment moved forward: tall, cylindrical black hats with huge eagles over the visors made the soldiers look tall as giants. They were splendid in their dark blue woolen coats with high collars and brass-buttoned cuffs, sheathed bayonets, black cartridge bags and light blue wooden canteens dangling at their hips. These were disciplined, firm-jawed soldiers, mostly New Englanders, sent down from Pittsburgh by President Madison, commanded by Colonel John Boyd. The senior officer under Boyd was Major George Rogers Clark Floyd, and Boyd’s aide-de-camp was another nephew of the old Long Knife, George Croghan. Here were men with war in their blood and officers with glory in their heads. General Harrison watched them with the pride of a Caesar watching his legions go forth. There were four hundred of these Blue-Coat Regulars, the cream of the American army, and they in themselves looked invincible—yet they were but a third of the force General Harrison had at his command.

Up ahead were the mounted regiments: the Kentucky Dragoons of Colonel Joseph Daveiss, in their blue coats and beaver hats, and a troop of mounted infantry militiamen, called the Yellow Jackets because of the yellow facings on their blue coats; these were under the command of Captain Spier Spencer, a tavernkeeper from the frontier town of Corydon. There were six hundred Indiana militiamen in total and more than a hundred Kentucky militiamen furnished by Governor Scott. Supply wagons rolled by then, following the army, and a herd of beef cattle was being held north of the town to be driven at the army’s rear.

The last time such an army had been seen in Vincennes had been exactly a quarter of a century ago, when the Long Knife General Clark had marched up the Wabash against Little Turtle’s confederation. It was like a repetition of history for some of the citizens who were old enough to remember. Back then, too, the threat had been a confederation of Indians up this same river; it was as if only the names had changed. That time it had been General George Rogers Clark against Little Turtle; this time it
was General William Henry Harrison against the Prophet. Harrison, combining lessons learned from Clark and Wayne, and a whole age of Roman generals before them, meant to move steadily but cautiously up the Wabash, building forts and supply blockhouses as he went and keeping out a screen of scouts commanded by his old spy Dubois. If all went as he meant it to, the followers of the insolent Shawnee brothers would be scattered and cowed before this year was out, and then the acquisition of the rest of the Indian lands could continue without opposition, and Indiana would become a state.

To be the father of a state! How Harrison’s soul fed upon that notion!

O
PEN
D
OOR RAN HIS STRING OF SACRED BEANS THROUGH HIS
fist and gnawed inside his lip, his eye fixed on the hollow man without seeing it, his heartbeat fast. He was scared and angry.