Panther in the Sky (105 page)

Already he could hear the screaming and shouting inside. He rode full tilt through the gate, and Redcoats and warriors scattered out of his path as he thundered into the inner compound.

The scene before his eyes was as bad as he could have expected. His angry shout stopped everything for a moment and even froze the Redcoats who were looking down on it from the parapets.

American soldiers, naked or in dirty underwear, lay smeared with blood, while warriors knelt over them, caught in the act of cutting off their scalps. Two soldiers lay on the ground directly in front of him, their skulls battered open, brains on the dirt. One big Potawatomi held in one hand a butcher knife, and another clutched a bound prisoner by the hair. Another warrior had his tomahawk raised over the head of a kneeling prisoner. The Redcoats on the parapets included officers, who apparently were afraid to try to stop the slaughter.

All the bloodthirsty howling had stopped at the eruption of Tecumseh’s well-known voice, but the prisoners were still sobbing and wailing. Tecumseh leaped from the horse even before it stopped. With a blaze in his eyes and his war club in his hand, he reached the Potawatomi in two strides and batted him down with a quick blow. With another stride he grabbed the throat of the other warrior and flung him to earth, then shoved back a third. The Indians stood, stunned out of their blood frenzy by the sight of their leader striking down his own warriors. Then they saw the rage and torment in his eyes, and it was more than they could bear to see. They backed off, turning their eyes down, releasing their grip on the prisoners. And if any had failed to understand what was happening, his cry then made it clear to them; its tone was part contempt, part anguish:

“Are there no
men
here?”

As the warriors fell back from his terrible visage, he spoke now in a voice almost strangled. “My poor People! What will become of my poor foolish People?”

And now as he turned, sweeping his gaze over the ghastly scene, trying to mask the emotions he had shown so nakedly, he saw amid a small group of British officers the jowly, pink face of General Procter. At this sight, Tecumseh’s outrage boiled over again. Throwing his arm out to point at Procter, he bellowed:

“You! Why did you let this happen in your fort?!”

Procter drew his upper chin into his lower ones. His eyes bulged for an instant, then narrowed. He started to speak, but his throat was tight after what he had just witnessed. He cleared it and replied, just as he had after the massacre at the River Raisin:

“Your … your Indians cannot be controlled.”

Of course it was a feeble excuse, born out of his own shame; he had just seen Tecumseh alone bring them under control. Tecumseh stared at him with contempt for a long time, his finger still pointed at him. In the near silence then, broken only by the booming of the cannonade up the valley, with all of Procter’s soldiers and officers in the fort listening, Tecumseh’s voice commanded, in plain English, the officer who was supposed to be the commander-in-chief of all the king’s forces and allies in the West:

“Begone, Procter! You are not fit to command! Go and put on petticoats!”

The two stared at each other for another full minute of silence, though Procter still could not look directly at Tecumseh’s eyes. Finally, his face livid as his red coat and shining with sweat, Procter turned away, elbowed his way through the knot of officers, and stalked back to his headquarters. He desperately needed a drink.

T
ECUMSEH BROODED THAT NIGHT IN HIS CAMP
. A
GREAT VICTORY
had been made small and ugly by the cruelty of his warriors. Harrison still sat in his groundhog hole, with about as many troops as he had had before it all started. Because his reinforcements had been destroyed, he probably would not try to march on to Detroit or Canada for a while, until more soldiers came. But he was still here, and he was still strong, and eventually there would be new armies of Americans coming up. The Americans would never run out of men. The only way to defeat them would be to destroy one American fort after another, ambush one army
after another, to move deeper into O-hi-o and Indiana with thousands of warriors and with Redcoats and cannons. Not long ago, when Brock had lived, Tecumseh had felt certain he could do that. But how could he do it with this slow and cautious and mean-spirited Procter?

Today Tecumseh with swiftness and bold intelligence had won a victory that should have made his heart as big and bright as the sun. And it was just one of many victories he and his warriors and their British allies had won in the eleven months since the start of the war.

He asked Weshemoneto why he had let Brock get killed.

Then he looked up toward the dark, massive shape of the American fort and thought of Harrison in there.

He had a terrible foreboding about Harrison. Harrison was much smarter than General Procter. Only a very smart officer would have built a groundhog hole like that and kept his soldiers alive all these days under so many cannonballs. Only a very smart officer would have devised an attack like that today, knocking out the British cannons on both hills.

It was not Harrison’s fault that he had failed today and lost his reinforcements. It was only the stupidity of the Kentucky officer who had allowed himself to be drawn after a decoy and get trapped.

My enemy is better than my ally, Tecumseh thought.

That did not make him feel very good.

P
ROCTER KEPT HIS CANNONS SHOOTING AT THE FORT, BUT IT
was plain that he had no heart to do anything more bold.

The warriors, who had won a victory but now could see no result, were losing interest. There had been much booty in the boats they had captured from the Kentuckians, so they had kettles and blankets and guns and salt, as well as scalps, and they were not likely to get any more scalps or booty for a long time. It seemed to them that if they stayed here longer, all they would get would be aching heads and deafness from the big guns and maybe unglorious wounds from the riflemen in the American fort. Despite Tecumseh’s entreaties, they began leaving in small bands. They thanked and praised Tecumseh for the great victory over the Kentuckians, but nevertheless they were leaving, until some better time.

Meanwhile, Procter’s Canadian militiamen also were wanting to leave and get back to their farms, which further wore down the general’s resolve. One of the militia officers, a mill owner
named Benjamin Arnold, was a strong, calm, big-minded man who reminded Tecumseh of Ga-lo-weh. He could talk about anything of his culture or the red man’s. He talked to Tecumseh sometimes at night about the farm and mill he had built on the Thames River above Lake St. Clair and how he loved the land of Canada. He had the same feeling as an Indian about the steady and ominous approach of the Americans toward his land. He was afraid Canada would be taken and overrun by the Americans unless Tecumseh could prevail. He too was a mourner of the loss of Brock and was equally gloomy because the war here was in the hands of a lump like Procter. “Mark my words, Chief,” Arnold said sadly, “don’t depend on ’im, for he’s no field man like you and me.”

Arnold proved right. Procter, worn down by the impasse and longing for the comforts of his home in Amherstburg, and still sulking from Tecumseh’s rebuke, decided soon that there was no point in going on with it. And so, on the ninth of May, he ordered the siege lifted and began packing up his army for the return to Fort Malden. Tecumseh would have to step back off his homeland of O-hi-o now, if he were to keep his promise of supporting the Redcoats. And he was a man who kept his promises.

It seemed now to Tecumseh, as he sat on his black stallion at the big, trampled gun pits where the siege guns had been, amid all the trash and detritus of war, looking down on the battered palisade and raw, churned earth of Fort Meigs across the river, seeing the countless buzzards circling over the deserted battleground, it seemed now that unless great new signs came, some immense flowing-in of spirit, there would be no way to go forward anymore. It was as if he and Harrison were standing on opposite banks of a river with their blades hanging at their sides, unable to fight and determine the fate of the land.

Until Weshemoneto showed him the way to get to Harrison and fight him face to face, and kill him, there was no hope for a victory.

T
HE SHIPS WERE TALLER THAN THE TREES, SO WHEN AT LAST
they began to glide down the Detroit River toward the great lake, all the Indians could see them from wherever they were.

Star Watcher was softening an elkhide to make heavy winter moccasins for her family when she heard the people exclaiming about the ships. She held the heavy hide in both hands and tugged it this way and that over the rounded end of a post, working into it the slimy brain ooze, limbering the skin. Elkhide was stiff and heavy, and only a strong woman, or a strong man, could keep working one like this until it was pliable and soft. A deerhide anyone could do, though even that was not easy; an elkhide was almost as tough a job as a bison hide, and rare was the woman who would wrestle one without another woman to help her. But in Star Watcher’s mind the moccasins already existed: a pair for Stands Firm, a pair for Cat Pouncing, and a pair for Tecumseh. They would be decorated with oak-leaf designs of beading; they would be impregnated with oil to keep out the cold water and wet snow.

Looking up, sweating, Star Watcher saw the colorful banners at the tops of the masts moving slowly past the leaves in the tops of the trees. Warriors and women and children hurried along the shore to watch them go out. The ships were like black-and-orange forts with white wings and were so big that men were climbing among their wings, yet they moved upon the water as smoothly as little things like canoes or ducks! It was as if the ships were standing still and the island floating by them. Even though Star Watcher was looking at these immense things with her very own eyes and watching them go, it was hard for her to believe they were not visions.

There were thousands of Indians watching them go. All of Tecumseh’s warriors were here close to the British fort, and many of them had brought their families, because the British had promised to feed and care for their women and children and elders if the warriors fought for the king. So there were many Shawnee and Wyandot, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Winnebago children
who hugged close to their mothers’ skirts as the great things moved by. Some of the children thought they were seeing moving hills with trees on them, with birds in the branches, but the birds were men.

Even to Tecumseh himself, who had learned what the different kinds of ships were called—brigs, schooners, and sloops—and how many cannons they carried, and where they were now going and why, and who knew the commander of the fleet personally, even to Tecumseh there was a great dreaminess about these ships. They were full of powerful medicine. Shamans of the very old times had dreamed of these things generations before any real ones had come to the eastern shore. Tecumseh remembered the one whose white sail he had seen against the gray-blue distance over Lake Mis-e-ken when he had walked on the sand shore with Chiksika half a lifetime ago. Perhaps it had been one of these very ships.

Now as Tecumseh watched the British warships go out toward the vast flatness of the lake, their canvas wings opening with a noise like fluttering thunder, it was like a sign of hope. Of course it was not a sign, it was just a real thing happening, but it was the first hopeful thing that had happened since the battle at Fort Meigs.

After Procter had given up once on that siege, Tecumseh had persuaded him to go back and help him attack the fort once again, two moons ago, but that had failed because the Americans had again stayed in their groundhog hole and refused to be drawn out to fight. From there the British and Indians had gone to attack a smaller American fort on the Sandusky River, but that attack had failed, too.

Following those failures had been more and more bad news. Harrison had kept building up his army for the invasion of Canada. The old Kentucky governor Shelby had brought still another big army of Kentuckians up through O-hi-o to Fort Meigs. Harrison had persuaded some of the government Indians at the Crane’s town to join the Americans against Tecumseh’s followers. Worse, even some of old Black Hoof’s Shawnee warriors were now scouts for Harrison’s army, and that had twisted like a knife in Tecumseh’s heart: Shawnees serving the American army! Furthermore, Chief Walk-in-Water, whose Wyandot village was just across the river from Fort Malden, had swayed back and forth between the Americans and the British like a blade of grass blowing in changing winds.

But the worst news had come just in the last moon.

The Americans had finished building their fleet of ships and had launched them. Now for the first time there were enemy warships upon Lake Erie. Procter had never had the courage or initiative to march east and attack the American shipyards on the American side of the lake, though almost a year ago Brock had said it was an important thing to do, and now it was too late. The new American fleet had come into view two weeks ago and insolently stood in sight outside the mouth of the Detroit River as if to challenge the British ships, then had sailed off over the southern horizon. The British officers said the American fleet was no cause for worry, that the British navy would never be defeated by any other navy, particularly a little fleet of inferior American ships. The commander of the British fleet on the lake was Barclay, a great warrior chief of the British navy and a famous hero, though still quite young. Barclay had lost an arm eight years ago while serving with the navy chief Nelson at Trafalgar, which, the officers explained to Tecumseh, had been the greatest of all sea battles. The newly outfitted ship that Barclay was now sailing out to the lake was the largest warship ever launched on Lake Erie. It was a brig of 490 tons called the
Detroit.
Barclay and Procter had no doubts that the
Detroit
and the five other ships could sweep the American vessels off the lake at once. Tecumseh liked to hear such confident talk, so the going out of the British fleet was like a good sign.