Panther in the Sky (50 page)

Thick Water came at night from the south, sent by Stands-Between with messages. He stood with Tecumseh in the darkness outside the fireglow of the army camp to tell him what was happening down there. “Those deserters went past the fort on the Miami-se-pe. The Blue-Coats who went after them still did not catch up with them. And the supply train still is not in sight. Surely it could not catch up for days.”

Tecumseh gazed toward the enemy’s campfires, and they glinted in his eyes. “Now,” he said, “is the time to strike. I am going up to see Blue Jacket.”

T
HE WAR CHIEFS WERE SURPRISED TO SEE
T
ECUMSEH WHEN
he appeared in their camp. He gave his account.

“The Long Knife army is camped now on the bottomland in the place where the Wabash-se-pe headwater crosses the trace. The soldiers are less than half as many as they were. They are hungry and fatigued and afraid. Their feet are wet. You hear them coughing in their camp, and they sound like a lot of geese. They are too sick even to fortify themselves. They have lined up their six cannons and left them with no breastworks in front. All they are doing is making big bonfires to warm themselves. All their powder and arms boxes are in stacks. The Blue-Coats who went after the deserters surely will go on down to protect the supply train from them, instead of coming back up. The soldiers are dull and least brave now. There will be no better time.”

Blue Jacket’s eyes glittered in his rugged face, and he breathed fast, staring out the door of the lodge into the dusk. “Ah,” he said.
“Weh-sah. Weh-sah!”

“There is no question,” said Little Turtle. “We must go and get around them tonight, for they surely will start to fortify at daybreak.”

“Now what will you have me do, Father?” Tecumseh asked. “We who have been wolves around the herd are ready to rush in before light and kill the old sick bulls.”

“No,” Blue Jacket said. “You are our eyes. Your seeing has served us as well as ten hundred warriors. In the morning we will see the face of our enemy and destroy him. I ask you to go back around and be the eyes at his back. Stay on the road between the army and its forts, and watch for the return of the Blue-Coat soldiers who went down, so they cannot surprise us. The Eye of the Panther is keen, and we need it still.”

“Then,” Tecumseh said, hiding his disappointment, “I will do that if it serves us best.”

Blue Jacket gave him a grim smile and squeezed his arm and said, “My son, you already have more scalps than most of us will get in our lives, so now I ask you to stand back and let others get some. Ha, ha!”

“All the People owe you much,” Little Turtle told him.

“The Great Good Spirit favors our People,” Blue Jacket breathed.

“Let us be strong by doing what is right,” Tecumseh whispered, going out into the darkening cold.

T
ECUMSEH AND HIS SCOUTS HEARD THE DISTANT SHOOTING
begin at daybreak the next morning. Low, dark, ragged clouds covered the sky. The low hills were covered with patchy, wet snow.

The noise from the north started with a stuttering of gunshots and then began to swell like the faraway coming of a storm. Soon there were so many shots that they were not distinct from one another and sounded like a steady thunder roll. Now it would die down a little to sputtering, then swell again to a muted roar. After a long time there came two or three thuds that might have been cannon shots. Tecumseh and Big Fish looked at each other, grim-faced. In such a storm of gunfire, they knew, men on both sides must be dying. Tecumseh wondered what Big Fish could be thinking. In an army of that size there probably were relatives and people he had known when he was Stephen Ruddell. But of course Tecumseh did not ask, because he knew that Big Fish was fully a Shawnee in his spirit.

By the middle of the morning the shooting had dwindled. Tecumseh sent riders down the rutted, muddy army road to look for signs of the other Blue-Coat regiment coming up. No report of them came. Tecumseh with Thick Water and Stands Firm, Seekabo and Big Fish, set up a vigil on a bluff overlooking a fording place where the army road crossed a shallow creek, about halfway between the battleground and the army’s upper fort. On that bluff stood a huge oak tree, from whose high branches the road could be seen for miles in both directions. Tecumseh said, “In Kispoko Town I remember there was a boy who was sometimes called Squirrel for the way he could climb trees.” Thick Water nodded with a slight smile, slung his gun on his back, and soon had climbed to a high fork. It was cold up here in the wind, but he could see over most of the treetops and rises of land for such a distance that he took deep breaths and smiled with his love of the country. When he looked down to the others, their horses looked the size of little dogs. The treetop swayed in the cold gusts and rocked him. Thick Water tied a thong around his waist and a limb, hooked his elbow over a branch, wiggled his feet until they were as comfortable as possible, and looked up and down the road. Far to the north a smudge of pale smoke against the lead-colored clouds showed him where the battlefield was. Because of the wind around his ears he could hardly hear any gunfire now.

Late in the afternoon Thick Water called down. He could see the remnants of the American army starting to come down the valley. For a long time they were mere specks on the far snowy
meanderings of the road, coming singly or in little clusters, in no sort of order.

As they drew closer he could hardly believe what his eyes were seeing. He took every detail into his memory, as if he might need to confirm with others that this wretched sight was what they too had seen.

They came in knots and clusters, in ones and twos, stumbling and staggering, some without weapons, some helping badly hurt comrades hitch along. Some fell and remained in the snow. A few were on plodding horses, and some of the horses sagged and fell and lay in the road. Figures were strung out for miles. They were no army anymore.

When the first of them were within half a mile, Tecumseh called for Thick Water to come down out of sight. And then from cover they watched them.

Some of the soldiers were wild-eyed, some dead-eyed. Some would run a few steps, moaning and gasping, as if demons were after them. Almost all were black with gunpowder and reddened with blood. As they moved down across the ford, they turned the snow red. Their voices were a dissonant chorus of pain and misery. Tecumseh and his scouts hovered almost invisible in thickets along the road and watched them pass by.

Only a few of the Americans who went by were officers on horses, and most of these were bloody and white-faced, slumped in their saddles. One humped, thick-bodied old man came by on a bony, feeble horse. This old man wore a three-cornered hat and was cloaked in a capote stained with mud and blood, his eyes cast down, his scabbard empty. He was on down the road a way when two officers rode up to speak to him, and suddenly Thick Water turned and asked Tecumseh:

“Is that not their general?”

“That is St. Clair. Yes.”

“Should we not shoot the old general?”

“No,” Tecumseh said. “We are here as eyes, not as teeth, to watch, not to kill. And you know what I have said. I will not kill helpless men. What honor is there in killing men whose hearts are already dead?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
T
ECUMSEH AND HIS SCOUTS WENT UP
the army road toward the battleground. The snow of the road was brown with mud and red with blood, littered all the way with hats, buckles, broken ramrods, bayonets, bullet bags, blood-soaked bandages, shreds of blanket, boot soles, and broken guns.

Frozen corpses lay where they had been hastily buried in snow; some of them had already been partly dug out and gnawed on by animals.

But even this pitiful trail of death and defeat did not prepare Tecumseh for what lay on the bottomlands of the Wabash-se-pe.

In the river bend, the entire valley was dotted with scalped, mutilated soldiers and dead horses. Every foot of ground was a trampled, bloody slush, strewn with smashed objects. Wagons with broken wheels, crates, and kegs lay broken and smoldering with dirty smoke. Some bodies lay over each other, in places where soldiers evidently had grouped and been surrounded. There were black smudges where gunpowder had been spilled. A shoeless, scalpless corpse lay curled on its side, both hands frozen around the haft of a lance that had gone clear through it. Buzzards were settling and hunching on bodies, picking out eyes or tearing at wounds, shaking their beaks. Town dogs skulked around the edges of the battleground, gorging themselves on the half-frozen human carrion. Indian boys from nearby villages were working over the field, harvesting brass buttons and buckles and gorgets. Every corpse had been scalped, most had been stripped of their shoes and blue wool coats. There were no guns in sight; all had been gathered up already. A cold wind drifted snow up against the dead.

There were nearly six hundred dead soldiers on the battleground, Blue Jacket said. Tecumseh told him of the many he had counted on the road and of the old general going by. Blue Jacket was marked by many blows but not badly hurt. “We could not kill that old general,” he said with awe. “Whenever he tried to mount a horse, we killed it. Whenever he spoke to an officer, we killed the officer. All morning he tried to make his soldiers stand and fight, but we killed them. Many stood together and cried, and we killed those, too. He tried to make his cannon soldiers shoot, but we killed them after a few bangs. We killed his camp followers. But we could not kill him, though he was in plain view all the time. I think this means he was meant to take defeat back to their nation himself. Oh, he was a brave old man! But not smart enough. Young brother, listen! For two years we have defeated their whole army, yes, twice Little Turtle has beaten America! If the tribes always fight together, we can do this any time they dare to come again. Perhaps we can preserve the rest of the lands the Great Good Spirit gave us, after all!” His eyes were red, his bruised face aglow. “Think what we have done! Think what we can do if we stand together!”

“The Great Good Spirit favors our People,” Tecumseh murmured. But he remembered Chiksika’s prophecy that even this Blue Jacket and Little Turtle and Black Hoof would mark peace treaties under the force of the white men.

L
OUD
N
OISE AGAIN HAD MANAGED TO STAY OUT OF BATTLE
by proclaiming himself not a warrior but a healer and medicine man. There was indeed much healing for him to do, for more than two hundred warriors had been wounded in the battle. Loud Noise had learned enough from Change-of-Feathers about herbs and poultices that he was able to help mend some of the severely wounded warriors.

But in the orgy of celebration right after the battle, Loud Noise was caught up in the sanguinary madness, and he did something he had often thought about with fascination during his lonely, rum-soaked reveries in his old hut in the marsh.

Tecumseh came looking for his brother and sister in the uproar of the village after the battle. The people were in a frenzy of feeling. There was dancing, there was boasting, fueled by kegs of army liquor that had been taken at the battleground, and fresh scalps were being exhibited everywhere. But amid the rejoicing there was also the keening of mourners, for the sixty-six warriors who had died in the attack. All the people were pouring out their hearts either in warlike exultation or grief or in both. Tecumseh, with Stands-Between at his side, moved through this firelit pandemonium with a bittersweet heart, loving and pitying the People, asking this crazed face and then that one where Loud Noise might be found. At last he found Star Watcher. She was standing in front of a small lodge, very rigid, her face set hard and eyes glinting with tears. She pointed at the lodge and said, “He is there. With them.”

Tecumseh turned back the door flap and stooped to enter. He glanced around the circle of men and women who sat facing a fire in the dense smoke within. They looked up at him with glazed, red-rimmed eyes. Their mouths were painted crimson. There was a stench of liquor in the close air. Strips of flesh hung on a spit over the fire, and the people were eating with their fingers. There was an air of awful tension in the lodge, as if some terrible excitement had just been interrupted. Even without the red-painted mouths to explain the scene to him, Tecumseh would have known what was being done here. He knew well enough from war the peculiar smell of seared human flesh. He knew that
the meat over the fire had been brought from the battleground, where it lay in such profusion.