Panther in the Sky (6 page)

Still the days and nights passed and the seasons turned.

His bones were growing straight in the straight cradleboard. Constrained in it much of every day, his limbs and backbone and the back of his head aligned by its straight wooden back, he was unconsciously being molded into that erect posture that characterized the Shawnees and made them seem an unusually proud and handsome people. Chiksika, now in his thirteenth year, was nearly as tall and straight as his father the chief, whom he emulated in every way. Chiksika and Hard Striker were often gone for many days at a time in the winter, gone together with their horses and guns and bows, just the two of them or with other men of the town, to hunt up or down the river and in meadow-lands to the west and south for meat and hides, leaving Turtle Mother and Star Watcher and the baby in Kispoko Town. Sometimes during their absences there would be howling, shrieking blizzards, and the snow and cold winds would force their way into the bark house. It would be hard to keep the fire alive, and the smoke would blow back down through the smokehole, filling the house, stinging their eyes, and making their throats hurt. During such times there might be much discomfort and distress, the mother and daughter huddling together in robes, trying to keep the baby warm, and they would murmur anxiously to each other about the safety of Hard Striker and Chiksika, who were living out in it somewhere without even a
wigewa.
The baby could feel their distress as well as he could feel the cold and the smoke, and he would cry a great deal then, his little voice muffled by the robes and the shriek and moan of the snowy gale outside. In this first winter of his life there were several weeks of such white and screaming weather, and then weeks when the wind would stop blowing and the stars would come out, but the still air would be so cold that trees would crack and the snow on the ground would crunch loudly when people walked by outside. The hunters found little during these times or could not travel back to Kispoko Town because of the cold, and some days there was no food anywhere in the whole town, and then dogs and old horses would be killed and divided. Several old people and some children died from the cold and hunger and from sickness brought on by the cold. It was not uncommon in the lives of the Shawnee to suffer
like this in midwinter. Some of the people lacked fingers and toes they had lost by freezing in winters past, and there was danger in going outside one’s lodge even to gather wood for the fires.

Sometimes this winter there was nothing for Turtle Mother and Star Watcher to eat for days. This they could bear because they understood and knew it would end eventually, but when a mother has had no nourishment for a long time, she cannot explain to her baby why her milk is not nourishing and why his stomach hurts and he never has the good sleepiness. And he cries.

But sooner or later a hunting party would return over the snowy meadow trail, wrapped to their ears in blankets and hides, their horses snorting frost, and these hunters would raise their cold-stiffened arms and cry a halloo to the village. Venison and bear and fowl, frozen rock hard, would be unloaded from the shivering horses and would be given not just to those hunters’ own families but to whoever was most weakened by hunger in the tribe. If there were five hundred hungry people in the town and one carcass, somehow it would be managed so that every person would receive either a sip of meat broth or a shred of flesh.

But sometimes a hunting party would come in with nothing, nearly dead from exposure, and if they came when the famine was most dire, there might be at most a hunter’s lame, scrawny horse to butcher, and the people would relish a taste of meat, even though it was bad meat, and then with it stuttering and gurgling in their bellies they could smile and hope for another day, for another and luckier hunting party to ride in, for their own husbands and fathers and brothers to arrive, for a warm wind to melt the snow and ice, or for some miracle from Weshemoneto: an elk getting trapped in broken ice in nearby Scippo Creek or the discovery of a part of a beaver carcass unfinished by wolves.

Then at last Hard Striker, Chiksika, and their hunters rode in across the twilit snow, yelling happily for help to unload and distribute the huge, hide-wrapped bundles of buffalo and elk and venison under which their horses were staggering in the deep snow. Soon, then, Hard Striker’s lodge was cozy with the heat from the cookfire and full of the delicious aroma and the flare and sizzle of roasting fat meat and the laughter and the familiar voices, happy, singing, tale telling. The baby was fed broth from a horn spoon and some warm marrow, strange tastes that caused him to look astonished and make serious faces, but then his stomach at last was content, and he went to sleep warmed by his parents’ bodies in their bed. And through the bark walls came the
laughter and pleasant voices of the other people of the village who also had been fed.

And so the days and nights passed, and the spring came again. And the baby born under the shooting star, whom Change-of-Feathers had decided was destined to be a war chief of unusual courage and vision, passed from his first year into his second, and then similarly into his third, for it was a brief time of peace, and in times of peace the world rolls smoothly through its rounds, allowing its children to learn and play and become what they may.

T
HIS TIME THERE WAS NO FLYING STAR OVER HER CHILDBED
, but once again Turtle Mother’s labors were to produce a birth that the Shawnees would never forget. She was becoming a legend among mothers.

This time, her daughter was not present to soothe her and help her. Star Watcher had just come to the age to be a woman, and the moon had caused her blood to flow down for the first time, frightening her. Turtle Mother, already starting to labor, had explained it all to her and told her to put certain of her belongings into a bundle and go to the lodge at the end of town where each woman had to go when this was happening to her, whether it was her first time or she had been doing it for years. When the blood was coming down, they were not supposed to be touched or smelled, or even seen, her mother told her, except by other women who were bleeding, too. Hearing this, Star Watcher had looked afraid and ashamed. She already knew of the women’s lodge, of course; other girls and women had told her about it, and even her own mother had gone away there regularly during the times when she was not pregnant. But now that it was her own time, Star Watcher suddenly had felt herself to be loathsome. There was a boy in the town, a fine Chalagawtha boy named
Wasegoboah, or Stands Firm, who played eyes with her. “Will Stands Firm know,” she had asked her mother, “that I am in the moon lodge? What will he think of me?”

And so Turtle Mother had had to pause in her labor and reassure her daughter. Most girls were taught about the blood moon by their grandmothers, not by their own mothers. But Star Watcher’s grandmothers were dead in the south lands, so now Turtle Mother had to tell her: “There is really no evil in the bleeding time. It only means that your body is old enough to make itself ready to bear children. Men want us to go apart at these times because men cannot understand some things. They are troubled because they smell something. A man fears and hates what he does not understand. He believes game will smell the blood on him, and flee. He believes that if a woman in her moon steps over him, he will become weak. If a man is going to war and his wife has her moon, his war party may be called back.” She chuckled, then groaned and grew tense, then relaxed, and smiled again.

“Sometimes, women have pretended to have their moon, in order to save their husbands from going to war. That is clever, but it is bad because it deceives the People. There is great medicine in the moons, my daughter, but it is not all medicine. There are many ways a woman can fool a man, by knowing things he does not know. But some such fooling is not right.”

Star Watcher, even in her anxiety, had listened hard to understand all this, and she had tried to understand it in terms of Stands Firm. As if knowing this, her mother had said then:

“If Stands Firm learns that you are away to the women’s lodge, then he will like you even more. He will like you in more ways. He will not be able to help himself.…”

She had paused again and held herself tense for a while as a pain passed through. Then, after a while, regaining her breath, she had smiled a sly smile at her daughter and said to her almost in a whisper:

“Men only
think
they are in control of things. Woman guides man’s path more than he would ever believe. But a woman who is wise will always let him believe he guides his own path. A woman who brags that she directs him, she makes him very mad. And he will send her apart from him just as if she were in her blood moon.” Turtle Mother’s eyes had glittered with the fun of sharing this great secret, even in her time of strain.

The girl, as mystified by all these strange new confidences as she was by the aches and the moist heat and the tickling sensations
in her loins, had looked intently into her mother’s eyes and asked: “How does one come to know these secrets?”

“Where does knowing come from?” Turtle Mother had said. “The secrets are being spoken in your belly now. Is not the closest of the spirits Our Grandmother, Kokomthena, our Creator? And is it not said in Our Grandmother’s very first law that we must be apart from others when we are in our blood moon? Why then do you think this is? Our Grandmother understands men’s minds, for did she not create them?

“Daughter, listen: Do not dread to go to the women’s lodge. You will be surprised. It is a very
good
place. Many such truths as I have just told you about men and women can be learned there. Listen to the women there as they talk. You will have a good time there, though of course this is a secret that men do not know. So we let them think as they like. Listen. Here is a good thing they do not even think of. For those five days a woman enjoys rest from the work of her home! Ha! Now you smile!”

“When I come back,” the girl had said, rubbing her cheek against her mother’s, “there will be another little brother or sister that I can hold.”

“Yes, my daughter. Another one. But maybe not so little.” She had become aware that she was carrying much baby this time.

And then after the girl had walked away in the snow to the women’s lodge with her little bundle of belongings, and the sun had become red in the treetops in the west, Turtle Mother’s pains had quickened and grown stronger, and the midwives had come in to prepare her. There were only women in the house now. Her husband, Hard Striker, and son Chiksika were away hunting. Their hunting trips were anxious times now, for the white men were more and more at large in Kain-tuck-ee, and there had been fights with them. This time her husband and his hunters had been gone for more than a week.

Now that Star Watcher could not be here to take care of little Tecumseh during the childbirth, the boy had been put in the care of relatives.

After it started, it began to seem to Turtle Mother that this birth would not be as hard as the others, even though her belly was very heavy. The child emerged soon. It was a boy, not unusually large. But strangely, the pain was still coming down.

And suddenly one of the midwives exclaimed, “Hai! Another one comes!”

Immediately there was an unusual excitement in the
wigewa,
for twins were very rare among the Shawnee.

This boy was almost exactly like the first. Turtle Mother squatted, looking at the two slick little black-haired squirmers before her and thinking for the first time in her life how good it was that a woman had two breasts.

But the pain had not stopped, and she feared that somehow she had been hurt inside by her double burden. She was suddenly very much afraid, afraid that she would die from a hurt inside, while her husband and sons and her daughter were gone from the
wigewa,
that she would die and leave these twins newborn.

And then as the midwives were preparing to take the afterbirths, one cried out that there was another head. This was beyond belief. Turtle Mother swayed, wild-eyed and frightened, her body pushing as if she must get rid of this unheard-of thing. One of the midwives nearly fainted. They were almost too disconcerted to finish their work but fumbled with the tangle of slippery cords, and in the wet mess, and finally pulled down a cramped, wrinkled, dark runt of a baby, who began squalling at once in a voice big enough for all three. His harsh, terrible wail could be heard for a great distance around the
wigewa,
and people came out into the snow with bemused expressions and looked toward Hard Striker’s lodge. They were still standing there when one of the midwives rushed out to fetch the Kispoko medicine man.

For never in the memory of any living person had a woman delivered three babies at once in a Shawnee town.

W
HEN
H
ARD
S
TRIKER RODE IN WITH HIS HUNTERS TWO DAYS
later, the runt of the newborn litter was still howling. He had scarcely stopped since the moment of his birth. He would scream until his contorted little face was engorged. “Only when the nipple is in his mouth,” Turtle Mother groaned, “does he cease.”

“What did you say?” Hard Striker asked. He was stunned by the news of the three babies at once, and he could not hear her words over the screaming of the runt.

She put her nipple in the runt’s mouth and then repeated in the wonderful silence, “Only when he eats does he quit shrieking. And even now, listen to him complain.” The baby growled and mumbled angrily as he sucked. Turtle Mother looked haggard from loss of sleep, and so did the neighbors who had come to greet their chief and to see what he would do about this poor unhappy little monster.

Hard Striker turned toward the doorway and asked the neighbors hovering there if they would like to go home to their own
wigewas
for a while so he could examine his new sons. And he
exclaimed: “Think of it! Three of them! Ha! Think of it! I could start a new tribe!”