Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom

woodsmoke stung the eyes. Bandaged warriors were walking or riding through the streets. Some were displaying the fresh scalps that hung on their rifles and lances, but their faces were grim. Tecumseh led his little brother Loud Noise and trudged through this forlorn scene, scarcely seeing it, his soul still overpowered by the sight and sound of his mother’s grief. He could not understand why his father did not come home and make her smile.
    Later during that strange and terrible day, Tecumseh slipped away from his sister and went toward his home and stood a little way off and looked at the house and listened to his mother’s wailing voice, his whole body shaking with the agonies he felt. Over the doorway of the house now hung a white mourning cloth. He looked at the white cloth and remembered how she had looked: her face hidden in her black hair, her hands tearing open her garment and spreading ashes and dirt on her bosom.
    Chiksika had much to explain to the family. He sat with them in their aunt’s lodge, and while Star Watcher took care of thethree little brothers and listened in the shadows beyond the fire, her eyes glinting with tears, Chiksika said:
    “A great war chief is honored by being buried close to the battlefield where he dies. So our father was buried down there, by the Beautiful River.
    “We painted his face black. We put him in a grave in the ground, with bark around him. We sprinkled in the sacred tobacco from the four sides of the grave. He lies with his head toward the setting sun. In the grave there is no stone or metal, as those can strike a fire in the grave. There is a hole in the bark in the end of the grave so his spirit can pass through. That is how our father is buried, and now you can see it in your mind, and know where he is.
    “We came back across the river on the rafts and in the canoes, in the dark after a whole day of battle. We did not win. More whiteface soldiers were coming down, and we did not have enough gunpowder left, and so Cornstalk saw that we could not win in that place. Oh, we had many scalps. Twenty of our people died, but four or five times that many of the soldiers we killed, and surely two hundred of them we wounded. They lay everywhere in the woods crying in their pain. Yes, we did them much more harm. But we did not win. No. We came back across the river with our dead ones and all who were hurt. And then our allies, the Wyandots, the Delawares, and the Mingos who were with us, they chose to go back to their villages rather than fight another battle against the Long Knives.
    “When those allies rode away, there came a darkness over the face of Cornstalk. He did not call them cowards, for they had fought well the whole day. But when they turned to ride the trails to their own homes, they could not look at his eyes.
    “And we buried our dead then, and followed Cornstalk home. All the way there was a thundercloud upon his face, for he had advised us not to go to war, and he had led us only because we had wanted to go. He will call a council of all the nation soon, and from that we will learn whether to go to war again or go ask the white chief for peace and mercy. Do you hear all this, Tecumseh?”
    The boy nodded. He was listening and understanding as well as he could, but the spirits were whirling his head around and making him see things. He was seeing his father in the ground encased in the bark of trees, with his face blackened and his head toward the sunset. He was seeing the warriors who had come to the village with terrible wounds. Some of them had been broughthome on litters because they could not walk. Some, like Chiksika and Stands Firm, had come limping. One had walked in without one of his eyes and another without one of his hands.
    And Tecumseh kept seeing his mother and hearing her shrieks. Always she had been calm and happy and clean. Now she had become something else, something as unsettling as the wounded men, because her husband had not come home.