Panther in the Sky Read Online Free

generation somehow through this cord. So the cord was powerful and good medicine. Now he passed the bag back and forth through the smoke of the campfire, praying. After a while he put the bag away. He glanced toward the shelter and thought with tenderness of what his wife and daughter were sharing in that dim place. The girl herself would someday have to suffer this same pain, before many years, he knew, because she would be beautiful like her mother, and her man would want to be upon her often. Hard Striker wondered who that man would be. He felt time moving, going around. He remembered when his daughter had been born. Now she was old enough to help at another child’s birth. And before many years she would be bearing. She was called Sky Watcher, because she had seemed to be staring hard at the sky when she first opened her eyes. The chief, remembering that, looked up at the starry sky through the still-leafless trees. It was good to have a clear look at the stars and to be in the quiet of the woods instead of in a town at the time of a birth, because the
unsoma
were clearer and more true when the world was quiet. For this reason Hard Striker liked to build a birth shelter away from the smoke and noise of towns for his wife when she bore children. The
unsoma
were the name-signs that came at the time of a child’s birth or in the ten days following it. The
unsoma
were brought by the Messenger Spirits, and one had to be alert to detect them and not catch a wrong sign. It was necessary to be open to the signs no matter what else was on one’s mind, and there was a great deal now on Hard Striker’s mind.
    When Turtle Mother had begun having the pains of birth, the family had been on the trace to the main Shawnee town of Chillicothe, on the Miami-se-pe. Cornstalk, the nation’s principal chief, had called for a council of all the Shawnee septs to be held there, to talk about the problem of white men.
    As chief of the Kispoko, or warrior, sept, Hard Striker would be a most important member of the council. Though he was known throughout the nation as a fair and far-seeing man, and his opinions weighed heavily even on matters that had nothing to do with war, this council was sure to have much discussion of war, because the white people were becoming very troublesome. For years they had crowded the Shawnees off their lands farther east, until the nation had congregated here in the O-hi-o lands above the great Speh-leh-weh-se-pe, the Beautiful River—the O-hi-o-se-pe, as it was called by most peoples. On the otherside of the Beautiful River lay the Sacred Hunting Ground of Kain-tuck-ee, where all tribes could hunt but none could live, because it was a land occupied by the ghosts of a giant race, whom the tribes had massacred there hundreds of years before. The Algonquian nations all hunted there, but primarily the Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. This had been the way of Kain-tuck-ee through many ages. Kain-tuck-ee was a sacred and bountiful and lonely land; because it was empty of people, it was full of game.
    But now an evil thing was being done about Kain-tuck-ee. White men were counciling with the Iroquois, ancient enemies of the Shawnees, trying to buy Kain-tuck-ee from them. The Iroquois neither lived nor hunted in Kain-tuck-ee and thus had nothing to lose by selling that land to the white men, as the white men in their cunning well knew. The whites were also trying to buy parts of Kain-tuck-ee from the Cherokees, who lived southeast of it. If the white men tried to settle in the Sacred Hunting Ground, surely there soon would be war with them. Already white hunters and settlers were intruding on Shawnee lands near the head of the Beautiful River, despite treaties that were supposed to keep them on the other side of the mountains.
    And so the matter of the council was very much on Hard Striker’s mind. But for this moment, he was trying to concentrate upon the important thing that was happening here in the circle of his