Panther in the Sky Read Online Free Page B

her, and the midwife’s hands were under her, ready to help the baby come out. Turtle Mother yielded everything at last and felt the immense relief, the pricklings and twinges inside. The grimace of pain melted from her face, and with a serene smile she looked down for the first sight of this new life she had made. There were flashing aftershocks of pain still, and sliding, oozy sensations in her loins, and warm smells of blood and slime and excrement coming up, and the midwife lifting and pulling away the gleaming creature, and then the birth sac, and talking in a soft, urgent voice, while Sky Watcher crooned happily and readied a bed of clean hides spread over a cushion of boughs. As Turtle Mother reclined with a long sigh, Sky Watcher helped the midwife clean the slime off the infant. Then they laid the little hot blob of life upon Turtle Mother’s bosom between her swollen breasts. She moved gentle hands over the infant, feeling it in the darkness for any faults. The baby was still on its cord. She explored the little damp groin and said in a breathy whisper, “There is his little
passah-tih.
Go tell your father it is a son.”
    Sky Watcher stooped to go out, then paused and gasped.
    The sky above the stark treetops was suddenly filling with a greenish light; it was like the night lightning on a horizon, except that it was not a flash, but a growing light. “Ai!” she cried, pointing up. Her father and brother were just looking up. And as they gaped at the sky, seeing the stars fade in the strengthening light, something shot over, something like a fire-arrow but much more intense, and yellow-green like the eye of a panther, streaking southward. Though it was silent, it seemed to hiss on the brain, to sizzle over the uplifted eyes.
    Hard Striker and Chiksika had risen by the fire-ring with their mouths open, watching the thing pass beyond the silhouetted branches of the leafless treetops. Turtle Mother where she lay inside the shelter did not see the thing, only the brief, strange glow outside the door.
    For a moment then as the darkness and the stars returned and the warm yellow light of the campfire replaced the cold green light of the sky, nothing was said. The apparition with its tail of stardust stayed in their minds, making them dumb, until Hard Striker at last closed his mouth and drew a slow breath and turned to his son, eyes glittering, and exclaimed:
    “It is the
unsoma!”
His gaze fell upon Sky Watcher poised in the entry of the shelter. “Daughter! You saw it!”
    “Yes! And Father, a son is here!”
    “A son! Ah-i-ee! Oh, what a man this will be, with such a sign as that! Ah!” He raised both hands toward the place where the light had gone, hands trembling with the unspeakable wonder of it.
    Inside the shelter, Turtle Mother placed the baby on the robe beside her and raised herself on an elbow. Now the midwife gave her a strand of boiled sinew, and Turtle Mother looped it around the umbilical cord and tied it tight. Then a hand’s width from the knot she took the tough cord between her front teeth and severed it with a sawing bite, the taste of the fluid in her mouth. The child’s limbs twitched, and a high, pure, quavering wail came forth.
    “Now, sister,” Turtle Mother murmured to the midwife, “when the sun comes up go and bury the sac beyond three creek valleys or more.”
    The midwife gave a sly smile. It was a secret among women, kept from husbands, that there would be a year free from pregnancy for every stream that flowed between the birthplace and the discarded sac. Turtle Mother loved children, but she did not want pain like that again for a long time.
    Sky Watcher came back in and moved to sit in a way so she could hold her mother’s head in her lap. “Mother,” she said, her voice breathy with awe, “it was a green star! A sign!”
    Her mother nodded, her eyes glittering. The infant, lulled by Turtle Mother’s familiar heartbeat, stopped crying. “Now,
wahsiu,”
Turtle Mother