Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom

in council with our great chief Cornstalk, I will tell him this, and I hope that I may tell him that all my warriors are with me!
Neweh-canateh-pah Weshemoneto!”
    The hundreds of voices of the Kispoko men responded in a roar: “Ho! The Great Good Spirit favors our People!”
    Tecumseh had quailed, listening to his father’s words. Now a fearful excitement crowded up in his breast, for though he knew little of war, he was old enough to understand that there would soon be a great disruption of all things he knew.
    H ARD S TRIKER WAS SURE THAT HE HAD SWAYED MOST OF HIS warriors to back him for war in the great council with Cornstalk. But that night his wife was looking at him with narrowed and cunning eyes, and he suddenly realized that his hardest battle of persuasion might still be ahead of him. As his wife, Turtle Mother was the Kispoko women’s chief, and the women’s chief was the peace chief. If the women of the sept decided against war, they had many ways of influencing the men, both in open council and by private persuasion. If Turtle Mother wanted no war against the white men, she could set the women in motion to change the men’s minds. So Hard Striker decided to watch her closely and see which way she was leaning.
    When she put the pot of succotash before him and knelt across from him, he shut his eyes and thanked Weshemoneto for the good world he had given them to live in, then prayed to Kokomthena with thanks for the corn and beans she had created. Then he smiled at his wife across the fire and reached with his hornspoon into the pot. She smiled sweetly back at him and filled her spoon also.
    He nibbled some of the corn from the edge of his spoon, saying, “Mmmmm.
Mmmm!”
Chiksika and Star Watcher and Tecumseh filled their spoons and began eating, watching their parents, aware of some wordless tension between them. The triplets were already asleep under a blanket on the bed at the end of the room. Loud Noise had been a good, quiet child for a change that evening, and the household of the chief was calm and pleasant.
    “How good this food is,” he said to his wife.
    “How good it is to be all together here and in good health, all our family safe,” said Turtle Mother. “May nothing ever harm this family or take any of us from the others.”
    Hard Striker stopped chewing for a moment, then resumed. He knew what she meant by that. He swallowed and said:
    “May no bad people ever drive us from this bountiful and sacred land.”
    Turtle Mother stopped chewing for a moment, then resumed. She knew what he meant by that. She swallowed and said:
    “May we have peace. For, as our great chief Cornstalk has told us, if we anger bad men, they will bring armies into this bountiful and sacred land, and make us suffer.”
    Hard Striker’s eyes flashed. But then he smiled at her again and blew on his succotash to cool it. He said, “If a child kicked this pot of food into the fire, and then did excrement in your bed, and you petted him and asked him to be nicer, do you think he would be nicer, and do that no more?”
    “Mat-tah,
no,” she said.
    “The Long Knives,” he said, “have done that to the Wapatomica towns. If we go to them at a treaty and pet them and ask them to be nicer, they will smile behind their hands to each other and then come into this valley to throw our food in the fire and do excrement on the graves of our ancestors. My wife, they must be punished for what they did, and stopped from coming here. The whitefaces must bleed now in the east, or we will bleed and weep all the way to the sunset.”
    Tecumseh shivered at what these quiet words made him see in his mind. He could remember, as in a dream memory, red blood on white skin. He did not realize that his father and mother were arguing. He presumed that they were always of one mind. Chiksika and Star Watcher knew they were arguing and refrained from saying anything.
    Turtle Mother’s face was now like a mask. But through herglittering eyes