Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom Page B

and thus one was striking and slicing not the empty air, but the vision of the enemy. One can sometimes feel the blade hit flesh, he had said. And if one feels the blow like that, it is a sign that when the real battle is fought, the blow will actually cleave enemy flesh. Therefore one must dance with the utmost exertion, even to the point of exhaustion, with the heart full of fire, in order to make the enemy’s vision appear. To do the war dance with half a heart, Chiksika had said, was to go half-prepared into battle.
    Chiksika now was second in the line of dancers. Before him was Blue Jacket, formerly the white youth who had been whipped in the gauntlet. He was a promising warrior now, as much a Shawnee at heart as Chiksika. They were transported. The war post had become a whiteface soldier in a scarlet coat. Blue Jacket and Chiksika circled close around the war post, war cries tearing their throats; they dodged and spun as they closed upon it. BlueJacket leaped high, and with a lashing blow as quick as the strike of a snake he struck the blade of his tomahawk into the very crown of the red post. Then Chiksika’s blade stuck beside it.
    Outside the circle of firelight, Tecumseh yelped. He had seen blood spurt from the post.

6
O N THE OHIO R IVER
October 10, 1774
    T HERE WAS NO MOON, BUT IN THE STARLIGHT H ARD S TRIKER could see the other war canoes and the rafts moving alongside through the mist on the surface of the great river, every vessel loaded with as many warriors as it could carry without sinking.
    They were now in the middle of the river. Hard Striker was in the prow of a large canoe. The whole sky was brilliant with stars. The water of the Beautiful River gurgled under the bark hull of the canoe.
    As he always did the night before going into battle, Hard Striker looked up to try to see his warrior’s star. Long ago when he was a young man courting Turtle Mother in her Creek village, he had learned from the Creeks their belief that the soul of every warrior was guarded by a particular star. She had pointed out to him which star was his own, and since then, as war chief of the Shawnees, he had lived and fought under one of the two stars that lined up with the Guide Star of the North. Now he had to turn in the canoe and look back over his shoulder to see the star. He looked at it for a moment and then returned his gaze to the river. His hand on the prow of the canoe felt the rub and flow of the water against the hull, as if the canoe were a living thing swimming on the living water. He could feel too the living strength of the eight paddlers whose strokes drove the vessel toward the east shore, closer and closer to the enemy’s camp. Hard Striker now was thinking of the plan of the battle.
    It was to be a battle plan unlike any he had ever followed. It was Cornstalk’s plan, for Cornstalk at last had agreed to lead thetribes against the Long Knife army. So many of his people wanted to fight the white men that Cornstalk had agreed, but with reluctance. Since it was Cornstalk’s war plan and Cornstalk was a brave and intelligent chief, it probably was a good plan, though it was not the red man’s usual way of fighting.
    Usually a war party would make a surprise raid upon a force or a town it could surround and then, if resistance became too great, would withdraw and await a more favorable chance. This time, though, there would be no better chance. The whiteface army camped at the mouth of the Kanawha-se-pe was now about the same size as Cornstalk’s force, ten hundred men. But in a few days it would be three times larger, because the white chief Governor Dunmore was coming down the great river from Fort Pitt with a much bigger army. And so Cornstalk had decided to engage this smaller part of the army before the two parts of the white force could unite. If the attack succeeded, there would be many captured guns and powder horns with which to arm more warriors for war against the other part of the army, which