Bobcat

CHAPTER 1

The scalp takers were chasing him, and they were close behind.

Get him!

He ran with his sister’s death scream still echoing in his ears.

He pushed directly into his clan’s cornfield for cover, ducking low and drawing his hunting knife. Once well into the field, he glanced back to make sure he’d left a plain trail of bent stalks, by crashing like a black bear through the late summer crop as he ran.

On they came, just a few seconds behind, three bearded men running headlong through the forest of corn with their heavy leather boots pounding the ground.

One found his broken trail. He went this way! and the three hunters slowed to an alert jog, moving ahead one behind another with their long guns up and cocked, looking just above and across the yellow-fringed crop for him.

Near the middle of the field, they saw his feathered head pop up straight ahead, to look back at them wide-eyed like a deer.

The lead man stopped, aimed, and quick fired his musket, causing the ball to pass high between the two feathers atop the indian’s head. Damn!

Then the young human was gone.

Wait for a good shot! one yelled in English as the two men with loaded muskets pushed past the shooter, who hesitated, and then followed without reloading.

Again the Quapaw stayed low and out of sight, pushing between the crowded stalks before he stopped and turned, cat quiet, to slip carefully back behind two leafy rows and kneel down to hide. He pulled the two white-tipped feathers from his hair, while remembering a war leader’s words. We’re not going to fight them. We’re going to kill them.

He wanted them dead—one and all.

Holding the knife, tip up, he gathered himself and just after the noisy threesome passed by, he stood up and stepped quickly to catch the last man from behind. In one motion, he wrapped his left arm around the killer’s face, pulled the man’s head abruptly back, and sliced the big knife deep across the soft throat, carving it almost apart.

The remaining two hunters kept pushing ahead through the leafy stalks, searching for him.

After pinning the twitching body to silence on the ground for a few seconds, and taking the short gun from the man’s belt, he quickly moved a few feet away to duck down low again and disappear into the leafy stalks. Cocking the handgun in his right hand and holding the red, wet hunting knife ready in his left, he waited.

In a minute, he heard the two men returning. Quiet now.

They padded just past him and discovered their dead friend.

Here’s Paul! the leader whispered loudly, stopping.

As the man behind looked around his partner to see the body, the Quapaw sprang up almost beside him, pushed the handgun against his ribcage, and fired a lead ball through his chest, then immediately dropped the gun. In one more stride, he was well inside the desperate swing of the last man’s gun barrel and stabbing hard up into his enemy’s chest with the long knife.

The man’s musket fired in a finger’s twitch, low into the corn.

The Quapaw held the killer up to look into his fading eyes, carefully slicing the blade around inside the squirming and tipy-toeing man. Surprise registered in the white man’s eyes at seeing the indian’s bright, blue eyes. You’re not—! Bobcat interrupted and spoke the English words, I am Bobcat. You die for murdering my family. A few long moments later, he stood back to let the loose weight drop. He pulled the big knife free.

The indian cautiously kneeled down, to look and listen.

The man he’d shot through the lungs was facing him lying on the ground a few feet away: surprise, horror, and shock were the last fleeting shadows across his pale face. No sound. No other movement followed.

After waiting a few minutes, the young brave collected the men’s knives, a blue wool shirt, and a wide brimmed felt hat from the bodies. Staying low and quiet between the rows, he trotted away to prepare.

He didn’t take the muskets or the short guns. He knew he would need silence in his upcoming hunt.

Bobcat had gone net fishing the afternoon his family was massacred. That’s what saved him.

He never saw the nine-man trading party paddle the three long canoes up the river to the plank dock of his clan’s neat park-like compound, ringing tiny bells, and flying colorful banners. The white men unloaded two big packages, and that lured everyone, weavers, potters, sewers, and farmers of the four families, away from their daily chores and into the open courtyard nearby.

Each of the thirty-four smiling adults of his clan had gathered food or drink to offer to the visitors as a welcome, as the traders returned to their canoes for more goods. Once there, the River Floaters calmly picked up their long guns, cocked them, turned suddenly around, and fired point blank back at the wide-eyed crowd.

A split second later, as the closest native men leapt to kill the shooters, the thunder sounded again when thirty muskets were fired from a brazen ambush spot not fifty yards away along the brush-lined riverbank, and most of the remaining taller men and women died where they stood.

Neither did he hear the dying parents’ screams of rage nor the children’s cries of fear during the overpowering charge of the killers to chase down and finish off the families with knives and clubs.

What Bobcat saw from over a mile up river was a thin black column of smoke rising over the tree tops and blowing east, and he knew a longhouse or thatched shed at home was burning.

The tall, young man dropped his fishnet and spear and gracefully mounted his pony with the swing of his leg, urging her into a gallop so he could help fight the flames. They raced for home on the cart trail between the tree-lined Arkansas River and the small cultivated fields of corn, beans, and squash grown by his family.

The horse was at a full run when Bobcat first saw the twisted and bloodied men’s bodies laying on the canoe beach and loading docks. His heart jumped as he realized there had been a battle, and he quickly drew his only weapon, a fourteen-inch, French-made hunting knife and slowed his mount to a canter. In surprise and disbelief, he turned the excited prancing mare past them and between the neat thatched longhouses into the open courtyard, where he pulled her to an excited stop among the bloody and scattered bodies of the men, women, and children of the rest of his clan. Oh no!

He leaped to the ground, hopefully checking the nearest people for life: his aunt Little Fox, his Sky Spirit grandmother, the hunter Red Sky, and his cousin Blue Man. He stopped and listened closely, but no breath could be heard, no moan or whimper of pain. All the colorful and lively Spirit’s of the people of his clan were gone. Their heavy bodies were limp and empty.

Then he saw the bright, blue ribbon he had given to his mother, Walks Soft, and a mournful ‘Nnooo!’ escaped his throat. He stepped over Running Man and kneeled on the blood-soaked earth beside her and pulled her loose body to his chest to hug her. In disbelief, he closed her terrified eyes and kissed her cool cheek. He kissed her fingers and hands in farewell.

They were all dead. And all were scalped.

Looking back at the dock, he noticed the new trade canoes, and that several of his uncles lying there had been shot, with knives and clubs in their hands. He also counted seven dead strangers near and among them. He noted the strangers were all white skinned and bearded, and that they wore heavy leather boots, wool pants, and loose cotton shirts like the French and American river traders chose.

At that moment, two musket shots echoed far through the forest and alerted him that more enemies were still nearby. He looked up and around. All was strangely quiet close by, except for the crackling of the growing fire in the middle of the row of Sky Spirit lodges. It now completely consumed his uncle’s raised front porch.

Seeing the flames made him look sharply across the compound to the row of Earth Spirit lodges, and his own family’s pole-framed and thatched longhouse. The end door was wide open and two twisted bodies lay beside the firewood pile and seed sacks piled up against the front of it. One was a red-bearded raider with a short gun in his hand and a double-headed tomahawk buried deep in his chest. The other was a gray-headed whiteman who wore buckskin, and he knew it was his grandfather, even as he hoped it wasn’t.

Sadly, he walked over and kneeled down to gently grasp his gray-haired teacher’s shoulder and close the concentrated blue eyes that stared sightless at the enemy. He had been shot twice in the chest. He too had been scalped.

Dread filled Bobcat’s heart as he stood up and carefully walked inside his home to search for his younger sister Mary, but the long room was empty.

His hope spoke out loud, Maybe she got away! And he went back outside with a thought to find her.

There again, he confronted the bloody slaughter of his family. He stopped, steadied himself, and in silence reached down to pull his grandfather’s tomahawk from the raider’s chest. It was a close-in fighting tool, and he wanted it because he felt the need to kill each of the remaining murderers with his own hands.

A wild rage began to well up deep inside him, and he let it build, until he wanted to run into the forest to hunt the killers, screaming and yelling oaths. But he was Quapaw, so he sat down abruptly on the bench in front of his home to calm himself and think, while the surviving village dogs came to sit, looking nervously around him, keeping quiet and waiting.

All tribes were used to quick raids by young men, sneaking bravely into another tribe’s village to see girls, steal what they could, or even kidnap young children for their families, like the wild Osage or Chippewa often did and like the men of his own tribe did too. But this was something he had never seen. This was the kind of slaughter that his teacher and grandfather, Robert McConner, had told fireside horror stories about: stories about the elders of the far away white nation, placing cash bounties on native scalps, and then claiming the dead native’s farms and possessions as abandoned so they could be made more useful.

For a handful of generations now, all those white men living far to the east had not seemed important to the many tribes settled in the French territory west of the Mississippi River, for there were so few of them, and the few they met carried valuable trade goods. Most of the local tribes accepted all traders and had used their tools and knowledge for the welfare of all the People. The Quapaw leaders chose to learn things from the French and be successful modern year-round farmers, hunters, craftsmen, and traders. Meaning, they were able to store food year around. With over four hundred warriors, they were also a large nation.

Now it was the year 1804, almost two hundred years had gone by and all tribes living in fixed settlements traded furs for factory goods and tools with the French, English, and Spanish to make their families day-to-day lives easier. Now some native men even hunted furs just to trade, always giving the extra meat to needy families. Some local families now prayed to a cross. Some of the people could read.

But Quapaw didn’t kill people just to rob them. No tribe did. If the men had feuds they killed for revenge, sometimes leading to tribal war, but they never murdered women or children. They are the future.

The sun was setting orange on the horizon when Bobcat was stirred again from thinking. He heard some of the returning raiders, laughing and calling out to each other, as he sat staring at his uncle’s longhouse burning in the square. He decided to wait for all of the killers to return and set up their camp, and see what he could do. He needed to know how many there were.

It was then, as he was getting up to leave that he heard his sister’s screams, and saw Mary dragged out of her hiding place on the other side of the courtyard by four men. Each man was concentrating on holding either an arm or a leg because she was fighting so very hard. They forced her down, but she somehow broke loose and grabbed hold of one man’s knife, and another quickly drew his own blade and rapidly stabbed into her body again and again and again. She screamed once more…

Bobcat immediately raised the heavy tomahawk over his head and raced silently up to the killers from behind, as the murderer himself leaned over his three kneeling friends, watching one lift her long black hair… Too bad she’s dead. But her hair is worth a week’s wages!

Thwaack! The big blade cut deep through the very top of the man’s skull, driving him to the ground, which in turn jerked the stuck tomahawk from Bobcat’s hands. So he ran into the cornfield.

At full dusk an hour later, in the quiet riverside hiding place that only young boys knew about, he painted his face, arms, and chest and hummed and chanted the ancient song of war of his people. He lit his pipe and took Earth smoke into his body and then exhaled it to share it with the Spirits of the Sky. He sat cross-legged on the bare ground and cleansed his mind of all thoughts except preparing himself to meet his own death, so he could fight to his end without thinking about dying. He asked the most sacred Spirit, Wah-Kon-Tah, the energy and force that permeates everything and keeps all life in balance, to help him slay the murderers of his clan. He thought his grandfather’s Christian God would forgive him.

Before the moon rose in the clear black night to light the way, he walked the familiar path to the tall cottonwoods clustered near the thieves and bounty hunter’s camp and climbed a tree to see them. The killers had all gathered together.

He was sure he felt the nearness of the ghosts of his family, looking over his shoulders. They were waiting on the edge of eternity for revenge.

Slowly, the thin moon rose above the trees and cast its light. The camp was only a stone’s throw away from Bobcat, out in the open with three big fires lighting its center. The painted warrior listened to the raiders excited stories about the attack, rapes, a live scalping, and looting while watching calmly from the high tree limb and hating them.

For most of the next hour, the men came and went freely to the canoes, carrying supplies to the river for water or walking into the forest for wood. But soon they all settled down.

Bobcat counted seventeen men still alive, sitting in that camp, talking, eating, and drinking. There was also a row of ten injured men, laying side by side, being treated for wounds. Twelve of the raiders had died in the attack, including the four he killed. Their bodies were already wrapped for travel and put in the canoes with his family’s stolen furs and tradable goods.

He needed to attack before they got into those canoes.

As he listened, he pieced together that they were traders and adventurers from up around the Ohio territories, only a long two days paddle on the river, and it was just a thing they all decided to do. They had chosen to camp on the Big Muddy’s west bank, in the French occupied Indian Territory, and the next day they moved up the wide southern mouth and mud flats of the Arkansas River to hunt meat, when they saw his small clan’s isolated compound.

They noticed with surprise that most of the men of his village neither carried nor kept fighting weapons close at hand. Some didn’t even carry knives. They were all modern crop farmers or tradesmen who worked with their hands and with European tools, not primarily hunters. Apparently few bears or big cats raided their family’s compound these days, and maybe, they hadn’t waged war for years.

Many of the men smiled, noticing that the tanned village women this warm summer were wearing short French silk blouses and cotton skirts. They were tall and beautiful.

The raiders planned an ambush and attack to rob the whole village. Yes, they would collect the scalps too, for cash money, and take anything else they wanted from these unknown people. Like bear, beaver, and puma skins, the scalps of natives were paid on a bounty system by many state governments. As a result, many native families living in rich farming valleys went missing, and the land was opened. When they were finished here, their plans were to continue paddling south before sunset toward the French port of New Orleans to sell and trade their newly found riches, but now they were running late and it was dark. They would have to stay the night in Indian country.

He knew they all felt nervous, because they kept reassuring each other about how the indians of the western tribes wouldn’t attack at night for fear of dying at night. If one of these heathens is killed at night, they believe the ‘dark spirit’ will enter his body, and he will wander deaf, blind, and alone forever. And this was true.

Nevertheless, there was a four-man guard posted in the shadows around the camp’s perimeter. They were instructed to keep the fires kindled and to wake the camp early so they could all silently escape in the canoes by paddling away in the very first of the predawn light.

The war-painted warrior named Bobcat had mixed blood and mixed cultures, American and Quapaw. Some cousins called him ‘Three Names’ because his American grandfather usually called him ‘Jake,’ and all the girls called him Blue Eyes. The Jake McConner part of Bobcat didn’t believe in the dark spirit. He’d been raised part Christian through long conversations with his grandfather, along with his sister Mary and his many part-French cousins in the next village, so he wasn’t concerned about dying at night.

He climbed down to the ground and tied his long black hair back, put on the blue wool shirt, and wore the wide-brimmed hat tilted low over his painted face for a disguise. He checked each of the razor edges on his steel hunting knives, then slid one into the sheath on his belt, one into the leggings of his tall moccasin, and held one ready in his hand against his leg.

With the thin moon high in the night sky and shadows small, he walked casually closer to the circle of light. He was quiet enough to walk within a dozen feet of the startled guard waiting there, who challenged the familiar hat and coat, Hey! Who’s that?

He responded in clear English, Don’t get excited. It’s just me. I needed to make water. And he walked out of the dark and right up to the shadowy guard, who stepped up to meet him.

The guard finally saw his stripped face under the hat’s brim. What’s that for?

In an instant of forward arm movement, Bobcat stuck the hand knife straight into the man’s heart. The startled man died in his arms.

The three other tired guards were easy to kill also. Each time he walked straight across the camp, putting the firelight at his back, and up to a guard, like a white man would, smiling friendly, and waving an empty hand to say, Howdy mate in perfect English.

Two of the three said, Howdy back.

No small sound came with their deaths.

The tired Americans had spaced their bedrolls out side-by-side, a few feet apart around the three crackling fires and had covered up and gone to sleep with their weapons beside them. Their fight with the peaceful-looking Quapaw, known as the ‘Downstream People’ by many tribes, had been unexpectedly fierce with the few remaining wounded farmers and their women attacking back violently before they died. This surprised the overconfident invaders and cost them hours of sunlight and some good men, including their leader. Now the rest wanted to paddle away as soon as it was light enough to safely navigate the wide river, with its many mud flats and sunken tree stumps.

With no guards to feed the fires, the camp light soon dimmed low, and while a night’s breeze was rustling the leaves and the tall grass, a tall shadow of a man dressed in a familiar coat and hat walked calmly into the camp. For twenty minutes, the painted warrior stepped carefully over and around one sleeping man to another sleeping man, and fire to fire like a punching and slashing shadow, killing silently the remaining murderers of his family, including the wounded.

Dawn found Bobcat sitting in the camp facing east as was traditional to welcome the birth of each new day, the coat and hat laid out beside him, his body swaying while he softly hummed.

One hundred and forty-one heavily armed and grim-faced Quapaw family men brought from the three villages upriver stood, respectfully around the outside of the camp’s perimeter, looking it over. They were painted and tattooed from the war ceremony and ready for battle, but now they carried their bows and arrows, lances and clubs loosely at their sides. Four men held new British smoothbore shotguns.

The war chief, a short, gray-headed elder named Standing Beaver, walked into the camp when Bobcat stood up and nodded at him. The many warriors followed silently, looking slowly around at the ‘sleeping’ men still covered in their blankets and their blood. Some few crossed themselves as Christians and prayed away at the ‘evil Spirits’; while some men took scalps to bury with loved ones in accordance to their traditions, to keep their relative’s spirit company in the long unknown ahead.

All the braves were relatives through blood or family unions. Some were part Spanish or French or American like Bobcat. He had tracked, scouted, and hunted with all of them, and they each greeted him with sad mouths and stood around him as brothers. They all had experience in feuding and killing between tribes and clans. But none like this. There were no memories of one man killing so many, or even trying. All were proud of his vengeance.

Standing Beaver asked in the locally common French, Bobcat, what happened?

In a tired voice, Bobcat replied in the old Quapaw/Sioux language, They murdered my family, so I have killed them all. He looked around and added, I didn’t want them to get away.

An Earth Spirit elder spoke, Bobcat, we will sing you praise and tell your brave story.

Lone Otter warned, Some may have gotten away! They will gather their family hunters, and more of the English talkers will come here from the eastern mountains for revenge.

Gray Cloud of the Sky Spirit lodge shook his fist. We will kill all that come! and a rare ‘yelling to be heard’ discussion began among the normally polite and quiet Quapaw adults. Most of the men felt that no one had gotten away to tell.

A grandfather wearing a plain farmer’s shirt and white field pants raised his hand, a call for quiet, and then spoke to the listening group. We have over five hundred warriors ready to defend our families and our land. We will meet with their leaders and tell them who we are, and end these raids from the east.

The French/Quapaw trader called Little Bear spoke next, The American trader at the post told me his leaders had paid the French Chief gold for this ‘open land’ they call the Louisiana Territory, and soon their people would come to live beside our farms.

A general ‘no’ came from the throats of the men.

Deer Runner, another trader, shook his head. They can’t buy our land from the French. The French don’t own it.

Where did these men come from? We should go there and kill their families!

Lone Otter spoke again, Their relatives may still come to us for their revenge. We can wait.

Standing Bear waved for quiet. We will speak of this at the Elder’s council. Now we must help Bobcat. The big family became quiet.

Bobcat nodded. I’ll bury my family.

He looked across the field, thinking about the many twisted and loved people lying in the courtyard. He looked around at all the men. I don’t want to bring a feud to my people. You are all valuable to me.

He leaned over and picked up the bundle of his family’s scalps, some big and some small, that he had retrieved and then spoke to the elders, After I honor my family, I feel I must leave. It’s time I seek my vision. I need to think.

Standing Beaver stepped close and placed his hand on the shoulder of the young man he knew. We all seek our own way Bobcat, but right now, we will all bury our family.

The elder turned to walk with Bobcat, and the warriors followed. They left the stiffening bodies to nature’s scavengers and walked back to the still and quiet compound with grim faces.

Some men did come back before dark that day to take the long canoes and weapons.

Two of the scalp hunters had escaped. They were the river guides familiar with these western people and they wisely never slept beside the light of a campfire but in some dark shadowed corner outside the camp. They didn’t hear Bobcat during his attack, but they heard the mass of Quapaw warriors surround the camp at dawn. They lay very still and when the many warriors could not seem to take their eyes off the dead men, they began to crawl away from the camp, all the time listening. The killer’s name was Bobcat.

They crawled as quiet as snakes through the mudflats and reeded ponds for more than a mile, and then they stood up and jogged to the big trading post near the Mississippi River. They spoke to the new American government trader there and got a canoe and paddled north, for home and family. They made up their own story to tell, about a murdering Indian named Bobcat.

It took two full days, and great care and ceremony, to bury all the special people. By late afternoon of the first day, hundreds of native relatives and many generations of mixed-blood French, Spanish, and American families came from the neighboring villages and farms to view and touch the empty bodies of their loved ones.

By the second day, they had carefully buried each family member above the floodwaters of spring, high on top of an ancient mound of earth where a thousand years of their ancestors lay. All buried in the ground within the domain of the Earth Spirits, but held up close to the Sky Spirits who wander above the ground.

They then burned to the ground his clan’s village: the long houses, skinning and seed sheds, docks, and outbuildings—everything. Burned it to end bad memories and start fresh tomorrows. Knowing that in a few years time the brush and trees and grass would return to cover this sad place.

In the end, the big family sang songs to the beat of tom-toms, swaying together in blended human harmony.

His friends all asked him, Where will you go? How long will you be gone? And when he considered these questions, he found himself often looking to the western horizon. To the storied wilderness of the rolling grass plains where no white man lived, and of the great white topped