A Panther Crossing the Sky

by J. R. Spaulding, Jr.

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Another guy, Tony — I’d tell you his last name, but a) we lost contact and I haven’t been able to get his permission, and b) unlike my sister, I’m not related to him so... y’know. Anyway, Tony separated his shoulder as he was dismounting from his horse backstage. Just as his foot was hitting the ground something spooked the horse and it jolted forward a few steps. When it happened, Tony’s hand was still wrapped in the reins. Popped his shoulder right out. One of the Adams — there were two guys named Adam — said he actually heard it, but that it sounded more like a thud than a pop.

At one point in the show’s history they had a cavalry charge during the II-8 battle. Two or three American soldiers would come barreling down the stage left ramp at a dead gallop, ride clear across the stage, through the backstage, and then continue around the pond across the back path. All this amongst the chaos of sixty or more men engaged in hand-to-hand combat. They no longer do the cavalry charge, for safety reasons. Which begs the question, I guess, as to why they did it in the first place.

I can’t answer that, any more than I can explain why people ever thought it was a good idea to smoke. Or why did cars not come equipped with seat belts. Why did we slaughter the Native American tribes, purposely infect them with smallpox, and then celebrate it all with Thanksgiving... or Columbus day. All mysteries to me.

Look, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. The horses, they were well-trained. In fact, they knew their cues better than some of the actors. But trained or not, they were still horses. They required us to have very specific traffic patterns onstage and backstage. We knew when they’d be rolling through, and if you didn’t stay the hell out of the way when they did, you were going to get trampled. Thankfully, I have no stories about that.

Being a backstage manager for that show must’ve been a nightmare, like being an air traffic controller, except the airplanes were thousand-pound animals with attitudes and personalities, and sometimes their own agenda.

All of this was a part of my life a long time ago, when I was a young man. And yet, to this day, I still dream about that place — the mountain, the land, the show itself. The dreams come mostly in the spring, after the weather turns, when you can smell the trees — the buds and the wet bark — right around the time when we would all be arriving for rehearsals.

That place was alive, man. You could feel it beating in the earth beneath your feet: assiskie ki-te-hi. An energy that had been soaked up for centuries, stored away. And if you gave yourself over to it, which many of us did, it was never going to leave you. I’m not the only one who dreams of it all these years later. I know that for a fact.

That land had a way of offering up its past. The place was full of spirits that would sometimes present themselves in the darkness near the edge of your vision. Ghosts: three old women haunted the top of the mountain, and there was an unfriendly presence down at the barn — nothing you could see — but it had been known to push people and even scratch them. Those were places we didn’t go to alone at night.

Countless people over the years — people who never knew each other, who had never spoken to each other, who had never even met — claimed to have heard a woman near the pond weeping and singing over the death of her son. Nobody had ever seen her, but their descriptions of what they heard were eerily similar.

The figure of a warrior, nonothtu, was often seen in the woods offstage right, just a torso shadowy and distant, but proud in the shoulders and watchful in the eye. A mischievous young boy darted and played in the stage-left woods. Curious, though cautious, people would spot him hiding behind bushes.

Occasionally he would follow you from a safe distance until you stepped onto the stage, and then he would just disappear. He waved to my friend, Carrie, on closing night. She thought it was Geddy Lee at first, another actor who was roughly the same age as the boy, but when she turned and saw that Geddy was in front of her, about to go onstage himself, she realized the gift she had been given.

Shelton, the woman who played the role of Tecumepese, Tecumseh’s sister, spoke of an area — a pocket, she called it — on stage right that felt unnaturally cold whenever she passed through it. She never told us the exact location of it, only that it was somewhere between the foot of the ramp and the entrance from the promontory. But she avoided it, apparently, walking around it whenever she could, not just because of the chill it caused her, but out of deference to whatever — or whoever — it was that remained there.

Not everyone witnessed these anomalies. There were plenty who flat-out didn’t believe. And there were also those who laughed at the mention of spirits. They’d say you had to be a little nuts to buy into it all: ki-i-ya metchi-squathay waneshaka. But you could see the wonder behind their eyes, nonetheless.

Then there were those, you knew they’d had some experience — something unexplainable. It was evident not because of what they said, but from the fact that they refused to talk about it at all. My friend Eddie comes to mind. At the hitching posts backstage left, as we were mounting up for the parade of chiefs one night, I know he saw something off in the woods. I could tell: he did a double-take, and his eyes got real wide. But when I asked him, “Hey, what’d you see,” he was too quick to answer. “Nothing,” he said. But it wasn’t nothing, I’m sure of that.

I experienced a lot of cool things on that stage. I did a lot of cool things. I mentioned the highfall, the fighting, the riding. But for all that, my favorite part of the show was the war dance. Oh man, I loved that scene.

It came at the very end of Act One, the big exclamation point before intermission, right after Tecumseh laid out his plan for uniting the tribes and driving the settlers back, east of the Appalachians. We were all fired up.

And then that music would hit. The soundtrack for the show was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and the music for the war dance was fantastic, like something you’d hear in a movie, or an opera. First, the drums: DUM-dum, tum-tum / DUM-dum, tum-tum — followed by a blast of French horns that would all build — the low brass and the percussion — until the trumpets would come in over the top and cut through it all. Man, I wish I could just play it for you, but, y’know, royalties and copyrights and those sorts of things.

The dance started out with us circling a war pole that we’d placed in the middle of the stage, our feet pounding to the beat of the music as we screamed our war cries into the night sky. From within that circle, three “stags” would appear: warriors smeared with white paint down their torso and wearing the antlers of a deer, and we would re-enact a hunt: one cluster of warriors chasing them toward another, and then back until they were cornered and panicked. The music would build, crescendo into a swirling whirlwind as we pulled tighter and tighter around them, closing in for the kill.

Some nights I would get so charged up, I thought I was going to lose my mind. On August 9th, I’m pretty sure I actually did. That was the night I spoke about earlier, at the very beginning: my glowing moment of flight.

I can’t explain how it happened — I can barely explain what happened. And I certainly can’t tell you why it happened to me. I wish I could say that I had tapped into something that night, that I had — for a brief moment... I don’t know; I told you it was hard to explain — that I had crossed into some other time, some other place, or perhaps it was the same place in a different time. But that seems wrong to me. To say that it was me, that I had anything to do with it, seems not just inaccurate but flat-out ignorant. Almost disrespectful, now that I actually hear myself say it. I think the truth is, I didn’t have anything to do with it at all. I think I was just a vessel, chosen for some reason, maybe a conduit. I don’t know. But the fact is, something came to me, some spirit or some force. I’m not sure what to call it. But whatever it was, it came into me and lived within me for the better part of that night. And it happened during that war dance.

Once we killed the stags, the stage would go quiet. The music would drop down to a single drum: DUM-dum-tum-tum, tum-tum-tum-tum / DUM-dum-tum-tum, tum-tum-tum-tum. We would separate into two groups on either side of the war pole, spread out in a semi-circle. That’s when the white wolf would appear — a warrior who had donned the actual pelt of a wolf — loping in, stalking us.

This was the blue-eyed devil, this wolf, the embodiment of every settler who had moved west and stolen tribal lands. Who had encroached upon the Pickaway plains. Who had built their villages and forts along the Little Miami River. Who defiled the sacred hunting grounds of the Kain-tuck-ee by poaching the deer and buffalo: pe-shek-the, metho-tho.

This wolf was both fearsome and glorious all at once, and we despised him and everything he represented. Fear and hatred would rise in us. Some nights, I would become so angry that I would literally see red, like everything was colored through a filter, like the world had been washed in blood.

He moved between us — all to the music — forcing each group farther and farther back, circling our war pole, claiming it as his own. He would slink over to one group, lunge and swipe at them, then the other. And as he did this, each of us would spread our arms — like wings — and circle away, eagles fleeing through flight.

Except on that night, in that moment, it became more than a dance for me. It was transcendent — no: transcendental. When that wolf swiped at me, all the rage, all the fear, the sadness, the upswell of intensity — it all broke forth. Physically, I followed through with the dance. I performed the actions of spreading my arms and flying away, but inside I had suddenly become the thing that, to this point, I had only been imitating. I was no longer alone in my own body, in my own head. I was flying. It was as if my consciousness was buried within the consciousness of another being. I was there, but I was submerged. Like a dream, when you’re doing something but watching yourself do it at the same time. But this was not a dream. Wide awake, my feet on the ground, but my spirit high above. I was fully alive.

And I was flying. The clouds wisped around me, and below me there were treetops — thick forests undulating across the mountains. Oh, the feeling. At first, terror seized me — what the hell was happening to me, where was I — and I almost pulled myself back to the surface. But then a sense of calm, relief... and then joy... washed through me and I just gave in to it: flight. The eagle was my brother in that moment, and together we were tethered in spirit, seamless: two unique beings coalesced into a single interdependent soul.

I don’t remember much of what happened for the entire second act of that show. I know I didn’t speak to anybody backstage — not a word. But onstage, from that point on, the words just poured from me. All Shawnee. Entire phrases and sentences that I had never even learned. As far as I can remember, I had somehow become fluent in the language. And all the while I was doing this I was also watching myself do it from behind my own eyes, if that makes any sense.

You don’t have to believe me, sitting there, now, listening to this. Oh, and don’t think that I don’t know how crazy this all sounds. But I swear to God, I swear upon the life of my children and the death of my father, that this is all true. And not like “based-on-a-true-story” kind of true, but an “I-actually-lived-this” truth.

When the show was over it was like a cord snapped, or was cut, and I was back, alone again with myself. Standing in the woods, offstage, at the top of the stage left ramp, the intensity of the whole experience suddenly came rushing at me all at once. Overwhelmed me. I could feel it down in my core, rising into my chest, and the blood filling my head.

I was so moved, and so incapable of processing it, that I just leaned against a tree for support and sobbed. None of the guys around me knew what was going on — Gabe, Todd, Sean, Tim, none of them. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t offer it up to them. They’d all been on the mountain long enough. They knew to leave me alone.

It wasn’t until later that I would make any sense of what had just happened. My friend Michael and I — Michael Mayhall. He and I were tight, like blood brothers from the minute we met. We were riding the horses back to the barn. A clear night, cloudless, warm, and we were side by side, riding in silence — which was unusual because we were always talking about something. But this night, all you could hear were the crickets in the field and the hooves of the horses crunching along the tightly-packed gravel road. And there were fireflies, dozens and dozens of them, winking in and out.

Michael could tell something was wrong, something was different. He was always good like that, one of the few guys I’ve ever known who was truly attentive to other people’s moods and feelings. So about half way back to the barn he says, very softly, “Hey man, you okay? What’s going on? You seem distant.”

I took a moment. I knew it was going to be hard to speak without all that emotion flooding back into me. But he waited; like I said, he was kind of intuitive like that. Finally, I took a deep breath and prepared to tell him the whole story — this story, the one I just told you — but right at that moment, right as I looked up, the most incredible shooting star I have ever seen fell in a great arc from one side of the sky to the other. It was beautiful. It was perfect.

Michael never saw it. And the thing is — and I believe this — I don’t think he was meant to. Because some things you cannot see, you cannot make sense of beyond the experience itself. Some things you need to live to know. Michael hadn’t lived through the events of that night as I had. Michael wouldn’t have known what that shooting star was, even if he had seen it. But I knew. I know. That wasn’t a shooting star. That was a Panther Crossing the Sky.

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Glossary and Pronunciation

Nila oushi-ka-toui Shawanwa lenawewee [NEE-luh WEE-shuh-Cuh-TWEE Shuh-WAHN-wuh le-NA-wu-way]: “I am the strongest Shawnee alive.”

Chalahgawtha [Shu-LA-guh-thuh; “th” as in “thin”]:

nonothtu [nuh-NOTHE-too]: “warrior”

Assiskie ki-te-hi [ah-sis-KEE-uh ki-TAY-hee]: “the earth’s heart”

ki-i-ya metchi-squathe waneshaka [kee-EE-yuh metch-e-SQUAW-thay wanna-SHOCK-uh]: “You’re a little crazy.”

pe-shek-the [pu-SHEEK-t’uh]: “deer”

metho-tho [muh-THO-tho; “th” as in “thin”]: “buffalo”