Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom

little warped body with pity and agony and fear in her heart, and had come to believe that there was a slight chance he could grow straight and not be forever lame or deformed. He did not have any fused joints, any strange holes in his bones, or any terrible growths or markings on him. He was simply a cramped, spindly thing with a narrow and lopsided head, like a bean. He would not necessarily become a cripple, she believed. But he
was
dubious.
    “I should talk with the shaman,” Hard Striker said. He frowned. The Kispoko village medicine man was lacking in wisdom and spiritual power, compared with Change-of-Feathers. He had ideas that were alien to traditional teachings, and many of the women in the sept were afraid of him because of such ideas. One of the ideas he had put forward was that if a baby looked as if it would be crippled, a sufferer and a burden to the tribe, it should be left out to die. The Shawnees never did this, but Turtle Mother knew this shaman sometimes recommended it, and she was afraid.
    Hard Striker turned his eyes away from the runt, as if it hurt him to look at it anymore. She saw that look in his eyes and feared what he might be thinking. Her husband had talked often with the shaman and knew that sometimes it would make sense not to allow a certain child to grow up. Animal herds keep themselves strong and healthy, he knew, by weeding out the weak and sick, and the Kispoko, being the warrior sept, should keep itself as strong and vigorous as it could. Still, though Hard Striker understood the sense of it, he was troubled by the idea.
    T HE K ISPOKO MEDICINE MAN CAME, AND AFTER LOOKING thoughtfully at the screaming runt for a long time and then sitting with his eyes shut and a feathered medicine stick in his hands, he rose and went out into the snow. Hard Striker followed him out, and they stood in the cold under the stars. The medicine man began walking among the
wigewas,
and after a while the two men were far enough toward the edge of the town that they could hardly hear the baby crying. It seemed that it would be easier to talk about its fate without its voice in their ears. Behind them, the soft light from fires leaked out of cracks and passageways of the bark huts, making little yellow rays of warmth on the trampled snow. Beyond the edge of the village there lay only frigiddarkness, and Hard Striker could not keep himself from thinking of an infant left to die in such cold and darkness.
    He said, his breath condensing in the terrible cold, “I wonder if the cradleboard would straighten him.”
    “I fear,” said the shaman, “that he would cry himself to death long before then. And your family would grow sick from lack of sleep. Maybe,” he added after a pause, “your neighbors would try to persuade you to silence him anyway. It is bad for the chief of the sept to have such a troublesome thing in the midst of his own family.”
    Hard Striker’s heart was heavy with dread and sadness. It did not seem that the shaman was going to counsel him to let the poor creature live. Hard Striker had been hoping that some hopeful word might come from him.
    Now the shaman said:
    “I think, though, that it could be dangerous not to nurture an infant born as one of three. That is a sign of much power. It is a great
unsoma,
like the shooting star. Maybe the Great Good Spirit means to test your faith and wisdom by giving you this loud and ugly one.”
    The medicine man did not say it to the chief, but he was wondering whether the loud one might even be the work of Matchemoneto, the Evil Spirit, and he feared that great trouble could come to a village where a creature of the Evil Spirit was being raised. On the other hand, to abandon such a creature might bring even more evil upon the town. The shaman had never faced a problem like this, and he was bewildered by it, and it was made worse by being in the family of the chief.
    Hard Striker felt that the medicine man might be thinking about Matchemoneto. He had