Night of the Full Moon

by Gloria Whelan

  Libby’s adventures continue in this second book of the Next Spring an Oriole trilogy

  Night of the

  Full Moon

  One of the soldiers shot his rifle into the air. Some of the Indians ran toward the woods, but the soldiers rode after them to bring them back. They were like the shepherd dogs in Virginia that ran barking and snarling at the sheep to herd them together.

  I grabbed Fawn’s hand. “What’s happening?” I whispered, too frightened to speak aloud.

  “It is what your father warned us of. They have come to take us away.”

  Text copyright © 1993 by Gloria Whelan. Illustrations copyright © 1993 by Leslie Bowman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published as a Borzoi Book by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993.

  www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Whelan, Gloria.

  Night of the full moon / by Gloria Whelan; illustrated by Leslie Bowman.

  p. cm.

  “A Stepping Stone book.”

  SUMMARY: A young girl living on the Michigan frontier in 1840 is inadvertently caught up in the forced evacuation of a group of Potawatomi Indians from their tribal lands.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78906-8

  1. Potawatomi Indians—Juvenile fiction. [1. Potawatomi Indians—Fiction.

  2. Indians of North America—Fiction. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—Michigan—Fiction. 4. Michigan—Fiction.] I. Bowman, Leslie. ill. II. Title.

  [PZ7.W5718Ni 1996] [Fic]—dc20 95-5386

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks and A STEPPING STONE BOOK and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  To Patricia Fagg

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  1

  THE WINTER of 1840 was a snowy tunnel. We entered it in November and couldn’t find our way out until April. Then spring surprised us. Almost overnight the white field by our cabin turned back into a pond. When Mama saw the last of the ice melt, she said to me, “Libby, it’s like something heavy lifting from my heart.”

  Black-and-white bufflehead ducks sifted down onto our pond. The blue heron was back stalking frogs. One morning we heard the oriole sing and saw it flash through the trees. Papa unraveled rope and hung the strands over branches. The oriole carried off the strands in its beak to weave into a nest that hung like a little bag at the top of an oak.

  By June all the rows had pushed out green in our vegetable garden. I was kneeling pulling out weeds when Fawn appeared, like she always did—as softly and suddenly as a butterfly lighting on a flower. Her name was really Taw-cum-e-go-qua, but that was hard to say. Fawn was the name my papa made up for her. “She’s like a young deer,” he said. “Graceful, with those long legs and big eyes. Wary, too. I’m always afraid of startling her into skittering away.”

  Each fall Fawn and her family, along with the other Potawatomi Indians in their camp, went north to their winter trapping grounds. They didn’t call themselves Potawatomi. They called themselves Neshnabek, which means “the People.”

  Fawn was splendid in a red and blue calico dress embroidered with red and blue beads. There was beading, too, on her deerskin moccasins. Her dark hair was braided with a red ribbon. “You have a new dress,” I said. “And a ribbon.” I’m afraid I was a little envious, for my own pinafore seemed dull, and I had no ribbons. Papa says beauty has nothing to do with fancy adornments, but I would have given anything to look like Fawn.

  “The hunting was good this winter,” Fawn said. “Each day in the forest the spirits of the animals called to my father. They told him where to put his snares and traps. He brought back many skins. At the store where he sold them he bought calico for me and my mother. I have another ribbon. I’ll give it to you.”

  The Indians were always giving things away. When Papa was not able to find enough business as a surveyor to provide us with food for the winter, Fawn’s papa brought us corn and wild honey and smoked fish. “Where did you make your winter camp?” I asked.

  “We had to travel many nights’ journey from here to find the mink and the marten and the fisher.”

  It was true we had fewer animals, for as more and more settlers arrived, the woods where the animals once lived were turned into farms. Some settlers came as we did by covered wagon. Some came by boat through the new Erie Canal. A steamer called the Governor Marcy came all the way from Buffalo. It chugged down the Saginaw River, sending the ducks and geese flying. Soon the train would come to Saginaw. Everyone was buying up property. Now Papa had lots of land to survey.

  “Did all the Indian families come back?” I asked Fawn. We had heard tales of smallpox in the north. The winter before it had spread like wildfire. Hundreds of Indians had died. Smallpox was a bad sickness for everyone, but because it was a white man’s sickness it was much more serious for the Indians. So many Indians died of the disease they couldn’t be buried properly and the wolves got at the graves.

  “Two families from our clan did not return.” For a long time Fawn was silent. When she spoke again it was in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her. “In the month of the longest nights my little brother, Namah, became sick. Sores covered his face and his body. He grew hot as though a fire burned inside him. He spoke in dreams. On the fifth day he died.”

  I remembered how Namah loved to trail after his father, Sanatuwa, and how his father had made him a small bow and arrows. I felt terrible.

  The sadness stayed on Fawn’s face. It only went away when she told me, “My mother has had a baby. It is a boy. He has a little red mark on the back of his neck just like my brother Namah had. Papa says Namah’s soul has returned to us from wojitchok, the spirit land.”

  “We are going to have a baby, too,” I told her. “Mama says it probably will be born in September. Papa says he’ll make me a little room all for myself in the loft of our cabin so the baby’s crying won’t keep me awake at night.”

  Just then Mama came out to welcome Fawn. “How pretty you are,” she said to her. “You look like a princess. I’m going to get my sketchbook and draw your picture.” I hoped Fawn would let me try on her clothes someday. Then maybe Mama would draw a picture of me looking like a princess, too.

  2

  MOST DAYS Fawn worked in the cornfields or helped her mother sew and weave baskets. But whenever she could, she slipped away from the Indian camp to visit me. We went swimming in our pond, where the little minnows nibbled at our toes. We picked wild strawberries in June and wild raspberries in July. When Mama taught me my lessons, she taught Fawn too. Once Fawn brought a little deerskin pouch of colored beads and showed us how to embroider with them.

  Fawn often came to see me, but I wasn’t allowed to visit her. The Indian camp was five miles away. Papa said it was too far for me to go by myself. It wasn’t until the end of July, when two strangers knocked on our door, that I finally got to visit the camp.

  The strangers said they were agents from the government. Papa invited them into our cabin. Mama gave them a drink of rhubarb juice. In the woods you were always hospitable to visitors. When there aren’t many houses, you have to stretch friendship hard to make it go around.

  One agent had h
ay-colored hair and a hat that was too big for him. He was shy about taking the rhubarb juice. He kept looking around to see if we were watching him drink it, which made us watch. The other agent had black eyes and black whiskers and didn’t seem all that friendly. He drank his mug down all in one gulp. “Are there many Potawatomi Indians around here?” he wanted to know.

  “Why do you ask?” Papa said.

  “A lot of people think the Indians would be better off away from the white men’s settlements. There’s wickedness goes on in towns that isn’t good for the Indians to see. Better to have them far from all that. There’s talk of sending them west across the Mississippi. They can have their own territory there. Someday there may even be an Indian state.”

  Papa said, “If you’re talking of sending them someplace where men are always good and never sinful, I’m afraid you will have to wait for Heaven. When they talk of sending the Indians away, I think it is not the Indians’ welfare that people have in mind. It is the taking of the Indians’ land.”

  “What if the Indians don’t wish to leave?” Mama asked. Her voice was angry.

  The agent shrugged. “Topnebi has agreed to having his people sent west. Proper treaties have been signed by him giving Potawatomi land over to the government. After all, the Indians get paid for their land.”

  Papa said nothing, but I could see he was holding his tongue with difficulty. Once a year the Indians came to Saginaw from all over Michigan, hundreds and hundreds of them. They came to get their yearly payment. The government paid them because the Indians had sold land to the government. Papa would shake his head and say, “It is hard to see a people who once could ride for days and still be on their land now having to line up to get a few dollars from the government.”

  The agent caught the look on Papa’s face. He said, “I must tell you the government means to enforce the treaties.” When Papa didn’t say anything, the agent stood up. “Well, we thank you for your hospitality. We were just passing through, but we may be back this way again.”

  I knew Papa was troubled, for as soon as the agents left he said, “I’m going to the Indian camp and warn them.”

  “Papa, let me come with you,” I pleaded.

  “Why not,” Papa said. “You won’t see a better day for a walk in the woods.” He was trying to keep me from seeing how troubled he was, but I saw him exchange a worried look with Mama.

  You learn more walking in the woods with Papa than you do in a dozen book lessons. We followed the trail the Indians made walking back and forth from their village to ours. The path led through a stand of pines so tall you had to tilt your head to see to the top of them. No sun could find its way through their thick branches. “Maybe we’ll see some deer,” I said. Early in the morning and at twilight the deer came and drank at our pond.

  “Not here,” Papa told me. “There is so little light, no shrubs or grasses can grow for the deer to browse. The only animals we’ll see here are squirrels after pine cones.” He looked up at the trees. “Some of these pines have been here for hundreds of years with no enemy but a bolt of lightning. Now I hear talk these woods are going to be bought up by a lumber company. Every tree will find its way to the Williams’s sawmill. They won’t leave a one. Those who come after us will never know what this land was once like.”

  We had moved the thousand miles from Virginia to Michigan because Papa loved the trees. “If the trees around us are all cut down, will we have to move again?” I held my breath, for I didn’t want to leave our cabin and our pond. And I would miss Fawn.

  “I don’t think your mama would like moving, Libby. Especially with a new baby coming. She’ll want to settle down for a while.” Papa’s words were comforting, but the dreamy sound of his voice when he said them wasn’t. That was the way he sounded just before he decided to leave Virginia.

  I felt something scrape at my ankle and claw at my dress. “Papa, look at all the wild blackberry bushes. We can get enough berries to make jam and have some left over for pies.”

  Papa had made a discovery as well. “See this tree, Libby? Do you notice anything?”

  The bark had a big chip. “An Indian has marked this tree as a bee tree,” he said. “By August it will be filled with honey, and the Indian will come back to claim it.”

  “What if another Indian gets here first?” I asked.

  “No Indian would rob another man’s bee tree,” said Papa.

  In the distance we could see the Indian camp. It was a small settlement with no more than five or six families. The families lived in wigwams. Fawn told me once that these are made from sheets of birch bark or mats of woven reeds laid over bent saplings. When the Indians moved to their northern hunting grounds, they just rolled up their reed mats and took them along. If we lived in a wigwam, I thought, Papa would be moving every week.

  The Indians didn’t pay us much attention, but all the village dogs ran out to sniff at us. They were skinny, which was just as well. Fat dogs got eaten. We found Fawn and her mother, Menisikwe. She welcomed us into their wigwam with the few words of English she had. A small fire burned inside. “To keep the mosquitoes away,” Fawn said.

  Their new baby was strapped to a board on Menisikwe’s back. “You baby, too,” Menisikwe said to Papa and me.

  Fawn explained, “I told my mother about your baby. She is weaving a basket for the cradle.”

  “I hope our baby looks just like yours,” I said. Their baby had a perfect round face. His hair was glossy black like the wing of a crow. His eyes were like the black pebbles you see shining in a streambed.

  While we admired the baby, Fawn ran to find Sanatuwa. Her father came to greet us dressed in a calico shirt and long buckskin leggings. A bright length of calico was wrapped around his head like a turban. In his belt were a knife and a small axe. Like Fawn, Sanatuwa spoke English well. He and his family had lived near Detroit, where Sanatuwa had traded with white people. Fawn had gone to a missionary school there.

  There were no chairs in the wigwam, only woven rush mats on the floor and on the wooden platforms that were used for beds. We all sat cross-legged on the floor while Papa told about the government agents.

  Sanatuwa shook his head. “Some years ago the People south of here were rounded up. They were forced to leave their lands. They had to journey for many days to a place where nothing grew from the earth but stones. There was sickness. Many died on that trip. Now the white man has tangled one of our own chiefs in his web. That chief has signed away what little land we had left. All for money. Once we wanted only what we could make ourselves. Now we have learned to want things we must buy. But how can we leave our cornfields? How can we leave the holy places where our dead are buried?”

  “I can’t believe they will force you to go,” Papa said. “But I thought it well to warn you.”

  “We thank you for telling us,” Sanatuwa said. “But we must stay to harvest our corn. It may be when we go to our hunting ground this winter we will not come back.”

  My sadness must have shown on my face, for Sanatuwa said, “Let us hope it will not be so. Now we will talk of a happy thing. On the day of the next full moon we will have the naming ceremony for our new son. Our clan would like you and your wife and daughter to be our guests.”

  Papa said, “That would be a great honor.”

  Fawn and I exchanged excited looks.

  On our way home Papa told me white men were seldom invited to such a ceremony. He smiled down at me. “With your skin so dark from the sun you could pass for an Indian yourself, Libby.”

  I began to daydream about how much fun it would be if I were Fawn’s sister and could live with the Indians in their camp.

  3

  EVERY NIGHT from that night on I looked at the moon to try to guess how long before it would be full. It filled out so slowly I grew impatient. Then for three nights there were rain and clouds and I couldn’t see the moon at all. At last Papa told me the next day would be the naming ceremony. Mama said Papa and I must go without her. “I’m
as big as a barrel and the heat bothers me. It can’t be many more days before the baby comes.”

  It wasn’t. The next morning, just at bird-song, Papa shook me awake. “The baby is coming, Libby,” he said. “I’m going to saddle up Ned and ride over to fetch Mrs. LaBelle. You must make your mother as comfortable as you can. Do just what she tells you.” Before I could put my feet on the floor Papa was gone.

  I was so scared I wanted to run after him. I made myself hurry to Mama. She was sitting up in bed, her hair still unbraided. Her lips were folded in tight, as if she was keeping something back. After a minute she gave me a skimpy smile. “Bring the baby’s cradle, Libby, and the chest with all the things we’ve made.” The cradle was the basket Menisikwe had made for us. Around the top she had sewn a braid of sweet grass so that the cradle was fragrant to smell. The baby would remember that pleasant scent all its life.

  My hands were shaking as I took out the linen sheets I had helped hem and the shirts Mama had made that were so small she had let me try them on my doll. Mama told me what to do, but every couple of minutes she would have to stop and hold her breath and her lips would get tight again. I kept stealing glances out the window to see if Papa was coming.

  Mama said, “Leave the things be, Libby. Tell me what you remember of our home in Virginia. I would give anything to be there today with our family and friends.”

  I sat on her bed and she held my hand. “Our house was painted white,” I began. “There were four rooms, and my room had paper on the wall with leaves and little flowers.”

  “Ivy,” Mama said, “and violets. How dainty they were.” She looked at the plain, rugged log walls of our cabin.

  “Your easel was in the sitting room, where you used to paint your pictures.”

  “Do you recall the garden?” Mama asked. Together we named the flowers: lilacs and bluebells and the Maiden’s Blush roses. Every few minutes Mama would squeeze my hand so tightly it hurt.