the day, probably sometime toward evening, judging by the way the sun is curving to the west. I gain my feet and look around, recognizing the gravel beneath me, the hill in front of my eyes. This is the place from my dream.
But there is no underwater panther here to greet me. I walk down the beach in my confusion and then stop, turn toward the hill again, squint at it.
“Hello nindaanis. You took your sweet time.”
The voice is soft, deep and damp and cool, embodying all the things that a human voice cannot, in multiple tones. I turn my head slowly, look across the three feet that are between me and a creature that my mind tells me should not exist. I wasn’t expecting to meet like this. I’m covered in mud and probably smell like something scraped from under a rock. I don’t have the copper, and I’m hungry and tired.
If possible, the panther is far more beautiful than it was even in my dream. It is also larger, its ears coming up to my chest, horns long enough to be even with my head. Its tail is still looped around its feet several times, and so long that it slides off into the water, and away from both of us. But where it joins with the water, it is bronzed like its horns and no longer covered in sandy fur. This shining brilliance matches that of a spot of brightness lying between us, a lump I recognize as the copper I brought to the island. The patina on it is gone, scraped away.
“Thank you for returning the end of my tail,” it says somehow with that eerie, melodic voice inside of my mind. I realize oddly that ‘it’ is really a ‘she’, the impression so strong that there is no way to think otherwise. “But I think you misunderstand. This copper bit was a part of me, but I gave of it freely to one who could use it, one who needed to learn to respect it. It was my gift to your mother. Now it is our final gift to you. Do you understand?”
I wish I could say that everything was suddenly kittens and rainbows and the clouds parted and I realized I wasn’t talking to some mythical cat-beast, but instead to a nurse in some hospital somewhere while having a psychotic break. But the burning in my lungs felt too real, the grit caught in my bra straps too aggravating.
“You want me to keep it?”
“If what I am saying holds weight inside your mind, then do as you please with it. I called and you answered. I only needed to see that you were willing. Sometimes, the point of things is not where you are, but where you could be, given a bit of a push.” A soft sort of smile slides over her eyes, her whiskers slipping back in mirth at a joke unfathomable.
“But…that was the point? To see if I would do what you wanted? That’s all?!” My fingers twist against my palms and I look down at the copper resting between us, lying in the sand. Then I look up at her, narrow my eyes.
“When you came here, what did you believe?”
“I-” My voice crumbles, I sigh. “I don’t know what I believed.”
“And now?”
Her words startle me, because I wasn’t expecting what they mean. I feel a cool sort of comfort pass over me, a blinding, brilliant firebrand of realization. My toes crumple and squelch in the shore mud as the sensation shivers up my spine and I find that I have words worth speaking.
“I believe what my mother told me. You did name me. All those stories she told me, they weren’t just tales whispered around campfires by people ignorant of science and math and a billion other things. I’m…part of me still doesn’t want to believe that this is happening.”
“And a part of you, perhaps, never will,” she whispers, tail twitching. “But that part of you is roughly three pounds of fat located behind your eyes, and that part of you that does believe, it cannot be measured by man. Perhaps that makes it more important, then? Because even death cannot take it from you.”
I think about Mom, about what death means between us. About dreaming about her. About the Ojibwe. I realize that there are things on this earth that science and religion and anyone I know cannot explain to me. There are things that only this hidden part of me can understand, knowledge no one will be able to take or explain away. Finally, I nod, and the panther moves toward me.
She takes the copper into massive jaws painted ivory and crimson, then drops the gifted end of her tail into my hands. It is warm and smells of the richness of the land below the lake, fathomless places I will never see. As I take it, her tongue brushes my hand, soft bristles upon it bringing both a sensation of familiarity and faint surprise at how real she feels. And then her side is against my side, and I reach down and very softly, respectfully, run a finger along one of her spines.
The barb at the end is so sharp, I don’t even feel the slit it slices into my flesh until I pull my finger away and see blood well at the tip, vivid amaranth against the mud on my hands.
“Careful,” she says, the smile back in her voice again. “Legends cannot be touched with careless hands, lest they forever mark you as one of their own.”
Blood drips down my finger onto her flank, and she reaches back, licks it off, licks my finger, and then backs her whiskers with a sigh. Her voice when it addresses me next is still calm, but holds a hint of finality. “Come along, then. Nindaanis. My daughter. You have much left to do before we meet again, yes?”
The dusk forest enfolds us, and the vertigo that drags me to the deep embrace of the earth is almost regretful before I’m dropped once again into something like sleep.
oOo
The sound of the lake moving beats against my mind until I open my eyes. The pain in my head is gone, but I’m still damp and now slightly cold. There is a weight in my left hand, warm and slowly cooling, and I glance over and realize that it is the copper lump. Pressing it into the rip along the thigh of my dry suit like a pocket, I sit up, then gain my feet in shaking movements that almost knock me back into the scrubby marsh grass.
I look down at my dirty suit, then at my kayak. I walk over to it and pass hands along the fiberglass shell. There are no cracks along its curvature, no places where the water could seep in. As I examine it pain radiates along one fingertip and I pull my hand away, biting back a curse. The first finger on my right hand leaves a crimson streak on the stern and I bring it to my face, look at the spot in the stale morning light. There is a tiny cut on the tip, a crescent shape where the flesh was slashed, scabbed over with blood, then re-opened at my careless use of it. I stare at it for a long time, then I gaze out at the lake, rolling in white breakers like the sea I’ve never seen.
Finally, when the sun is high above the hills, I wash myself off in the shallows and go home.
In time, the cut on my finger will heal. But not before it scars, and not before I ask my grandmother to gift me with all of the stories I never asked my mother to tell. And she will tell them, until it is time for me to whisper them to a child of my own, and to pass on a lump of copper that was once the end to an underwater panther’s tail, as bright as the day it was given to an Ojibwe girl who did not believe. Because that is the only way it should be. That is the way of my people.
Copyright 2015 by F.L. Pomeroy
Edited by Bobbi M.
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this story are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. The author concedes that any research mistakes herein are her own, and welcomes any feedback you may have
This is dedicated to my grandmother, who told me the story. And to my mom, because she already knows.
Copper Bright Page 3