It had all been too much. Within a day, more than five hundred lodges along the river had been struck as the bands dispersed to the winds. Tears streamed down the cheeks of the Ojibwe women as they said farewell to their sisters and cousins, knowing they might never meet again.
In vain, Ashagi ran through the encampment, searching for Bapakine amid the uproar of tearing down the lodges and the packing of belongings. The camp had become an anthill with thousands milling through the lanes amid packs of dogs racing and yipping with excitement.
Far ahead, Ashagi caught a glimpse of Bapakine pushing toward a fleet of canoes by the river, bending beneath a broad pack of buckskin. She had been taken by a warrior from the south whose wife had died in childbirth.
“Bapakine!” she screamed. “Bapakine, wait for me!”
But then a hand grasped her shoulder and whirled her around. Kesamna’ista. “Come,” he said, pulling her toward him. Unbalanced, Ashagi fell to the dust, striking her head against the hard ground. Kesamna’ista glared at her, and with a grunt pointed to where his band was already threading its way toward the prairie beyond the camp. Dejected, Ashagi rose and followed.
Reaching a bluff that afternoon, Ashagi turned to find the camp of the great gathering was almost empty, with long lines of Sioux departing in every direction. Across the plain she saw dogs dragging long poles laden with rawhide packs and women bowed beneath their burdens.
Left behind was the circle of earth lodges and a scaffold erected as high as a tall man could reach. Upon it, a young man’s body was wrapped in buffalo hide.
4.
ASHAGI’S REVENGE
For many days they wandered westward, coming at last to Kesamna’ista’s village on the banks of a shallow river. Although it was no wider than the river of her own lost village, Ashagi came to learn that this one, called the Misi Sipi, was a tributary of the Father of All Rivers, which ran to a great salt water far to the south. It was said that the river grew so wide that crows dropped from the sky in exhaustion when trying to fly across it, and that its mouth at the salt sea was a broad as Kitchi Gami. Ashagi scoffed at these tales, for she knew how far a crow could fly, and her father had said that the great salt water was far to the east, not south. But it was also true that traders from distant tribes sometimes came up the river in dugout canoes, confirming that it was indeed a pathway to a warm, southern sea. Sometimes she didn’t know what to believe.
After they finally arrived, Ashagi found that her new village was as modest as that of any band, a few lodges, with not too many mouths to feed, and a mix of children and dogs running back and forth between the cook fires. It was a dull, hot place of buzzing flies and biting mosquitoes set low along a river bank. Ashagi looked around and thought, it is in this place, among these people, that I will spend all the remaining days of my life. It was hard to have any hope for tomorrow when every day was the same as the river, a flat, lank strip of water which seemed to have no current, no direction.
As they settled into the rhythm of village life, Ashagi’s days and nights were only punctuated by shame and humiliation. Even though she was still a young woman of little experience, she knew that Dakota couples sought the privacy of the woods when they wished to pleasure each other, as did the Ojibwe. But Kesamna’ista had no shame and pushed himself on her when others were present in the lodge, even though his coupling could only be dimly seen in the firelight. And for this, Ashagi hated him above all things. He had debased her before the eyes of her sister-wives and the talk quickly spread through the village.
Kesamna’ista had four daughters by Saya’hupahu and Maza, but his only son had died of a fever and the coughing disease, and when he spoke to Ashagi at all, it was to demand that she produce another son. And that was only when he grunted over her in the night, yanking her hair back over her shoulders until she thought she would scream, and demanding she speak the words as he rammed into her. “A son, a son, a son . . .”
She thought often of the sun warrior, lying cold now on his scaffold and picked by crows, wishing that it was he who had taken her to the wedding bed instead of the ogre Snail Eye. She thought of taking a lover to deny Kesamna’ista his child. And if she conceived, who would know if the child was his? Even Maza, who had borne Kesamna’ista’s last daughter, had laid with every man who passed through the village, or so it seemed, exiting her lodge in the evening hours as the plaything of any young man who smiled at her chinless face. Should she follow Maza’s example? Could she even find the opportunity? Kesamna’ista’s desire for a son meant Ashagi suffered his attentions nearly every night.
“He is an evil man; he is a demon,” Ashagi exclaimed one day to Saya’hupahu as they sat together pounding cornmeal outside their lodge.
“Ah, yes! A demon.” The old woman threw her stone down to wring her aching hands. “But you have made him such with your pretty ways.”
“Pretty ways?” Ashagi spat. “I paint my face with mud when I see him looking at me. He makes me sick.”
“You make us sick.”
“Then return me to my people.”
“You are with us now; there is no returning. Give thanks that you live with the Dakota, it is a gift.”
“I do not accept your gift.”
“Why?” Saya’hupahu looked up, her rheumy eyes growing earnest. “You are the youngest wife of a head man now who has the respect of all our people.”
“I am the wife of a muskrat. That is how he treats me.”
“You are spoiled.”
“I will kill him.”
Saya’hupahu snorted in response. “Big words! Once, I threw a gourd at Kesamna’ista,” she said. “I was your age then, young and not as pretty, but chosen to be his first wife. The gourd hit him in the face near his good eye. Do you know what he did to me? I did not walk for half a moon.”
“Then I will take more care,” Ashagi muttered.
“Ah, Ashagi, the great warrior! And how many men have you killed? Men are killers; they kill every day so that we might live with the meat they bring. Do you think they die so easily? You are no warrior, child. You are a willow, meant to bend with the wind.”
Ashagi said nothing, but could not deny it.
“Do you think we want you here?” Saya’hupahu went on. “No! There were seven mouths to feed in my own lodge before you came to us, now there are eight.”
“I did not ask to be made your slave. I was meant to live with a kind man and a true hunter of my own people.”
“Well our husband is not a kind man, nor a great hunter, but he is not so bad, either. Somehow he provides.” Saya’hupahu looked Ashagi up and down. “You are his pretty thing now, but he is no demon. He is just a man smitten with a demon’s dreams.”
“And what is such a man? Not kind? Not so bad? Your words make him only half a man.”
Saya’hupahu frowned, her lips tight. “Some of us would take half a man over no man at all. Think on it, daughter.”
Ashagi did think on it and came to the conclusion that she’d rather have no man at all. She hated Kesamna’ista more every day—and every night. Besides her loathing for her husband, there seemed to be no place for her with Kesamna’ista’s people. Well before her capture, she had learned, a third of the band had died of a coughing sickness, and what remained of the survivors seemed rootless, incomplete. Many were indifferent to her, many were still grieving, and others held an implacable hatred toward the Ojibwe, fostered on generations of raids and counter-raids, even though her band had not been party to such raids in recent memory.
Thus, she had no sense of belonging to a clan of many brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts. Not like the clan of her father, which traced its blood to many other families living far beyond the horizon until all of the Anishinaabek were as one through the ties of kinship.
Except for Maza, who had accepted her with a half-heart, most of Snail Eye’s band shunned her as a woman who lacked dignity. There was talk over the evening fires of how Kesamna’ista abused her before the eyes o
f her own sister-wives. This produced knowing looks and much clucking of tongues, for surely Ashagi’s beauty had led to such perversion. “The Ojibwe women have no shame,” was a common refrain. “Even the dogs have more pride.”
Eventually, even Kesamna’ista heard the whisperings and no longer attacked her in Saya-hupahu’s lodge. He had little choice: his first wife had invited another family to live with them after their home had burned, putting an end to his habit of rutting by the fire.
Yet there were times when Ashagi was seized from behind as she went about her chores, only to behold the dead eye and mole face of Kesamna’ista. Sometimes she twisted from his grasp and ran, but just as often, he dragged her to the woods. Afterward, her skin burned as if she had been chewed by ants.
“You are a toad,” she spat at him one day after he finished defiling her.
Kesamna’ista gave her a wry smile, smacking his belly. “But I am your toad, and you are my fly.”
“I do not want a toad.”
“What do you want?”
“I want a man. I want a man who will speak to me,” she said, straightening her tunic. “Can you speak? A long time I have been with you now and still you say nothing to me.”
“I am speaking now,” he answered with a grunt. “Your tongue has grown sharp as a bird, little one, and you have grown shabby. What of that?”
Ashagi said nothing, for it was true that in her misery she had stopped caring for her appearance. Her hair was as unkempt as a crazy woman and her cast-off dress had tattered to rags. Often, she felt like pulling at her hair and screaming into the night.
“I am in mourning,” she said at last. “I am grieving that my family is dead, and I am the slave of a toad. There are no gifts that a proper husband brings his wife. There are no kind words, only this,” she gestured at the glade where Kesamna’ista dragged her for his couplings.
“Yes,” Kesamna’ista grunted. “Remember it and be grateful. Remember that I have made a place for you with my people and you deserve nothing more. Your place is to bend for me when you are called, not to waste words I do not care to hear.”
“Oh, you will hear me!”
“I hear you, but the next time I will answer with my hands,” he warned, his good eye glaring at her.
“You will never have what you want,” she said, her voice growing dark.
But Kesamna’ista waved in disgust and shuffled back to the village, leaving Ashagi to reflect on the emptiness of her threat.
It settled upon her that except for Maza, she had become a woman who had no one to turn to, no family, nor clan. It was a fate almost as grave as being banished.
“A girl’s clan is everything,” Nookomis had told her when she had been a girl of six. “Without your sisters, who would you be? Without your brothers and uncles, how would you live? Imagine yourself, alone in the forest, with no one to feed you or to keep you warm at night in a bed of furs. Without your clan, you are nothing. You are only a flower in a glade where all the other flowers have died. Do you understand?”
Ashagi had squirmed in her seat, toying with the buckskin doll Grandmother had made for her. Like any child of the Ojibwe, she could not imagine a life spent alone. “I would never leave you, Nookomis,” she said at last. “We would be flowers together.”
Grandmother had smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Ah! So it would be you and me, alone in the forest. We would make a pair!”
“We would fight the wolves,” Ashagi said somberly.
“Yes,” Grandmother nodded, though she pursed her lips at the thought of it.
“And we would find our people,” Ashagi hurried on, eager to show that she, too, would play her part in the long ties that made up the Heron clan. “I feel it in my blood.”
Grandmother turned to Ashagi and studied her with thoughtful eyes. “Do you really, child?” She cupped Ashagi’s chin in her hand and tilted the girl’s face up. “Yes, I think you do. It is a thing every girl knows, long before she becomes a woman. Men need days of fasting and dreams to lead them to the truth, but women know the strength of the family. We have always known.”
Ashagi had nodded gravely at the time, but now, in the clutches of Kesamna’ista, far from the arms of her grandmother, the memory of their talk only deepened her heartache. She knew that her mother’s clan lived somewhere to the north, far beyond the charred ruin of her village and the bones of Nookomis. But her mother had been a Cree, and her people lived far beyond a maze of lakes and forests where they chased herds of caribou endlessly through the seasons. Even if she was free to race in terror through the forests and the spirits who lived there, Ashagi knew she would never be able to find her mother’s people. And so, as Grandmother had said, Ashagi was nothing. She had no one.
The misery of endless days and nights by the sluggish river did not last, however. By summer’s end, Kesamna’ista said it was time for the band to move east.
“East? What is to the east but poor game and the skulking Ojibwe?” Saya’hupahu protested.
“The Ojibwe are beaten and scattered,” Kesamna’ista said, “and there’s trouble down the river with the Pawnee and the Arikara.”
His first wife sputtered in disbelief. “The Pawnee? The Arikara? They are nothing to us. They are far, far away, and so much trouble you bring me to move everything, especially to an unknown land.”
“Other bands are moving, too,” Kesamna’ista said. “All who live along the river are leaving. The people of the Elk clan have already left.” She continued to protest, but he left her to pack, while she grumbled over the trouble he caused her and the pain in her joints.
But what Kesamna’ista didn’t say was that it was the red sickness coming up the river that the Dakota feared, and not the Pawnee or Arika, who were dying in heaps. It was said that seven summers ago, a great canoe filled with demons had landed on the coast west of the Misi Sipi and had unleashed a horde of evil spirits. The sickness was crawling up the river, consuming every tribe in its path. Though he had much to fear by leading his band east toward the hunting grounds of the Ojibwe, it was the red death that remained a greater threat in Kesamna’ista’s thoughts.
The spotting disease bubbled up from the mouths of its victims with seeping red sores spreading through their throats and lungs until it was if they were burning raw within. Their whole bodies were overtaken, and they suffered with endless vomiting and diarrhea until they bled from every orifice. No warrior could stand before the red death. No medicine could suffice. Whole nations were dying along the river, the bodies of their people laying without ceremony where they fell, to be picked at by animals, crows, and vultures.
It was said that death came quickly, but this is not what Kesamna’ista wished for an end, nor for his band.
Nothing looked familiar on their journey to the east, which took nearly a month. Ahead lay gray, featureless forests and a range of low mountains, which Ashagi scanned in vain. She knew that her village had been north of the big lake, Kitchi Gami, but Kesamna’ista’s band settled well south of that sweetwater sea. Often, there were long portages between rivers that tore at the bottom of the canoes, requiring days of patchwork.
One night, she thought of the story she had heard of two sisters who had stood with the men of the Heron clan on the morning of the raid. Wielding tomahawks, they had fought to their deaths against the Dakota, killing one of the enemy and wounding another before they fell. If only she had died fighting alongside those women! If the chance ever came again, she vowed that she, too, would die as a man.
Often, she plotted the murder of her husband when she woke with her thoughts spinning in the darkness. She would lift his club and bury it between his eyes as he slept. She would thrust a knife into his cones as he lay snoring. She would gouge his single eye with a sharpened bone. Yet, despite her vows of murder and revenge, Kesamna’ista weighed upon her like a fallen tree, pinning her with an inescapable paralysis. She could not act against him; she could barely rise from her sleeping place in the morning without a slap f
rom Saya’hupahu, and her hands shook when she thought of taking up a weapon. She became convinced that something was wrong with her eyes because the world itself seemed to be closing in as a dark tunnel of trees through which she wandered in despair. Even days of full sun grew black in her thoughts.
Sometimes, she and Maza commiserated.
“I had always believed I would marry a young man and a great hunter,” Ashagi said one day as they fletched a hide together. “My grandmother told me so.”
“Ah, my grandmother told me the same,” Maza said. “And now here we are with old Snail Eye.”
“But you have been with younger men.”
“They are worthless,” Maza scoffed. “Here? Worthless. I have given up hope that one will bear me away.”
“How long have you been with Kesamna’ista?”
Maza puckered her lips and told the seasons on her fingers. “Seven summers,” she said at last. “I was traded by my father for little more than an elk and a pouch of tobacco. He said I was lazy and ugly, too, but the truth is he was a bad man and a poor hunter.” She sighed and looked off into the distance. “Kesamna’ista is not as bad as some men. He provides and will think more of you once you bear him a son.”
“That is not the fate my grandmother gave me,” Ashagi sniffed.
“Your grandmother!” Maza laughed. “What can she know? She is dead.”
Ashagi went quiet, staring at Maza until the girl flinched. “You are bold to speak of the dead,” she said finally.
At this, Maza went pale, for who would summon an angry spirit?
“I meant no offense to you, sister, or to your grandmother, only to say that you will be cherished by our husband in your time.”
Windigo Moon Page 5