Then they would come, as sure as the wind.
A dog began to bark in the camp and silently, he crept backward in the darkness, hugging the earth until he was well away for another night of shivering with only a blanket of leaves to warm him. But that morning, with the dew of the first light still shining on his skin, he had seen the three women passing by the bushes where he slept and had followed them to the berry patch. And now, here she was before him, the woman of the firelit shadow. The woman groaned, clasping her cheek, and her eyes met his with reproach. In that instant his decision was made.
Because the woman was young and strong, there was no doubt of that. Strong and beautiful with cherry cheeks and fiery eyes. And though her face was clouded with trouble, beyond those clouds he sensed a serenity as clear as the sky above Kitchi Gami on a summer day. A clear sky that could flicker out of the blue with lightning. That, and the swell of her breasts and tilt of her hips through her doeskin tunic was such that he felt a warmth spreading in his groin.
He grabbed her by her hair and pulled her with her arms flailing in protest back down his track through the forest. His throbbing face had grown angry now, and with it his heart; he would show this wildcat who was master.
All day they ran, with him prodding her along or pulling her though tangles of brush, scrambling over rocky ground and wading streams. Always to the east, stopping only to listen in the stillness of the forest, straining to hear the cries of pursuers.
Yet as they ran, he wondered about the Dakota woman. Why did she not speak? Why had she not run when he was down? What woman would stand and fight a man when there was a chance to flee? His thoughts brushed the Old Man’s story of gwiingwa’aage, the wolverine that ran in the guise of a beautiful woman, killing men in their sleep for the joy of it after fucking them senseless.
An uneasy feeling crept over him at the thought of what such a captive might mean for his chances. He was exhausted, starving and lost, while she looked fresh and full. He would tie her when they slept.
It wasn’t until late in the day that he heard something far in the distance, possibly only the cry of the wind, but more likely men in pursuit. They would be running hard on his trail without a woman being dragged against her will to slow them down.
“A captive must be killed if pursuers are closing in,” his father had said when they were preparing for the raid. “Leave no one to point the enemy your way. Let no one slow your escape.”
He knew what his father would do. It would already have been done.
But not yet, he thought. For what was the sense of taking a prize if a warrior gave it away too freely?
They scrambled on, wading for a time down a shallow river. Once he lost a moccasin in the sucking mud. He drove his arm elbow-deep into the ooze to retrieve it.
The woman’s eyes widened in surprise as he rinsed away the muck.
“What? Did you think I had pulled a snake from its den?” he asked, but she gave no answer.
Instead, she pointed back downstream where the silt of their trail ran with jets in the water. Even when it settled there were signs that they had passed this way.
He pulled her uphill from the river to a ridge where he strained to listen with his good ear.
Now he heard them, far off, but clearly the voices of men, yet for the moment he was too exhausted to go further.
The woman sat heavily on a fallen tree and stared clay-faced out over the ridge. She looked as dismal as the dead tree with its bark shearing off in tatters. A halo of flies surrounded her and her cheek was blackened where he had struck her.
He brushed his own torn cheek, and knew it heralded a scar. What irony that his first brush with battle had come at the hands of a woman. He imagined trying to explain the scar over hundreds of campfires to come, if he lived to see another. It was the mark of a wolverine, that is what he would say, a she-wolverine with a bad temper.
Again he remembered Father’s words about leaving no tale-tellers behind, and what capture would bring. “Better to die at the seams of your own flint than to become the plaything of the enemy.”
The woman was nothing to him, yet still he was reluctant. He wrestled with the thought. She was a prize, but also a burden. It would take but a moment to have her hair, leaving her corpse for the enemy. Father would be pleased with that.
He scooped a jagged rock from his side, double the size of his hand, hefting it as he angled behind her. But the rock spoke to him, no, and he felt a sickness creep over him at the thought of the act. That, and her eyes followed, full of defiance.
“What is your name, great warrior who would kill a woman?” she said in the language of the Anishinaabek, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Tell me your name, so I can tell your grandparents in the Happy Land that you are a coward and a woman-killer.”
“Ho, she speaks,” he said, tossing the rock to the side.
“Yes, I can speak, woman-killer. I am not made of stone.”
“If you know the language of the Anishinaabek, then you know that it is rude to ask my name,” he said.
“Rude? You make as if to kill me with a rock and think I am rude? You drag me through the brambles and the muck and think I am rude? Look at me!”
She held out her bare arms, which were drawn red with scratches.
He shrugged, holding out his own raw arms. “We are as twins,” he said. “Tell me how a woman of the Dakotas comes to speak the language of the Ojibwe.”
“This is what I think of the Dakotas,” she spat, “and this is what I think of you.” She spat full in his face.
“Such a wildcat.” He frowned, wiping the spittle with his forearm. “You’re a bad one.”
“Kill me now or you will see how bad I am.” Her face was rigid, though tears streamed down her cheeks.
“No, I think I will keep you as my dog. Though you are more like a haughty crane.”
“Tell me your name, boy.”
He laughed. “I am no boy, haughty crane. I have taken you, haven’t I?”
She looked up through her tears. “Then prove you are a man and tell me.”
He had never heard of anyone asking after someone’s name so directly. Those who gave away their names to strangers risked having them shouted aloud in the forest to be heard by bad spirits. All knew there was a magic in names, which must be protected. Yet now, the woman had dared him.
“Miskogiizis,” he said. It was his birth name, Red Moon, seldom used.
“And your everyday name? What do they call you?”
He gave her a cold look, one that his father would approve of. “Why should I trust you? You will be laughing out my name when your people peel my skin back with their knives.”
“I will not go back to them, Miskogiizis,” Ashagi said, gazing into his eyes. “If you wish to keep me, you will share the name of the one I am to die with.”
“We will not die,” he said brusquely, “and we cannot dawdle over names.”
“Tell me.”
He hesitated. The woman had already bewitched him into sparing her life and then sharing his birth name. Yet, as in their first moment in the berry glade, she was a prize he hoped to win, and he had no other gift to give her.
“What shit you give me,” he muttered, “considering you are my captive.” Then, he held her gaze and said, “It is Misko.”
“Misko,” she smiled, as if he had said something sweet and foolish. “You are Little Red. What? Like a cherry?”
Misko snorted and wiped the sweat of his brow from his eyes, incredulous that he was having such a talk with a woman and a captive at that. Father would think him weak, even worse than weak, and he was glad Father could not see him now. “Yes, like a cherry,” he said dryly, shifting his gaze to the valley below.
“Little Red,” she said, turning his name over in her thoughts. “Little red cherry.”
Misko snorted again and gave her a wry look. “I think you are a wolverine after all. But whether or not you will slaughter me in my sleep, we must go now.”
Across the valley, the top of a tall pine exploded with the winging of five crows as the sun began its descent. He seized her hand and they crept down the rocks in the opposite direction.
And then they ran as one, scrambling northeast this time, angling toward the lakeshore, which he knew was still a walk of two days. When his father’s war party had set out more than a cycle of the moon ago, his father had said that after the raid, the warriors must run for two full days and a night to escape capture, and even then, who knew? “In my youth, we ran four days after striking a village of the Wendat, and even then they followed,” Ogaa had told him. So all that night he ran with the woman, stumbling on through the thickets and the spruce, black beneath the moonlight along faint trails in the direction that Misko guessed was toward the big lake, Kitchi Gami.
Running through a forest at night is hungry work and Ashagi could tell that Misko was getting faint. The next day she gathered burdock, chantrelle, shaggy mane mushrooms and silverweed roots as they ran. The plants were more fit for squirrels, but gave a thin strength to their legs. But finally, that afternoon, they came across a pathway that was more than a game trail, and then they came to a familiar clearing. It was his father’s camp, the place where Misko had set out on the trail of a moose, eight days earlier.
Propped up against a tree and covered with pine boughs, he found his sleeping robe of more than twenty rabbit hides, which his mother had stitched so carefully. The blanket was wrapped around his father’s war club. His father had taken Misko’s club and left him his own; it was a weapon carved with Ogaa’s story and powerful symbols for protection against any enemy. In the soil beneath the tree were signs pointing west.
So his father had not forsaken him, Misko thought as he cradled the club. He hefted its stem of tapered oak, the granite ball at its tip whirling with a deadly force. He wondered where father and his band of warriors were now. For all he knew, it was they who were in pursuit, shouting in the forest and alerting the Dakota.
But he wondered more at the spirits of the forest, presuming most of them to be unfriendly. What tree or rock would betray them? What bird would whisper in the enemies’ ears? When the woods were at their darkest, he could feel the manitos crowding in with their ghostly arms barring the way and placing branches in their path.
“We must go,” Ashagi said, breaking his thoughts. “If we can find this place, then so can my husband.”
“Your husband?”
“He is dead to me now, as I will be dead to him if he finds us.”
But secretly, Ashagi was sure of their escape. Kesamna’ista was an old man more than fifty summers whose limbs were aflame with rheumatism and the men of his band were more layabouts than warriors. They would not care to risk their skins for their chieftain’s lost wife, especially since most of them considered her a shrew who had murdered her own son. Nor could they know that Misko was only one warrior. She reasoned that they would be slinking around every tree and bush on their trail in fear of ambush, if they were still following at all. Yet she did not share her thoughts with Misko, because for the first time, Ashagi felt that freedom from the Sioux was possible.
They headed east on the path, which had been well trodden by his father’s warriors days before. But though the way was smoother, Misko thought glumly that even a child would be able to follow them. At best, they were trading speed for discovery.
Late that afternoon, with the sun cutting sharp on the horizon, he tugged at Ashagi’s arm and beckoned her over a shallow rise. Beyond the hill was a small lake that Misko had seen nine days before while relieving himself. Spanning the lake and the stream that fed it was a dam, ancient as the oaks, built over many generations by the amiks. The beavers were namesakes of his own Amik clan in Misko’s village, far to the east.
Days before, his father’s starving warriors had torn a hole in the top of the lodge, hoping to capture the beaver living within. But the lodge was hundreds of years old, and the amiks were buried deep beneath an impenetrable tangle of sticks and limbs. That, and everyone knew that the time to attack a lodge was in the winter when the amiks were drowsy in their half-sleep.
Ogaa’s men had soon quit in disgust, but their digging had created a pit of tangled boughs, which could be defended.
“What of this?” she asked.
“My brothers have offered us a hiding place,” Misko said, pointing to the lodge piled high at the center of the dam.
He pulled her past the curtain of cattails and then through the rotting ooze at the bottom of the pond, her head nearly dragged under by the weight of her tunic. They clambered up the slippery branches of the lodge with Misko falling backward once into the water when a section gave way before clawing his way back up the tangle of maple limbs. The pointed ends of the cuttings jabbed at them, slipped and gave way, scratching a long streak of blood across his chest.
Nearing a state of panic, Misko began to lose heart as the branches clawed at him. But on the far side of the lodge he found the cleft in its tangle and they burrowed into the maze of sticks.
When he was sure that no one could see them from any angle, he spread his robe of rabbit furs on the rough cradle and covered their nest with a skein of leafy branches. Then they shed their wet leathers and lay clasped together, shivering, even though the afternoon sun was warm upon them.
And then the woman gazed at the face of her captor with the bloody cheek that she had delivered upon him, and felt that she had never been so happy. Eya, she had marked him as her own.
“What is your name, haughty crane?” he murmured.
“I have no name.”
“Everyone has a name and I have given you mine. Even the beavers below us have names in their beds.”
“My clan is gone.”
He said nothing.
“Call me No Name Woman then. Or Faraway Woman. Call me—” she searched for words— “lost.”
“Even those who are lost have names.”
Their eyes met in a long silence, filled only by the drip and creak of the lodge’s branches and the call of a redwing blackbird. Her hand wandered and she felt a stirring between his legs and something twinged within her in return.
“Tell me your name,” he whispered.
She paused a long time, searching his face before answering.
“Ashagi.”
Her fingers brushed his wounded cheek with a look of wonder in her eyes and he needed no encouragement. He buried his face between her breasts and filled his chest with her scent, a mystery warm and close that promised life and gave life its promise in return. Woman! He breathed in her essence and lost all sense of thought, except that he wanted more.
For two nights and a day they lay in their nest, whispering their stories. Once, they heard the slap of a tail on the water and Misko strained to listen with his good ear, imagining that his uncles among the beaver were seeking to warn him. But if any men passed by on the trail over the rise, they left as quietly as they came.
On their second night together, the fingers of the Great Spirit Kitchi Manito reached for the northern sky, glistening red, blue, and green as they grasped at the stars.
“What does it mean?” Ashagi wondered. She had seen the lights many times in her village to the north and each time they wrote a message of things to come in the sky.
“It is a sign that we are free of our enemies,” Misko said with the confidence of a young man.
Misko’s voice was as gentle as a cool balm as Ashagi snuggled beside him. She closed her eyes and sank into his story as he murmured in her ear.
6.
THE WALLEYE
When his mother brought Misko into the world, catching him in her arms by the shore of Kitchi Gami, she looked to the east and saw the great autumn moon rising like a pumpkin over the water while, in a perfect harmonious dance, the sun died a ball of ochre to the west. Red and gold trees, blazing at the peak of their glory, rustled in the breeze, whispering to each other along the shoreline. The sweet smell of new life hung on the
crisp air, and she inhaled deeply and looked to the skies as the moon rose, nearly as red as the sun itself, but paler, darker, larger, as if brooding on its strength.
Niibinkowsiw, or Summer Meadow, felt her heart lift in thanks to the Great Spirit, for she knew, as every mother did, that her son was destined to be a great man. She named him Miskogiizis, Red Moon. Curiously, Miskogiizis was even redder than the autumn moon at his birth and many remarked that he was as cherry as a cardinal piping amid the red leaves of fall. The condition remained many days, prompting his nickname, Little Red. It was the custom of the Anishinaabek to give a child a nickname, often with a touch of humor and humility, which served most for their entire lives. Only when Miskogiizis reached adulthood would he be given his true name.
“We will call you Misko for now, Little Red,” his mother said, gazing down on the small, intent face with her heart lifting like the moon beyond her shoulder.
In this, Misko was fortunate in that the name stuck, for often a child was cursed by his playmates with a taunting name of humiliation: Hag Face, Dog Dick, Red Anus and such; this, so that he might strive all the harder upon his manhood to earn a more worthy name for some deed of bravery or sacrifice.
The season was unusually cold, so after washing the babe, Niibinkosiw had swaddled her son within the coarse fur of a bear.
“As he was born, so shall he pass, on a bearskin robe,” she predicted to her sister midwives, who tittered in approval.
“You are a prophet now, and a mother,” one laughed.
Niibinkowsiw’s thoughts flashed forward and saw her son, two generations on, lying wizened in his wigwam, heaped with honors, and with sons and daughters all around. Would he remember his old mother then and hope to see her again in the land of the spirits? It was an odd notion, quickly brushed from her thoughts.
It is said among the Anishinaabek that a son walks the trail blazed by his father. And so it was that Misko had been lost in the forest when he came upon Ashagi because of the trail his own father Ogaa had walked more than twenty years earlier, well before his birth.
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