Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  By now the forces of the enemy were collecting on the shore, hooting and jeering and exposing their flanks. Some were already wading into the water, waving their weapons above their heads. The enemy had painted their bodies black and red and were clothed for battle with bone breastplates and headdresses of feathers and porcupine quills. They had prepared with ceremony and care, and unlike the Ojibwe, they were rested and well fed.

  Words were no longer necessary. The eight men clambered into the two good canoes, including Ogaa, with three in the half-wreck. Those without paddles shoveled at the water with their hands. On the shore, the enemy soon realized they had been deceived, and the mass of them turned inland to follow the fleeing survivors of Ma’linganbawi’s war party.

  “Too late,” Ma’linganbawi chuckled as they paddled south around the island. “They will not catch them now.”

  But this happy thought and the good fortune of finding the canoes was dashed as soon as they rounded the tip of the island. Down the coastline, they saw a large encampment of the Odugamies and a fleet of more than twenty canoes setting off in their direction.

  “We’re done,” Wajiiw said, dropping his paddle from his good arm as the three canoes nestled as one.

  It was then that Ogaa recalled his strange dream of paddling through the fog of a vast lake. His voice piped high above the waves.

  “There is still a way,” he said, pointing to the eastern horizon. “That way.”

  That way, into the vastness of Mishi Gami. The lake was said to be wider than a swift man could walk in three days, if such a thing were possible. No man was ever known to have crossed it in a canoe. But Ogaa had had a dream, and such portents could not be ignored by the Anishinaabek, who had always been well guided by the wisdom of dreams.

  “I was paddling to the east in my dream,” Ogaa said, excited now and embroidering his tale, though, in fact, in his dream he might also have been paddling to his death and the afterlife.

  Quietly, the men surveyed the lake, which was peaceful, beckoning, and boundless, with no sight of a distant shore.

  “There are islands out there, which the traders follow on their way south across the lake,” Wajiiw noted. “But they are far to the northeast and the wind blows from the north. We could not paddle that far against it.”

  “No, it would have to be straight to the rising sun,” Ogaa said excitedly. “That is what I saw in my dream. We head straight across the lake.”

  “Your dream would take us across the widest part of the lake,” Wajiiw said.

  Although no one had ever crossed Mishi Gami, it was held to be possible. Once, a head man of the Ojibwe had paddled with a party of ten men across a shorter stretch of Kitchi Gami, which was considered far more treacherous.

  But there was no other choice than Ogaa’s dream.

  “Talk, talk, let us go. There is still time,” Ma’linganbawi said, waving impatiently, for the enemy was now less than six bow shots away.

  So, with the sun at their backs and cries of disappointment and accusations of cowardice ringing from the shore, the three overburdened canoes set off into the unknown with each man digging for his life against the water.

  “Farewell, sister fuckers,” Ma’linganbawi muttered as the shore receded to a long flat line of gray outlined against the sun. “Someday you will burn in the fires of the Anishinaabek.” But of this last, he was not sure.

  Every man was exhausted from the day’s fighting and the stress of fleeing. Some had drawn blood or been bloodied in turn. One man, Wee-esh-coob, Sweet, lapsed into a sleep from which he could not be roused, having been dealt a sweeping blow full in his face that broke his jaw. The left side of his head had swollen large as an autumn pumpkin. That, and an arrow tipped with an antler had pierced his back to the length of his smallest finger. All knew that he had come to die for Ma’linganbawi.

  At the fore of the canoe, Wee-esh-coob, blood trickling from his ears, slumped sideways and dropped his paddle. Ogaa reached out and seized it as it floated past. Exhaustion fell prey to fear, however, then relief as they paddled all night through calm waters. With aching arms they followed the blue arc of the moon and the path of the west wind, watching the endless horizon of the lake fade from black to gray as the night waned. Gradually, the sun rose weak on the water.

  Each man looked on in silence as the sun rose as red as a summer fire in the east, foretelling bad weather. A red sun at dawn meant rain.

  “We’re fucked,” an older man muttered behind Ogaa’s ear. “Out here with the demons of the underworld and not a bird in sight. Today, we eat with the fish.”

  “Or they eat us,” Ogaa said with an unexpected bravado that surprised even himself.

  As they feared, the lake began to heave and buck that day. They had come to the lair of those unspeakable things that lived below the surface of the world. The shamans described the beasts of the underworld that prowled the bottom of the lakes. Among them was the dark shadow Ogaa had glimpsed in his dream, and the most fearsome was Misshinahmaygway, a fish monster with a body that was half snake and half fish, yet with a human head. The size of a small island, Misshinahmaygway prowled the waterways, demanding a sacrifice for safe passage. But Misshinahmaygway was a thing of legends which no one had seen in many years, and Ogaa gave it no credence, for it seemed an unlikely tale meant to frighten children.

  Yet many members of the Anishinaabek had seen Misshipeshu, the water panther, which was said to have the head of a lynx and the notched tail of a reptile. Misshipeshu stirred the depths with his tail, raising vast waves and whirlpools. He raised the summer squalls which had taken the lives of many generations of Ojibwe fishermen. It was also well known that giant snakes prowled the waters of the deep lakes, sometimes gliding beneath canoes to devour the upended paddlers.

  Far away, lightning struck the water as the storm came on, and with it, the eternal battle of titans. Often around their winter fires, the Anishinaabek told tales of the thunderbird, Animiki, mortal enemy of the water creatures with whom he has battled for all time in the war between the sky and the underworld. Although they could not see him through the clouds, Ma’linganbawi and his men knew that Animiki was hurling his lightning bolts at the monsters below and cracking thunder with the clap of his wings.

  Even Ogaa had heard of the great tree of life that rose from the underworld to the land of the living, and from there to the sky where the thunderbird flew, and from there the tree grew even further to the path of stars leading to the spirit land. And now, as he sat open mouthed, tilting in his leaking canoe, he felt as small as an insect as he watched the beasts of creation warring against each other.

  A low wind rushed over the water, dark as the dusk, and swept over them with a breath like winter. Then their canoes began to buck and bend in the waves, spinning and tossing and slopping full with water until every man cried in terror. All knew that a canoe could sunder in the middle if it were caught between waves.

  Soon their canoes were bucking on the waves as if strung like puppets on the cords of Maji Manito, the evil one. Ogaa puked over the side and saw his pale face reflected in the dark water below. He clutched like an animal at the side of the canoe, all thoughts driven from his mind except for a fear as deep as the lake itself. How many dead men wandered through the mud at the bottom of the lake? How many gray shades of them padded along the sand of its slopes? There must be thousands down there, chasing after fish, gray and dejected beneath the waves, fishermen and traders upended and drowned, ranging back to the time of his grandfathers’ grandfathers.

  Yet Ogaa recalled he had a friend in those depths, for nibiianaabe, the fish man, was his spirit guide. The merman had come to him from the waters of Kitchi Gami when he was thirteen summers old, only four years before, and had climbed the cliffs of Kitchi Minissing to meet him in the vision quest when he had become a man. Perhaps it was the fish man who saved him.

  “We need an offering! We need a sacrifice!” Wajiiw yelled as the canoes bucked on the water. With the waves r
ocking in a violent herky-jerky motion all around, they had lashed the three craft together for safety. Yet it was as if they rode on the back of a cougar with the lashings threatening to tear their canoes to pieces.

  Eya, but how great a sacrifice? Wet as otters, the men dug for their tobacco, finding it lacking to appease such a storm. At best, there was a handful between them. A dog was called for, the favored sacrifice in many ceremonies. Men who faced trouble on the water would tie a dog’s forelegs together and shove the creature over the side. But, lacking a dog, the men eyed one another as their canoes rocked in the water.

  At last, Ma’linganbawi nodded at the slumped figure in Ogaa’s canoe. It would be Wee-esh-coob, the man called Sweet.

  “Can we do this and not be judged?” Wajiiw asked.

  “We will be judged, that is certain, but he is an old man without a wife who joined us to die a warrior’s death,” Ma’linganbawi said. “Would you not do the same if it were you lying there instead of he?”

  In truth, Wee-esh-coob was more dead than alive. His skull had grown to nearly half its size again and an angry circle of red had spread across his back from the arrow lodged between his ribs. None believed he would live to see nightfall. Yet he still had life within him; they could feel his heart beating and his flesh was warm, even feverish.

  “Brother, are you with us?” Ma’linganbawi cried in the slumped man’s ear. “Can you hear me, brother?”

  There came no answer, nor any response when they shook him.

  “He is walking with the spirits already,” Wajiiw said.

  But it is not easy to toss the dead weight of a man from a rocking canoe without joining him in the water, even though they had made a raft with their lashings. With difficulty they pulled him to the side, sinking to the waterline with the effort. They arranged his feet to the west so that upon his death, he would find himself already walking on Che-ba-kun-ah, the road of souls.

  With a silent slip he was over with many words of anguish from his killers trailing after him.

  “Thank you brother for the life you give to save our skins. Forgive us,” Ma’linganbawi said as the dark shape drifted down with its arms outstretched in a futile struggle. This, followed by cries of thanks from all the men, clinging for their lives amid the leaping waves. Within two lengths of a tall man’s body, Wee-esh-coob disappeared from the sight, bound for the bottom of Mishi Gami.

  Yet, despite Wee-esh-coob’s sacrifice, the creatures of the lake renewed the fury of their thrashing until the lake whipped white as the snows of the Starving Moon. Clutching the sides with all their strength to keep from being thrown to the waves, the men severed the ties binding the three canoes out of fear that they would soon tear themselves apart.

  Then the sky did a curious thing and all who saw it remembered it for the rest of their lives. Gradually, it turned from a faint pink to a swirl of clouds of many colors, and from their depths came a towering green funnel, glowing with the same sheen as the lights of Kitchi Manito in the northern sky at night. The leading edge of the funnel took on the appearance of a vast earthworm, as it burrowed and twisted its way down to the surface of the lake. From the west, a low line of coal black clouds came rushing across the horizon as if a line of warriors, nettled with threads of lightning. A rumble of drums sounded over the water with the crashing of thunder, and then the day gave way to night with the lightning flickering like a bird’s wings at the darkness. Then it was that Ogaa thought he saw the horns of Misshipeshu rising above the waves, twisting in their direction and disappearing almost as soon as he glimpsed them. Then he saw the monster itself rising in a great spout, like a tornado of water, roaring over the waves.

  “We must paddle, brothers!” he yelled. “We must paddle for our lives!” His thin voice was barely heard over the roar.

  The men looked at him in shock. “You led us here, you shit-eater, and now we face our death!” the man behind Ogaa’s back called out over the storm.

  “Yes, brother! It was I and only I that led you here,” Ogaa called back. “Remember that when you tell your story around the fire to your grandchildren! Remember that when you are old and gray and a toothless, tired old fucker! Now paddle or die!”

  And so they did. Although Ogaa’s arms ached so much from exhaustion that he thought they might rip from his shoulders, his body responded as if shot through with lightning. Rain began falling in sheets as dense as a waterfall. The already overloaded canoes began to fill, splintering with the weight of the water. With nothing but their hands for baling, the men alternated between cupping water over the sides and paddling on, twisting helplessly in a tangled course amid the waves. Gradually, the three canoes drifted apart in the storm.

  “Together! Stay together!” Ma’linganbawi cried as one by one the canoes bobbed in separate directions.

  Those were the last words Ogaa heard of the war chief known as Standing Wolf. Gaping in the direction of Ma’linganbawi’s canoe, he imagined he saw a great form rising amid the curtain of rain along with a shriek in the wind that seemed to reach from one end of the lake to the other. The darkness of the heart of the storm overtook Ogaa’s canoe, and when it was gone, so was Ma’linganbawi and the others. Today it is said, his spirit wanders the mud at the bottom of the lake, chasing after fish along its hills of sand.

  “What does your stinking dream have to say now?” yelled the man at the stern of the canoe, the one Ogaa did not know. There were three of them now, baling water over the sides as the storm whispered its last.

  Ogaa had no answer. Unable to speak, he pointed east, or at least, in the direction he imagined was to the east.

  Who knows why some men live and others die? Or why heroes sometimes tumble while cowards earn a second chance? All knew it was the will of the Kitchi Manito, or perhaps by the force of Ke-zha-mune-do, the guardian manito of mercy.

  But on the third morning after a night of trembling with cold, Ogaa and his companions beheld two islands and a great mountain of golden sand on a far shore.

  “It seems we have come to the spirit land,” Ogaa croaked.

  “It is the Sleeping Bear,” said Wajiiw. “I have heard legends of it, but never dreamed to see it. It is said to be a favorite place of the grandfather of all things, heavy with spirits.”

  “Then it is fitting that a Mountain has come to a mountain,” Ogaa smiled weakly, “for brother, it can only be that the Great Spirit has led us here.”

  Paddling on until well past midday they came to a broad beach stretching out of sight in either direction, with sand as fine as one could hope to discover in the Happy Land itself.

  Ogaa tripped climbing out of the canoe and fell face first on the shore, his body wet and quivering. He felt a greasy stream of urine running down his right leg as he melted into the sand. Above him towered the great hump of the dune, higher it seemed, than ten tall pines stacked end to end.

  At a nearby creek, a band of Potawatomi hunters greeted them as brothers, sharing a roast of beaver tail. Nothing like it had ever tasted so good, and together, they sang songs of thanks for their deliverance.

  Niinawind niigaanii anangokaa

  The stars guide us

  Niinawind niigaanii anangokaa

  The stars guide us

  Niinawind noondam anangokaa

  The stars hear us

  Miigwechiwi Kitchi Manito

  Thanks to the Great Mystery

  One of the party was especially interested to hear every detail of their story, asking again and again for the fine points of the grievances that drove them to war, the expedition, the battle, and their flight across the lake. He had strange gray eyes and a club foot and seemed much older than his years.

  “But you are no Potawatomi,” Wajiiw said, having traveled among those southern kin of the Ojibwe. “You speak as do the Anishinaabek and your moccasins are the same as ours.”

  “Ehn, and I am no hunter, either,” the stranger said with a smile. “I am of the Anishinaabek, though I live as a trader now and count f
our tribes as my brothers.”

  “Four tribes?”

  “I was born to the Makwa clan among the Anishinaabek,” the trader explained, “but I have traveled among the Wendat, the Odaawaa, and the Potawatomi. I have been a guest in the lodges of the Erie, the Nippissing and the Cree, and before I die, perhaps even the Dakota and the Odugamies.”

  Then, drawing in his pipe, the trader had gestured at Wajiiw’s dangling limb. “What of your arm, brother?”

  Wajiiw groaned. “It is the will of Kitchi Manito,” he said, his face pale with agony.

  “The enemy struck him with a club and knocked his elbow from his cradle,” Ogaa said. “He paddled the way across Mishi Gami with his right arm.”

  “I can fix it for you, brother, if you are willing,” the stranger said in a low voice.

  The trader instructed Ogaa to cradle the big man’s head in his lap. Then, he had stroked Wajiiw’s broken arm and shoulder gently, brushing his brow with wet, cooling herbs.

  “Tell me of your clan, brother,” he whispered in a soothing voice, filled with kindness. “Tell me of your clan, your woman, and your village.”

  Wajiiw relaxed just slightly with the look of a child crossing his eyes, and it was then that the stranger gave a hard jerk and snapped his elbow back into place.

  “Oh, brother, you will never be whole again, but you will never be broken, either,” he said as Wajiiw groaned beneath him. “You are better now. Better than you were.”

  That night, the stranger told them that he was returning from a trip of several moons to the south. He had journeyed beyond the great O-y-o river and the hunting grounds of the Shawnee where he had traded in the land of Coosa, including what was left of the great town of Itaba.

  “Ah, but we were disappointed,” he said, “for Itaba had vanished along with hundreds of other towns running all the way to Misi Sipi.” He and his brothers had brought a canoe full of copper and furs from the land of the Ojibwe down many rivers to trade in exchange for tobacco, mica, turtle shells, and cowries from the sea further south. “But we found only ghosts and small bands of people, where once there had been thousands.” The trader fetched his pipe and a coal from the fire, offering tobacco all around to those gathered to hear his story.