The next day, Animi-ma’lingan set off to the west from Boweting with a party of Odaawaas to begin his education as a trader and a giimaabi. Years of being hobbled by his lame foot had been channeled into strengthening his arms and chest at the paddle of a canoe, and though his everyday name was the Old Man, he flew through the water as if he were a spring sturgeon. The Odaawaa were delighted to have him in their craft.
Only a simple cowrie shell hung on a leather thong around his neck gave any indication that Animi-ma’lingan was of the Mide; but then, only they would know such a thing. He was determined to fulfill the task the elders had given him, and at Mo-ning-wuna-kaun-ing he learned of the mines of the Minong to the north and the copper they wrestled from pits in the earth. There, the Old Man parlayed his skill at storytelling into a gift for trading. With his canoe riding low in the water with copper he began to travel; first, far east to the Agawa cliffs and beyond to the land of the Nipissings and the Odaawaa. Then far beyond the sacred island of Mishi Mackinakong to the long houses and fortified towns of the Wendat and the Erie.
Ah, such things he saw among the thousands living there. The Wendat tilled fields of maize and tobacco spreading as far as a man could walk in a day. Palisades of sharpened pines circled the Wendat towns, and their people dwelled in long houses big enough to hold ten families.
As he traveled, he listened and remembered, nodding over the fires of the Odaawaa, Nipissing, Wendat, Miami, and all the tribes beyond, pushing deep into the south where few of the Anishinaabek had ever wandered.
In the telling of his own stories of the Ojibwe he was careful to reveal nothing of the Mide-wi-win, nor his place among them. And when he felt the need to dig deeper, he was careful to couch his questions in a way that was appropriate for a simple trader. The price of being recognized as a giimaabi, he knew, was slow death, for that is the fate of all spies.
Although he would not know it for many moons, it was not long after Old Man Animi-ma’lingan left the grand lodge of the Society of Shamans that Wabeno passed into the spirit land. The day the young spy departed was the last time he would see his father, and although he hoped for a sign from the great beyond, Wabeno sent back no messages.
10.
THE COMING OF AGE
By his thirteenth summer, Misko had mastered a series of bows and arrows crafted by his father. He had learned the art of scooping the sturgeon, nahme, from the depths of the lake, along with the pickerel, pike, and whitefish that swam below his net. He had served as a club-bearer in the game drives, and had learned to butcher a moose once it had been brained and brought down in an enclosure of branches and brambles. But he had not yet accompanied his first raid, nor was he yet a proper man; he was an in-between man.
Then one day, before the eyes of their band, Misko’s father blackened his face with ashes and told him it was time to travel into the forest.
“Where will we go?” Misko asked as they took the path to the northwest up the coast.
“To the lonely place,” his father replied, and Misko knew it would be the same place, heavy with spirits, where his father had gained a vision when he too had been an in-between man.
They walked half a day to the northern end of the island, stopping once to observe a sow bear and her two cubs sauntering up the path before them. The makwa looked over her shoulder with an air of unconcern, leading her cubs into the brush to let them pass.
“They know we have no care for them,” Ogaa said.
Later that day, after his last meal of dried venison greased with fat and sweetened with berries, Misko and his father came to a tall cliff on the north shore of the island where they found the ruin of an ancient cedar, struck by lightning and hollowed out long ago. Although it was a hot day, a thread of cool wind from the north tickled Misko’s limbs as he gazed upon the lonely spot.
The skeletal tree grappled at the rocks lining the cliff with its dead roots, a gray giant at the north end of Kitchi Minissing. With its eerie silence, heavy with presence, the clearing was plainly the haunt of spirits.
“The manitos dance here,” Ogaa said, catching the fear on his son’s face. His face lightened as he remembered his fear when his own father had brought him here many years before. “But you will be well because you are strong and you are my son,” he said with a small laugh of reassurance. “This is the path of every boy who becomes a man. Welcome it!”
At least, that is what Ogaa hoped for his son.
The tree had been split in two and half its wreckage lay on the rocky ground. Together, they collected a bed of pine boughs for Misko to lie on that night along its shattered trunk. From where he lay, Misko would see the splintered shaft of the cedar that night, outlined stark against the sky like three fingers pointing to Kitchi Manito.
Ogaa had carried a coal in a small clay pot from the village. By luck it still lived, and the two sat down to smoke a pipe of tobacco and red willow bark before they parted. A portion was placed upon a rock beside them as an offering to the spirits.
“I had my dream here and my father before me and his father, too.” Ogaa gazed into his son’s face as he spoke. “Before that, this was the island of the red earth people of the Odugamies. We drove them out when the Anishinaabek came here from the east.”
“What was your dream, Father?”
Ogaa pulled the lone eagle feather from his braid. “It was of nibiianaabe,” he said, pointing. “The fish man came to me in a dream while I was half awake. It came over the edge of that cliff and spoke words to me that I could not understand.”
At this, Ogaa made a gaping fish face and gasped, pursing his lips open and shut at Misko while bugging his eyes. “That is how he looked,” he said gravely.
A chill ran through Misko as he imagined his father confronting the fish man from the depths of Kitchi Gami. Not many of the Anishinaabek had ever seen the nibiianaabe, not even those members of the Merman clan who lived on the shore of the mainland.
“But that was long ago and every man has a different vision,” his father shrugged.
“Yes, Father, I look forward to mine,” Misko said, though he hoped it would not be of the fish man.
“Remember, you must not leave this circle, no matter what thoughts or fears come upon you,” Ogaa said, drawing a line in the air around the clearing with the pipestem. “Remember, you are here to see things which will seem strange. Do not fear them. They are here to guide and protect you.”
“Ehn, Father. I will have no fear.”
“There is water here,” his father said, identifying a treacle at the base of the tree which fell down the cliff face beyond, “but you must not eat. In the old days, men did not allow themselves even water when they sought the spirits,” Ogaa said as an afterthought. “Sometimes they tormented their flesh with knives or scoured themselves with nettles to bring visions to their parched bodies. But we are not as strong as the Old Ones were. Remember that as you wait for what comes.”
With that, Misko’s father stood, and, without a farewell, headed for the path. He paused at the edge of the clearing and turned to look at his son. “I will be back in five days,” he said. And then he was gone.
That afternoon, Misko lolled in camp, bored and wondering what sort of vision might come his way. For years his father and the Old Man had talked of the day when he would seek his guardian spirit. It was a lonely time of fasting that every man endured, and many women, too, and it could also be a fearful time, confronting the manitos who were not often kind.
Sitting by the hearth of his mother’s wigwam, Misko had scoffed at the idea that he would be afraid of solitude. By the age of thirteen, he had spent many nights in the forest while on the hunt, although always in the company of others and with a comforting fire. Indeed, he had practiced the dream quest on his own, spending entire afternoons sitting quietly by his own place of power, a boulder perched on the eastern end of the island.
Yet as the sun went down, the shadows deepened on the shattered trunk of the old cedar as if something within its broken heart wa
s unwinding with the collapse of the day. The silence of the place seemed unnaturally still, as if the world itself was retreating. As the dusk surrounded him, so did his fear. Misko thought of the bears they had seen earlier in the day. The island had many bears and they roamed by night. On the prior spring, a young brother, only six summers old, had been seized by a bear while wandering a short way from the village. The bear was an old male, lame and starving, desperate enough to risk its life by skulking near the village. No one had noticed that the boy was missing until the next morning. A coven of crows led the People to him, where he was found with his entrails spilling across a carpet of moss.
In a silence so deep he could hear his own blood rushing in his ears, he heard the snap of a twig, imagining the form of makwa rounding the bushes. But only silence walked through the clearing, and things which were not visible. He cowered in terror under the boughs of his shelter, imagining dark forms creeping like vines from beyond the edges of the dead tree as it glowed softly white in the starlight. He thought of the ghosts and demons the Old Man had spoken of on one particularly frightening evening before the winter fire. He thought of the little snakes of the Sioux and the Haudenosaunee, whose war parties crept all summer through the lands of the Anishinaabek. He remembered the stories of the windigo cannibals and of Misshipeshu, the serpent with the head of a lynx that prowled the waters off the island. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw dead men moving in the dark.
And yet with each succeeding terror, he followed the instructions of his father and the Old Man and sang to drive the fearful thoughts away.
N’gaawiin zegendam, n’gaawiin zegendam
I do not fear. I do not fear,
Nandom nibowin, nandom nibowin,
The call of death. The call of death.
N’gaawiin zegendam, n’gaawiin zegendam
I do not fear. I do not fear,
N’aawi’ogichidaa, n’aawi’ogichidaa
I am a killer, I am a killer.
The songs helped drive his fears away, allowing him to see things clearly. It was only a squirrel or a chipmunk rustling in the bushes, he told himself. It was only the buzzing of a moth or a bat, not the spirit of a man. It was crickets, not monsters, he heard calling his name in the night.
“You must not fear these distractions,” the Old Man had said, “for when the vision comes you will know that all these are only dreams.” The Old Man told him that the purpose of the quest went beyond obtaining a guiding spirit. “Your time alone is to remind you that a man is nothing by himself,” he had said. “By himself, a man is a mouse in the teeth of a panther. Gaawiin, no, not even that; he is a shaking leaf with all creation against him. Without your family and your clan, what are you? Without your brothers to hunt alongside, how can you live? Without your sisters to make a snug home, where would you be? A man who is alone is nothing; that is the lesson of the dream time.”
That morning Misko woke shivering with the dew. But finding himself whole, he stretched and smiled with the knowledge that he had endured the night and was one step closer to being a man. All that day he imagined returning to the village and being honored with the naming ceremony once he had shared his dream with his father. He sang, watched the sun, and waited.
What was his guardian spirit to be? he wondered. Otter, moose, loon? Sturgeon, duck, bear, beaver, lynx? A woodpecker rapped at the cedar; could it be? Martin, grouse, squirrel? Whitefish, turkey, eagle, deer, wolf, elk, cougar? All these and more passed through his thoughts as he wondered which would come to guide him to manhood.
But all that came on the second day was hunger.
The fears returned also on the second night, but less so, outweighed by his growing hunger. Misko brushed them away as spiderwebs, singing with greater lust and slapping his thighs in a drumbeat. He shut his eyes, willing a vision of his totem to his side. But again that night, nothing came but a strange dream he could not grasp hold of upon waking.
He filled his belly with water, and though it was hot, he shivered in the sun. Nothing came that night either, though he dreamed that something was pawing at his mother’s lodge.
On the fourth day, nothing, and by now Misko’s throat was so hoarse that he could no longer sing. He felt dizzy; he was a thin boy and had never gone this long without food, even during the Starving Moon of two years ago when the band had survived on the frozen corpses of deer lying half buried in the snow.
But still no vision came, and he thought of how angry his father would be when he turned up his hands with nothing to show. Everyone in the band would know, and Misko would have to endure the vision ceremony another time, still a boy with no man’s name to honor.
Lying on his cedar boughs as dusk settled, he could have wept in frustration. He could not weave an untrue vision; that would only make the manitos angry, and his father and the Old Man would see it as a lie.
“Whe, whe, whe . . .” he sang as sleep overcame him, for once without fear of what might creep into the circle beneath the old tree. Hunger had worn him down, and though he struggled to remain awake, a weariness that ran as deep as his bones dragged his eyelids shut.
Then, in the place between wakefulness and sleep, during the time when the manitos, puk-wudgies, and witches travel between the other world and ours, a storm began to gather in the west, and through his dreaming thoughts, Misko heard the familiar roar of the wind in the treetops, a common sound on the shores of Kitchi Gami. With the wind came a flickering shadow that filled the half-lit sky from one horizon to the next. The shadow pulsed like lightning, flashing the sky from black to white as the wind became a buzzing sound that filled Misko’s ears. It was as if he had plunged his head into a hive of bees. Down and down the shadow thing came until it was no bigger than his thumb, gazing with its black eyes into his. Abruptly, the thing pecked at his eyes with the thorn of its beak. Misko leapt from his dream with a stifled cry. The clearing was empty, the shadow gone, and the roar replaced by silence.
Late in the fifth day, Ogaa rounded the bushes into the clearing to find his son sitting cross-legged beneath the jagged tree. At a glance he could tell that the boy had become a man.
But even so, there came a problem.
“What is it?” Ogaa demanded of the Old Man when he and Misko returned to the village.
Misko had drawn a picture of his vision on a sheath of birchbark, describing the roar in the sky and the beating that surpassed his understanding.
As the Old Man listened to Misko’s story and gazed at the drawing, a smile wandered over his face.
“It is nenookaasi,” he said. “It is the hummingbird.”
Ogaa grunted. “I thought as much,” he said, disappointed. “I have seen them far to the south, but never on the island.”
“And have you ever seen nenookaasi?” the Old Man asked Misko.
Misko shook his head no.
“Then this is a good thing,” the Old Man said. “It is a true vision of an unknown thing.”
“It is a puny bird,” his father interrupted. “It is a little bird, no bigger than a mouthful for a fox. It is not fitting for my son to have such a dream.”
“Gaawesa—you are wrong, brother,” the Old Man said, straightening. “Nenookaasi is small, but he is the strongest of all the birds in creation. Have you seen how he beats his wings faster than the eye can see? Have you seen him fly as fast as an arrow that can travel sideways at will? Have you seen how he hovers in the air? If Nenookaasi were the size of an eagle, not even you would be safe from him.”
“That is a strange thing to say,” Ogaa said. “Am I to fear my own son?”
“You misunderstand.”
“He must go back to try again.”
“This cannot be,” the Old Man said. “Not unless you wish to anger the spirits.”
No, Ogaa did not wish to do such a thing, for the spirits were peevish and inclined to be malicious at any excuse.
“Is that to be his dream name then? Nenookaasi?” he asked irritably.
Misko looked u
p expectantly, for the naming ceremony was to be his reward for his time alone. It was an honor for Animi-ma’lingan to choose his dream name, to be announced at a feast in the village. Few would ever use his dream name, but it would hold a power that would strengthen and protect him for all his life. Nenookasi would watch over him.
The Old Man had been asked by many in the band to name their children upon receiving their vision and he had spent many days pondering the right name for each one. Mostly, it was a name related to the seeker’s dream, but not always. Often, a man earned his name through a great deed or else the snare of misfortune. But he had taken particular care in finding a name for Misko, for he thought of the boy as his own son. He had clasped him tightly to his chest, seeking a revelation, yet no name had come to him.
Animi-ma’lingan looked into the upturned face of the boy who had become a man and watched it fall with his words.
“No, young brother. Nenookaasi will guide you, of that I am sure, but he has not given you his name,” he said. “Your name has not yet been given to me, but soon I hope it will come. Soon.”
11.
THE POLITICS OF WAR
Peace is a fragile thing, and by Misko’s eighteenth year even the birds and the animals of the forest seemed to be at war. The eagles fought seagulls along the shore. Sparrows fought crows. A whitetail buck with a tall crown of antlers was seen sparring with a bear, something no one had ever seen before. At night, resting far afield, hunters reported the rage of timber wolves tearing at one another in the darkness. The woods resounded with the crash of antlers as the big bulls among the moose rammed at each other in their lust. Even the squirrels seemed to be in a fury, chattering war songs in the trees, or so it was said.
Far to the southeast, it had been reported that the Haudenosaunee had formed a confederation of five tribes called the League of the Longhouse, which boded ill for their neighbors. Every band of the Anishinaabek along the shores of Kitchi Gami grew watchful of attack.
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