Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  To the west, the Dakota Sioux were once again raiding the Ojibwe hunting grounds. Word had come that prior fall that the Dakotas had slaughtered a village of the Heron clan on the north shore of Kitchi Gami near the Gakaabikaa falls. They had stolen the young women, and killed everyone else but an old woman who had gone mad conversing with the che-bi-ug spirits of her murdered people. And this without provocation after a long peace.

  Massacres were all but unknown on the Great Turtle Island. At best, the warriors of the Ojibwe took a few lives of the enemy in their hit-and-run raids, but to kill all the men of a peaceful village was unheard of. It violated the laws of Kitchi Manito: never to take too much, be it food, game, or even the lives of the enemy. But then, it was reasoned, the Dakota had their own gods, and perhaps they were not as kind. Over the council fires it was speculated that the enemy had gone mad, possessed by the evil spirit, Maji Manito. No one ever knew that it was the vengeance of the Sioux war chief, Secachapa.

  As it happened, some of the Heron clan had familial ties to Ogaa’s village. His own brother and two cousins were among the dead. Their bodies had been hacked to pieces and their bones scattered by the enemy to deny them new lives in the spirit land. Ogaa’s kinsmen had married three skins away, as was customary; they had been visiting the village of their wives when the attack took place.

  At first, Ogaa was not inclined to act. He had little love for his brother, and it had been more than ten years since he had led a raid. To be a warrior was a young man’s burden, and Ogaa was well into his forties.

  But then came the nagging of the relatives of his kinsmen, and the sudden recollection by all that Ogaa had once been a great hero of the Anishinaabek. “No one has mentioned the deeds of my youth for years and now their reminders are falling like rain,” he grumbled to his wife.

  Rain it did, as word of the massacre swept the southern coast of Kitchi Gami like a cutting wind. All through the fall, Ogaa’s ears were filled with a nagging refrain: “When will you act, brother? There is blood of our people on the ground; what will we do? You are ogichidaa; where are the warriors?”

  Ogaa had too much pride to admit that he had no plan, other than to nurse the ache in his aging bones for whatever remained of the life Kitchi Manito had chosen for him. But by the first snowfall of that year the war spirit had rekindled within him, and with it the dream of a last stab at glory. That winter, Ogaa and the chiefs along the coast met to discuss a campaign of revenge against the enemy.

  “Our brothers, the Herons, cry out to us,” Ogaa said upon each visitation. “They have been robbed of their lives, even of their spirits! Their blood is our blood, yet the snakes of the Dakotas have bled our brothers without mercy or cause. Soon they will come for us, one village at a time. We need to kill these fuckers before they kill us.”

  It was a practiced speech with gestures and dramatic pauses, honed by the fires of Niibinkosiw’s lodge with Misko serving as an audience. Everywhere, Ogaa’s words met with agreement. But the politics of war were slow in the grinding, with long distances to be covered in the heart of the winter. Misko accompanied his father on every mission through the interior forests that season, making arduous trips of a week or more on snowshoes and by canoe to meet with the head men of the scattered bands in their hunting quarters. At times he feared they would freeze to death as he and his father huddled in their furs with only an overturned canoe for shelter, while Biboon, spirit of the north wind, cried out their names in the night.

  On many evenings, Misko found himself sitting in the background of the council fires as his father met with one chief after another, devising a plan of attack. It proved to be a valuable education.

  All agreed that a response was called for, but Misko noted that there was much dissent as to what level of vengeance should be sought. Ogaa urged a war party of half the warriors along the coast, a raid involving hundreds of men to smite the Dakota for all time.

  But a raid involving hundreds was not the way of the Ojibwe. Most raiding parties numbered fewer than ten men, and many still remembered the disastrous raid of Ma’linganbawi, who sent many of their brothers and sons to their deaths against the Odugamies. Ma’linganbawi had raised a war party of more than four hundred warriors, Ogaa among them, of course, and nearly a quarter of them had been killed when the Odugamies joined forces with the Dakota in an ambush.

  Thus, Ogaa’s proposal had the air of a skunk to many, especially the head men who guided civil affairs in each village. These were not war chiefs, but rather, the chieftains who oversaw the everyday matters of each village, including disputes, the migration through the seasons and the arrangements for ceremonies and festivals.

  “What you ask for would take more food than we could provide,” noted the head man of several bands living on the Kiwewina peninsula, which jutted deep into the western end of Kitchi Gami. “What would be left to feed those left behind? And who would remain to defend our women and children if the Haudenosaunee come raiding from the east? We cannot risk kicking up a bee’s nest with the whole Dakota nation.”

  “A bee’s nest?” Ogaa responded cooly. “That’s exactly what we will do brother, but it is we who will do the stinging.”

  “Yes, these are good, brave words,” the head man from the Kiwewina said. “But the Dakota are many in number and live in a far country that none of us knows. How will you find the enemy? How will you surprise them? Are you not one of the few who lived to tell of the disaster that struck Ma’linganbawi war party?”

  These cautions seemed sensible to Misko, but he could not share such thoughts with his father, who raged against the wheedling and timidity of the elders whenever they were out of hearing.

  “They are not men! They are frightened old women, crying over their sewing!” he stormed. Misko flinched at his words, knowing they would be an intolerable insult to any man of the Anishinaabek.

  “Father, take care,” he cautioned. “It is friends you need, not enemies. The birds will whisper your words where you do not want them heard.”

  “Let the birds sing,” Ogaa huffed. “I need men who are not afraid to be men.”

  That spring a council was called of all the ogichidaas and head men along the coast so that Ogaa could address them as one.

  Many warriors had flocked to Ogaa’s pipe in his younger days, eager to join his raids. But it had been years since the old raider had gone pillaging, and his star had fallen low in the estimation of the coastal chieftains.

  Yet they listened. Ogaa rose like an old bear to speak in the council’s longhouse, with more than fifty chieftains and their sidemen packed knee-to-knee in attendance. The light filtering through the smoke hole above his head seemed to set his silvering hair ablaze as he stood wraithlike among the warriors. Then, with his voice rumbling deep and hoarse from an old injury to his throat, Ogaa drew the gathered men to his breast, mesmerizing them with tales of blood and plunder on the raiding trail. Few could resist.

  “Listen! Listen to me, brothers!” Ogaa drew himself up and spread his hands to encompass all who circled the council fire. He gave a long pause, considering the assembled chiefs in silence. A pause so long that his audience looked to one another and grew restive, rumbling amongst themselves.

  “What if it was you, brothers?” he began, spreading his arms to take in the circle. “What if it was you whose bones were scattered and whose women were taken? Would you wish to hear such talk as we hear now?

  “I can’t forget the brother of my own blood, nor my cousins and what was done to our people,” he grieved in a loud voice before the somber chieftains. “I hear their spirits crying out to us! Listen! Can you not hear them with me? They are crying that we have abandoned them; they cry out for vengeance while the warriors of the Anishinaabek sit in their lodges, picking their noses, and mumbling like old women.”

  At this there came not a sound from the assembled chiefs, but Misko noted some of them nodding.

  “And brothers, think of this, too,” Ogaa went on. “What will th
e Anishinaabek be if we do not answer our enemies as warriors should answer? The Dakotas are snakes with their honor lower than the ground beneath their bellies. Snakes are coiling all around us! Should we not trample them? If I lie to you brothers, then take my words and put them in a hole in the ground. Cover them and leave me with them forever!”

  Here, Ogaa raised his club and shook it slowly over their heads, his voice rising to a shout. “If we do not act, then all of us will be seen as weak as the Herons!” he cried. “And brothers, it will be true! For another lifetime will have gone by with the old ways of the warriors forgotten or never learned by our young men. I cannot let this rest! For our women and children, we cannot let this rest!”

  But if matters could not rest, then neither did they rise to the fever that Ogaa wished, for the elders had heard the old talk of war and glory many sad times before. True, the young men of every band were behind him, but many were untested boys of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years or so, eager for adventure, but ignorant of the hazards and lacking in skill.

  In his quiet observations, as meek and unobserved as a sparrow in a bush, Misko heard grumbling among the chiefs that his father’s plan of a thousand warriors was nothing but a foolish attempt to rekindle the glory of his youth.

  “A man who believes himself to be larger than his life can do great things, but he is more likely to bring on great troubles,” said a Mide shaman. “We honor Ogaa’s courage, but where does his courage come from? A man of less pride would craft a plan of less risk.”

  Yet, by the council’s end several days later, Ogaa had wrestled an agreement from the head men along the coast that an attack should be mounted, though none could agree on how large, or when.

  That spring, Ogaa set his wife Niibinkowsiw to making a replica of his own hand out of buckskin, which would be passed from band to band for the pledge of unity in the coming raid. The hand must be embroidered with powerful symbols to show that it radiated strength, he said. It would be filled with dearly traded tobacco to smoke as a covenant of war. Further, he instructed Niibinkowsiw to embroider a fringed sheath for the pipe, which would travel with the Hand of War.

  Niibinkosiw was honored by the task her husband had given her. But the work passed slowly, for though she was named Summer Meadow, that warm season was well past in her life and her hands had grown old, with a raw, crippling pain in their joints. She also still had all the cares of a wife: cooking meals, gathering firewood, scraping hides, foraging for berries, roots, and plants to eat. None of these tasks were excused and they took up all of her day. Thus, work on the buckskin hand could only take place after the evening meal when Niibinkosiw was worn to exhaustion.

  Ogaa dismissed three hand totems that Niibinkosiw fashioned of doeskin, saying that none was good enough for his purposes. One was comically large, the other ridiculously small, insignificant. The third had a misshapen finger that went off at an odd angle. Eventually, he charged Niibinkosiw’s younger sister with creating the war symbol, yet did not tell his wife. This sparked days of cold rage, alternating between a frozen silence and screaming jags from his wife for his unspeakable insult. And so, the fashioning of the hand passed back to Niibinkosiw, and Ogaa was well enough with it when the fourth incarnation took shape two weeks later. If there was anything lacking from his critical eye, he kept it to his breast.

  But then came the embroidery of the hand and the pipe sheath, and by this time Niibinkowsiw was so rattled by her husband’s impatience that the work dragged on three times as long as might be expected.

  “If you want it perfect, it will be perfect,” she screamed at him. “But perfection doesn’t happen in a day.”

  So Niibinkosiw was careful to dye and re-dye the porcupine quills chosen to embroider the hand and she sent Misko up and down the coast in search of the smallest and most delicate cowrie shells for its decoration. These had to be traded for with considerable bargaining and cajoling, for no one wished to part with such treasures, even for such a sacred totem.

  Still, between the trading and his father’s mission, Misko learned a great deal that year, which would help him in the years to come.

  Meanwhile, in his frustration, Ogaa contemplated divorce. With a word he could be rid of Niibinkowsiw and she would return to her family’s clan on Manitowaaling, the Island of the Spirits. But who then would take up the work of completing the totem hand and the pipe? And who would prepare his meals and stoke his fire while he did the important work of a chief? Niibinkosiw’s hands were crippled and slow, but a new, younger wife would eat all of his time, like a snake devouring its tail.

  Thus, the work dragged on for a full moon, and then nearly another before it was finished. Ogaa burned with impatience, for summer was half over and the raiding season was flying by, and yet his wife was still fussing with the hand. Yet, great war chief though he was, a man-killer who ate no shit from any man, nor any woman, either, Ogaa did not dare protest too strongly against the wrath of his own wife. For even a man who kills without mercy must endure the complaints of an unhappy wife. He reasoned that it was better to risk the scalping knife of the enemy than to hear that she-wolf howl again.

  12.

  THE WARRIORS ARE GATHERED

  At last the irksome hand of pillage was finished, and even Ogaa had to admit that Niibinkosiw had done well creating the buckskin hand with its embroidery of quills and a lacing of tiny shells. “Your work will bring us power over our enemies,” he predicted, lavishing praise upon his wife. Ogaa’s war pipe was finally complete, too, with its catlinite bowl of red pipestone, traded from the Crees long beyond memory, who in turn had fetched it from the Dakotas. The bowl had been carved with the face of a bear by some long-dead sculptor.

  Again, Ogaa and Misko took to the canoe tracks and forest pathways, this time in search of warriors. By the time of the Fishing Moon, they had collected the pledges of fifty-four warriors with a promise to gather at Kitchi Minissing with their weapons and supplies at the next full moon. It was not the 1,000 warriors Ogaa had called for, but it would have to do.

  It was the Old Man’s duty to make the charm bundles that would protect the warriors on their expedition. He and his apprentice, Giigoohn, Little Fish, collected personal items from each warrior—hair, amulets, armbands—and then added magical items of their own choosing. Each warrior would wear his charms in a small bag around his neck or tied at his waist.

  “Is it true that such a bag will make me invisible to the Dakota?” Misko asked, hanging his sack of charms around his neck.

  “Oh yes, if you are standing behind them,” the Old Man joked. “But more likely, it will blunt an arrow from piercing your chest.” Then, leaning close, he said, “The charms are to give a man courage, something to believe in, nothing more. Grasp them before battle and you will feel stronger and less fearful.”

  “I will have no fear!” Misko scoffed.

  “I hope you return to tell me so.” the Old Man studied Misko’s face. “Your father has the blessing of the Great Spirit, for only brave men make great warriors, and only great warriors are chosen to lead other men. But brave men fare no better than cowards, for a man who is afraid is easily overcome, but a man with courage throws himself many more times into the path of death. You must choose a path somewhere in between if you wish to live long.”

  “Then I will be brave now and a coward when I am older.”

  “Yes, yes, and a fool always, but watch yourself. I would not care to see you as a coward, nor would I care to see you dead. And remember, the enemy is not the only thing that kills. Hunger is the reason most war parties fail. A band of fifty men or more need a steady supply of many large game animals to endure the rigors of the long trail to the enemy. Your father’s plan calls for a journey of a full cycle of the moon and half again, perhaps longer. Much can happen on a journey so long. My advice to you is to go fishing instead.”

  “I can hardly disobey my father,” Misko said with a frown.

  The Old Man scowled. “Yes, always the pr
oblem of the father. It is only old men who should go to war,” he said after a moment. “For old men would be slow to depart, slow on the path, loathe to attack, and quick to return to the comfort of the home fires and their women.”

  “But then who would win?” Misko laughed.

  “Everyone. The enemy, the People, the children, we would all win.”

  The Old Man then presented five copper arrowheads as a parting gift, a treasure to be used with the greatest of care, with not a single one to be lost. “You must dig them out, whether lodged in man or beast,” Old Man said. “You must not lose them, for they belong to your son and all his sons yet to come.”

  Misko weighed the green copper points in his hand, so light, yet so deadly, and imagined the day when he would have a son and repeat Old Man’s words to the young boy.

  The Old Man met with Ogaa a few days before his departure to tell him that the sky was not with him.

  “Last night I saw the lights creeping in the northern sky and they were red and only red. I saw that it was the blood of our brothers.”

  “Priest, it might also be the blood of our enemies,” Ogaa said, waving three fingers in dismissal. “The lights of the sky have no allegiance. No one can tell what they might mean.”

  The Old Man gave him a wry look and chuckled. “How bold of you to say that I, a shaman of the Mide-wi-win, cannot read the lights of Kitchi Manito!”

  “I meant no offense, brother,” Ogaa said. “But I have known priests to be wrong before, and men often have disturbing dreams when they are challenged. The summer wanders on, and with it our time to strike.”

  “Yes, but I have also had a dream of men rushing over a waterfall.”

  “And were they our men?”

  The Old Man shrugged. “Who can say? But if the spirits were on our side, the dream would have held more cheer.”

  Ogaa snorted. “I am hardly one to disregard the wisdom of dreams, since I found my own fate in a dream,” he said. “But our canoes are filled and ready to leave. I could no more stop them now than I could stop the waves on the lake.”