Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  “You could stop them with a word, brother. Think on it. Consider your own dreams and what they might hold.”

  But Ogaa’s sleep was untroubled by dreams or worries of any sort. For two days and nights he had fasted without food or water, lying naked and in agony on a bed of cold rocks along the shore of Kitchi Gami, with the chill water between the stones lapping at his flesh. He had prayed to the Great Spirit and the manitos of the lake to make him invisible to his enemies, and on the morning of the third day, had seen the promise of lightning as it streaked the horizon. The cloak of Kitchi Manito would shield him from his enemies, and he snored deep and easy in the knowledge.

  Not so the Old Man, who twisted on his bed of cedar boughs and deer hides, kept awake by premonitions of doom. The Old Man did not intend to accompany Ogaa’s war party to see that their medicine was strong, as would be the case with most shamans. His club foot would only slow them down, or leave him stranded if there was a panicked retreat. His apprentice, Giigoohn, had been delegated as the medicine giver for the trip.

  The Old Man had shown Giigoohn how to prepare pain medications from willow bark as well as solutions of oak to cleanse wounds. He had taught him how to treat puncture wounds with poultices, how to remove an arrowhead with care, and what little could be done to ease blows to the head. But this did nothing to quell the Old Man’s agitation. Even the birds seemed to warn against going.

  Three dogs were slaughtered on the eve of the warriors’ departure and their livers were sliced into fingerlings, one for each man of the war party. The raw, red-brown shreds lay bloody on a flat rock as it was passed from man to man.

  “You must eat without gagging to prove you are no coward,” Ogaa said to Misko, selecting his own slice and sucking it down as if with a great relish.

  To Misko, the raw liver looked like bloody worms. As the liver was passed around, each of the warriors affected to eat their share with pleasure. When Misko’s turn came, he made a show of chewing on the mushy organ meat with gusto. His neighbor slapped him on the back and laughed. “You are a warrior now, sister-fucker!” he said.

  “Soon,” Misko grinned, wiping the side of his mouth with his finger. “After eating that shit, what could be worse?”

  Ah, but there was a worse thing. Misko had heard of his father’s practice of devouring the hearts of those he had killed on the raiding trail, biting into that pearly organ as if it were a corn cob in order to consume the dead man’s strength and courage. Not every man, but those who had shown courage. Men who had accompanied his raids spoke of reverence for the heart-eating ceremony, for after Ogaa had taken his bite he would cut slivers for his warriors so that all could share in the kill. Cupping the hearts of his enemies, Ogaa had tasted them both raw and roasted. It was said that by eating them, he had gained certain powers that made him appear as if a demon to his enemies. No one doubted it.

  Misko did not look forward to tasting a dead man’s heart, but if it came to that, he resolved to recall the feast of the dog’s liver and follow his father’s example.

  The next morning dawned with fire on the water. A fog had settled over the cove and the sun came up in a ruby haze behind it, making it appear as if a forest fire was smoldering on Kitchi Gami itself.

  “It’s another sign that you should desist,” the Old Man muttered in Ogaa’s ear as the village turned out to see the warriors off.

  “If we stay any longer, we will never leave,” Ogaa snorted in reply. Then, turning, he called out to his circle of warriors: “A good sign, brothers. This is the lake of our enemies’ blood!”

  A cheer went up, but it lacked heart, for some muttered that perhaps it was a sign of their own blood rising above the water.

  “I can only give you Kitchi Manito’s blessing,” the Old Man said glumly after Ogaa had again exclaimed at length on the surety of their mission. “The rest is on your hands.”

  Ogaa’s troop of fifty-four warriors smiled and cajoled as they pushed past the women blocking the way to their canoes in mock protest, as was custom. The women smiled and laughed in return, but not all, for some knew from bitter experience that a warrior does not always return.

  The sun rose bright with promise over their shoulders as they turned west, and even their paddles laughed as they slapped at the waves. Behind them, a line of women, children, and old men waved from the shore.

  Things did not go well. By midday, dawn’s warning of bad weather proved true as the sky grew heavy with low-hanging clouds, and a darkness close to that of night itself enveloped them. By afternoon the rain came in a cold, ceaseless torrent that continued for two days and nights. Every man was drenched, even through the protection of the furs they threw on against the wind. Drenched and cold to their bones.

  On the third day, a canoe collapsed sideways in the bucking waves, sending half of their food, and a man weighed down by his leathers to the bottom of the lake. Those above could see his shadow sinking in the dark water, grasping upwards like a ghost. No one who drowned in these chill waters ever returned as a corpse along the shore, for the spirits of the underworld were strong on Kitchi Gami, and jealous of their winnings.

  Those who survived the upheaval clutched at the side of the rescuing canoes and were paddled to shore. But the rocky shore proved no relief, for a dense tangle of brush had built a wall of brambles to the waterline itself. The men slipped and fell on the algae slime of the rocks lining the coast, with one cracking his knee and breaking his nose. They were obliged to wrangle like salamanders over the rocks to the thicket by the shore, where yet another canoe tipped and was torn at mid length as their brothers tried to retrieve them.

  From the safety of his own canoe floating a spear toss off the shore, Ogaa looked on at the debacle in silence and then gave the harsh laugh of selfconscious bravado. “Brothers, be brave, this will harden you!” he called to them. “Shit-eaters,” he grumbled as an afterthought. And that is also what Ogaa called them the next morning after a wet afternoon of towing the ruptured canoe to a landing spot and patching it with bark and pitch. Only four days out, and the desertions had begun already.

  Four men, including the warrior with the broken knee, turned for home after one of them claimed that he had had a dream of disaster the night before. He had dreamed that a beaver the size of an island had slapped at the waters with his tail as their canoes paddled by, dashing them all in a spray beyond which he could not see.

  “Our brother came to warn us,” the dreamer said, reminding Ogaa that theirs was the Amik clan, the clan of the beaver.

  It was a bad moment for Ogaa, for the people of the Anishinaabek do not argue with the wisdom of dreams. “Always these fucking dreams, brothers,” he said at last. “They come when men are challenged to be men. They make men weak, even though no one knows their meaning.”

  All faces turned to the medicine man, Giigoonh. He didn’t meet Ogaa’s eyes, and looked away from the warriors, gazing into the far distance. “I cannot say what it means.”

  Nor would the deserters bow when Ogaa raged at their cowardice. But he could not deny that the man with the broken knee was now useless as a warrior, and to Ogaa’s regret, he was said to be a good man in a fight. “Go then,” he waved. “If you are frightened by something as foolish as a giant beaver, then we do not need you. It is a child’s dream! Go.” As they turned to go, Ogaa lifted his leg and farted loud and long, raising a cascade of laughter from the remaining men. “Go!” he commanded, shooing the deserters as if they were children.

  Fortunately, the departing warriors were unfit in Ogaa’s eyes, and he was not sorry to lose them. One was barely fifteen summers old, another had complained the whole way, and the third was a simpleton, who his band wished to be rid of. His only regret was the loss of the man who would henceforth be called Broken Knee.

  The remainders paddled on, heavy beneath their silence, for it is the way of all men to say nothing, wrestling with their thoughts in the face of ruin. But there was grumbling in camp that night as the older men cons
idered that the season for the running of the whitefish would soon be upon them, and that their wives and the men who stayed behind would be gathering at the rapids at Boweting for the annual catch. Along the riverbank, the fat whitefish would be hung on drying racks as sustenance for the winter ahead.

  “They’ll be spearing more than fish up there,” said Ginwaamiikana, Long Trail, a gloomy man of middle age whose wife was a renowned slut.

  “But you will return with a Dakota woman to tame her,” Ogaa said, picking up the thread. “Perhaps several women.”

  “Aye, and perhaps only a crease in my head and no fish to get through the winter,” Ginwaamiikana responded.

  The forty-nine pushed on, a formidable force if a middling village of the enemy could be found. They passed through the waterway and crossed the portage dividing the long finger of the Kiwewina peninsula, gliding past the mountainous country beyond. On the sixth day they reached the western edge of the lake on the great bay of Shag-a-waum-ik-ong and hid their canoes beneath the shelter of a bluff along the shore. In those days, this country was not yet the heartland of the Ojibwe. Misko’s heart pounded as hard as the waves themselves as his bare feet touched the sands, for here was the frontier of the enemy, and soon, very soon, their blood would make him fully a man. Or so he hoped.

  But where to go? The war party had stopped at two villages along the way, seeking the paths of the enemy, but each was empty except for a few elderly left-behinds who were too aged to travel east to the fishing grounds. “West,” came the answer, but every member of the Anishinaabek knew the enemy lay to the west.

  “Where to the west? Is there a trail? Is there a river?” Misko’s father had nagged a toothless husk of an old man at their last stop.

  “Just go,” the ancient one had waved. “Just go and they are sure to find you if you don’t find them.”

  So they went, and Ogaa reasoned that southwest was the most likely route to the Dakotas for reasons he kept secret.

  Fear accompanied the march into enemy territory along unfamiliar trails, a fear unlike anything Misko had ever known. Often, he remembered his foolish boast to Old Man that he would not be afraid, and just as often he clutched at the bag of charms around his neck, finding little courage in their clutch. The possibility of discovery and ambush seemed to lurk behind every bush. Most terrifying were those times when it was Misko’s turn to scout far ahead of the party, for all knew that scouts did not always return.

  For the sake of concealment, the nights passed without a fire, adding to their misery. The more experienced men took care to sleep alone in the brush well away from camp as an extra precaution against attack. On the third morning inland, six more men had disappeared in the mists, creeping for home. Now they were forty-three.

  Misko could see the anger on his father’s face as he harangued the remaining men to stay strong, lambasting the cowards who had deserted them. Those who turned back would be ridiculed without mercy when the warriors returned with their prizes, he predicted. “I will see that they live the rest of their lives in shame and regret,” he vowed.

  Eya, but forty-three men is still a large force if only a small village of the Dakotas could be found, perhaps even one that had sent warriors to slaughter the Herons.

  Yet, slowly, starvation set in as the last of their dried fish and pemmican disappeared. The dank woods through which they passed had not been burned in more than two lifetimes, so there was no forage, and thus, no deer. A squirrel, a skunk, a porcupine, each catch was eyed by the warriors with a calculating eye toward his sliver of meat. The hills and forests were curiously empty of game, and over one stretch of five days, the hunters found only a fawn, which they ran to the ground. The deer was torn to pieces and eaten half raw. Misko watched as one of the men tore at the intestines, squeezing their contents forward as he gobbled them in a frenzy.

  Soon, the only meat they found was that of earthworms writhing beneath the rocks, but even that was scarce; it had been a dry season and the twisting prey had fled underground.

  13.

  THE MOOSE

  Misko was hungry, too, but with a growing impatience to prove himself. Yet Ogaa never chose him to join the hunters when the band collapsed for the evening. “I need you here with me,” his father growled whenever he asked to join the hunting parties, and for the first time, doubts began to rise in Misko’s thoughts as to his father’s wisdom. Once, when Ogaa thought no one was looking, Misko had seen a look of fear on his face as he gazed upon the warriors. Then in a flood came all the mutterings he had heard from the head men in council, that his father was more concerned with greasing his legend than in taking the path of a careful raider.

  One night as he lay brooding, a portent came calling. Misko heard a shuffling among the leaves where he lay and then came the silhouette of a warrior setting off to relieve himself. Before he could whisper a warning, the intruder stepped on Misko’s bow as he stumbled on.

  Misko caught sight of his face in the moonlight; it was the young brother of Bezhigo-Nika, Lone Goose. Misko and Nika had always loathed the sight of one another for reasons they could not name; they were like mixing oil and blood, as the Anishinaabek say. In their village of more than sixty souls, they seldom spoke to one another, and as estranged men are wont to do, they quickly looked away when they caught the other’s eye.

  Nika’s brother was the youngest among the raiders, barely beyond his boyhood. He met Misko’s eyes in the blue light of the moon, but no apology was forthcoming. Misko clutched his bow to his body as he turned back to his slumbers, hoping that its power had not been lessened. All knew that it was bad luck for an untested warrior to cross another man’s bow.

  Finally, late one afternoon when the day’s catch had again come up empty, Ogaa waved “go” in resignation, and Misko set off through a cleft in the trees to the north, determined to prove his worth. Soon, he found himself on a dim game trail, sinking low through a boggy stretch of tamaracks. Their branches were so dense overhead that it was like winding through a cave. He pushed on through the dank woods, which deepened from blue-green to black as darkness fell. And still, he pushed on, sure that dusk would raise the prey that roused itself when evening fell.

  Far down the deepening gloom, he picked up the track of a moose plodding along a slough of mud. The tracks were so fresh that they were still seeping with water. Creeping forward, Misko managed a grim smile, imagining the look on his father’s face when he brought news of his kill to the camp.

  Misko had never killed a moose. At best, he had been charged with beating the bushes on a moose drive that had herded a few frightened animals to the edge of an island peninsula for clubbing. His club had struck a glancing blow off the back of a fleeing cow, but that had left little to boast of. Yet the big moose ahead was a prize, which could save his father’s raid from disaster. Even Ogaa would be forced to bow when he, Misko, presented his father with the liver.

  Yet in his wisdom, the Great Spirit had given every man a weakness so that no man would grow too proud to bear. Misko’s weakness was his hearing, or lack of it.

  As a child he had slipped on the slime at the bottom of a canoe and tumbled sideways while fishing with a net in the river. His head had struck a rock and he lay unconscious for two days, attended by his aunt, who professed some skill with medicine. For two days his aunt had shrieked and wailed over him to drive the evil from his body. She had wrapped hot rocks in buckskin, almost hot enough to scald, and placed them on his chest. She had wafted fragrant smoke laden with healing herbs over his face and fanned him with the wing of a hawk.

  Truly, her efforts had been heroic, and it was later speculated that perhaps if she had blown smoke in his ear while beseeching the spirits he would have recovered, but when Misko awoke on the third day, the hearing on his left side was almost gone. Gone forever except for the faint trace of voices guessed at like the babble of a tepid brook.

  Thus, Misko seemed haughty to those who spoke to him from the left, for he seldom answered. Some
found him reserved at best, even arrogant. But the wound was also a gift, because it made him strain to listen all the more intently through his right ear, and he strove to be courteous and turn as if in greeting whenever he noticed those approaching on his left. And by listening rather than speaking, Misko had learned many things that most men passed over. Even as a young man, he was adjudged to be wise, if a bit cold.

  Yet now, when he least needed it, his weakness betrayed him, for rounding a thicket and bending over to view the dwindling tracks, he did not hear the rustle over his left shoulder. Too late, his nostrils filled with an unmistakable stink that was sour with sweat, muck, and musk.

  He looked up to find the wooden face of a great bull moose looming over him, almost close enough to touch.

  With a bellow, the moose swept his rack in Misko’s direction, jerking backward with a shivering start. Its antlers hooked his bow and snapped its cord with a violent twang.

  Misko dove to the ground and rolled behind an oak, only to find the moose scrambling in his direction from the other side. As anyone who has ever met a moose knows, the giants of the forest are much swifter and more agile than they appear. And in the rutting season, which was soon upon them, the bulls grow livid with rage. The bull facing Misko was twice his height, with a rack as wide as he could spread his arms. Yet it scrambled around the tree as if he was no larger than a squirrel, its eyes flashing black fire. Misko knew well that an enraged moose is the most dangerous animal in the forest, yet it is not easy to catch a warrior of eighteen summers, and he slipped and dodged as sleek as an otter into a stand of saplings with the bull crashing in frustration behind him.

  Yet, the moose is a forgetful beast. The Great Spirit had granted him this weakness so that he might not grow too haughty. Soon enough, the bull forgot his outrage and fell to nibbling on shoots as Misko hid behind a tree.