He fidgeted with his arrows and the edge of his flint knife. Without a bow, even the copper points could not pierce the hide and well-muscled chest of a bull moose. The points, which once seemed so lethal, now looked fit only for rabbits.
The moose edged closer, and glancing up, caught sight of Misko again with a quizzical look. With a bellow he charged again, and the ensuing game of tag drove them from tree to tree as the sun flew over the horizon. Misko couldn’t help but laugh, for the foolish moose had no chance of catching him. He held on to the vain hope of braining the moose with a rock, but none presented itself, and so at last he shimmied up a slender maple to wait it out.
The moose contented itself with browsing the forage beneath the tree, a branch bouncing off its hump without effect. At last, as the woods deepened from gray to black, it wandered into the darkness and disappeared.
Lost. Misko climbed down from his perch and peered at the tracks disappearing in the gloom. He set off in the direction opposite the moose, sure that it was the way back to camp. A mistake. All men like to think that they are sure of their directions, and the Anishinaabek have a better sense than most, but finding one’s way in a featureless forest is as much a matter of luck as it is instinct. Only much later did Misko realize after stumbling along by the thin light of a quarter moon that he should have slept by the scramble of tracks until dawn.
Dark things come to a man when he is lost in the forest at night. Thoughts of ghosts, spirits, and unspeakable creatures that shuffle and sniff in the darkness. Around him the forest began coming to life with nocturnal animals. But there was something more, slipping just out of Misko’s vision. Gradually, he sensed shadows moving amid the trees, blue beneath the light of the moon. They were shadows of dead men, chasing the shades of ghostly prey. The Old Man had showed him as much back on the island; it was the trick of seeing only with one’s thoughts. Misko could feel the rustling of spirits in the forest and caught sight of their forms in his imagination. Silently, he watched as the gray-blue shades slipped over and around him while the night whispered their eternal chase.
Eya, these were the shadows of the spirit land, and yet there was something even greater beyond Misko’s vision in these woods: the manitos of every living thing. Every rock, tree, animal, river, lake, cloud, man and woman, everything under the sky had a manito, watched over by Kitchi Manito, the greatest of them all. They did his bidding, or, just as often, acted on their own, and not always with good intentions. Every soul of the Anishinaabek feared those manitos which brought sickness, hunger and bad luck. And even children knew that there were many of them.
Misko’s skin grew cold and his teeth began to chatter as he pushed back at the fear of spending the night in a haunted place. He pushed on toward a break in the canopy, desperate to find his father’s camp. He came to a glade, wading through tall grass in the moonlight, the blades caressing his legs, cold and wet.
Directly ahead there was a path and a lump in a tree. The lump became a figure as he drew closer and he saw that it was an old woman sitting gray as an owl on the low branch of an oak. He crept past, head down, fearful of catching the dark hollow of her eyes. Her bones, thin and gray, were scattered on the ground beneath her, as were the tatters of her burial shroud. He glimpsed birch wrappings curling in the moonlight and a hand lying among them, the bones of its fingers spread like a spider on the ground. She raised a finger as he passed by, but said nothing.
A chill crawled up his spine like a spider as he crept past; he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck.
An owl swept through the clearing, a gray shape moving fast and low through the darkness. Misko leapt back in terror, and then, knowing that it was only gookooko’oo, hurried on. He heard the chuff of its wings as it passed through the trees and sensed the weight of its long glide through their branches as it searched for movement on the forest floor.
Ah, but an owl is an omen, and who knows what else? He was running in the darkness now, desperate to put the dead woman behind him as gookooko’oo uttered its throaty hoots high up in the trees. Who knew what spirits crept in the land of the enemy? Who knew what ghosts haunted these woods? He sensed that the dead woman was following him. Surely, she was a witch, or perhaps a che-bi-ug, the soul of a victim, whose fate is to haunt the place where she had been slain, wailing and crying in the night.
Around him, Misko could see grim faces in the trees and the rocks here and there by the moonlight, their arms reaching out from among the limbs. Above, even the moonlit clouds crawled like a silent snake through the sky. The horror of the woman in the tree pushed him down a gully and over windswept hills. By now, Misko knew that he was far from his father’s camp, with no sense of where it lay. At last he found a cleft in the base of a great oak, and sweeping the litter of acorns and twigs from its damp hollow, he backed into its protection.
Oh, for a fire, a fucking fire he thought as his eyes scanned the darkness beyond the oak. Reclining within the rough hollow of the tree, he tried to sleep, summoning the sound of waves on the big lake as the Old Man had taught him.
Half asleep he heard the hoo-hoo-hoo of gookooko’oo somewhere off in the trees and wondered if the owl was the dead woman’s spy. Gradually, its call retreated into the distance.
Late that night he leapt awake to the dread of a shadow passing through the forest. Every hair on his body stood on end amid a hush in the night. He felt the thing creeping up behind the tree where he huddled, stopping as if to listen to his heartbeat and the blood pounding like thunder through his veins. For a long moment it paused with Misko frozen in terror not more than a bow-length away in the black of the night. Then, without a murmur, the darkness passed him by, disappearing into the trees.
Misko sat with his back braced against the hollow of the tree for the rest of the night, as still and expectant as a whitetail, craning for any quiver of sound in the forest. It seemed a lifetime until the milky haze of dawn dimmed on the horizon, rolling the darkness and its spirits back down to the underworld.
Something rustled in the leaves in the leaves and clawed at a tree on the far side of the clearing. Terror ripped through Misko’s veins like icy water, thinking that the ghost had found him. But it was only gaag, the porcupine. Hunger overcame his fear and Misko crept from his hiding place. He brained it with a rock, narrowly missing the swish of its tail.
That morning, with the forest still gray with mist, Misko gutted his kill with the point of one of his useless arrows and ate its tiny heart and liver.
“Thank you, brother,” he whispered. “Thank you for giving your life so that I will live another day.”
Misko thought of the roasted porcupine his mother prepared back home on the island, a dish as succulent as that of a woodcock or partridge, savored by all the Anishinaabek. But to eat a porcupine’s flesh drawn stringy and raw was another thing.
Still, Misko felt the juice of life welling within his starving body and though he gagged on it, the fatty meat raised his spirits. He butchered the rest of the animal as best he could, taking a quill in his arm for his efforts. He plucked the barb free with a grimace and gnawed at the rubbery strips of flesh, eyeing the hills to the west.
That is where father would have gone, he thought.
That afternoon, he fell upon a flock of turkeys, with twelve of them wandering single file on a pathway to the west. Misko had come upon them pecking at acorns and they paused to stare at him. He spoke to them in their language, hoping to edge closer, but the gobbler who led them clucked a warning and they turned and ran up the trail. He jogged after them, clutching at a fallen branch as he ran on in the hope of braining one. But they easily outran him, taking to the limbs of an oak, where they watched him straggle on.
Two days later, with his body scoured by brambles and his hair as matted as a madman, Misko came upon the village of the enemy and encountered the women in the glade picking huckleberries. Then came the abduction of the woman and their flight through the forest. Now, this blue heron woman, Ashagi, w
as his, and as they lay together beneath the sun in their nest of branches and twigs atop the beaver lodge, he gazed into her eyes and dreamed of what life might be like at her side.
That night they heard the crashing of trees and the swish of branches as the beavers went to work along the lakeshore. Misko and Ashagi listened to them chew throughout the night along with the paddling of new branches across the water to shore up the dam. Below them, they heard stirrings in the lodge as a mother amik rustled with her young. Misko thought of the times he and his brothers had torn the roofs off just such a lodge in the winter to spear the beaver within. He listened through the night for the slap of a tail on the water that might warn of men gathering on the lakeshore, but all was quiet except for ceaseless chewing and falling trees.
BOOK III
1590-1600
14.
THE WAY HOME
Hunger drove Misko and Ashagi from their shelter on their second morning atop the beaver lodge. It had been four days since they had fled from the enemy, and Misko reasoned that even the most ardent among his pursuers would have turned back by now.
Hunger was the eternal companion of the Ojibwe, the unwanted relative that drove them from place to place through the seasons in the constant search for food. Misko and Ashagi had eaten nothing but the stalks of cattails for two days.
“We have become like the beavers themselves,” Misko muttered as they gathered shoots for traveling.
“If we were beavers, we would at least have fish,” Ashagi replied.
Moving east, the forest dissolved into a patchwork of tall grass and milkweed. They grasped at rose hips and cranberries, but the pickings were slim, already grazed by birds, deer, and bears.
Misko knew that the forest teemed with animals, but these remained hidden by day and hard to kill at night. At best, a hunter hoped his arrow might find a vein in the quiet hours at dawn or dusk when the prey had not yet returned to its hiding places or was stirring for the evening. He thought of the deadfall he and his father had fashioned back home on the island. They had baited its tripping stick with a fish head and a falling log had crushed the back of a big makwa.
When they had dragged the carcass from beneath the log, Father had decorated the bear with his own necklace and had blown smoke into its mouth from his pipe. Then he and Misko had begged its forgiveness, for makwa the bear was sacred to the Ojibwe and its spirit must be soothed lest bad dreams come their way. They had rendered every part of the bear, its fat, meat, hide, guts, and grease, and Ogaa had given Misko the longest claw to hang on a cord around his neck.
Misko could almost taste that meat now and felt the press of makwa’s claw against his chest on its leather thong as they stumbled east. He still clutched at his arrows, yet without the sinews of a deer’s leg or the tools to make a bow, they were all but useless.
The next day they arrived at the hunting grounds of the Anishinaabek, which had been recently burned to produce the forage that attracted game. Misko and Ashagi crept at the edge of the blackened meadow, hoping to catch sight of deer or elk nibbling at young shoots, but nothing came so they pushed on, wading through a meadow of ferns, releasing a cloud of dragonflies that rose from the fronds in jeweled clouds, their bodies glinting in the heat. Raspberry vines clawed at their legs at the edge of the field, as if attempting to hold them beyond the concealment of the trees.
Their legs scratched and bleeding, they finally found an empty village later in the day. Its people had left for the fishing grounds and the running of the white fish. It was a small place of only six lodges. They found the body of an old man, sitting upright and cross-legged before his home with an empty wooden bowl and a pipe lying on the ground beside him. His dead stare had grown soft as the belly of a fish.
“He was too old to take along,” Ashagi said as they crept past. “One of my own grandfathers died just so when our clan left for the winter hunting grounds. We offered to carry him on a litter of branches but he waved us away, asking only for his pipe and a knife to open his veins.”
“A fair death,” Misko ventured.
“Better than some.”
Another meadow came and then another at the far side of which they saw six whitetails bounding into the woods, the flag of their tails waving farewell.
But gazing away from the deer, their eyes fell upon a flock of birds chattering amid a grove of berries, and Misko recognized them as the gluttonous pigeons that eat themselves sick, vomiting their food in order to eat again.
Careful not to train his eyes in their direction to give the sign of a predator, he crept sideways into the flock amid several birds perched on a low branch. Without warning, he swept his father’s club among them, and two birds fluttered at his feet, where he stamped the life out of them. Above him, the flock lifted and settled again, the pigeons overcome by their greed. Misko scooped the thrashing pigeons from the ground and snapped their necks with a hard twist. Then, after wrenching their wings free, he used the point of one of his useless arrows to slit them down the middle. He dug for the guts of each bird with his thumb and peeled back the skin to reveal a palmful of breasts, still pulsing with life.
It was a grisly meal, and they sucked at the bones wide-eyed as if they had become wolves. Ashagi had never eaten anything raw before, much less with the life still beating from its body. The blood of the birds tasted of iron in her mouth and the raw flesh wriggled as worms down her throat, but, although she gagged, she could not stop chewing, nor did she wish to. With the blood came the rush of life returning to her body.
Misko took another swipe at the laden branch, but missed as the flock took flight. But the spirits were with them now, and soon they came across a woodchuck bobbing in the branches of a small tree. Misko shinnied up the tree and brained it.
“Clearly, you are better with a club than a bow,” Ashagi laughed when he leapt down. “But can you make a fire?”
The answer was no, not without a drill of those hard and soft woods that warmed one another to the point of curling a blaze in a nest of kindling. At dusk they came upon a small encampment, also empty, with its coals long dead and wet from the rains of the gathering fall. Misko scraped at a flint with one of the precious copper arrowheads, but no spark was forthcoming.
But at least they slept in the shelter of a ruined wigwam that night, and though Ashagi refused the raw flesh of the woodchuck, finding it too much to take in, they both gave thanks to its spirit for surrendering its life.
Like the pigeons, the raw flesh was impossible to chew; it was rubbery, unyielding. At best Misko could suck the juices from the creature’s muscles, cutting off bits small enough to swallow whole.
“How is it?” she asked as Misko dug at the bloody flesh. “How does it taste?”
“Like shit,” he said, making a face. Yet he kept chewing.
Misko was not happy to see the figure on the beach, squatting disconsolate with his head in his hands. For two days he and Ashagi had wandered east to the shore, seeking the canoes that his father’s band had left hidden beneath the cover of pine branches.
Biibaagi-Nika, Lone Goose, looked up through haggard eyes and a numb face.
“O, comes the great warrior at last,” he said in a sour voice. “And where were you?”
“Where is my father?” Misko demanded.
Nika scooped a handful of sand and let it filter through his fingers. “Dead, all dead,” he said. “Beheaded by the Dakota and their bones scattered. All cleft of their heads except my own brother. And me. And you.”
He stared at the waves crashing on the shore for a long moment as no one spoke.
“My father?”
“Taken by a club man from behind as we fled through the forest. They filled his eyes with arrows as he lay dying.”
Misko turned the words in his thoughts, finding them too slippery to grasp. His father was invincible, everlasting, as distant and untouchable as the god-like spirit, Manabozho. Yet there it was.
“And your brother?” he asked.
“Gone to the fire,” Nika said, burying his face in his hands. “Gone to the fire.”
Nika said that nearly half of Ogaa’s war party, nineteen warriors, had turned their backs for home several days after Misko had gone missing. There had been a contentious showdown one evening beneath the cliffs of the Gaag Mountains in which voices had been raised in protest that the war party was hopelessly lost and in danger. Hunger and fear of an unknown country had overwhelmed the deserters and they had skulked to the east with feeble excuses and catcalls trailing behind them. The remainder, a force of twenty-three, had pushed on, assuming that Misko had also fled for home, or would catch up.
But the manitos had been against them and they found themselves in a narrow gorge tangled in greenbriar and grapevines when the sound of war whistles rang out. There had been only a sprinkling of arrows and a shower of rocks, but by then Ogaa’s warriors were so unnerved by hunger and apprehension that they turned and ran in a panic back down the trail, straight into the enemy’s ambush.
“There must have been hundreds of them,” Nika said, his eyes lifting at the memory. “We could hear them all around us, hooting from the walls of the ravine. Showers of arrows came winging through the trees like starlings. More than half of us fell beneath their hail! Then came waves of club men racing down the slopes.”
Other than Nika, not a single raider had survived.
Misko gave a sigh for his proud and foolish father. Ogaa had often professed that he wished to die a warrior, but Misko wondered how his father felt in his final moments as the red flower of his blood blossomed in such a grim place far from home. Had he smiled in gratitude at the moment of his warrior’s death? Or had he wished for an old man’s sickbed in the arms of his woman?
The charms that had been crafted by the Old Man had failed to protect him, and as Nika told it, his father had not even had a chance to sing his death song. Now, Ogaa was on the road of souls. Revulsion crept over Misko; he couldn’t help but wonder if his father was missing his head as he made his way west.
Windigo Moon Page 15