Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  Red Bear. The name Miskomakwa wrapped around Misko like a favorite robe, warm and comfortably heavy, and the next day a naming ceremony was held on the shore before all who remained in the village. His new name told all that he was truly a man and that Red Moon, Miskogiizis, the name his mother had given him so joyfully at his birth, was gone forever. Forever after, he would be Miskomakwa, Red Bear.

  Days later, he came upon a group of hunters who were skinning a man suspended from a frame constructed in a forest glade. Drawing closer, he saw that it was not a man after all, but a bear; for when a bear is stripped of its fur, its naked body looks exactly like that of a naked man. And when a bear is stripped of its flesh, its bones are much like that of a man. Who is the bear, and who is the man? he wondered, fingering the bear claw on the thong around his neck.

  At last the day came when it was determined that an election would be held to replace the head man, Aabitainini. By now, there were more than fifty members of the revived band on the island, drawn from refugees along the mainland.

  As the entire band sat in a circle before a bonfire, Miskomakwa nominated the Old Man, Animi-ma’lingan, to lead them. He spoke eloquently of the Old Man’s experience and wisdom, adding that he would do much to instruct the younger members of the band in the ways of the Anishinaabek.

  This produced a chuckle.

  “You are too generous, Misko,” Animi-ma’lingan said, shuffling to his feet. “But look at me! I am lame. I get around only by canoe, and a chief must be sure of his feet in more ways than can be counted. I have knowledge, but not the heart for village affairs, nor am I a warrior. I am a wanderer, a trader and a priest of the Mide-wi-win, but I am not a leader, nor wish to be.

  “No,” he went on. “Your head man is young, but he is among you. And if he will have me, I will guide Miskomakwa as the leader of your band for as long as he needs me.”

  But privately, the Old Man knew there was no hope of his nomination succeeding. His aim was simply to plant a seed that might take root in the years ahead.

  For a time the wind blew in Misko’s favor, an honor he saw coming with a mixture of dread and desire. Misko came from a respected family and he had the support of a powerful shaman. There could be no better case for his advancement as chief. But the Ojibwe are not inclined to make hasty decisions, especially when it comes to affording too much responsibility to the young. Young men do rash things and are by nature unaware of the consequences of their actions, not having had the benefit of cruel experience. The man who would lead the band of the Amik clan must be above all levelheaded and mature.

  Several in the band also complained that Misko had acted rashly when he had torched the bodies of their family members, even given the orders of the medicine-giver, Giigoohn. What did Little Fish know? they muttered. He was a mere acolyte, not yet inducted into the Mide-wi-win.

  “The dead should have been washed and had their cheeks painted brown, as is custom,” a naysayer said. “They should have been buried with ceremony with their feet pointing west and with small houses of birch bark erected over their bodies. Brothers, we all know this to be true.”

  “Ah, but you were not there, brother,” a survivor of the Amiks said. “There were too many to bury; we did the best we could. Even now, there are villages all along the shore filled with scattered bones and bodies not yet buried, nor ever will be.” To all this, Misko kept silent, his face as composed as the cliffs of the distant shore. His supporters pointed out that the blackened bones of the dead had been buried with ceremony once those who survived were well enough to aid in their send off, but by now, the momentum was against him. The consensus of those who sat cross-legged in the council lodge was that Misko was a leader in the making, yet still far too young to guide the people.

  “He is only nineteen!” an old man said in exasperation.

  Eventually, after speaking back and forth until the night was almost over, it was decided that Bird Man, Naabese, would serve as chief until a better candidate came of age. Naabese was more than sixty winters, yet he was easygoing and capable of a casual authority. He was as an uncle to the band and it was agreed that all would listen to his advice during this difficult time.

  “I did not wish to be head man until I learned that I was not be one,” Misko told Ashagi ruefully that night when he crept to her side in their lodge.

  “You will be my chief,” she murmured. But someday, she vowed, Miskomakwa would be something more.

  So it was that the next day that Old Man Animi-ma’lingan recorded the deeds of Misko’s father on a birchbark scroll, picturing the beheaded warriors and the coming of the red sickness. He painted thirty-three red lodges on the scroll to indicate the villages which had fallen to disease along the coast. The Old Man would carry the scroll to the great lodge of the Mide-wi-win society at Boweting at the eastern end of the lake where it would be available for study over many strings of lifetimes.

  As an afterthought, he drew a small red bear at the corner of the scroll, wandering the coast beyond the island of the Amik clan.

  16

  MIGRATION

  It was the time of year when the big lake Kitchi Gami began to rouse itself like a living thing. As big as a sea, the vast lake gave life to the Anishinaabek in the way of fish and ease of travel, but was also quick to anger, especially when the chill winds of fall began calling over its waves. In a roar the lake told them that winter was coming.

  Often, Misko’s band heard the music of the wind lashing the trees as evening fell, rising to a roar that bellowed and raged through the night, heralding a storm. At times, the wind shivered the wigwam walls as if to make them explode. As the fall winds rose and the geese flew south, Kitchi Gami turned from blue-gray to mud brown, hammering at the shore for days as if the waves themselves held the spirit of thunder.

  Life fell into its age-old rhythm on the isle of Kitchi Minissing. Hunger and the eternal quest for food left little time for grieving. Autumn brought the time of year when every member of the band worked at collecting enough food to make it through the long winter and the barren spring.

  Misko had a quiet place of power on the island where he often went to examine his thoughts. All men and women, too, had such a place where a manito dwelled, a tree, a rock, a riverside idyll, or a quiet glade that held a comforting power. Misko’s was a solitary boulder he had found beyond the brush lining a cliff on the east side of the island. With his back to the rock, he thought of his father, his mother, and all that he had lost. He had become like Ashagi now, who had lost her family and her clan. All must be remade, like the mud men that children made out of sand on the shore.

  But there was little time to reflect on such things, for summer had left them and the scramble for the coming winter had begun.

  The gathering of food took many forms in the fall, beginning with Manoominikegiizis, the Ricing Moon, when the women of the Anishinaabek took to canoes to strip wild rice from the reeds of shallow lakes. Here, Ashagi excelled, for she had helped with the harvest in the ricing lakes of her home to the north since childhood and was eager to show her new sisters that she could collect more than her share.

  The end of Manoominikegiizis left no time for rest, for it meant the start of the nutting season when the band sought out the walnut and hickory trees that had fed them through the winter for generations. The nut groves had been nurtured and protected for as many lives as anyone could remember and their harvest produced hundreds of baskets. The nutting season also brought flocks of turkeys, bear and hordes of squirrels, all seeking their share, but more often, they fell to the snares of the Anishinaabek.

  Soon after, the entire band decamped for the rapids of Boweting at the eastern end of Kitchi Gami to harvest fish. Here, the waters of the vast lake drained in torrents down a flight of rapids that was four times the height of a tall man from its outflow to the pit of its cascade. It was said that in the old days, men ran from one side of the river to the other on the backs of atikameg, the whitefish, which streamed in a
silver current to the warmer waters of the south. The atikameg had a look of perpetual surprise on their faces, as if they were astonished by the Ojibwe fishermen who came seeking their lives each fall.

  It was also at Boweting that a great festival was held each year, a gathering that brought together the Three Fires of the Ojibwe, Odaawaa, and Potawatomi. Often, their cousins, the Nipissing, came as well, as did traders of the Wendat who lived to the southeast, along with their cousins, the Tionnontatehronnon, known as the Tobacco People. Even the Cree of the far north came, bringing caribou pelts for trade.

  Then came many days of trading, drumming, dancing, and singing. It was a time for wives to watch over their husbands, lest they lose everything in the endless gambling, which both men and women loved. There were also storytellings, ceremonies, feasts, marriages, magic shows, puppetry, jugglers, pantomimes and games.

  The most popular game was that of the hoop and spear, in which teams of men chased after a rolling mesh hoop in the hope of spearing it as it zipped over the playing ground. More than a game, it was good training for bringing down a deer, or a man of the enemy.

  The festival also turned out thousands who flocked to see the fastest men of every tribe play baug-ah-ud-o-way. This, where a wooden ball wrapped in deer hide was hurled from netted sticks up and down a field of trampled ground that stretched nearly out of sight in both directions.

  Ashagi watched anxiously as scores of men played on each team. She cheered Misko on as one of the players, but did not wish him to be too fierce in the attack because fights were common, as were broken bones and broken skulls. It was fair play to club opposing players with a racket. Unlike other women, Ashagi did not dream of having a great warrior for a husband. Grandmother had told her that great warriors sometimes returned home as cripples, or with blows to the head that left them senseless, if they returned at all.

  And while the feasts and celebrations continued, all along the shore the drying racks were draped with thousands of fish to be smoked and packed away for the coming winter. Perch, walleye, whitefish, muskelunge, sturgeon, pike and trout. It was as if all the tribes of fish gave of themselves so the Anishinaabek might live.

  The festival also provided a chance to find a husband or a wife from a band of several skins away, or to reconnect with old friends and family members. The chiefs of many bands gathered to smoke and share their doings in the great lodge at the center of the camp, which spread for miles beyond the village.

  Wendat traders also arrived, bringing canoes that were heavy with cornmeal and tobacco grown in their farms on the eastern shore of Tima Gami, the deep lake which lay southeast of the straits. The Old Man claimed that nearly 30,000 of the Wendat lived in an area that was no larger than a man could walk across in two days. It was a number that no one in the band could grasp; suffice to say there were was many farmers of the Wendat as there were quills on a porcupine, or leaves on a tall maple. While trade between the two people was welcome—the Wendat farmers were eager to trade their corn for the furs and copper of the Ojibwe—the men of the Anishinaabek found the life of the Wendat quite comical.

  “Who would dig with sticks at the earth to grow maize when a man’s place is to hunt and fish?” Misko wondered.

  “Oh, they make up for it,” the Old Man had replied. “When they are not digging in the dirt the Wendat are obsessed with raiding. It’s how their men prove they are more than just scratchers of the earth.”

  “We do not fear them.”

  “No, but that is only because they need our trade in furs,” the Old Man said. “They killed off all of the fur-bearing animals in their lands long ago and it is to their benefit that they remain friends with the Ojibwe.” The Old Man described Wendat longhouses that could shelter fifty or more people drawn from several families, and how they surrounded their towns with walls of sharpened pines twice the height of a man. The Old Man shook his head sadly. “The Wendat have battled the Haudenosaunee for more lifetimes than any man knows.”

  “I would not wish to be caught by either of them,” Misko replied, for he had heard the stories.

  “Oh, fear not. They can’t make it through the winter without us, nor we without them,” the Old Man laughed. “They would freeze and we would starve.”

  “Ehn, but the greater blessing is their tobacco,” Misko said, for taking a pipe added comfort to the winter for both men and women.

  By the onset of winter, a cache of rice, nuts, and a portion of the dried fish harvest was stored in pits on the island in birch wrappings sealed with pitch to provide for in the Starving Moon of the spring. The remainder was packed into canoes for the journey to the winter hunting grounds in the south.

  Winter quarters were on a large inland lake where game was plentiful and the season less harsh, owing to the lake’s warming influence. Well before the first frost, the women of the village had begun packing their bundles of hides, fur blankets, pots, and mats for the trip south. For Ashagi, this also included carefully removing the strips of birch bark which made up the walls of her lodge. She rolled them into bundles and packed them into the bottom of the canoe that would carry them south.

  It was a familiar trip for Misko. He had made the journey every autumn since he was a babe swaddled on his mother’s cradleboard. But to Ashagi the journey was all new and he enjoyed seeing it through her eyes.

  “We too traveled in the winter, but our hunting grounds were to the north of Kitchi Gami where the caribou ran,” she said. “My father’s band shared hunting grounds with the Cree, who treated us kindly. But I think it was much colder where we wintered.”

  “It will be cold enough, but free of the wind,” Misko said. “We have good hunting and plenty of firewood.”

  “I am happy of it, but I will see with my own eyes if that is true,” she replied glumly, thinking of the tasks ahead. It was a woman’s burden to scramble after firewood each day though the deep snow, while nights were often filled with repairing the soaking moccasins of the hunters.

  The trip took eleven days, paddling against the current up a sluggish river and then making a portage of two days to another river further on. When the big inland lake hove into view, the last of fall’s sparkling colors were dropping from the trees and Biboon, the north wind, began making his calls, howling at the walls of the hastily assembled wigwams. One by one, the families of the band spread out down the lakeshore to build their lodges, each claiming a hunting ground far removed from the others. Even so, there would be visits of several days between families up and down the lake to liven the long winter, and some gathered their lodges in clusters of two or three.

  Then, just before the first snowflakes fell, the band gathered to hold a festival, dancing, drumming, and singing before a bonfire to celebrate that all was safe and secure against the coming storms.

  Storms? Eya, there were storms to freeze the blood of a wolf. Even though the big lake was now several days to the north, the Amiks were often visited by the gales which swept over its surface and beyond the hills.

  Far to the north, the lake was possessed by Misshipeshu, the lynx serpent, which roared with a throat full of gales in the time of the Freezing Moon, Gashkadinogiizis, tossing spray into the crowns of the tallest pines along the shore. Eya, even breaking them in hundreds as a child snaps a handful of tinder. At times Biboon tore at the wigwam walls and the cries within rose to match that of his thundering voice. When the winds tore a section of bark from the lodge wall, it was the duty of the women to squirm forth in the wind and rain, repairing the tear as best they could before returning soaked and chattering to the comfort of their robes and the fire.

  That winter, the men pushed forth on snowshoes, probing the marshes around the inland lake for the sheltered hollows where the deer, moose and elk gathered. Often, the game was belly deep in the snow and easy prey for hunters skipping along on their shoes of curved wood and leather thongs.

  Back in the village, the women and children spent much of the day gathering firewood. They parceled out fa
st-burning wood for cooking and slow wood for heat. They also spent much of their time at the sewing and mending of clothing. Hunting was rough on the mens’ leathers and there seemed to be no end of need for new moccasins, leggings, and cloaks.

  There were also days when the entire band stayed indoors, huddling close together against the blizzards which swept down from the north. They would snuggle for warmth with two or three families to a wigwam, dozing half asleep for days on end as the snow poured in the smoke hole, hissing in the embattled fire at the center of the lodge. The men didn’t mind; it was good to stay up far into the night, laughing and talking by the fire, and then sleeping in late. After all, there were always snowshoes to mend, or arrows and bows to fashion when the torments of the winter proved too much to endure.

  Ashagi and her sisters from two other families had constructed a lodge which had two smoke holes, one at either end. The framework of the wigwam had stood there for many years as the central lodge of the winter camp, with some of the poles being living trees which had been bent and tied. It took more than a week to replace the remaining lodge poles, which had rotted away, and to patch in a smattering of elm and birch bark.

  At Ashagi’s suggestion, they constructed a double wall, with elm bark facing the outside and a sheathing of birchbark lining the inner walls. They filled the space between the walls with moss gathered from a nearby swamp to insulate the lodge from the cold. Ashagi also buried stones around the fire pits to collect more heat; the stones would radiate warmth throughout the night. An additional pleasure was a small room off to one side to serve as a sweat house, with every member of the band invited to take their turn bathing away the winter cares with the steam raised by heating rocks, which were sprinkled with water from a birch bucket.

  It took much longer to construct, but when the lodge was done Ashagi and her sister-cousins had an abode that was more likely to draw visitors all through the winter nights, along with the warmth and good spirits they brought with them.