Truth be told, in the deepest recesses of her heart, she had begun to hate him for it. “You remind me of Kesamna’ista,” she hissed at him one evening as they quarreled on the beach. “Snail Eye demanded a son and made a slave of me.” What started as a pleasant walk together and a coupling in the woods had turned sour when Misko hinted that he was considering a second wife.
“I only wish to add to your lodge,” Misko replied carefully, knowing he was walking on treacherous ground.
“By insulting me with another wife?” Ashagi said, her eyes flaring. “I was Kesamna’ista’s third wife and his women hated me for it. Oh, I hated it too, more than you could ever know. Why would you shame me before our own people?”
“There is no shame,” Misko said. “It is the way of many head men to have more than one wife. This you already know.”
“Yes, but do I know you, Misko? Are you still the man I wed? You have become a bully to me. You have become like your father.”
“Like my father? Oh, little heron, if my father were here, he would tell me to beat you,” Misko replied. “I am not like him in any way.”
“No, your father was disappointed in you for not being the great warrior of his dreams to polish his own legend,” she said. “You have Niimi for a son, yet you punish me for what only Kitchi Manito can provide. You only want a son to shine on the great Miskomakwa.”
“That is not true, I—”
“Yes! Yes it is true! I see your father in your eyes and tell you, I will not have another woman in my lodge!”
“In my eyes? What do you know of my father?” he protested. “It may be that he died on the day we met.”
“No, but I heard of him well enough. He was a proud and foolish man and I can see him in your eyes. Beware, Misko, that you do not turn into him or Kesamna’ista …”
Ashagi was on the verge of saying “… or I will leave you,” but was wise enough to hold her tongue, for Grandmother Nookomis had told her many times never to make a threat unless she was ready to stick it to the hilt.
Instead, she shook her head and whispered, “You stab me to my heart, Misko. You stab me to my heart.”
They walked back to their lodge dejected and said nothing more of a second wife. Indeed, they said nothing at all to each other for several days, and then only with words coated with frost.
Ashagi’s sadness increased as the fall drew on, and even on those sunny days when she stood laughing and bathing with her sister-cousins on the lakeshore she began to feel the darkness creeping at the edges of her vision as it had when she had been a captive of the Dakotas. She fought the darkness as best she could, but it had a way of creeping into her thoughts like a mink creeping up on a sparrow.
That fall there was no journey to the festival and the fishing at Boweting, nor was there any word from the north as to the spread of the pock-making sickness that had swept the Wendat. A group of Potawatomi traders stopped at the Amik’s new village and said that the Dakotas had called off their raid after learning of the sickness coming their way. Yet nothing had been heard of Nika and the band of warriors who had gone to meet them.
The Potawatomies told them that long ago, a band of theirs had occupied the area of the Sleeping Bear and had cleared the garden spot over the hill by burning the trees. Yet, after occupying the area for several years, the Potawatomies had retreated, saying that the ghost of the sleeping bear haunted this land and had driven them away. To this, the Amiks only shrugged, for the Ojibwe had a sacred bond with bears that made them brothers and sisters.
Thus, by fall the new home of the Amiks was well established. There was talk of constructing a palisade around the lodges in the style of the towns of the Wendat or the Haudenosaunee, but without any enemies at hand, the plan fell away for lack of ambition among the men. Such walls were the work of slaves, and of these, the Anishinaabek had none.
Even so, the men were not idle. Misko and Niimi spent ten days paddling far down the coast and back in search of a winter hunting ground, and then the Amiks settled into a familiar ritual as the trees turned red and yellow, bidding them time to go. The food caches for spring were prepared and the bark of the lodges was carefully wrapped and stored in the canoes once again with all of their pelts and possessions.
Then the entire band traveled south to the north bank of a river called the Ministigweyaa where much game had been observed in the marshes. One by one, the families of the Amik clan dispersed down the river, building their lodges within a day’s walk of each other.
The river was sluggish and froze over in the winter, making it possible to run sledges and toboggans along its banks where the game lay hidden. When hunting on snowshoes, the men of the Amiks tracked down deer, bear, elk, moose, and marten. Even once a panther, which had been treed and shot from its perch, pierced with twelve arrows.
The Amik men also skipped over the ice to tear the roofs off the lodges of their namesakes, the beaver. They climbed trees to dig torpid raccoons from their hollows. Each evening, their sledges brought new meat skidding over the snow to their lodges where children danced a greeting amid the barking dogs.
Misko earned the scars of a long scratch down his right arm during one such harvesting. Spotting a hollow within a tree, he reached in to find that a big mother raccoon was not as sleepy from the cold as he might have wished. A raccoon can whirl and fight like a bobcat when it is cornered, and this one hissed a warning before raking Misko’s forearm from elbow to wrist. He grunted and climbed back down the tree, returning with his spear to plunge at the darkness of the hollow. Below him, the snow had blossomed like wild roses with the ring of his blood.
Ah, but life was good in the new land, he thought as he tossed the crumpled raccoon to the ground below. They had escaped the pocking sickness as well as the Dakota for a paradise equal to that of the Happy Land itself. Even Nika had gone missing and Misko smiled at the pleasant thought that his enemy might be lying dead on some distant shore.
In the time of the Spirit Moon, he and the men of the Amiks constructed a long V-shaped corral of brush, higher than a tall man could reach. Then, every second day they began a game drive along the riverbank, with the boys of the band clacking sticks together as they drove the whitetails through the deep snow and into the brush pile where men with clubs and spears waited. Some of the deer leapt high enough over the brush to escape, but not many.
Eya, the harvest was rich, with the taking of more than eighty deer in a single moon and good eating all that winter as the Amiks celebrated their good fortune. The meat of a winter deer is bitter and thin, but they still had stores of maple sugar to sweeten it.
Misko could not have felt more like a hero as the people laughed and joked in his wife’s lodge that winter. There was only the growing coolness of Ashagi to chill his bones, but that, he thought, would soon be resolved, and she would have no choice but to live with his decision. He was the man, after all, and what choice could a woman have?
He had seen the hummingbird that summer and knew that fate was on his side.
21
ASHAGI’S CHOICE
More than three hundred drummers sat pounding in a circle and chanting to a rhythm as loud as the clap of the thunderbird’s wings. Many of the drums were pitched to chime with others in chords that swayed the rhythm of their voices in a rolling pattern.
Within the line of drummers, a long line of women circled, each singing and holding onto the waist of the sister before her. Naked, they had painted themselves in red ochre from head to toe—the color of human life. And within that circle, another line of women danced and sang in the opposite direction before a bonfire, which threw flames three times as tall as a man at the center of it all. From the view of a hawk, the dancers, drummers and the fire below made up the eye of Aayash, the Transformer, who had brought fire to the world of men.
Ashagi stamped within the outer circle, close to the drums, singing as if to tear her lungs out. The release of the drums, the dancing, and the voices raised in song lifted her
spirits to the sky. She had been dancing and singing for days now with her sisters; it was the thing they loved most about the festival.
It had been two autumns since the Anishinaabek had gathered at Boweting and now thousands had flocked to the rapids, filled with joy at meeting their kin again. The Ojibwe had survived the pocking sickness of the year before by melting into their woodland retreats, but now they had burst forth in a celebration unlike any of them had ever known. Every night there was dancing and drumming, sometimes continuing until dawn to celebrate the rising sun. Each day after the fishing was done, there were games, pantomimes, jugglers, and contests.
The day before, Ashagi had watched a race between the fastest runners of the gathered tribes, who flashed around a circle track as naked as the day they rose from their mothers’ wombs. Ashagi gasped when she saw one of the youths at the starting line; he looked exactly like the Dakota warrior she had seen dangling from a bloody pole in the sun dance during her captivity. Even his hair was the same, cut in a line across his shoulders. And like the doomed sun dancer of the enemy, his looks inspired a chorus of giggles and sighs from the maidens in the crowd, who pressed in close to stroke his arms, shoulders and back.
Eya, and the runner proved as strong as he was handsome. He sprang from the line and pounded barefoot around the track, outdistancing the others as if he had the legs of a deer. Gasping as if to die as he crossed the finish line, he threw his head back and raised both arms in victory as he passed through the fluttering hands of a gauntlet of eager women.
There were many bets placed on the winner of the race and Ashagi had wagered a fine robe of beaver furs on the youth. When he crossed the line in victory, her own heart fluttered as she claimed her prize: a fine collar of purple and blue wampanoag shells, which had been fetched from the distant sea.
But a much greater surprise was seeing her former husband, Kesamna’ista among a delegation of the Dakota who made their way to the main lodge of the Ojibwe chieftains. The Dakota had sent a peace mission to Boweting, declaring their intention to rein in their warriors in the hope that the Ojibwe would do the same.
Ashagi stood at the side of a long row of the Anishinaabek as Snail Eye and his honor guard passed by, every one of them adorned with eagle feathers and their finest paint. His ugliness had deepened with age, but the creases of his face gave him a distinguished look. She was surprised to see a flicker in his lone eye as he passed by, but her former captor said nothing.
It struck her that she had seen more of old Kesamna’ista than she had of Misko the past few days. As a head man, Misko was busy with the other chieftains arranging the events at the festival, and it was not unusual for men and women to go their separate ways at such an event. Yet, amid the thousands gathered along the river, she had never felt so alone. The distance between her and Misko had widened with the warmth of spring and his growing insistence at taking a second wife.
That spring had been painful as she watched bear cubs rambling behind their sows in the forest and fawns trying out their spindly legs in leaps and jumps. Her heart sank as she watched chicks hatching and heard the sky fill with birdsong at the joy of new life. Each sign of life stabbed at her, and she could see much the same in Misko’s eyes. Each new babe brought forth among the Amiks felt like a mortal wound, thrusting at her own inadequacy. She could not blame Misko for wanting a babe to call his own. She could not blame Misko for wanting a second wife.
It did not help matters when Nika turned up at the festival with two wives. He had brilliantined his hair to a high gloss and the oil ran slick over his body, raising his tattoos to a vivid polish. Despite her hatred, Ashagi found it hard to look away.
Nika had wintered at the west end of Kitchi Gami after a spell of harassing the enemy and had taken a young virgin there whose family had suffered great hardship. Her family wished to be rid of her, while Nika felt it was his due to have two wives, or perhaps even more in light of his deeds as a war chief. A man killer was entitled to more women, and who could blame him for serving his needs?
Even so, Nika’s eyes still glittered when they caught hers and she turned away, thinking him a wolf.
But Nika followed her, speaking over her shoulder.
“I have heard that Misko has not yet done you justice as a woman,” he said.
The words hit Ashagi like a plunge through thin ice. She turned on him. “Who would say such a thing? You are rude.”
“Yes, I am rude.” Nika, the tattooed dandy stood before her, his hands on his hips, an easy smile on his face. “I am a rude fool, yet I would be your fool if you would have me.”
Ashagi laughed, incredulous. “And be your third wife? Have you gone mad?”
“There would be only one wife in my lodge if you were mine,” he answered. “I would send the others away.”
“That would be the cruel act of a cruel man.”
“Cruel? You have bewitched me, and you think I am the cruel one?”
“I did no witching of you, goose. Look at my hands,” she showed him. “I have been digging at the dirt of a garden all summer. Are these the hands of a witch?”
“I still want you,” he growled, taking a step closer. “What do you want? Presents? A child? I will give them to you. Wives to serve you? I will make you my first wife. Whatever a man can give, I will give you.”
“I want honor, respect, the things every woman desires, but these you cannot give me, Nika. You can only take them away. Search your heart. You want only what you cannot have. If you had me, you’d be sniffing after another. Tend to your own wives; they will serve you better than I.”
But Nika had grown ardent now. “Misko has failed you,” he implored, even though looks were being cast his way by those passing by. “It is my time to be with you. Give me my turn.”
With those last words Nika’s voice had grown small, begging. Ashagi gazed at him and saw that Nika no longer resembled a proud dandy tattooed as a demon. He was more like a frightened boy staring out from behind his paint. But more disturbing was the sudden feeling that she knew Nika better than she did her own husband. With the changing of the seasons, Misko had become a stranger to her.
Torn by confusion, she pushed Nika away. “I have nothing to say to you,” she said, turning her back and walking away. Yet her heart was racing and her breathing grew heavy as she fled, for although Nika frightened her with his shameless intensity, still there is something in a bold man’s compliment that a woman finds hard to ignore. If only Misko was as ardent as Nika, she thought. But we are old together and our fire burns low.
Later that day, Ashagi and her sister cousins watched a pantomime of men who dressed up like women for an outrageous skit. These were the contrary men whose womanly ways had made them outcasts, living together on the outskirts of the larger villages of the Anishinaabek. The men fluttered and cooed, pretending to do the work of women and gossiping about their husbands, waving their hips to and fro in an obscene parody. Ashagi laughed until her chest burned, yet still there was a pain within her that couldn’t be laughed away. Her world was falling apart and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
There was little chance for anyone to feel settled as the festival carried on. In the north, the days of high summer are nearly twice as long as those of the winter, and after the fishing and the dressing of the whitefish was done each day there was time for lengthy visits with friends and relatives who had gathered from distant bands.
Feeling scattered and rootless, Ashagi decided to surprise Misko with a meal of grilled crayfish and cornbread. She had traded a handful of yellow porcupine quills for a portion of cornmeal and had baked it on a flat rock with the crustaceans. She had seen little of Misko at Boweting, except when he crept into their lodge late in the evening after a day of fishing, play, and gossiping with other men. Their conversations had grown disjointed and awkward. In fact, Misko had begun treating her as other men did their wives, barely speaking to her at all.
Perhaps this will help, she thought, turning t
he crayfish on the hot stone as they turned a deeper shade of red. They were his favorite meal.
But as the sun edged deeper in the sky in its long descent the meal grew cold and still Misko did not return as he had promised. She turned from the fire for a moment and his meal was gone, taken by some young boys of a neighboring band. Ashagi shrieked at them as they laughed at her from behind a wigwam across the way, but there was nothing to be done, for stealing food was a game all boys played to learn stealth on the path to becoming warriors. Ashagi had done as much herself in her girlhood when she had played at being a boy.
Dejected, she set out in search of Misko, taking a pathway through a stretch of woods to a neighboring band. It was the woods where lovers met to embrace in private, beyond the hubbub of their crowded lodges. She hadn’t gone far when she glimpsed the bare back of a man moving in rhythm amid the bushes and her heart fell. It was Misko, her man, her wolf, taking a woman in a glade barely out of sight. It was the pretty daughter of the family sharing their lodge during the festival.
For a moment, the sky spun and the earth gave way beneath her legs. The sight of him wavered in her vision so strangely that she could barely believe her eyes. Misko, whose eyes had gleamed like pebbles in a rushing stream when they had taken their pleasure together. Misko, to whom she had given everything of herself. Her Misko!
So, it has come to this, she thought, a cold feeling settling over her, choking at her heart. She knew Misko had been with other women before. That was the way of all men, and there was no hiding it in a small village that loved to gossip. But catching him in the act rubbed her face in it, dredging up all the shame she felt over being without a child. That, and her helplessness at his talk of taking a second wife.
No woman under the sun wished another wife in her lodge. It was an unspeakable insult, a clear sign that things had gone wrong with one’s man. And no woman was prouder than Ashagi. The thought of welcoming a younger woman to her lodge with a lying smile on her lips filled her with rage. In time she would become like old Saya’hupahu, the Red Bird of the Sioux who had hated the sight of her.
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