“Now, the Haudenosaunee hate the Ojibwe almost as much as they do the Wendat, and this would not have saved me, but gradually, by making signs and pointing to my club foot, I convinced them that I was no warrior. A captive of the Anishinaabek was brought forth who had been adopted into the Haudenosaunee, and she was able to tell them that I was truly just a trader and hoped to travel among them as an honored guest. I told them that I had been bringing them many gifts when they captured me.
“To this, the Haudenosaunee scoffed, but some believed me and set to talking of my fate. Seeing my chance, I told them that I was a storyteller and a traveler bearing many tales of great interest. I told them that I could share many things of value about faraway places.”
Gradually, he said, the Haudenosaunee decided that sacrificing Animi-ma’lingan to their god would be pointless, for he was clearly no warrior. A warrior would endure the pain of having his fingers cut off, indeed, would mock his enemies and tell them they must try harder. “They chided me for crying like a child and said I was not worthy of sacrifice,” he laughed. “And so it was true, for Kitchi Manito did not choose me to be a warrior. He chose me to survive by my wits, and I used every trick of pantomime and deception I could muster, because warrior or not, no man desires to have his soul fed to the demon Aireskoi.”
Intrigued by Animi-ma’lingan’s worth as a storyteller, the chief among the Haudenosaunee adopted him as his fool. The Old Man set about learning their language, taking care to offer a new tale each night. The chief quickly came to value his guest, but tied his leg to that of the Old Man each night with a stout cord of elm bark.
“The slightest movement would awaken him, so I could never escape in the night. Then, too, the towns of the Haudenosaunee are surrounded by tall fences of sharpened pines, and along their inner walls they maintain a maze, like a spider’s web of stick fencing, which is meant to confuse any attacker, but also makes it difficult to leave.
“Still, I began devising a plan of escape, first, by making friends with the dogs of the town so that they would not betray me on the night of my departure. By now, the stubs of my fingers had gone black and I feared losing them. I begged my new master to allow me a small bowl of healing salve so I might save the rest of my hand, and soon, it had healed enough, but my master had forgotten all about the bowl. I kept it carefully hidden beneath the thin furs upon which I slept. They have miserable bedding, full of lice and fleas, not like the thick furs of the Anishinaabek.
“I began gathering my medicine. One night, we dined on a possum and as usual, they gave me the worst of it, a portion of the guts. I was lucky to have any at all, since as their slave, they mostly fed me cornmeal. But I kept the loathsome meat and concealed it in my pot, where it quickly rotted. The next morning, when I relieved my bowels outside the palisade walls, I hid a handful of my shit and carried it back to the pot. By good fortune, there were also some may apples growing by the shitting grounds, and as I squatted over a log with no one looking, I pulled several from the ground and gathered their roots.”
Animi-ma’lingan paused to reload his pipe, fetching a coal at the end of an unburned stick from the fire. He was never in a hurry with any of his tales, always stretching them out with long pauses and dramatic gestures—except when he took the opposite tack and blew like the wind to great effect.
“Now, as you know, the root of the may apple is a poison,” he continued. “And so I chopped it fine into bits and mixed it with a little water along with my excrement and the grease of the rotting guts. Eya! It began to stink beneath my sleeping robe, but not so much as a longhouse that has more than fifty Haudenosaunees farting cornmeal all night!”
To this, much laughter rang out, which lightened the somber mood.
“It was a simple matter for me to toss the mess in my captor’s stew pot that evening while diverting his wife with sweet words,” he went on. “And that night my master came down with a bad case of the shits. He had to keep stirring from his bed to crap outside the longhouse, and the shits came on faster and faster. After the third time, his bowels were in such an uproar that he cut me from his tether and ran for the door, too impatient to drag me along.
“Quickly, I wadded up my robe to make it seem as if someone were still sleeping there in the dark and I ran for the door at the far end of the longhouse. People often stirred from their sleep, so there was nothing unusual about me passing through the door. When my master returned, he saw a form lying there in the darkness and assumed it was me. He did not know that at the evening meal, he had eaten the fruit of my buttocks, the rotten possum, and the may apple root in his stew.” The Old Man slapped his knee and let out a loud cackle. “Chief Shit-Eater, I call him now, though he saved my life. Since I had chosen the new moon for my escape, the guards in their towers could not see me as I fled to the palisade gate and my friends among the dogs did not betray me. I found my way through the maze by running one hand along its length the whole way back and forth, and then I was free.”
“But how did you return home to us?” a young warrior asked in amazement, eyes wide as a full moon.
“I stole a canoe, but before I pushed into the stream, I kicked holes in the bottoms of every other canoe on shore. I paddled west for all that night and two days thereafter until I came to the land of the Eries, a tribe that maintains an uncertain peace with the Haudenosaune and the Wendat. I was weak and starving, so I took a chance and begged some food from the Erie. They demanded I tell them my tale, and the chief laughed so hard I thought he would piss himself. They were delighted by my tale of escape from their sometime enemies and congratulated me on my cleverness before they sent me on my way. From there, I paddled north up a broad river and into Wauwi-Autinoong, the shallow, round lake that opens upon the lake of the Wendat and the way home.” He shook his head in wonder. “Only then did I truly hope that the Haudenosaunee wouldn’t catch me.”
“But does it bother you that you did not die as a warrior?” Nika asked at the conclusion of the Old Man’s tale. “Many men would think it a disgrace.”
The Old Man crinkled his wizened face and laughed as merry as an otter beneath his graying braids. “Gaawiin, no! I might as well say, does it bother you that I am here with all of you now? As I said, the Great Spirit chose me at birth to live long and tell my stories.”
24
THE ICE WORLD
The world was getting colder. The Anishinaabek could feel the fingers of Biboon creeping deeper into the seasons each year as if the North Wind meant to strangle the summer and place the Snow Moon in its stead. The band itched from boredom, forced to spend long days confined in their lodges, half-dozing in the smoke of their vain fires. At times they heard trees booming in the night as their trunks exploded from the cold.
As the snow grew deeper, game grew scarce. Ishpaagonagaa, the deep snow, allowed the hunters to walk on its back with their snowshoes as they had always done, but the deer, elk and moose who lived in its grasp could not find forage and starved by the thousands. The snow also made the antlered ones easier prey for wolves, the competitors with men, who skipped over the crust to kill in packs of growing numbers.
“We have become diggers more than hunters,” Misko grumbled to Ashagi when the snow had fallen deeper than a tall man’s head. The days had become filled with the excavation of frozen game, sometimes trapped in pits of their own stamping, other times marked by hooves and antlers piercing the snow.
“Be grateful there is something for you to dig at,” Ashagi replied. “For what will we do when there is nothing left to dig?”
“That is a riddle no one cares to answer.”
One day, dressed double in furs against the searing dawn, Misko bulled his way through the snow which buried the portal to Ashagi’s lodge and found six crows sitting frozen to a branch just outside the village. Aandeg the crow is poor meat, and as thin as sunfish at that, but that day the Anishinaabek were grateful to have it boiled in a soup. Misko was also grateful to forsake hunting as the wind had sheared
at him like a knife, even through his heavy furs.
Summers had also become a heartbreak, with snow falling deep into the spring, almost into the summer itself. Corn would not outlast the season and the pumpkins and squash were stunted and small. Ashagi’s heart sank to find a skein of ice rimming the shore of her ricing lake during Manoominike Giizis, the Ricing Moon. She paddled among the reeds and found the pickings thinner each year and the work harder to fill the baskets they needed to survive the coming winter.
The Old Man said that giants far to the north were building a wall of ice and pushing it south, laughing as they came.
Even the Cree, who lived in those icy lands, were pushing south in flight from the cold. They, above all, knew winter firsthand, hunting caribou and eating only meat in a land without edible plants. Often, they lived as makwa, the bear, dozing in their lodges for days on end as Biboon shrieked outside.
Not even the Old Man had traveled to the land of the Cree, but he had encountered a band of their refugees that summer on the north shore of Kitchi Gami. They told of seeing frost giants swirling across the frozen plains and roaring in the night.
“Ehn, it’s a good time to die,” the Old Man laughed at a council of chiefs gathered at Mishi Mackinakong that fall for the annual meet-up on the sacred island of the turtle. “I am old and soon will be gone to the Happy Land, where I pray it will be warmer. Don’t worry, brothers, I will send you warmer winds once I am safely there.”
“It is the young ones we fear for, Old Man, not you,” grumbled a head man from Miniswiigob, the basswood island, which lay nearby. “How will they live if these winters deepen? It is the end of the world.”
“Never say that.” The Old Man’s face stiffened. “The end of the world has been foretold over many lifetimes going back to the days of the Great Flood and still the Anishinaabek live on and on. Kitchi Manito has a plan for us, and it is not to starve in the frost.”
“But when? When will we be free of these frigid days?” the chief groused.
“When the Creator wishes, but I tell you truly, brother, it may not be in your lifetime.”
Yet even with the growing cold, there were bright times to warm the hearts of the Anishinaabek. The hunters of Misko’s band were invited to join the Odaawaa in a game drive on Manitowaaling that fall and scores of moose were driven to a peninsula by beaters sweeping across the island. The waters ran red as the giants bellowed and trembled on the shore of their last stand, cut down with clubs, spears, and arrows. More than sixty moose were taken.
Ashagi’s arms felt as if they would drop from their shoulders at the effort of hacking at the thick hides and dressing so much game. Her hands were covered with bloody blisters from wielding the skinning chert, but she didn’t complain. What woman would when her man had delivered so much of the sweet moose meat needed to outlast the winter? Still, good tidings for the hunters meant woe to the women, since a hide is no easy thing to cure. Every speck of flesh within the stinking hide had to be scraped free with flint knives. In the summer, this was attended by clouds of biting flies; in the winter by searing cold. Then, the inner surface was scrubbed and soaked with a mixture of brains, urine, and liver that had been mashed to a foul jell. The last step involved wrapping the hide around the smooth bark of a young maple and pulling it back and forth for the best part of a day until it had softened.
That spring the Amik clan reveled in an unexpected consequence of the cold. Ashagi’s shallow ricing lake had frozen almost all the way down to the muck and marl of its basin, killing thousands of fish. The people of the village were alerted to the fish kill by the sight of hundreds of birds flocking to the lake. Dragging their canoes through the snow, they set out over the ice to do battle with the birds feasting on the floating carcasses of bass, bluegill, pike, and sunfish which had bellied up through the open water at the center of the lake.
Many of the fish were rotten and worthless, but there were hundreds still frozen, and the men and women of the clan clubbed scores of screaming gulls and eagles, which flapped over the open water in a tornado of white and brown wings.
There was a feast that night that would be told of for a generation as the starving Amiks ate themselves sick. And then they ate again the next night, and the night after that, and still there were fish and birds in the hundreds to spare for the long, cruel spring.
Ah, but that was a rare happy time in a worthless winter, for in the Moon of Crusted Snow, a hunting party had gone out, questing far down the river in search of game. It was a difficult time of year for the antlered tribe because it was the season when the snow was hard packed and crusted over with ice. This provided easy footing for wolves and men on snowshoes, but those creatures with hooves broke through the crusted snow and foundered, making it impossible to run. Already weakened by months of near starvation, the deer and moose were easy prey for wolf packs.
Late in the day the hunters heard a roaring from over a low hill. As they looked on, frozen in their steps, three deer burst from a clutch of cedars followed by an immense timber wolf. The wolf stood as tall as a man’s chest and was perhaps seven footsteps long. Its eyes were the bright yellow of an owl set against its pelt of charcoal black. It flew past the hunters like a monster out of myth, roaring like the wild wind as it disappeared into the trees. They gaped at one another; every man had been too awestruck to raise an arrow.
“It’s an omen, brothers,” Nika said. “Has any man among us ever seen a wolf so large?”
“Not even by half,” answered Misko’s adopted son, Niimi, who had grown to be a man of twenty-four years. “It is a monster from the Old Man’s legends.”
The next day the hunters followed in the tracks of a wolf pack trailing a family of moose. Their hope was to find the ma’lingans feasting over a fresh kill and to drive them howling into the trees. Possibly, the men would bring home some wolf hides as well.
But Biboon had other plans. Late in the day, Nika paused to investigate a side trail, going over a low hill as Misko and the other hunters pushed on. No one noticed the scrum of black storm clouds limned in yellow boiling over the horizon from the north. Then, as if in a thunderclap, the north wind blew up a white-out that turned the world into a fury of blinding snow so thick and relentless that a man did not know his head from his feet. Whiteness everywhere and nothing else but the shriek of the wind. It was as if they were suspended in a cloud of driving snow, beyond which it was impossible to see further than a man could spit.
“Under the tree!” Misko cried, and the men took shelter beneath the spreading branches of a tall fir, six of them huddled together for warmth with their backs to the cold all through the night. Beyond the sheltering branches the wind howled like a demon.
And the men beneath the tree howled for Nika to join them as if they were wolves themselves. But their voices were as sparrows in the wind, blown south in the bitter night. Less than a stone’s throw away, Nika staggered past the tree in the storm, his own voice lost in the gale.
Deep in the night, Misko ventured from the snowy branches in search of Nika when the wind fell and the stars turned the deep, twinkling purple that comes with the most intense cold. Though he did not care for his rival, it would not do to lose him. Yet the forest cloaked in new snow as deep as a man’s forearm revealed nothing.
That morning, aching with cold and feeling near death themselves as they quaked beneath their furs, the men of the Amiks searched for Nika, who could not have wandered more than two bow shots from their shelter.
But they found nothing, even though they searched until the sun sank on the shortened day of the winter. Then, the hunters built a fire worthy of the lights of Kitchi Manito himself and shouted into the night for Nika to return, for though he was not well loved among the Amiks, no one could deny that he was a warrior all could depend upon. No brother of the Anishinaabek gave up another without a fight.
“He has gone to the Spirit Land,” a hunter said on the second morning as they turned for home. “His body is beneath the snow
. Mark this place, brothers, and we will find him in the spring.”
All felt that Nika’s shadow had been listening in his snowy grave when their voices rang through the forest. That, or perhaps the monstrous wolf had returned for him. Yet, a day later Nika arrived back in winter camp with his face as mottled and red as a demon from frostbite and five fingers blazing in anger on his hands—three on his left and two on his right. That, and half of his toes had turned as red as coals.
“You sister-fuckers left me to die!” he screamed as he stumbled into the encampment, falling on his knees and writhing in pain from his shriveled fingers. “Oh fuck me, it burns! Oh you ass-fuckers, shit-eaters! I curse you all to hell!”
Nika had shamed the men before their women, but none could speak against him. The encampment sprang to his aid, bringing a sweet broth of pumpkin to drink and furs to cloak his ravaged body. Women who hated the sight of Nika clutched him to their breasts with tears streaming down their cheeks. His brothers urged him to be strong as they clasped him all around, burying him in warm furs.
Four moons later, when Nika’s useless fingers and toes had turned black, limp and dead, his brothers among the Amiks sang the war song at the top of their lungs as they held him down while the Old Man hacked them away with an obsidian knife.
“It’s either your fingers or your hands, brother,” the Old Man said quietly. “For if the blackness spreads, it will take all of you unless it is cut away.”
And that was not all, for by then the tip of Nika’s nose had turned black, as had his cheeks. The Old Man said he was lucky he had not lost his eyes.
But lucky? Set against the proud tattoos of Nika’s face, the blackened nose and cheeks gave him the look of a clown, a frightening, dangerous clown.
Nika’s mouth twisted in a snarl like a mad dog as the cuts were made, but he did not scream because there was no longer any feeling where his fingers had been. His face grew wet with sweat and his eyes retreated into his head until they looked as lost as a little girl’s, but he did not scream.
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