Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  Then one day while Ashagi was out collecting nuts with Niibin by her side, she gave a start as Nika rose from the gray-green bushes like a ghost. At first, she thought he was an animal, lunging at her.

  Ashagi darted for Niibin’s hand and turned to run, but in an instant found Nika standing close before her with a spear in his ruined hand.

  “Sister, hold, I was taking my day nap here, but I am happy to see you,” he said, weaving from one foot to the other before her.

  Nika wore a strange, wavering smile and was more a skeleton than man; his starving flesh had stripped him to his bones. His skin had become a puddle where his old tattoos had blended one into another without repair through the years and his hair had grown long where once it had been so carefully cropped and roached about his head. Now he no longer even bothered to braid it and it hung lank to his shoulders. His face was gaunt, the skin stretched taut over his skull, just as the Old Man said was the mark of a windigo. If Ashagi had not known him, she would have taken him for a wandering madman.

  Even so, Nika still possessed the intensity of a stalking cat.

  “Stay away from me,” she said, taking a step back with Niibin wide-eyed beside her.

  “I mean you no harm,” he answered in a low rumble.

  “You are banished. Everyone says you are dead! You must leave or they will kill you.”

  “Banished? Kill me?” he gave a creaking laugh. “Yes, it is true. I am banished except for those small bands that have not heard of me, and they are few now. Even the Odaawaa have turned their backs. I have become a thing of the forest among the animals and the spirits. It is not a good way to live, sister.”

  Ashagi knew that silence was her best recourse, but as Nika tottered stinking and gaunt before her, she could not resist.

  “You ate your own wife.”

  Nika shrugged. “She meant nothing to me. We were in our cold camp with game so scarce that we fell to eating bark from the trees. I sacrificed her so that I and my other wife could live. Death was a blessing to her.”

  “That’s not the way of the Anishinaabek.”

  “No, but it was one way, and now, I am here.”

  They stood staring at one another for a long, uncomfortable time as Niibin squirmed from Ashagi’s grasp to play beneath the walnut tree.

  “Brother, you seem ill,” Ashagi said at last.

  “Ill? Yes, ill,” he replied, his eyes wandering to the forest floor. “But it is a sickness without a cure.”

  Again there came a silence.

  “I know your sickness, but it was never meant to be,” she said at last, voice low.

  Nika shuffled his feet and snorted. “Do you really know? It was Misko,” he said, “the great Misko, he is the cause of my sickness, not you, sister. You would have been the cure.”

  “Misko has never been your enemy; he does not even think of you.”

  “Ah, you are wrong, he thinks of me often,” Nika said bitterly. “Has he made a liar of you? He knows you should have been mine. You for the blood of my brother, my son. You should have been mine! I curse him for denying me, but that is all gone now. You are gone.”

  “This is foolish,” Ashagi said in disgust. She gathered her basket and took Niibin’s hand.

  “Men believe that they are the hunters and we are the game, but it is the woman who chooses the man, it is always the woman,” she said. “When a father gives his daughter to a man, it is only with her consent if he is truly a good father.” She held Niibin’s hand tight, hoping some of her words would cling to the girl’s skin. “Listen, brother. I had no father to give me away, but he lived in my heart. It was I who chose Misko, knowing he would have my father’s blessing. My father would not have chosen you, that is the length of it! You put yourself forward as a warrior, a war chief even, but warriors slaughtered my family and burned my village when I was young. Warriors killed my mother and father, my brothers, and aunts, and uncles before my very eyes. Warriors gave me to a fat old man and bade me be his third wife. Warriors fought over me and humiliated me, and I wanted no more of them! Think on that, brother, and not on Misko. For even if Misko had not wanted me, I would not have had you.”

  But if Nika did think on Ashagi’s words, he gave no indication. With a sly smile, he backed away from her, out of the sunlight and into the trees, raising a hand in a slow farewell. Soon, he was gone.

  Ashagi kept silent about Nika thereafter; there was no need to trouble her husband with tales of a rival who was now less than a beggar. Life was not all sweet plums and honey, however. Misko was often gone off hunting, now that game was scarce, and the scrabble for food was more difficult than when they had arrived on these shores twenty summers before.

  It was just so that Misko and Biidaaban went off hunting in a swampy area far inland, bidding Ashagi goodbye with promises of deer for the fire. That afternoon the children of the village came rushing up from the beach with news that two long canoes were making their way up the coast from the south. A party of traders pitched their camp a bow-shot south of the village and waved for the Amiks to join them.

  The traders had a strange beast in their canoe, which none of the Anishinaabek had ever seen, except for the Old Man. It was thicker than a dog and mottled pink and black, with intelligent eyes, a blunt nose and a curling tail. The traders kept it on a leather cord tied around its neck and it screamed like a woman as it was dragged ashore.

  The dogs of the village stormed after it, but the beast wheeled and gave one a savage bite, sending them howling.

  “What is it, Father?” Ashagi asked, clutching his shoulder from behind.

  “It is the dog of the Zhaagnaash.” He turned to her, his face decorated with a worried frown. “It is called a pig.”

  A silence settled among the Amiks gathered on the shore. By now, all had heard the Old Man’s tales of how the Zhaagnaash were the shadow men who came from beyond Zhewitaganibi, the great salt water. When the Zhaagnaash had first appeared on the salt shores to the east, many thought they were wdjibbon, shadow men who walked and talked, even though they were dead. Soon, however, the shamans of the eastern tribes had determined the newcomers were in fact human beings who had come to trade and live on the Great Turtle Island. Now they were known as Zhaagnaash, the white men.

  “Are they Zhaagnaash?” Ashagi asked of the traders, for she had never seen one. Nor had any of the Anishinaabek. None of the traders looked like the white spirits of the evening tales. They were said to wear odd clothing, with repulsive tufts of hair growing on their faces. And some were as bald as vultures, as if they had been scalped.

  “No, these men are Wabunukeeg, from the tribes of the daybreak people who live far to the east. As for the Zhaagnaash, only their pig has come. For now.”

  That night, Ashagi and the women of the village crept down to the beach on reports of a strange sight. The twelve traders were gathered around a fire above which was suspended a large pot, hung on the braids of an unknown metal attached to a tripod of three poles.

  The pig had been killed and butchered and now the pot simmered with a stew of its flesh along with turnips and wild onions. The women stood in the darkness beyond the fire, gathered in their furs against the chill of an early fall, and murmuring in speculation. None had ever seen a pot so large, nor one which could withstand such heat, for the clay vessels of the Anishinaabek were small and poorly fired. They often broke when an attempt was made at cooking.

  “Beindigain! Come forward!” a tall member of the strangers called to them. No one was familiar with his tribe, but his speech was that of the Algonquins and the women understood him well enough. He beckoned them forward with bowls of the stew held out in each hand and they passed it from sister to sister. The stew was well seasoned with salt and all agreed it was very good. More than that, it seemed almost beyond belief that their meal had been prepared by men!

  Ashagi crept to the fire and gazed at the pot. Eya, it seemed a miracle; its rim was thin as a swan’s feather and its sides were charcoal bla
ck as the stew bubbled within. There was enough to give every member of the village a bowl.

  “Iron,” the tall stranger said solemnly, giving the side of the pot a ping with his finger.

  “I-ron?” Ashagi answered. She had never heard this word.

  “Iron,” he nodded. He pointed at her, a rude thing to do, and then back to the pot.

  Ashagi blushed, but quickly forgave, realizing that the stranger was simply asking if she wished to trade gifts. He was a head taller than any man of the Amiks and wore his hair cut blunt at the level of his earlobes, both of which dangled with cowrie shells. His tattoos of black and blue climbed his neck in zig-zags and he wore a garment of rough brown fabric quite unlike the cotton that traders sometimes brought up from the south.

  He fingered the otter stole around her neck and then the hem of her robe, made of a dozen beaver furs which Misko had taken the winter before.

  “Bring these tomorrow and I will show you much more,” he said. Ashagi said nothing and maintained a rigid face, but she could not contain the flicker of excitement in her eyes, and this the stranger saw. “An iron pot for you tomorrow, pretty one,” he promised. With a laugh he turned back to the fire.

  The traders were a hardy bunch, much given to laughter. “They’re happy that we’re not inclined to cook them in their own pot,” the Old Man said, having arrived at many uncertain shores himself. And it was true that the strangers’ laughter seemed born more of relief than jollity.

  That night, Ashagi and Minose discussed the pot and what it meant.

  “My people had a copper pot, but it was much smaller,” Ashagi recalled. “We lived in the copper country and such things were common.”

  “Ah, but did everyone have such a pot?” Minose asked.

  “No, it had been difficult to make and it leaked.” Ashagi explained that the miners of the Minong shaped the metal they dug from the earth by pounding it flat with hammers of the same metal. However, unlike a pot of clay, which was easily shaped, a vessel made of copper was difficult to make. But she also recalled that the small copper pot shared around her father’s village also made cooking much easier. The alternative was heating stones to be juggled into wooden platters or leather sacks filled with raw meat, vegetables and water. The results were always uneven and gritty, with the inner ingredients half cooked at best.

  Ashagi and Minose agreed that the iron pot of the traders would make their lives much easier.

  “But do you think the pots might be the work of demons?” Minose asked.

  “If that is true, then the demons are kinder than we imagined,” Ashagi said. “How can something so helpful be evil?”

  The next morning the Amiks arose to find that the traders had spread their treasures out on the beach. It seemed incredible that so much could be contained in two canoes, even though each vessel was long enough to hold ten men.

  There were many of the iron pots spread out on the beach, much smaller than the one used the night before, but just right for a woman and her family. The women of the Amiks swarmed the pots like gulls after a school of beached fish, gabbling just as loudly in their excitement.

  Ashagi seized a pot and clutched it to her breast, her eyes flashing at the possibilities. But the traders had even more to offer and spying them, the women surged forward with cries of wonder.

  There on a cotton blanket was spread a treasure of beads of many colors: the ruby throat of the hummingbird, the orange breast of the oriole, the red of a woodpecker’s crown, the blue of the sky, yellow of the finch, and the purple of thunderclouds; and each bead was exquisitely transparent and glimmered in the sunlight. Beads were nothing new to the Amiks. The women had fashioned their own of tiny shells, seeds, wood, and amber for all their lives. But no one had ever seen such beads as these, and each had a tiny hole for stringing.

  “They are made of glass,” one of the traders said. “It is a thing made out of the sand itself.” He lifted a handful of beach sand and let it filter through his fingers.

  Glass? It was another word that none among them had ever heard. But none could deny that the beads were a wonder and in an instant, the women grasped the possibilities. They had all created many fine garments, embroidered with porcupine quills, shells and the like. But these beads! They conjured irresistible dreams.

  Ashagi gathered two handfuls and placed them in her pot. Then came a hand on her shoulder. It was the tall stranger from the night before.

  “You have brought your furs? Good!” he boomed. “I can give you the pot and the beads for these,” he said, nodding his head toward her goods. Ashagi had brought her beaver robe and some other furs that she had been working on.

  “But what of the otters you wore last night?” he asked. “Would you trade them also?”

  Ashagi shook her head no. The otters had been a special gift from Misko all those years ago when they had first arrived at the Sleeping Bear.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I will give you this in return.”

  He pulled the shining thing from beneath his shirt and Ashagi’s eyes widened at the sight of it. In an instant she knew that the thing must be hers.

  Then the stranger did an odd thing. He pressed his lips on those of Ashagi and gripped her arms until she leapt back in surprise.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  The tall trader offered a wheedling smile.

  “It is a thing the Zhaagnaash do when they desire a woman,” he said.

  “You are a rude man.”

  “Yes, sister, but I want you. Even though you are an old woman you are comely and I would give you a present for the pleasure you would bring me. Come to my blanket tonight.”

  “If I come it will be with my husband to kill you,” Ashagi said, affecting the haughty crane of her youth. Gathering her things, she turned for her lodge and fled with the stranger’s laughter at her footsteps.

  She longed to ask the stranger what tribe he came from and where, given the wondrous goods he had brought, yet those were questions no woman could ask a man. The next day she heard the Old Man probing and strained to listen, but the stranger’s words meant nothing to her.

  Several days after the traders departed, Misko and Biidaaban arrived home, savoring the fragrance of cooking fires long before they reached the village.

  “They must be preparing a feast for us,” Biidaaban said.

  “Hah! Not for the likes of us, but truly, something big must be happening,” Misko said. “Perhaps it is a wedding feast, and we have arrived in time for our share.”

  But there was no feast, only the clamor of happy women chattering with excitement over their new pots. They had begged the men of the band to bring them anything they could lay their hands on to cook in their ironware, the bottoms of which glowed red as the coals themselves.

  Dumbstruck, Misko heard the news over and over again of the traders and what they had brought. But Ashagi was not cooking outside her lodge. Instead, she sat waiting within, and when Misko entered and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that she was holding a beautifully embroidered shirt as she sat at his place on the sleeping platform.

  “It is for you,” she said, “a hunting shirt for all that you have done.”

  Ashagi had worked in secret on the shirt for the cycle of nearly two moons, drawing its pattern on birch bark and stitching it with the sinews drawn from a whitetail’s leg. But the final touch had been the beads. She had spent most of the past night and day sewing them on; there had been no time for cooking.

  Misko gazed on the shirt of soft doeskin and gave a start. It was exactly like the war shirt his mother had made for Ogaa so long ago. His father had worn it on the raid and the shirt had gone down with him. Yet unlike his father’s shirt, which had been embroidered with porcupine quills of yellow and red, Misko could see that Ashagi had threaded a pattern of beads of cornflower blue, unlike any he had ever seen before. Such shirts were given only when a man was recognized for his skill as a hunter or a warrior, and though Misko had never be
en one for raiding, he had done his share in feeding the clan.

  “I did not know I was such a great hunter!” he exclaimed, holding the shirt up. “Miigwech, thank you.”

  Misko pulled his old leather hunting tunic over his head and tried the new one on. It fit him like a second skin.

  “I will surely be a better hunter now,” he beamed. “But where did you get these strange beads?” He already knew the answer, but it was good to hear Ashagi’s telling of the tale, which poured out like a tumbling waterfall.

  “But listen, that is not all,” she said, once she had described the strangers and their treasures for the second time. “There is also this.”

  She swept a patch of buckskin from her side and there it lay, glimmering like the surface of Mishi Gami in the half light of the wigwam.

  “The men called it steel,” she said. She had taken care to memorize the word, repeating it over and over so that she could share it with Misko. “See how it cuts. It is sharper than any shell or stone.”

  Misko grasped the knife and held it up, instantly feeling its power. It had a strong spirit, easily felt through its wooden handle. He took a corner of the buckskin at Ashagi’s side and drew the knife through the hardened leather. It sliced through the hide as if it were no more than cornmeal mush.

  “Sharper even than obsidian,” Misko said, carefully setting it down on the ledge. “We must take care not to break it.”

  At this Ashagi laughed. “You cannot break it!” she said. “It is not like obsidian, it is more like the Old Man’s copper, only much stronger and sharper.” She told Misko of her canny gift giving of the otters for the blade, dramatizing the wonder of the traders accepting common furs for such miracles and omitting any mention of the stranger pressing at her lips. Misko felt a mild twinge of regret at learning that Ashagi had traded the otters away, but had to admit that they had come out the better end of the barter. He had not even seen the iron pot yet.