Misko did not answer, but readied himself to draw back his bow. Nocked in the bowstring was an arrow he had saved all these years; it was tipped with one of the copper points the Old Man had given him when he was barely a man. Though the edge of its green blade was dull, its point was sharp enough to pierce bone.
Nika came as a silhouette and a wavering cry, standing dark against the sky. At Misko’s back, the bear gave a questioning grunt and rolled over. Misko lifted the bow. He felt a sudden lightness trilling through his body, and his injury and hunger made his head spin as if it was a stone in a child’s sling. He prayed the old arrow would not crack upon release. Yet with the certainty of a man who sees his sweeping arrow drive home, Misko was sure the shaft would find Nika’s guts.
Rousing himself, he ignored the pain shooting through his leg and drew back his bowstring. A shadow loomed in the space between the branches. It was time. Now or never. Misko stood quickly and released his arrow. Yet in his daze, he cracked the top of his skull on a heavy limb of the overhanging elm. In a blink, the arrow careened off a fallen limb and shattered.
Then, a great pressure filled Misko’s chest, as if a pine tree snapped its base and buried itself within him. With a dismay that spread from east to west across the horizon, Misko felt the terrible crack of his ribs as they swallowed the lucky thrust and full weight of the windigo’s rage. Dimly, as if he was now floating overhead, he saw Nika exulting over his body. His enemy had become a skeleton, half naked in a web of rags, his skin yellow and black stretched over a haggard skull.
Misko watched from above as his enemy hammered at his chest with the spear. With a great sadness he considered that soon Nika would strip the hair from his head, and then he would have his heart. Overwhelmed, he was unaware of the beast beside him shaking its head in bewilderment and irritation as it reared from its sleep.
But Misko had no time to consider his ruin, for the world at his feet was melting away.
The old stories were true. Misko saw that he had gained a pathway free of snow and his leg was no longer broken. The path headed west to a blank horizon. Misko had never seen a prairie, but knew it must be so, just as the old ones had described it. It was Che-ba-kun-ah, the road of souls, the long white trail to the Spirit Land.
Nor was he alone. Dimly, he heard a buzzing, as if a swarm of bees accompanied him, and then he perceived a fluttering shadow in the air before his eyes. Louder and louder it came until its thrum roared in his ears. The beads of its black eyes settled upon him as its head flickered back and forth. Then Nenookaasi the hummingbird began to swell until its body filled the sky from one horizon to the next, flashing red and green with wings that hammered like thunder. His spirit guide had come to take him home.
Misko lingered a moment before looking west, finding that his feet had already begun moving toward the place Ashagi had gone. The old ones said that the trail would lead him four days across the empty prairie to a vast, swaying bridge. The bridge turned into a serpent once it was crossed, barring the way back forever.
On the trail beside him, he saw the shadows of men chasing the shades of animals through groves of misty trees. A stag leapt past, as silver as the light of the moon in the forest, and Misko gave chase along the path. Gradually, the pathway began to glimmer, twinkling as if it were a woodland filled with trilliums, and gazing down, he realized he was traveling along a carpet of stars.
29
THE RED BEAR AND THE BLUE HERON
He met her at a crossroads where she had lingered with the shade of a heron at her side until she had dwindled to little more than a cobweb. Eya, she was almost gone, but Misko recognized the last light glimmering in Ashagi’s eyes and caught her final smile as he reached out to hold her, his beloved Blue Heron. He no longer had any arms to wrap around her, yet still he took her to his breast—how, he did not know.
By now, the lonely path of stars had become a river of life, flowing fast with spirits, all heading west. Strange men and women joined them, the likes of which they had never seen, first in the dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, and then beyond count. And with them came a stream of toads, ducklings, beaver, marten, bear, deer, and other animals beyond all imagination with the sky above thick as a soup with the flight of insects and birds. A slurry of green ran at their feet, and Misko realized it was the dying vegetation of the earth.
Then the path of stars became a wind of souls, as the manitos of every living thing that had passed on blended together, careening, twisting, melting until every sense of self had vanished. Eya, Misko and Ashagi were reunited with all the spirits of their ancestors, but it was all as one spirit, one soul. As the Anishinaabek had always known, all things under creation were one. All that had lived was twisted and tangled, with souls melting into souls upon souls until every living thing moved through the veins, the heart, the eyes, and breath of Kitchi Manito, flowing toward the birth cord of life to come.
Yet a part of Misko held back, clinging to the earth. It was the warrior within him that had made a vow of vengeance. In the distance, he heard a drumming like that of a heartbeat, only deep and slow, and then, incredibly, the thin voice of the Old Man singing in the language of the Old Ones from many strings of lives ago. Misko strained to understand, but the words had been lost with the wind and the waves long before his most distant grandfathers were born.
Gradually, the drumming increased and with it the chant of the Old Man until all that Misko ever knew fell mute, and beyond the sense of men. He had grown rough, damp and stiff, musky with the stink of insects, worms and tiny mushrooms clinging amid beads of snow to wet fur, his final thoughts blinded by the hunger of a long winter’s sleep. He saw that his hands had turned to paddles, dense with fur, and tipped with long claws that glistened black even in the dim light. He dug his claws into the dirt and rose up in his den to find a man-thing dancing and whooping in the snow. He seized the skeletal creature from behind and drove it to the ground.
Then, two figures lay broken in the snow beyond the jumble of the den, one with blackened skin, still twisting from its splintered back, the other lying crumpled with a broken shaft lodged in its chest. The bear sniffed at both, knowing they were of the tribe of men. Often, it had run from men passing through the forest, or had watched in silent reproach from the shelter of a bog. The bear did not taste the flesh of the speared man, for it smelled too much like itself, but for the other came the crack of ribs and the tearing of muscle. Sharp claws scooped out the still warm heart of the windigo, and the bear devoured the bloody, beating organ. To the bear its heart was not frozen, it tasted of life.
Still groggy from his winter’s rest, the bear lingered over the blackened body all morning, tearing at its thin muscle, gnawing and pulling at the flesh to find the rich guts below. Finally, having eaten its fill, it stood on its hind legs and looked around. Something irresistibly sweet had called to him before he had awakened. And something called to him still.
It had been the call of the Old Man. Eya, and over the winter fires of the Ojibwe it was claimed thereafter that the Old Man was Manabozho himself, hidden all these years among the tribes of men. Manabozho, the Transformer, who walked the earth in the guise of men, using the gifts of trickery and wisdom to serve as the guardian of life. Or so went the legends when Old Man Animi-ma’lingan passed from this life soon after Misko. Who can say if it was true? But having eaten its fill of the blackened man and hearing the Old Man’s song, the bear shuffled past Misko’s body and turned west for the shore of Mishi Gami. The bear paused by the shore and nosed at the wind, sniffing the promise of spring. Then with a grunt, he turned north.
Late in the afternoon, Niibin came running barefoot in the snow to her brother, Dawn Boy, who was at work repairing his snowshoes. With a cry, she pointed into the distance. “Brother, come quick. Father is coming!”
Biidaaban leapt to his feet and ran up the low rise between the empty village and Mishi Gami, carrying the war club of his grandfather. He had not seen the cannibal Nika since his
father left, but that did not mean he was not lurking nearby.
Across the ice he saw a figure rising on two legs, blazing red against the low hanging winter sun and for a moment, Biidaaban believed that his father had come home after three nights spent alone out in the cold. Surely, father would bring the meat that would save them, for they had reached the last swallow of desperation.
But his heart fell as the figure dropped to all fours, and Biidaaban saw that it was not his father standing on the ice, but a bear, roused from its late-winter slumber.
Eya, but the bear was the largest that Biidaaban had ever seen, big enough to sustain them all for the rest of the winter with its meat. But to kill a bear is a grave thing among the Anishinaabek, requiring many prayers and songs of thanks. What would Father do? Biidaaban watched the bear and whispered, “He would say, ‘You are a man now. You are the man to watch over your sister and your clan. You are a man! Do what you must’.”
The bear shambled forward across the ice on three legs, dragging one behind. Closer and closer it came until Biidaaban could feel the heat of its breath on his face. It rose up, its eyes gazing black upon him as if waiting for him to speak. Then, to his astonishment, the bear bowed in supplication, kneeling on the milky ice of Mishi Gami to offer its life.
Swallowing his fear to steady his quaking arm, Biidaaban drew a breath and raised the war club of his father and his grandfather high over his head, whirling its ball of granite down like the sweeping wind.
THE END
AFTERWORD
In the basement archives of the Traverse City Historical Society there’s an old museum cabinet dating back to the 1890s. Crafted of dark brown walnut and rimmed with brass fittings stained gray with age, the cabinet holds many curious artifacts of the Odaawaa and the Ojibwe who once lived along the shores of northwestern lower Michigan, and still do.
The cabinet is feathered with cobwebs and dust, rarely opened except perhaps once a decade by a scholar or grad student. Few ever reach the bottom of its eighteen drawers, losing interest after musing over the collection of arrowheads, spear points, adzes and such which occupy the upper levels.
Yet in the bottom drawer lies an old birch scroll, which was wrapped in paraffined canvas long ago for its protection. It was donated to the museum in the 1930s by an unknown resident of the Indian village of Peshawbestown, located twenty miles to the north up the Leelanau Peninsula. The scroll is believed to be some 400 years old. Few have gazed upon its crumbling surface since the 1930s, for its pictures are delicate and inscrutable.
But if perhaps an ancient elder of the Anishinaabek could see them and discern the meaning of their misty swirls, he might say that the drawings in ochre and charcoal tell of legends told long before the coming of the white man. He would see a canoe paddled at the command of a hero past the monster Misshepeshu across Lake Michigan. And this followed by a company of warriors beheaded by the Dakotas. Then, the story of a son, chased by a moose and winner of a great beauty, who led his people to the south away from the menace of disease and the enemy. He would find a red bear drawn in a corner of the scroll and wonder at its meaning.
He would also ponder the ending of the scroll. That of a brother and sister, represented as the morning sun and a flower of the high summer, who paddled to a new home on South Manitou Island, a place of good fishing and many deer. There, perhaps Biidaaban and Niibin gazed up at night and searched the sky for the stars of their mother and father. They would see their faces drawn in the dunes of the far shore. Eya, they put their mother’s iron pot and their father’s steel knife to good use and passed on the war club of Ogaa to Biidaaban’s own son. Where it lies today, no one knows.
And late in the summer during the time of Manoominikegiizis, the Ricing Moon, perhaps they heard singing and drums out on the water late at night and saw the ghostly canoe of their grandfather passing gray in the waves toward the shore of the Sleeping Bear.
AUTHOR NOTES
My earliest revelations regarding the Native People of Michigan came literally from the earth. One of my family’s greatest treasures is the scores of arrowheads, spear points, and stone axe heads found by my father while tilling the fields of our family farm during the 1940s. There was also a mysterious mound in the woods at the far end of our fields, which rose six feet or so above a pancake landscape. That old mound was perhaps all that remained of the people who left those arrowheads. Once, there had been a village here, set along the route of a trail through the forest.
These relics of the Odaawaa and perhaps even the Hopewell Culture before them, led me to believe that there must be hundreds more scattered around our 200-acre farm, left there over the millennia by what must have been thousands of hunters. It left me with the belief that the footsteps of the Indians are to be found everywhere in much greater numbers than we can begin to imagine, not just in Michigan, but throughout all of the Americas.
In writing Windigo Moon, I’ve indulged my home turf by including the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore as the “promised land” of my characters. This pristine landscape along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan is still the promised land for many of us today. Some say that the spirits of Native Americans and their manitos still linger here, and it’s easy to feel that sensation as you stroll the beaches, dunes and islands of this beautiful landscape. The aptly named Manitou Islands, just a few miles from the shore, are said to have magical properties.
With that said, any errors in this book are the children of my imagination, or perhaps from choosing an incorrect historical source. It’s also true that every work of fiction views the past through the lens of its times; thus, elements of feminism, environmentalism and political correctness are given a nod here and there to suit modern tastes, even though the Anishinaabek of 400 years ago surely had a radically different take on life, which sprang from the heart of the clan and the harsh realities of survival.
The events in the book (circa 1550-1619) take place during a time of crisis and upheaval during the 11,000-year habitation of the upper Great Lakes.
It’s estimated that prior to 1600, the Ojibwe numbered anywhere from 20,000 to an astounding 100,000 persons living in clans of extended families, with perhaps 3,000 attending the annual summer and fall festivals at the fishing grounds of present-day Sault Ste. Marie.
Yet, by the time British traders began appearing on the scene in the 1760s, the Ojibwe population had dwindled to a few thousand, with only 200 or so reported at the Sault.
What happened? A disaster of apocalyptic proportions.
“Almost from the first appearance of European fur traders and colonists, native societies around the Great Lakes and Ohio River valley were caught up in a relentless cycle of violence, dispersal, and relocation,” notes the book, Through Indian Eyes: The Untold Story of Native American Peoples, published by Reader’s Digest.
In the late 1400s and early 1500s, explorers from more than a dozen countries brought home tales of civilizations with well-ordered towns, farmlands and systems of government among the native peoples of North America. Yet, these early encounters unwittingly introduced smallpox, viral hepatitis, measles, diphtheria, typhus, and other diseases for which the Native Americans had no biological defenses.
Over the past two decades, many well-researched books, such as 1491 by Charles C. Mann, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, The Lost City of Z by David Grann, and A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horowitz, tell this devastating story, recounting the destruction of Indian civilizations. In 1491 Mann reports that up to 90 percent of the estimated 100 to 120 million Indians living in the New World may have been killed by introduced diseases, with many dying years before the first colonists arrived in the early 1600s. Elsewhere, that figure is set at 50 percent; in any case, a catastrophe beyond imagination.
The native peoples were especially vulnerable because they attributed diseases to magic or the spirits of evil manitos and gathered tightly packed in their lodges for safety, creating a biological bomb of humanity; whereas the citizens
of old Europe tended to flee to the countryside when epidemics such as the bubonic plague struck. Thus, decades after the first explorers touched the shores of North America, the colonists of the Mayflower and succeeding vessels found a new world that was largely empty of its former population, with abandoned towns, overgrown fields and thousands of scattered bones.
It’s believed that viral hepatitis killed up to 90 percent of the Indians living along the coast of New England in the early 1600s. A merchant named Thomas Morton wrote of the epidemic of 1616-1619 that the Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” with the dying, “left for crows, kites and vermin to prey upon.”
In the South, the army of conquistador Hernan de Soto laid waste to virtual kingdoms in a swath extending from Georgia to the Mississippi. Yet it was the smallpox-bearing hogs he brought from Spain which killed far more Native Americans, with epidemics engulfing tribes across North and South America.
What was life like during these dangerous and tumultous times? No one truly knows. But, like the Old Man, I am a storyteller, and Ashagi and Misko have called out to me for many years. I hope their tale will inspire you to learn more about the lives of those who walked this land before us. Please see the resources, notes, chapter-by-chapter bibliography, along with discussion questions found on my website at www.robertdownes.com.
MY THANKS
Trying to conjure a world set four hundred years in the past is not possible without consulting many keen observers who are long gone down the trail of mortality.
But first I’d like to thank the vibrant souls among the living whose sense of joy and enthusiasm put me on the path to publishing this book. They include Elena Makansi for her inspired artwork, Kristina Blank Makansi for her wise edits and insights along with her colleagues Donna Essner, Lisa Miller and marketing intern Catherine O’Mara of the Amphorae Publishing Group for their esprit de corps and love of books. I am also grateful until the end of time for the efforts, skill and friendship of agent Evan Marshall. Add to that list Lisa McNeilley and the Cascade Writers Group and my daughter Chloe Wildman Scribner, whose timely advice set loose the arrow of completing Windigo Moon. Thank you also to Anishinaabemowin language instructor Isadore Bebamikawe-Toulouse and my classmates for offering a glimpse into the continuing effort to preserve and share the Native language and culture.
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