Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  That evening, after the Dakota had rested and eaten themselves sick on the village stores, they buried their own dead in a funeral pyre in the gathering place between the lodges. Peering through a crack in the longhouse, Ashagi saw that the tall warrior whom her father had killed was borne with ceremony on a litter carried by six men to the top of the burn pile. A long, headdress of eagle feathers swept down his back, and he was richly dressed in leathers bleached red with ochre. The Dakota’s holy man said words over him, and then a deep shout resounded from the chests of the warriors as the wood pile was torched.

  “Father, though you are dead, you are smiling somewhere,” Ashagi whispered through her tears. She was numb from her ordeal, almost beyond words, reduced to the level of an animal as she gazed in terror at the warriors only steps away. Eya, she had always been considered a spitfire by those of her village, given to sassing back with flashing eyes when she was challenged, yet now she could not stop trembling. Grandmother Nookomis stood by her side, nodding, with her hand on her shoulder, unable to speak through her own tears.

  Thereafter, the Dakota danced, sang, and drummed around the blazing pyre until long past midnight. Each shout from the warriors pierced the women in the lodge as if with the prick of an arrow as they huddled glum and sobbing through the night.

  When the women and their children emerged from the great house the next morning, squinting in the sun, they found the village littered with limbs, heads, feet and hands streaked with blood and dirt. Sightless eyes gazed up from the ground, their pupils already furred and gray. This, and the smell of blood mixed with feces where wounded men had watched as their intestines had been torn from their bodies. All this in a storm of flies and sniffing dogs, with the enemy calmly looking on, smoking their pipes.

  “Gather your robes and all the food you can carry,” said an enemy brave who spoke their language. “Then say farewell to your village, sisters, for you walk with us now.”

  Guards accompanied each woman to her lodge to prevent escape to the woods. Then, when all returned to the gathering ground, they were tied neck-to-neck with a long cord of elm bark twine. There were twenty-three of them still among the living, with eight children tugging and crying at their feet.

  “What now, Grandmother? What now?” Ashagi held the hand of Nookomis, the only elder of the village who had been spared. Her grandmother stood beside her, ignored by the warriors hurrying up and down the line. The old woman would be left behind to tell the tale of the raid to anyone who happened by, or to end her days among the dead of her clan.

  “Stay strong, daughter. Stay strong and live,” Nookomis had said, squeezing her hand. “Remember me always; remember me and your people will live on through you.”

  Then the village had been fired, and the wail of the women rose in pitch until it outdid the crackling flames in its anguish. The long houses, which had cradled so many families, built with love through the effort of so many hands over many years, caved inward and fell to the flames. The great lodge of the chieftains, which had hosted so many honored guests, traders and shamans, burned to the ground. All of the wigwaams and storehouses followed, all sacrificed to the fire. Why? Why? The question was on the lips of every woman and child and burned in their eyes and memories as they watched their homes dwindle to ashes.

  The Dakota were at their leisure marching south from the village, not bothering to tie their captives on the second day. And who could escape, and where? When the line of women and children stopped for the night, Ashagi counted more than two hundred warriors on her fingers and toes, drawing a line in the dirt each time she reached twenty. The raiders were five times that of the men of her village. What had they to fear when every man and boy had been slaughtered? Some had left their war clubs behind, graven with their totems, so that all would know who killed the last of the Heron clan.

  A few of the captives could not stop sobbing as they pushed along the trail. A child who would not stop screaming was sent to the spirit land with an axe blow to the top of her head and tossed to the side of the line. Ashagi felt as if she was floating through a dream of horror, with the frightened faces of her mother and father looming before her as she walked. Her body shook as if in a violent fever and when she spoke, her words trembled on her lips and fell to pieces. The worst outrages had stopped by the second day, but still the women and children were taunted with the scalps of their fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons, which were dangled from spears before their wailing faces. The women whispered amongst themselves, “They are ab-boin-ug, ab-boin-ug!” for roasters was a name the Ojibwe had given the Dakota for their habit of charring their captives alive.

  “Foolish women, have peace,” said the brave who knew the Ojibwe tongue, scoffing at their fears. “It is the Ojibwe who are known for roasting their enemies until their flesh puckers. We, the Dakota, are blameless and have better things to do than caress you with flames.”

  Despite what the Dakota said, some of the women continued to mutter of death by fire. But frightened as she was, Ashagi knew her value to men. There was a reason the Dakota had spared only the nubile women and children of the village, and it was not for greasing their fires.

  “Where will they take us?” she asked a cousin as they struggled along.

  This cousin was old enough to recall the raiding days before the long peace with the Dakotas. She had kept her life by claiming to be a medicine woman.

  “West, far west,” she answered, “to the land of the Dakotas.”

  “For what purpose?” Ashagi asked, though she knew it well enough.

  Her cousin looked up and laughed, her tearing eyes as bright as wet cherries. “For what purpose? Daughter, for all I know, they mean to eat us!”

  “They will gag on us,” Ashagi said somberly.

  “But what then? Do you think it will be better to lie with these monsters?”

  For this, Ashagi had no answer.

  “Nadue-siu,” Ashagi whispered under her breath as she watched the warriors. For “little snakes” is also what the Ojibwe called the Dakota. Sometimes they were simply called snakes, the Siu, or Sioux. Ashagi’s own people sometimes called themselves “the people who draw pictures,” the Ozhibii’we, after the pictographs they made on birch scrolls and the stone shoulders of the earth. But their everyday name was the Anishinaabek, for like those of every tribe under the sun they considered themselves the True People, the Original People. To be Anishinaabek was to be among the people of the great Ojibwe nation of many clans scattered all along the big lake Kitchi Gami and beyond.

  Her dusky sister, Bapakine, Grasshopper, had been stolen from the Dakota’s five summers ago. While leading a band of hunters, her father had found the girl gathering firewood along a river near her village and had taken her to be raised as his adopted child. Bapakine was unusually dark, as dark as the mud of the river where she had been found, yet she had taught Ashagi a smattering of words in the Dakota’s language. It had all been just a game then, but now Ashagi grappled to remember. Each word precious as she strove to grasp the babble of her captors. She gazed back and forth among them as if she were a dog, with no greater sense of comprehension.

  As she walked, she willed herself to think of her mother singing lullabies in their wigwam at winter camp, and of her father’s teasing. “Sing little bird, sing,” he would say, stroking her hair as they lay before the fire. Little bird was all that anyone in her band had ever called her, a child’s name, and in her delight she had never taken the name of a grown woman, even though she was sixteen summers old and well favored for marriage.

  Her family had been snug as a nest of wrens, singing and drumming in their lodge through the long nights. Their only enemy then had been the merciless cold, easily defeated by the stories told by her father and grandmother before the winter fire. One night, she remembered, the snow had fallen in millions of tufts, floating as soft and silent through the trees as the downy feathers of a swan. “Why do the snowflakes gather as they fall?” she had asked, marveling at the
sight of the feathering snow.

  “Even the snow has a family, child,” her father had murmured. “All things have a family. We are all one clan in the eyes of Kitchi Manito—the earth, the sky, the animals, and birds—we are all family.” Eya, and on that night, Ashagi had thought of the family that she, too, would bring from her body when the time came for her to become a mother.

  Ashagi had been promised a life as fixed and unchanging as the stars rolling through the sky through all the years beyond count. A life that had been handed down from all her grandmothers going back as many generations as there were stones on the beach. Someday soon, the promise said, her eyes would lock on those of a man from several clans away, perhaps at the summer festival held far down the lake. He would be handsome, with flashing eyes and a broad smile, and one day he would appear at her mother’s lodge with a deer slung over his shoulder, along with earnest words and tobacco for her father. Her father would say no, but the young hunter would come again and again, each time with more deer, elk, moose, whatever it took to prove that he could provide. And, in time, after his little bird gave her assent, her father would say yes, and the man would come to live with them as her husband, and as her father’s new son.

  Then, with the Great Spirit willing, she would become a mother, then a grandmother, then merely a whisper in the memory of her clan as her daughters and their daughters carried on. That was the promise given by the creator of all things, eternal and unchanging among the Anishinaabek.

  Like every child of the Ojibwe, she had been nursed by every woman in the village who had milk in her breasts. Some suckled until they were six years old, learning the lesson early on that everything was shared among the Anishinaabek, even a mother’s milk. She had been a beauty even then, envied for her looks. She had learned to fight at an early age when those among her sister-cousins pulled at her hair or smeared her face with mud. With flashing teeth and her wide eyes flaring, Ashagi was more of a terror than a beauty when she was provoked, likened by some to the che-bi-ugs, those vengeful spirits of the dead.

  Often, she spent time at the feet of her grandmother, listening to stories of the Old Ones going back to the time of the flood, which had covered all of the Great Turtle Island. Nookomis knew stories beyond count, and when her little bird grew tired of the telling, there were her two brothers to play with, or the comfort of her father’s voice, as low and resonant as the bull elk.

  “Sing, little bird, sing,” her father Naabeyaakig, River Otter, coaxed many nights by the fire.

  “Ah, you spoil her,” her mother had said. “She is a pretty one and will become a flirt if you spoil her so. You must not spoil her.”

  “No, singing cannot spoil this one,” Naabeyaakig said, looking into his daughter’s eyes. “With her singing, she will share her beauty.”

  So it was that Ashagi sang often as a child. But it did not last. One day when she was six summers old, her father had brought home a new sister. Naabeyaakig had found the girl of the Dakotas collecting firewood along a river bank far to the west and had spirited her away with his band of hunters. A feast and a night of dancing was held to honor her adoption into the Heron clan. They named her Little Grasshopper, Bapakine.

  No one among the Anishinaabek of the northern Ojibwe knew then that Bapakine was the last child of Secachapa. The pillager known as Dead Beaver was leader of a Santee Sioux society of warriors, renowned for their raids up and down the Misi Sipi and also against the Cree, who lived far to the north. Secachapa had lost not only his wife, but four sons to a mysterious coughing sickness, and his daughter was the only sunlight glimmering on his black heart. No one knew then, nor ever would, that Secachapa had sworn by Wakan Tanka to spend the rest of his life searching for his lost child, vowing to kill all who had taken her from him. And now, all of Ashagi’s family was lost—her mother, father, grandmother, brothers, her home, her village, her flirting beaus—all lost. All she had left of her own was her frail name to remind her of what could never be again. Her chest ached as if it would burst.

  On the second night away from the village as she huddled close among the women, shivering by the shore of Kitchi Gami, Ashagi had a vision as to what her true name should be. Far down the shore she saw a heron silhouetted against the silver of the moonlit lake, standing as still as a tree in the shallows beneath the curtain of the night.

  Bird, how did you come to be so far from your nest? Are you lost like me?

  As if it had heard her thoughts, the heron came bobbing slowly toward her on its awkward stilts, its claws scratching at the stones by the water’s edge, until at last it was close enough for her to catch the gleam of its amber eye. It fixed on her and gave a mournful honk, then lifted to the heavens with its wings translucent beneath the moon. Lying there, shaking in the damp air, she realized the bird had come strutting slowly in the night to choose her. It was a spirit come to guide her, of that she was sure. She would honor her father and her lost clan with its name, a grown woman’s name, Ozhaawashko-ashagi, Blue Heron.

  The next day, Ashagi saw the men appraising her and the other women as they walked. The young warrior that her father had wounded argued with a pot-bellied old man, gesturing in her direction. She hissed at them and the young one laughed, while the old man gaped with a face like a mole. One of his eyes had the pearly sheen of a clam shell’s inner rim. Stomach rumbling with hunger and disgust, she turned away. Since the women had walked away from their village, they’d had nothing to eat.

  Two days with nothing in their bellies took a toll on the captives, and when the children began to beg to the point of irritation they were given handfuls of wild rice taken from their own village along with unsweetened wild oats. It helped, but not much.

  That night, as Ashagi tossed fitfully, her belly still complaining, Grandmother Nookomis came calling in her dreams, rustling like an autumn leaf in the wind. Thin braids of gray fell on either side of her hazelnut face lined with the rivers of winters beyond count. Her dark eyes were filled with tears of longing as the throng of captives was led west, leaving her behind to die of loneliness among the bones of her people.

  “_____________ him!” Nookomis said in the dream. “__________ him!” But Ashagi could not make out the words.

  On the third day they piled into the Dakota’s waiting canoes and set out south along the shore of Kitchi Gami. For three days they bobbed along the lakeshore, enduring the sick feeling that comes from being jerked like a child’s toy in the waves. Then came a succession of rivers and lakes with endless portages, and the women put to work hauling the canoes and gear of their captors. They were filthy with sweat by nightfall, for some of the portages were half-a-day’s walk or more and the Dakota demanded that they carry the fragile canoes on their shoulders. Often, Ashagi slipped and fell beneath the load, once almost breaking her knee on a jagged stone. Soon, her moccasins were worn to nothing, and her bare feet were scratched raw and painted with mud. Yet no one dared linger, for the warriors were impatient with their spears, thrusting the weary forward with cries in their strange, buttery language.

  By the new moon, they reached a country where the trees began to dwindle as families of elk and woodland bison crossed their trail. Ashagi sensed a change in the air; the sweetwater scent of Kitchi Gami and her home was long behind her.

  One evening the women found the Dakota men buzzing among themselves with excitement. A hasty dance was organized around the fire that night, attended by many trilling cries of triumph as the warriors flickered before the blaze.

  That morning, Ashagi awoke to find the Dakota busy painting themselves as if for battle; they had slathered their bodies with swaths of greasy, red ochre and charcoal, with rings of white and green encircling their eyes or drawn in lightning bolts over their faces.

  “See how they primp their hair? They are dressing for another raid,”” she said to Bapakine. “And then what’s to become of us if they lose?”

  “No, sister,” Bapakine comforted her, “they are only coming home.”


  By the noonday sun, the dancing tumult of painted warriors drove the captives to a shallow ford along a broad river where they were met by a multitude of thousands. Amid cheers that resounded like a roar along the riverbank, the warriors dashed forward, screaming their delight in the homecoming, and waving the scalps of the vanquished before them as they danced across the water. There, spread along the river, was a sight beyond the imagination of the Anishinaabek of the far north. Ashagi was astounded by the size of the village; hundreds of lodges ran down the river far out of sight, its pathways crowded with barking dogs and howling children.

  To the wonder of the captives, many of the lodges were constructed of the earth itself, piled thick and high on every side over a network of branches and topped by beamed roofs covered with bark. At one end of the village Ashagi noticed another wonder: there were several lodges constructed over a patchwork of skins overlapping a network of poles. Like arrowheads they were, pointing to the sky. Bapakine said they were called tipis.

  “How can so many people live in one place?” Ashagi wondered.

  “This is just a summer camp. My true father brought me here as a child. The clans have gathered to trade and visit. They will move on once the raid is celebrated.”

  Ashagi wondered what her own part would be in the celebration, but was afraid to ask.

  As if guessing her thoughts, Bapakine laughed. “Don’t worry, sister. You are as nothing to them. They will no more harm you than your father harmed me when he found me by the river.”

  Just outside the encampment, a bitch in heat was yelping and leaping sideways back and forth in the dust. Leaping at her heels was a yipping pack, howling and panting, their peckers wet and red with anticipation. A yellow male with a spotted eye latched on and the bitch screamed as they locked together and twisted in the dust. Ashagi knew it would be a sleepless night for those lodged within earshot of the pack, for the dogs would bark and howl until the sun rose, unless they were driven off with a shower of stones.