As they paddled, rocking in the waves, Ashagi wondered how the wedding ceremony of Misko’s band would differ from that of her own. She had no doubt that he intended to wed her, but when? And how? She would no longer be a slave or any man’s concubine.
No, she decided, if he was to marry her, there must be a proper ceremony, with a feast, gifts, and guests. The experience with the squabbling warriors of the Dakota had confirmed that Ashagi was mihopeca, a woman of great beauty, and though every woman doubts that such a claim could possibly be true, still, she held onto its promise as a shield and a club to be used against the wolves of men. Mihopeca! Alone in the world without family or clan, her beauty would serve as her weapon in the eyes of men.
Ashagi paddled on at the bow of the canoe and sang over the wind.
“Woman, woman, night is calling,
In the night a man is calling,
Do you know his name?
Will you play a lover’s game?
Woman, woman, you have power,
He’s the bee and you the flower.”
At the stern of the canoe, Misko had his own apprehensions. He gazed forward at the long braid on Ashagi’s bare back as they paddled on, his own spine twisting and tortured by his declaration the night before. As his captive, he had the right to take Ashagi as his wife, whether she agreed or not. Yet things were not so simple, considering that she was of the clan that his father’s war party had sought to avenge. Nor did he wish to simply command her as a captive; he wanted everything, every part of her, willing and happy to live by his side.
But she was a beautiful woman and he watched glumly as Nika shot frequent glances at her from the neighboring canoe. From time to time, Nika steered in close to offer some flirting observation of the shore, the skies, the birds overhead. With the honeyed voice of a practiced nightwalker, he wove in compliments of her beauty and praised her strength.
Misko grew downcast. Women were a mystery to him, and this one had made him say a foolish thing. He was not a dandy, nor were his words as smooth in a woman’s ear as those of Nika. He imagined Nika turning Ashagi’s head in time as he had with many other women. Yet to his relief, Ashagi ignored Nika’s babble, keeping her eyes to the eastern horizon as if she were a cairn of stones.
Whether this was a good sign, Misko could not say, for young though he was, even he knew that a woman of Ashagi’s beauty was free to weigh her own fate. And his worth in her eyes was still unknown.
But these, he knew, were unmanly thoughts, and that troubled him just as much.
Yet, as they coursed for home along the coast, Misko had other concerns. The coast, crowded with villages of the Anishinaabek, seemed empty. There were no fires in the villages they passed and no one waved as they paddled by.
“Where are your people?” Ashagi asked. Even her own quiet coast on the north shore of the lake had more wanderers along its beaches.
“They’ve gone to the running of the white fish,” Nika said when Misko hailed him. “We may yet meet them returning from Boweting.”
“But even the old ones are gone,” Misko said.
“Perhaps there were raiders.”
“Even so, our people would have hidden in the forest and would be happy to see us now.”
“Sometimes it is not possible to hide in the forest,” Ashagi said, thinking of the fate of her own village.
Ogaa’s war party had bypassed the villages to maintain secrecy, but now the three of them paddled on, fearing that the enemy might be lurking behind the empty wigwams. They gave a halloo at several villages, but heard nothing in response.
Later that day, they saw a corpse lying by the shore, picked at by two eagles. They sat in the waves, calling to the trees beyond the body, but no one appeared and so they paddled on.
The paddle home took three days amid the crashing of waves, the monotony of which Ashagi thought would drive her mad. But on the fourth day Misko pointed to the cliffs of a distant island. “It is our home, Kitchi Minissing,” he said. “Soon, you will meet my mother and all the brothers and sisters of our clan.”
Ashagi nodded gravely, apprehensive of meeting her new family and wondering how she would be received. She thought of her own mother. What would she have said if her brother had brought home a strange woman?
“Eya, but you will also have to tell your mother of her husband’s death,” she said.
“This, I believe, she will already know,” he answered. “The spirits will have told her.”
But as they reached the island they heard wailing from the shore. A naked child of no more than two summers was jigging at the edge of the beach, screaming itself hoarse. As their canoe touched the beach they were overcome by the sweet and sour stink of death, lingering in the still air by the shore. Even at a distance, it made them gag.
Misko leapt from the canoe with his club held high and ran for the wigwams. There were bodies piled up all around the lodges amid clusters of pecking crows. His brother and sister-cousins were lying among those he had played with as a boy. Then he found his uncles and aunts who had so often shared their lodges; all were lying in tangles, their mouths open, gaping red and black with blood, their bodies covered in vomit and excrement. Rivers of brown, dried blood streamed from their mouths, nostrils, even from their eyes.
“Mother!” he cried, bursting into the lodge he had known since childhood. The floor along its walls was lined with mushrooms and a mouse ran out the portal it had chewed in the bark. A horde of flies whipsawed the dim room. There she lay, sprawled on the mats covering the ground, Niibinkosiw, unknowing that her husband had died, unknowing that her son had returned. Her eyes were open and her mouth gaped in the fish-face of death. She, too, was covered in the filth that painted the others.
“Mother, oh mother,” Misko whispered. He lifted Niibinkowsiw and held her in his arms, pleading. “I am with you, Mother. I am with you now.”
He held the husk of her life a long time, striving to remember her voice, her eyes and the touch of her hands. Then he wrapped her in a deer hide and set her down, promising in silence to see her again when all was settled in his own life. By now, she was well along the trail west to the spirit land with Father. At least she would have his company.
Misko emerged from the lodge to find that Nika had left to discover the fate of his wife, who had gone to stay with her mother’s band far beyond the cliffs lining the mainland. Ashagi was sitting on the beach, comforting the distraught child through her own tears.
“Misko!” she cried, but there were no other words to say. She threw her head back, sobbing and screaming at the sky.
His head swam as if a swarm of bees had risen between his ears. How could this be? How could this be? He gazed wildly around. Surely it was only a dream! The sight of three coyotes skulking just beyond the lodges convinced him it must be so. But no, there it was, no dream. Dead friends and family lay everywhere at his feet. Most of the village lay strewn about the lodges or rotting within.
Grasping two handfuls of ashes from the pit at the center of the village, Misko groaned and buried his face in their dust, shaking the ashes all through his hair until he had grown stark as a ghost. Then he began cutting his chest, arms, and forehead with his flint. The blood streamed over his body as, slowly, he began to dance in a stumbling gait, singing the death song, not for himself, but for all the members of his clan who lay watching through sightless eyes. Alone he danced, where there should have been many. He sang himself hoarse, trying to sing loud enough for the dead themselves to hear.
They found Giigoohn, Little Fish, the apprentice to the Old Man, propped against the side of the council lodge at the center of the village. He had been one of the deserters after Misko had been lost, yet now he was within a pipe’s smoke of dying.
“Is it you, Misko?” he croaked. “Are you dead?”
“I am with you, brother,” Misko replied, running his hand down the side of the shaman’s face. “But soon perhaps I will join you.”
“Yes, soon” Giigoohn
waved feebly. Like the dead, his throat looked as if it had been burned raw, and yet he forced the words from his ragged larynx. “I had a dream. Can you believe it, brother? I had a dream of what you must do. I saw you in my dream! Can you believe it?”
Misko waited without speaking.
“Burn us, brother. Burn us all.”
Misko hesitated. “Brother, I hear you, but that would not be right by the spirits,” he said in a low voice. “Only warriors killed in battle can be buried in the fire.”
Giigoohn gave a thin smile through his misery and coughed, a stream of blood running down his chin. “Yes, brother, but that is what they say you must do. They spoke to me of the fire, and of you.”
At sundown, Misko and Ashagi dragged every body they could find into the council lodge, which had stood at the heart of the village for more than three generations. They arranged the bodies facing west toward the path of souls, with Giigoohn still warm among them.
“Brother, think of what you are doing,” Ashagi warned. “This is no proper funeral to honor the dead. Think of the spirits and their wrath.”
But Misko shared the dying words of the shaman.
“He said the spirits did not want the coyotes and crows wolfing at the souls of the clan through the night,” Misko said. “He told me to bury them in fire, and I will obey.”
Then, as an afterthought he said, “It is all on me, little one. The spirits will know that it is all on me.”
Eya, the crows blackened the sky over the village, their wings quivering in a curtain of malice when Misko and Ashagi tugged the dead from their beaks. In a fury, Misko kicked at a scavenging coyote so hard that it broke its ribs and sent it tumbling amid the bodies.
At sundown, exhausted and filled with horror, they searched each lodge in the village for gifts to send with the dead on their journey. Bows, beaded heirlooms, knives, clothing, medicine bags, snowshoes, and all of the beloved family treasures that the dead would need on their journey west. They tore down the walls of a nearby lodge, adding its bark to the funeral pyre for more fuel. Then, offering a long prayer and songs to Kitchi Manito, Misko set the council lodge afire. Far into the night it burned, its sparks glimmering deep into the sky to meet the stars.
15.
THE TIME OF CEREMONY
That morning, Ashagi awoke wanting nothing more than to run screaming through the forest. The young boy they had found on the beach had clutched tight to her side through the night, and she had taken care to comfort him in his time of terror. But her heart longed to be with Misko, who had prayed over the funeral pyre until dawn.
But there was another thing that tormented her. Before he had left, Nika had given her a long, strange look in which she saw the wolf lurking within his eyes.
“What?” she had asked. “Aaniin?”
Nika gave her a sly smile, as if they were secret lovers. “You know,” he said.
Ashagi glared at him in contempt. “Are you mad?” she said. “Can you not see what lies before us? There is death all around!”
“I have seen death all around at the hands of Ogaa and his foolish raid,” Nika answered. “And yet I live, as do you. Come with me, leave this place before death finds us, too.”
He had gestured toward his canoe bobbing by the shore. Beyond the lodges, Ashagi heard Misko’s wail and the beginning of his death song.
“Get away from me!” she hissed, reaching for a stone on the beach.
“Come,” he gestured again, nodding his head to the far shore.
“Give it up, fool. I am with Misko now and will stay with him.”
But Nika kept on with his lingering gaze, as if memorizing her face. He snorted as the smile faded from his lips. “Misko,” he said, as if she had named an insect.
Ashagi turned back to the crying boy and when she looked up again, Nika was gone, paddling to the east.
“Go, bloody wolf,” she had muttered after him. But awakening the next morning, she knew that the wolf would return and there would be trouble.
A handful of survivors, barely alive and wasted by hunger and thirst, lay moaning in lodges throughout the village. Ashagi killed a dog and roasted its meat. She caught the drippings in a wooden tray and stewed the shredded meat with pumpkin in a birch vessel. She drew the survivors from their lodges and nursed them with the soup in the full sun until their eyes began to glow again. As was custom, she saved out part of the food as an offering on the cook fire so that the souls of the dead would also eat. Even so, more of them died that day, and the next.
Before the survivors, Misko continued the stumbling dance of mourning, singing the death song. By now, the blood covering his body had crusted brown and black across his chest and his eyes had been burned red by the ashes he had buried in his face. But he danced on and sang, begging forgiveness for immolating the dead the night before. He had transgressed on the funeral rites, which required painting the faces of the dead and preparing them for burial.
Only eleven remained of the Amik clan of more than sixty, and as Ashagi’s broth and nursing brought them back to life so, too, did their voices rise in grief. All joined in the death song as the fire of the crematorium lodge still smoldered. The bones of the dead lay tumbled in its ashes, raising renewed cries whenever the survivors gazed upon the blackened heap.
Giigoohn was no longer with them to question, but none could say that Misko had not done the right thing, and in between the wails, came broken smiles of thanks for their rescue.
That evening, as they huddled in a wigwam large enough to boast two smoke holes, the survivors shared the story of what had happened.
Soon after Ogaa and the war party had paddled west, a trading party of the Odaawaa had arrived from the land of the Wendats. These were the four town-dwelling tribes of maize growers who lived on the eastern shore beyond the isle of Mishi Mackinakong. The Wendat were renowned as farmers, and it was said that it took half a day for a man to walk across the fields surrounding their stockaded towns.
The Odaawaa lived north of the Wendat along a broad river that swept inland to the northeast as far as the land of the Cree and their saltwater bay. For generations, the Odaawaa had been famous as traders all through the lake country, welcomed everywhere they went, and traveling as far west as the lands of the Dakota.
“They came in a canoe as long as six men lying end to end, filled with cornmeal from the Wendat,” said Amazo, a stay behind who had not yet turned twenty. “We gave them gifts of copper and furs and gave thanks for their maize to help us through the winter.”
But the Odaawaa left a sickness behind when they traveled on to the west, and within days of their departure, the people of the Amik clan were awash with vomit and fever as the red bumps spread over their skin. Eya, they itched themselves raw before dying.
In a panic, they had gathered in the great lodge for protection from the disease until it was crammed the point of bursting its bark walls. Cedar boughs and sage were burned in the lodge to purify the air. Misko’s aunt, the one who knew much of healing, had feathered the smoke of medicinal herbs over the faces of the sick, singing and crying over them until she too fell dead as a stone.
“Some of the old ones of the village donned the demon masks of the Old Man, shouting to frighten the manitos which brought the disease,” Amazo said. “But the sickness passed through them like the wind running through grass.”
“And the Old Man? What of him?” Misko asked.
“He left before the sickness came,” Amazo said, waving. “He has gone far to the south.”
At the height of the plague, some had staggered outside to be picked at by crows. Others, including Misko’s mother, were too sick to crawl from their lodges to join those who had banded together against the manitos. A blizzard of death had rolled over the village under the autumn sun.
Yet, by the grace of Kitchi Manito, the disease had run its course, and the manitos who carried it had flown west along the coast. Now, Misko and Ashagi understood why the villages along the shores of the lak
e had fallen so still in their passing. The red death had struck more than thirty bands.
Terror stalked the Amik clan even after the bones of the dead had been buried with ceremony. There were hauntings for many days thereafter and often the survivors were awakened by screams in the night from those who found the dead peering down on them as they slept. As was custom, the survivors ran zig-zags through the forest, hoping to lead the dead spirits away from their lodges. Each evening, the Amiks prayed for the dead to leave them in peace, but this was in vain, for the night terrors went on and on, with visions of the dead walking through the ruined village or rising from the earth.
“We should leave this place,” Ashagi said as they huddled by a fire on the shore one night. “It has become the home of ghosts.”
“Time will take them from us,” Misko replied. “The Old Man once told me that a ghost cannot walk the earth for long.”
“But they walk too close among us,” Ashagi said. “Eya, I have seen one myself, peering from behind a lodge.”
Misko looked across the water to the mainland. “Don’t you think that ghosts are walking there, too?” he pointed. “This is our home and we will hold it in our arms.”
But the dead kept coming, and within half a moon a decision was made to strike the wigwams and move to a small bay beyond the southernmost tip of the island, leaving the spirits to their bloody ground.
Soon thereafter, when the survivors of the Amik clan had grown wan with grieving, they were cheered by the return of six brothers and sisters who had been sent to the hickory and walnut groves on the mainland. Their duty had been to guard the nut trees against the turkeys, bears, and other animals who competed with the Anishinaabek for food.
“When no one from the island came to join in the harvest, we feared you had been attacked,” said one of the party. “We had bad dreams and chose to return, though three stayed behind to guard the groves. Naabese is among them.”
So now there were nineteen of them, Misko thought, less than a third the strength of the original band. And Naabese, Bird Man, was surely the eldest left alive. The next day, four canoes arrived from the mainland, bearing eleven wild-eyed survivors from two villages. Thirty in all now, but with almost all of the elder members of the Anishinaabek dead.
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