At last the Old Man raised his hands and eventually everyone quieted. “Brothers, there is no defense against two great enemies which come at us on either hand. We cannot turn toward one and leave our backs exposed to the other. But I have seen a path for us that pits our enemies against each other and keeps us from harm.” He paused for a moment and looked from man to man, holding each in his gaze. “It is a way that the spirits themselves have shown us.”
The Old Man explained that he had seen waves of black fire converging from the east and west when he had consulted the spirits in the sweat lodge. The blackness had extinguished a faint fire of the people when it met in the middle of the lodge, yet he had divined their salvation.
“Sitting with my back to the north, I saw the sun rising in the south in my mind’s eye,” he said. “That is the way for us. We cannot go east to meet the disease nor west to risk the enemy, nor north across Kitchi Gami. The south offers the only way to safety.”
The Old Man said that the land beyond the straits of Mishi Mackinakong offered good hunting with only small, scattered bands of the Anishinaabek who would welcome their cousins from the north.
“It is also possible that if we leave, the sickness coming our way will fall upon the enemy instead, removing them from our worries,” he added.
South? The unknown south? The land of the Potawatomies? There was much grumbling in the village when the men shared the Old Man’s plan with their women. The Anishinaabek had occupied their village at Kitchi Minissing for generations and it was hard enough moving to winter quarters each year without having to repack all into their canoes and move to an unknown land.
“It will also mean missing the festival at Boweting,” the women complained. It was the brightest star among the seasons and their only hope of visiting kin who lived at a distance. And yet the Old Man had advised them to leave at once and forsake the joy of the summer gathering.
The young men also grumbled that fleeing south would send a message to the Dakotas that the warriors of the Ojibwe had grown soft. It would tell the enemy that they had turned into women. Eya, even less than that, into young girls who gathered their skirts and fled.
Determined to uphold his claim as war chief, Nika continued to push for an ambush. “We can’t abandon our homes and hunting grounds without loosing an arrow,” he protested. “The Dakota will pursue us to the edge of the sea itself if we show ourselves to be cowards.” All agreed Nika’s claim had merit, even the Old Man.
Ultimately, it was decided that Nika would head west with twenty warriors to harass the enemy and scout their numbers while Misko would lead the Amik clan south beyond the Mackinakong straits for the coming year. The time of departure was set for as soon as the women of the band could strip the lodges and pack the canoes. Within days, Nika and twenty warriors smoked the war pipe of bondage and gathered their weapons. They left with little ceremony as their women cried and waved from the shore.
“Where would you lead us?” Misko asked the Old Man on the eve of their departure.
“In truth, I do not know, for there are many fine places beyond the isle of Mishi Mackinakong. It will depend on what sort of welcome we receive from our brothers to the south. I had a dream that might tell us, but its meaning remains hidden from me,” he added, thinking of the crow man who had visited him in the sweat lodge, Aandeg-inini. Who could say what the crow meant to tell him?
“I, too, had a dream whose meaning is unclear to me,” Misko offered. He told the Old Man of the golden bear he had seen, and of his father sitting naked on a beach.
Slowly, the Old Man smiled in recognition. “I know this place!” he said. “Misko, you have found our home in your dream.”
So it was that the people of the Amik clan gathered their things and paddled east in a fleet of twenty-two canoes along the coast and down the river beyond Kitchi Gami to Boweting. At the rapids they tied their canoes to cords of braided rawhide and led them through the worst of the churning water from the safety of a path along the shore.
The village at Boweting was deserted. A lone old man, too crumpled by age to travel, said that the shamans of the Mide-wi-win had ordered an exodus of the Anishinaabek north to the Agawa country, hoping to elude the plague decimating the Wendats.
It was on the Agawa cliffs and canyons that the Mide-wi-win priests had labored for generations, painting visions of animals, myths, heroes, and dreams in red ochre on the rocks. The surrounding country served as a natural fortress, providing many hiding places, even from the spirits.
There followed a small discussion about joining their brothers and sisters beyond the Agawa, but the Old Man held to Misko’s dream. “It is a longer journey, but it will be warmer there this winter,” he said.
Thus, on a clear day, when the waves clashing between the big lakes Mishi Gami and Timi Gami had subsided, the flotilla of canoes crossed the strait beyond Mishi Mackinakong and made their way down the western shore of the southern land. They spent the night on the Waagosh point, which the Old Man said was named for the foxes because the peninsula crept into the lake just so.
Paddling on they traversed a bay, and then days later, across a stretch of two more bays divided by a peninsula. On and on they swept with the Amiks crying at times for their lost home and then singing for the joy of finding a new one. The Old Man kept a drumbeat in the lead canoe, singing loudly the whole way, while boys were kept busy drumming in each of the twenty-one canoes behind him. Misko brought up the rear with a pennant of eagle feathers twisting in the wind over Ashagi’s head at the prow.
At last they swept around a long peninsula and continued south to a land that opened on broad beaches as far as could be seen. Mountains of sand rose up as they paddled on, ribboned by sparkling streams beneath their slopes. Then, on the morning of their thirteenth day of paddling, the Old Man called for a halt to the flotilla as they bobbed on the waves just off the beach of a crescent bay.
The children of the band tumbled over the sides of the canoes before they reached the shore, laughing and splashing naked in the water. Above the beach, Ashagi saw a fringe of pines, and a bevy of six whitetails gazing upon them. The deer stood as still as the shadows of trees themselves before bounding as one into the forest, the flags of their tails waving behind them.
Laughing, she slipped from her doeskin skirt and undergarment of nettle stalk yarn and joined the children splashing in the water. The sun baked the sand in a shimmering heat and the water rippled over her body, soft, clear and warm. Soon, the entire band had shed their leathers to bathe naked as one, laughing and singing in celebration, for the Old Man had told them they were home.
And so it seemed to Ashagi. She felt the sun lying warm on her back and the sand running as rivers through her toes. The beach spoke to her as if a welcoming manito. “We are in paradise!” she laughed.
“There!” the Old Man cried as Misko waded from the water to join him onshore. “There is your blond bear!”
And Misko saw that it was true; a great golden bear took shape in a towering dune, overlooking the lake like a sentinel. The bear of his dreams lay on the shore as a mountain of sand, taller than ten pines stacked end to end.
“It is the Sleeping Bear, Nibaa-makwa, where your own father landed when he was still a boy,” the Old Man said. “Your father led you here in your dream.”
Ashagi skipped from the water and padded up to the shore to join them, and though it was shocking for a woman and her man to show any sign of affection in the company of others, even more so dripping and naked beneath the eyes of the sun, her heart was so overflowing with joy that she could not help clasping him in her arms and howling her delight.
“You have good dreams, Husband! You have good dreams!”
That night, after the Amiks had made their camp at a stream south of the mountainous dune, the Old Man told them the legend of nibaa-makwa, the sleeping bear. The entire band gathered on the beach as the Old Man paced around a bonfire of driftwood. A boy was set to softly drumming as Animi-ma’
lingan began his stories.
“It was here that I met your war chief Ogaa nearly thirty summers ago,” he began. “Oh, he was just a frightened boy back then, yet he had fought many warriors of the Odugamies as well as many monsters crossing this broad lake.” He told of how Ogaa had guided the survivors of Standing Wolf’s raid across Mishi Gami and had been honored for his courage by the grandfather of all things.
“Do you see that star?” the Old Man tilted his head back and pointed to the heavens. “It is there, just below the foot of the Bear Head. That is your chief, Ogaa. The Great Spirit placed him in the sky when he died to watch over us, and to honor his deed of crossing the lake.”
Ashagi’s eyes widened as she glanced at Misko. The Old Man had never mentioned this honor before. But if Misko was surprised, he gave no sign.
“It was here, too, that Kitchi Manito made the great bear, nibaa-makwa,” the Old Man went on, now relishing his tale. “Many lifetimes ago, a mother bear and her two cubs lived on the far shore of Mishi Gami in the Oisconsin land where the sun makes its bed each evening,” he said.
“Then a great forest fire swept over the land, driving all of the animals and the people who lived there into the lake. Thousands drowned or were burned alive, more souls than needles on a tall pine. Yet the mother bear and her cubs would not succumb to the fire. They set out swimming east, even with the water behind them boiling by the shore.” Here, the Old Man spread his arms wide above his head, making long shadows on the beach. He made the motions of paddling with his arms as he did a slow dance in a circle beneath the stars, singing.
“Swimming, striving,
As the water pulls us down.
Swimming, crying,
As the spirits pull us down.
Swimming, diving.
Kitchi Manito save us!
Breathing, crying,
Kitchi Manito save us!”
“Far off in the sky vault, Kitchi Manito heard the voice of omaamaayan bear and gazed down with interest, seeing her valiant trek across the lake with her cubs trailing behind her. For seven days and nights they swam, for a bear cannot swim nearly as fast as a man can paddle a canoe and there were high waves and monsters of the deep to overcome. Oh, and brothers, the bears began to starve too, for though they caught a fish or two, it was not enough to sustain them while swimming for seven days and nights.”
Here, as was always his habit, the Old Man tapped at his pipe, and lifting an ember from the fire, relit his tobacco, growing lost in thought, as if remembering something he had seen himself.
“At last, the great mother arrived on this shore and collapsed, breathing thanks to Kitchi Manito for the gift of her life,” he continued. “But her joy did not last, for both of her cubs wailed in terror just off the shore and sank below the waves. They were too exhausted to make it to the shore.”
“What happened to the cubs, Father?” a wee one asked. “Did they drown?”
“Oh yes,” the Old Man said, bending down to ruffle the young one’s hair, “but they also lived. For all this time, Kitchi Manito had been watching the mother and her cubs and his heart was moved by them. Although the sow bear died of grief on the shore, the Creator of all things took her body and transformed it into the great dune which shelters us here this evening. And he also raised up her cubs from the bottom of the lake and transformed them into the two islands we see offshore.
“And sometimes,” he concluded, “if you listen to the wind at night, you can still hear their voices rising over the water as they sing to their mother: ‘Swimming, swimming, Omaamaayan save us! Omaamaayan save us!’”
That summer, the Amik clan set about establishing a new village on the creek south of the Sleeping Bear. A great tree stood on a hill above the creek, calling to them that this was their new home.
The land was fruitful with game and forage, yet curiously empty of men.
The Amiks had embraced the new land, yet with acceptance came a sadness for the many old and familiar things which had been left behind, including the ancient trees of Kitchi Minissing, which had grown sacred through the generations. Trees with friendly spirits, beneath which lovers had exchanged vows and where children had played and stories had been told. And they missed the living boulders, cliffs and bays, heavy with the collective memory of the band, the old, familiar places of solace where burials and births had occurred, places which had grown roots into the soul of the Anishinaabek. Their hearts ached for what was lost, but with much to do in establishing the new village there was little time for singing sad songs over what had been lost.
As head man, Misko scarcely needed to offer direction. Within a day the men and boys of the band had thrown a weir across the creek and had begun catching fish that migrated to and from Mishi Gami.
But the weir was bedeviled by a family of otters who tunneled through the water, carrying the full catch away for two days in a row. Misko devised a net of basswood cord weighted at its edges with stones and hid behind a blind he had constructed of pine branches.
While hiding in the blind, a bolt whizzed past his ear, too fast for the eye to see and he ducked, thinking that someone had shot an arrow at him. Turning, he saw a small bird, no bigger than his thumb, with its wings beating faster than he could see as it hovered at the neck of a flowering thistle.
It was nenookaasi, the hummingbird, which he had seen long ago in the twilight of the spirit land when his father had taken him on his dream quest. Only now, after all these years had it revealed itself to him in this new land. Misko waited for nenookaasi to speak to him. Yet after a moment of supping at the nectar of the flower, the tiny bird shot sideways, buzzing away in a whipcrack.
That afternoon, he lay four otters at Ashagi’s feet, each as long as his arm. “A cloak for you to wear this coming winter,” he said.
“They’re beautiful, and so soft,” she said, her eyes lighting up. It had been a long time since Misko had brought her a present, and even though the dressing and curing of the hides would take a good deal of time, already she delighted at the wrap she would sew, and she secretly vowed to make Misko a quiver for his arrows from one of the hides. Not that she needed any more work, for establishing a new village was a toil fit for giants, yet mostly laid on the backs of women.
Up the hill beyond the pines, Ashagi and the women of the Amiks had found a garden patch in a clearing of oaks and maples. The trees had been girdled long ago, then burned to kill the canopies high above to let the sun shine down on the crops below. The black, limbless trees told a tale of others who had gardened here before them, yet it was obvious from the saplings growing all through the clearing that the plot had not been tended in years. The women began uprooting the saplings and turning the soil with their digging sticks; there was still time to plant pumpkin, squash, beans and maize.
After tearing the sod from the ground, Ashagi worked the soil with the shoulder blade of an elk fastened to the end of a pole. She built up small hills as she had been taught by Minose, planting each with stinking fish guts, then with maize, beans, pumpkin, and squash. The bean plants would climb the cornstalks and the pumpkin and squash would wander between the hillocks.
As soon as the first shoots of the garden began climbing through the soil, a squad of boys was sent from the village to sleep with them at night in order to scare off any deer or raccoons that might come nibbling. That fall, if the crops came forth, Ashagi and the other women would leave small sacrifices of tobacco in the garden to thank the plants for giving themselves to the clan.
As if there wasn’t enough work to be done, the sisters also began building lodges that could shelter as many as four families. They were delighted to find a flat place of elevated ground with a grove of tamaracks rising like spears above the lakeshore. These were bent and tied, with more tamaracks cut and sharpened to be buried into the ground and bent as well. Soon, the upside-down baskets of the lodges took shape with the frames covered with sheets of the precious bark that had been packed all the way from Kitchi Minissing. Deer
hides were used as coverings for the entrance and the smoke holes in each lodge and reeds were collected from a nearby swamp to be woven into floor mats.
Even when the new lodges were built and occupied, there was no rest. The Amiks set to work clearing a broad space around the lodges, almost as far as a man could throw a stone in order to keep mosquitoes at bay and to deny cover for enemies intent on creeping up on them.
Ah, but the Great Spirit never intended for the Anishinaabek to work themselves blind, so on many afternoons when the sun was high in the sky, they stripped and bathed in the waters of Mishi Gami, reveling in the warmth of the golden beach. And on many evenings as the setting sun pulsed cherry red on the horizon, the band gathered around a fire set near the shore to drum, sing, and dance as the Evening Star glimmered in the west. Then came talk of the day’s hunt and foraging, with the men and women gathered separately as was their custom, sharing the gossip of family and friends.
By late summer the Amiks were heartened to find a ricing lake within half a day’s walk from the encampment. The shallow lake was whiskered with thousands of reeds, which bore the long brown seedlings the Anishinaabek relied on to make it through the winter. By the ricing moon, Manoominike Giizis, the men would begin portaging canoes overland so that the women could begin plucking at the reeds.
With all the chores to be done, Ashagi collapsed on her bedding each night, her arms aching from pulling weeds and digging at the soil. Oh, I am getting old, and yet there is no babe, she thought sorrowfully. The long days of paddling to their new home and the demands of preparing the garden had made her as strong as any man, yet she could feel her body being worn down by time and toil. She wondered how much longer Misko would cherish her without a child to call his own. Niimi had been a good son and was now ten summers and would soon be a man. Yet, though Misko had raised Niimi as if he were his own blood, he pined more and more for Ashagi to bear him a son.
Windigo Moon Page 26
