Peace is a good thing, Misko reflected. Although he had killed prey beyond count all the days of his adult life, he had never felt the need to become a man-killer. He had shunned his father’s path and had no regrets. The good kill of a hunter feeding his clan had been enough for him. Yet Misko wondered at times if his son, Biidaaban, was growing up unprepared for the harsh ways of the world. Like his older brother Niimi, Biidaaban had grown up with the bow, practicing ceaselessly all through his childhood until his arrows struck their mark more often than not. He had a good eye and often joined his father in the hunt. The ceremony of his first kill had come when he was eight years old; he had taken a raccoon from a tree with his first arrow.
But it is one thing to kill a raccoon and another to take down an enemy skulking near one’s village. Misko wondered if his son would be prepared for raiders if and when they came. Or would he lie shivering in fear when the stink of the enemy was close enough to breathe in? It was no secret that even hard men among the warriors sometimes found themselves terrified for reasons none could explain. Yet that was the time when a man must force his quaking legs to rise up, and command his arms to strike out with his club, even when his arms felt as if they had turned to leaves tossed in the wind.
“It is strange to live in a peaceful land,” Misko said to Ashagi one day over their meal. “If Biidaaban has never gone raiding, how will he learn to defend his clan?”
Ashagi shrugged. “I would not risk our son on a raid, but I can’t deny that peace has two faces,” she said. “My own people lived in peace and grew careless.”
“Biidaaban will make his own decision when the time comes,” Misko decided. “Who can stop a young man from the raiding trail?”
“Do not rush him, he is only fourteen,” Ashagi reminded.
Yet to their dismay, they soon discovered that Nika had already courted their son with plans for a raid on a far-off coast. A fracas had kicked up between two hunting parties of the Wendat and the Ojibwe living along the straits at Mishi Mackinakong where Nika had relatives. Under the guise of friendship, the Wendat had invited a small party of Ojibwe hunters to join them for a meal, yet had dragged off one of their brothers the next morning, waving their clubs and showing their buttocks in derision as the outnumbered Ojibwe cried out in vain for his release.
Nika planned to join a raid of vengeance and as the self-appointed war chief of the bands along the coast of Mishi Gami, he had gone off with his war pipe in an effort to raise a party of warriors. For the most part Nika’s efforts had gone unheeded, for the head men of the bands along the coast pointed out that the Wendat were a great nation numbering in the tens of thousands who were as addicted to war as the Haudenosaunee. What, they asked, would be the wisdom in kicking up such a bee hive?
It was also true that Nika had grown strange since the loss of his nose, his fingers and toes. He was given to odd laughter at inappropriate times, yet this was the least of it. He had taken to groping the virgins of the village and to eating more than his share when the wooden platters were presented. Nika clutched the food to his chest with his strange laugh and drooled with a silver look in his eyes as if his thoughts had gone off far away with little intention of returning.
“Hungry, always hungry,” he muttered. Eya, and Nika’s suffering wives were even hungrier, for he had never been much of a hunter to begin with, and now with half his fingers gone he was even poorer in pursuit of the game.
Yet a man killer must be respected, and by dint of his past deeds as a raider, the head men of each village were obliged to hear him out. Nor could they stop him from seducing their young men with his violent fantasies.
“Don’t let yourselves grow soft, brothers,” he would growl, almost whispering the words. “Don’t go to your graves with no mark upon your club.”
Misko observed his rival with growing anxiety, for as head man of the Amiks he knew there would come a time when he would have to step in. He knew Nika would welcome such a confrontation even more than his plans to war against the Wendat. So, as usual, he sought council from his wife.
“Tell the chieftains there is a greater need for hunters in these hard times than for trophies of the enemy and bragging around the evening fire,” Ashagi said. “Tell them that we women have no time to care for wounded men or to grieve for those lost in Nika’s foolish raid.”
Yet there are always young men eager to make their mark on an enemy’s skull, especially those of twenty summers or less and Biidaaban was one who was seduced by Nika’s talk of glory on the war path.
It was only through talk of bloodshed that Nika became himself again, growing sharp and raising himself up in contrast to the grasping dog he had become at the meat platter. When he talked of raiding, Nika’s eyes regained their old fire and he talked like a man who was once again sure of himself. “War is the tit upon which men suckle, bringing life to our cheeks,” he said, among many other foolish things. He spent his afternoons sitting under a spreading oak with the boys and young men of the village, talking of his raids and the pleasure they had brought him. To the dismay of Ashagi and Misko, Nika had insinuated to Biidaaban that he would have a place as a scout in the coming raid. This, even though Biidaaban was not yet a man, much less a veteran raider.
“This, you will not do,” Misko had ordered his son. “Nika is no friend and we do not trust him. He will crush your skull when you are not looking just to spite us and come home with a tale that the enemy killed you. But we will know, and he will know that we know.”
“I hear you father, and will listen,” said Biidaaban, looking downcast. “But in another summer, it will not be so.”
Yet the talk of the raid made Misko realize that it was time for Biidaaban to become a man. He was fourteen and as tall as his father.
Thus, days after Nika and a party of men had traveled north to their fate, Misko took his son to the greatest place of power along the coast.
It was atop the Sleeping Bear, up where eagles sortied with hawks, with a view that seemed to stretch to the blue end of the earth itself. Together they sat and smoked atop the great dune, looking out over the twinkling blue of Mishi Gami and the twin cubs of the Manito islands.
“Here you will spend five days just as I did and your grandfather and all your grandfathers before them,” Misko said.
“Will I have a fire, Father?” Biidaaban asked, his face as serious as any young man’s face ever was.
“You will have no fire, nor any food, and only this water,” Misko said. Ashagi had sent along a bucket of birch bark sealed with pitch and filled with water for her son.
“The Old Ones denied themselves even water,” he added, remembering the words of his own father. “They scoured themselves with thorns and lay naked in thirst and pain until the visions came. But today men are not so strong—nor so foolish.”
Misko and Biidaaban built a lean-to of pine boughs as protection from the cool wind coming off lake Mishi Gami and then a circle had been drawn in the sand.
“If you sing, you will drive your fears away, but you must not leave this circle,” Misko said, just as his own father had instructed.
“The manitos are strong here,” he said, remembering the words Ogaa had spoken at his own dream quest so long ago. “But you will be fine because you are strong and brave and you are my son.”
Like his fathers’ fathers’ before him, Biidaaban became a man during his lonely vigil, and Misko and Ashagi and the whole clan celebrated their good fortune. Yet half a moon later, word came that Nika’s raid against the Wendat had proved a disaster. The Ojibwe of Mishi Mackinakong had decided against attacking the Wendat, despite the loss of their brother, yet Nika had pushed on with his small band of warriors against all advice. Five had been killed in a surprise attack among the rocky cliffs barring the way to the Wendat’s country, and two of their brothers had been dragged off to the Wendat’s gruesome tortures. Now, all of Mishi Mackinakong was quaking at the thought of an attack.
It was said that Nika had cackled
like a turkey hen throughout the battle and had done nothing to help his brothers except for waving his war club over his head and yelling in a tongue none could understand. The man had gone insane. Eya, but that was not the end of it, for in his disgrace, Nika had taken his two wives to an abandoned wigwam far up the shore, vowing to spend the winter alone. Nika’s wives cried acid tears when they were forced to leave the village and the food that the Anishinaabek shared.
That spring in the cycle of the Starving Moon, two hunters passing through the forlorn camp and found human bones riven with teeth marks in Nika’s cook fire. Some of the bones had been broken clean through in order to suck the sweet marrow from their chambers. Nika could not be found, but his second wife sat rocking in her lodge in a trance, almost frozen and close to death. She had dwindled as thin as a skeleton, and at first the hunters had mistaken her for a corpse.
The hunters gathered her—she weighed no more than a spring turkey—and carried her two days down the coast to Misko’s village. They fed her slices of deer liver, coaxing her back to life.
“Ah, I am lost!” she cried, sobbing over her tale when she was nourished with broth in Ashagi’s lodge. “Ah, he cut my sister to pieces and made me cook her, one arm, one leg at a time. Ah, I can still see her face, it will never leave me! And I did not want to but he made me eat, telling me that I must be fattened. Telling me I would be next!”
All knew what this meant. Nika had gone windigo, and his second wife was now windigo, too, by her own admission. The penalty for cannibalism was death or banishment, which no member of the Anishinaabek could survive for long. Without the aid of the clan, those who were banished soon found themselves eating worms, and shortly after were food for worms themselves with no ceremony to send them on to the spirit land. They would spend a restless eternity with their bones scattered in the forest.
Once again that night in Ashagi’s lodge, where the exhausted woman lay in a half-doze of terror and remorse, the Old Man told the story no one ever tired of. He spoke of how the windigo were a race of giants who lived on an island far to the north in the land of the rough and rude Cree, the Innu, and the Naskapi—and that they were monsters which ate men at their pleasure.
“The windigos of the far north are creatures of immense power who grow larger with each human being they eat,” the Old Man said, drawing himself up to as much stature as he could muster in his increasingly frail condition. “Indeed, they grow as large as the brother or sister that they consume. Yet they are always hungry, never satisfied.”
“How can one tell such a demon?” Biidaaban asked.
The Old Man took a pull on his pipe and reflected. “Oh, you will have no trouble in that, brother,” he said. “The windigo is as gaunt as a skeleton yet as tall as a moose with gray skin stretched thin over its bones and eyes as black as the muck of a swamp sunken deep within its skull. It is a stinking thing, stinking of death to turn your stomach, as if dug fresh from a grave. And its lips are ragged and torn, tarred black with the blood of its victims. If you see one, you must run for your life.”
“Yes, I think so, father.” Biidaaban looked around, stifling a nervous laugh.
“And what of Nika?” Misko asked.
“To taste human flesh is to become windigo,” the Old Man said simply.
Only two winters before, the Amik clan had held a windigo dance, the wi-indigookaanzhimowin, during a time of famine to remind themselves that it was taboo to eat their own kind. Starving though they were during a season of little game, the Amiks had donned masks and had danced backward in a circle to a drumbeat. At that time the Old Man had reminded them that there were only two paths in the face of a famine when the end was near, “you must choose to kill yourselves with dignity or resign yourselves to starvation. There is no other way.”
Even so, sometimes it came to happen that a starving member of the Anishinaabek ate his own kind, even babes and children, in order to survive. And it was said that men who had gone windigo had frozen their souls.
“A windigo has a heart of ice,” the Old Man said. “His heart is solid ice; I have seen it myself when a child killer was cut open. There was a ball of bloody ice in his chest where his heart belonged.”
“Can such a thing be saved?” Misko asked, though his heart was already set on killing Nika.
“There is only one cure and that is to drink boiling water or fat,” the Old Man said. “It can be done, but few survive.”
“What of Nika’s wife?” Misko asked. As head man, he would have to order her banishment, and all knew she would not survive more than a day in the forest in her weakness.
“Hmm, yes,” the Old Man considered. “Has she always been a good woman?”
There came a murmur and nods. Many had pitied the fate of Nika’s wives, long before their brother had gone mad.
“I remember her as my sister-cousin and friend,” Ashagi volunteered. “I remember the days we sewed together. She has a sweetness.”
“And do you think her heart has turned to ice?”
To this there came no answer.
“It is a thing impossible for us to know,” Misko said at last.
“Then, could you excuse her if I were to cure her?”
Those in the lodge exchanged looks in the half darkness of the dwindling fire, yet before they could answer the Old Man decided for them. “It is good that you feel this way,” he said, nodding as he pulled on his pipe. “I will melt her frozen heart and you will accept her back as your sister with no banishment, no punishment. You will accept her as Nika’s victim and show your generosity. And she will have a new name, Wabun Ahnung, Morning Star, for she will rise new among us.”
There was a rustle of agreement as no one dared speak otherwise.
“Now, boil me a pot of water and make it bubble hot enough to scald even the heart of a thunderbird,” he commanded in a low, rumbling voice. “And leave us here alone, for it will be a long night.”
Then, with his strange grey eyes slunk low and gazing up at them from a crouch he growled, “Brothers, sisters, I make no promise that she will survive.”
That night, the people of the village heard horrible screams coming from Ashagi’s lodge, and the chanting song and wails of the Old Man’s medicine as he melted the ice which gripped the heart of Nika’s wife. Eya, the Amiks shuddered at the thought of the poor woman held down and forced to drain boiling water down her throat! She screamed on and on as the Old Man’s voice rang high over her agony.
Yet in the morning, Wabun Ahnung, stepped shyly from Ashagi’s lodge with a wan smile on her face, nodding to her brothers and sisters in the dawn of her new life. And the Old Man’s medicine had proved so powerful that there was not a single mark of the night’s scalding on her lips. Their sister had been reborn.
No one could see the bruised nipples on the thin breasts beneath Morning Star’s tunic, which the Old Man had twisted to make her scream like a speared rabbit through half the night.
27
THE END OF THE WORLD
Five summers had swept by since the birth of Niibin, with the years passing like the long, lazy rollers on Mishi Gami when the water was running high. The girl named Summer splashed in the waves and played in the sand at the waterline as Ashagi sat on the beach, weaving a basket.
How quickly she grows, Ashagi thought, thinking of her own days as a child. When she was Niibin’s age she had played beneath the thunder of the Gakaabikaa falls, far up beyond the north shore of Kitchi Gami. Many times she had gazed into the dark waters of that river, seeking the brave face of the girl who had sacrificed herself to save her clan by leading a war party of the Dakota over the falls.
Ashagi sat and wondered what her life would have been like if she had not been taken by the enemy. Would she have a daughter now and two sons? Niibin, Niimi, Biidaaban, she savored their precious names as her mind wandered on. Would her father have married her off to an older man in some faraway clan? Would she be the wife of a head man? Like her namesake, Blue Heron, of the los
t Heron clan, she had flown far south to a new life.
Now she found herself at the end of the world itself, as far south as any of the Ojibwe roamed. Here at last, she had found happiness. Even now, thirty-one summers after her abduction, Ashagi still dreamed of raiders at night. The nightmares had lessened through the years and she barely thought of them when she awoke, yet she could never forget them entirely. She still fingered the copper blade the Old Man had given her as medicine to drive her nightmares away.
But she did not need dreams to tell her that death was the faithful friend of the Ojibwe, eager to visit in the guise of raiders, disease or hunger when no one else cared to call. Every brother and sister of the Anishinaabek knew as much.
Yet new life beckoned just as often, and soon, Ashagi would take a new name, that of Nookomis. The wife of her adopted son Niimi, the Dancing Boy, was on the brink of giving birth, elevating Ashagi to the status of a grandmother.
“Becoming a grandmother is the only good thing about getting old,” she had confided in the Old Man when her son had told her the news.
“I have never been a grandmother, so I do not know if this is true,” he chuckled in return.
“Yes, but you have been everyone’s grandfather since you were twenty summers old,” she teased.
“It has felt that way, too,” he laughed.
“All my life I have dreamed of becoming a grandmother, like my own dear one, Nookomis. I miss her still.” Ashagi’s eyes glistened, and the Old Man gazed at her tenderly.
“Yours is a strange wish, daughter, for when you take the name Nookomis, you will also receive the gift of old bones, aching joints and forgetfulness.”
“Ah, some things I hope to forget and my fingers already ache.” She knew it was not proper to tell the Old Man all that she felt. She was grateful for her beauty and her place as a head man’s wife, but her new role as a grandmother would bring respect for her wisdom and leadership of the family.
But now the Old Man guessed her thoughts. “Now I understand you, daughter,” he said, his dim eyes growing bright. “All women crave respect, and now it is you who have taught me a lesson. I will be proud to call you Nookomis.”
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