Windigo Moon

by Robert Downes

  “Oh, but it will be so much easier to dress the game now and make our meals,” Ashagi went on as he nodded. And truly, Misko grasped in a instant that the steel knife of the traders would make his life easier too, for few things are more difficult than piercing the hide and hair of a deer, an elk or a moose with a flint blade, wrestling in a snowbank far from home. Indeed, the steel and the iron would make both of their lives easier.

  That night, the Old Man shared what he knew of the traders. Twelve years before, the Zhaagnaash had established a trading village not far from where the great river of the east met the salt water. Early on, the Zhaagnaash had accompanied a party of Algonquins when they encountered two hundred warriors of the Haudenosaunee. Yet the Zhaagnaash had easily overpowered the invincible Haudenosaunee with a magic of thunder and fire that no member of the Anishinaabek could begin to grasp, not even the Old Man.

  “There were only three of the Zhaagnaash dressed in strange clothes with sixty Algonquin warriors against two hundred of the Haudenosaunee,” the Old Man said. “Yet when the battle began, the Zhaagnaash killed three of the enemy’s war chiefs straight away with blasts of thunder and lightning, and the rest ran off in terror. The Zhaagnaash carry magical staffs which belch a fire that kills at a distance.

  “Now,” he concluded, “the Zhaagnaash and the Haudenosaunee have become mortal enemies, but this is all to the good, for it will keep our enemies looking to the east instead of at us.”

  The news of the Zhaagnaash settlement had spread west with the speed of the wind, as had word of the goods they brought to trade. Alas, the Zhaagnaash often seemed to bring sickness as well and had been shunned by some as demons.

  “Where do they come from?” Misko asked as the band gathered around a fire at the heart of the village.

  “This we do not yet know,” the Old Man replied. “But what we do know is that they have no women.”

  “No women? How can they live without women?”

  “This is a mystery,” the Old Man said. “But they want our women more than is seemly. Often, they will trade away their treasures just to mount a women, and there have already been halflings born of these unions. And here is the strange thing, brothers and sisters,” he added in a low voice. “The Zhaagnaash do not appear to live in clans, nor have any knowledge of them. Thus, they cannot know if they are committing incest when they mount a woman. For all they care, she could be their sister.”

  A murmur of astonishment ran through the women gathered by the fire. The Zhaagnaash would gift away their treasures for a woman’s favor? It seemed beyond belief.

  “I would not do it,” Ashagi whispered to Minose.

  “Not even for an iron pot?” Minose answered. “Sister, I think you would bend over in the space of a single breath.”

  “No, for who knows if these Zhaagnaash are demons disguised as men,” Ashagi answered. “And even so, Misko would not approve. He is a jealous man and would not share me.”

  Minose nodded. But it had been many years since her own husband had died, and though she had had a few sometime companions, there was no one who rose high in her thoughts. “Better to bend over for the pleasure of a Zhaagnaash than to have to scrape the flesh from inside a beaver hide,” she said wryly. “It would not take but a moment if these shadow men are as horny as they say.”

  Ah, but the Old Man said that the village of the Zhaagnaash was farther than almost any member of the Ojibwe had ever been, including himself, and the tribes between them were intent on keeping the trade to themselves. He said the traders had arrived at their shore after more than two moons of constant paddling and portages and that it would take them even longer to get home up the long river past the Nipissings and the country of the Odaawaas. The traders had come from a mix of tribes, including the Wendat, the Odaawaa and several that were unknown to them. The tall trader who had bartered with Ashagi was from the Etchemin, a tribe which dwelled close by the great salt water.

  “These are interesting times,” Misko said when the Old Man’s story was done. “But you spoke to the sickness that the Zhaagnaash bring. Have they brought more?”

  To this the Old Man shrugged. “Again, who can say? No man can cast a disease at a distance, and by all accounts, the Zhaagnaash truly are men, or at least half men.”

  The Old Man paused and a troubled look settled over his face as he searched his thoughts. “Perhaps they are simply men who have no color, yet bleed as red as any other. Only the passing of time will tell us the truth.”

  Misko was barely home when a messenger arrived from the villages to the north, summoning him to a council. Even though Nika had been banished, he had somehow survived by skulking near the villages, stealing food and killing dogs. A council had been called to determine what to do with him.

  “What to do? Kill him!” Misko roared. “Why is there need for a council?”

  At this the messenger shrugged. “Perhaps there is another matter,” he said.

  Reluctantly, Misko gathered his sleeping robe and his father’s club for the waiting canoe. Too often, he had been away from Ashagi and his family over the past season and he was loathe to leave again.

  Eya, he had become weak as a woman for his own wife, he smiled. They held hands together in the dark of her lodge and looked into each others’ eyes. Such displays of affection were never offered in the eyes of others, but who knew what a man and woman did in the privacy of their own lodge?

  “Take care of our children,” he said. And then, on an impulse, he gazed in her eyes and said the words he had never spoken in all their years together.

  “Gi zah gin.”

  Ashagi smiled, for she had always known he loved her since the first day they lay together, holding each other beneath the sun.

  “Gi zah gin, Misko,” she replied softly.

  Then, wearing his new shirt, he was off. For a long time Ashagi watched the fleeting canoe as it labored north in the tossing waves, no more than a dot beneath the dune of the Sleeping Bear.

  That night, she vomited the meal she had cooked in her new iron pot. And then vomited again and again. Her chosen friend Minose hovered over her as she lay on her doeskin, wiping her feverish face with a poultice of fragrant herbs and washing Ashagi’s cheeks with her own tears.

  Yet no matter how much she prayed and sang in her misery, the torment in Ashagi’s stomach would not let up. Her guts twisted in agony. Her throat burned raw from the vomit of which there was no end. Toward dawn, with her chin wet with blood and the acid slime of her stomach, Ashagi saw a shadow pass by the doorway as something peered in, looming dark against the morning mist. As the thing crept closer, Ashagi knew she would never be a grandmother. Death whispered in her ear that morning, and when Misko returned five days later, the love of his life was lying cold in her grave.

  28

  TO THE WEST

  When the time came for the band to depart for the winter hunting grounds, Misko would not leave Ashagi’s grave. The narrow mound lay beside that of Minose, for her chosen friend had died soon after nursing Ashagi. Grandmother Earth held them both now. Side by side they lay overlooking the waves of Mishi Gami with the soles of their feet pointing west.

  In a hush, the band packed their things and wished Misko peace, leaving an old woman behind to cook for him and tend his fire. She would watch over five-year-old Niibin, who had elected to stay, as had Biidaaban, and the Old Man.

  Misko had instructed Niimi, the Dancing Boy, to go with the band along with his wife and their newborn son. Niimi had reached the age of twenty-nine, well enough along in years to serve as head man.

  “Son, go and speak in my place,” Misko instructed him. “The people need a head man and you are the best we have. They will listen to you as they have listened to me.”

  “Father, they have not always listened so well,” Niimi cautioned.

  Despite himself, Misko managed a weak grin. “Yes, but that is the way of all who would lead.”

  After the clan departed, Misko spent each night be
neath the stars beside Ashagi’s grave, hoping to hear her voice one last time. The Old Man had told him that the spirits of those who had gone often came and spoke to their beloved in the days after their deaths. It had been half a moon now, yet still Misko hoped to hear her whisper in the night.

  One night, a green star trailing flames of purple, orange, and blue fell from the cold sky and Misko wondered if it was a warrior returning from the spirit land to walk the earth again. The spirits of the night crept over and through him, yet he no longer feared them. Eya, he longed to join them.

  Often, he woke shivering with a carpet of oak leaves blown over his sleeping robe, expecting to find Ashagi standing there. But only once did he hear her. It was on an evening crisp with the cold, the violet stars glittering in the great pathway through the sky.

  “Get up,” she had commanded in a voice so clear it made him shoot upright from his slumber. He sat beside the grave and smoked for a long time, waiting to hear more. It was her, he knew it was her, yet that was the last he ever heard from his beloved. Toward dawn, Misko rose and settled back in the nest of his family. Behind him, the pale, cold sun rose like a sick old man to battle the coming winter.

  That winter was as cruel as the famine of two years before with the land empty of game. Oak trees cracked like thunderclaps in the night, and the northern sky was lit with spirits dancing in crazy undulations. Although his heart was black with grief and his thoughts dismal beyond words, Misko tore himself from his sleeping robe each morning to join the hunt with Biidaaban. Despair settled over him like a wet cloak, both in losing Ashagi and for the peril facing his family.

  It had been a mistake to allow them to remain with him; he should have sent them to the southern hunting grounds. Their deaths would be on him if he did not provide.

  Then one day, deep in the winter when they had begun boiling their leather for broth and surviving on the smoke of their pipes, Misko found footsteps in the snow, circling the empty village. They were those of Nika, the windigo.

  “Ehn, I saw him while you and Biidaaban were off hunting,” the Old Man said that night, grateful to have the taste of a yearling raccoon which Misko had dragged from its hollow.

  “He was as a crow, roosting in the pines above the lodge,” he said. “I did not recognize him at first, I thought he was the spirit of a man I saw in a dream long ago. But it was Nika, and he is no longer of the Anishinaabek. He has become a lone crow in the forest, robbing the nests of others.”

  “Or perhaps only a corpse,” Misko said. “Did he come forward?”

  The Old Man shook his head. “No, and lucky for us, for there was only the old woman, Niibin, and me, and I am no warrior. Perhaps he did not know you were gone, but he is watching and will come again.”

  Yes, and who will protect Niibin then? Misko wondered. The Old Man had outrun the wolves for more than seventy seasons, and now his joints were raw with age. Misko did not doubt the Old Man’s bravery, but knew he could not stand against Nika.

  “You must stay behind now to watch over the others while I seek the game,” he told Biidaaban the next morning. “You have your bow, and I have this for you.”

  He pulled a deerskin sheath down from the top shelf in the lodge and unwrapped his father’s war club. It was a thing of beauty and dread, notched with Ogaa’s fourteen kills, with the long, curving handle carved with symbols of the Amik clan. Biidaaban hefted it; the granite ball whirled like the sweeping wind, nearly grazing his knee. He could discern the blood of the enemy on its point and feel their spirits moving within its length.

  “Within this club,” Misko said, eyeing it gravely “lives the spirit of your grandfather and his father before him. And when I die, something of me will live on in it too; and so it will be for you when you pass it to your own son.”

  “Yes Father, I can feel it.” Biidaaban ran his hand along the smooth shaft. “Though I did not know him, I can feel Grandfather living still within the wood. He has a powerful spirit, and he is with us now.”

  Misko nodded.

  “He will be strong with you,” he said. “Take care, and if Nika comes, fill him with arrows from a distance. Don’t let him come close. Don’t let him fool you with his begging or sweet words.”

  “Yes Father. I will kill him.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Misko said, smiling. He had to look up to his son now, for Biidaaban had grown a hand taller than his father, and now that he was nineteen years old, he was a fully a man in the eyes of the Anishinaabek.

  “Take care of your sister,” Misko said, before taking his bow and melting into the forest.

  Misko’s doom came as all such things do, with a small step.

  He was crossing a creek minding a set of rabbit tracks in the snow when his feet flew up from under him on the skin of an icy rock. When the blanket of red pain lifted in his thoughts, it brought the revelation that his right leg was broken below the knee. He crawled wet and freezing beneath the boughs of a large spruce, resting on a bed of needles. Beyond the branches he heard the cawing of crows as his leg began to throb to the beating of his heart. Even the crows knew he was done.

  Strange thoughts crept over him like the morning mists of a swamp creeping over a lakeshore. Dimly, he heard the call of a lone goose flying overhead. Where are you going, nika, and how did you lose your flock? he wondered. The call of the goose receded in the distance, lost, perhaps unto its own death.

  He knew the hoop of his life was broken, and yet with Ashagi gone, he no longer cared. All was lost, he thought, Ashagi, his mother, father, perhaps even Niibin, Biidaaban, and the Old Man. The old, homely band of his people, his clan, his brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles. Those who fled the shores of Kitchi Minissing, striving through the seasons in their leathers, beads and paint. What would become of them? Who would guide them when he was gone? Would the people follow Niimi?

  The Old Man had said that the Anishinaabek would always live on, yet the world itself was coming to an end. It was growing colder, darker, and riven with the manitos of diseases few of the Anishinaabek could stand against. Perhaps even the stories of the Ojibwe and the old ways would be gone forever, too, if his children did not live to pass them on.

  What is a man? What am I? He looked at the frozen landscape surrounding him. He had never been a great warrior; his father had seen that clearly from his birth. He had never properly killed a man, nor even a woman of the enemy. It had been another who struck the death blow when the enemy had been within his power.

  And now, if Nika found him helpless, as he surely would, the windigo would eat his heart, denying him reunion with those waiting in the spirit land. Yet the thought of it brought a grim smile to Misko’s face with the certainty that it was he who would do the killing this day. He would kill Nika, even with his last breath.

  The pain in his leg and the weakness that came with hunger overcame him, and he drifted off into that twilight where the manitos dwell. Within its cozy darkness, he dreamed of Ashagi.

  She said nothing, but looked at him with questioning eyes and he was settled. He had done all a man could do for her and his clan. For all his faults, he had won her. She had borne his children, and they had run together through all the years as united as the wolves themselves. It would have to be enough.

  Far off, he heard a drumming.

  Who knows? Perhaps it was then that Manabozho, Nenookaasi, and Kitchi Manito held a council to decide the fate of Miskomakwa. He was no hero of whom songs would be sung, but he was their man.

  Far away, deep in his slumbers in the comfort of a thick bearskin, the Old Man lifted his right hand in his sleep and muttered words that he could not have known had he heard them on waking. His singing woke little Niibin in her bed, and though she did not understand his words, she smiled nonetheless.

  That morning, Misko found himself half frozen in his bearskin robe, yet still alive. His leggings were crusted with the ice of his blood, but the cold had driven the pain from his leg. Through the boughs of the spruce he could se
e the sun and with it the way home. There was nothing left to do but crawl.

  For two flights of an arrow he crawled that morning, a long way for a man creeping through snow. Behind him was a snaking trail that a child could follow, spotted with the blood of his broken leg. By midday, Misko heard an exultant cry, so close that he thought he might see his pursuer in the next instant.

  He scrambled for the shelter of a fallen elm; its shattered trunk was as thick as four men, weathered gray over years of ruin. He spotted a crevice beneath a tangle of branches and dragged himself within. Inside, Misko caught the stink and steam of a labored breath, and his eyes grew a shade dimmer. The tangled limbs harbored the den of a dozing bear.

  The bear stirred beneath the snow filling its den and raised its head, gazing at him with eyes that did not see. It had stirred, but was not yet awakened. It was a big bruin, larger than any Misko had ever seen.

  He thought back to the time on Kitchi Minissing when his father had taken such a bear in its winter sleep. His father had handled the drowsy bear with ease, rocking its head back and forth as he would a child’s cornhusk doll before sending it to the spirit land with his spear in its throat.

  Misko smiled grimly. Caught between Nika and a waking bear, the spirits had played a fine trick on him. Yet he still had his arrows and his bow, and Kitchi Manito willing, the bear would not awaken. That, and he was Miskomakwa, Red Bear. The Old Man had done well by his name. Perhaps his namesake would pass him by. He hummed a song, low and deep in the voice of a bear as the black heap beside him stretched and moaned.

  Misko huddled against the warmth of the sleeping bear all that day, gazing at the clearing in the branches above his hiding place. He would have a clear shot at Nika, who could not possibly resist coming on.

  There was a thud against the branches above him as a length of wood as long as his arm tumbled into the den. Then another piece of wood and a cautious cry in a croaking voice.

  “Brother, I know you are injured. Let me help you.”