Thunder Bay

THIRTY-THREE

Henry woke to the smell of sage and cedar burning. He opened his eyes and found himself in a wiigiwam, wrapped in a bearskin. A few feet away a woman sat tending a small fire. She had long gray hair woven into a single thick braid that hung over the shoulder of the plaid wool shirt she wore. When Henry stirred, she looked up.

“Where am I?” Without thinking, he’d spoken in the language of his people.

“Some men from the village found you. They brought you here.” Henry understood her words, but she said them in a way he’d never heard before.

“Are you Ojibwe?” he asked.

She shook her head and added a cedar sprig to the fire. “Odawa.” The deerskin flap that hung across the doorway was drawn aside, and an old man entered. Bright sunlight slipped into the wiigiwam with him.

“Finally awake.” He sat next to Henry. His knee joints popped like walnuts cracking. “Who are you?”

Henry said, “Niibaa-waabii.” His Ojibwe name. It meant Sees At Night.

“I am Ziibi-aawi. This is my daughter, Maanaajii-ngamo. You have been sick a long time.”

“How long?”

“Seven days ago you were brought here.”

“Fever?”

“That and other things. You are not Odawa,” the old man said.

“Ojibwe.”

“A lost Ojibwe.”

“Not lost. I was looking for the village.”

“Where you were headed, you would not have found it. You were lucky the men stumbled onto you. They thought at first you were an old man gone out into the woods to die alone.”

“Old man?” Henry said.

Ziibi-aawi waved an age-spotted hand toward Henry’s head. “Your hair.”

Henry reached up and grasped a handful of the fine black hair, which he’d let grow long since he left the boarding school. When he looked at what he held, he didn’t understand. His hand was full of strands white as spider’s silk.

“My hair,” he said. “What happened to my hair?”

“You are young for hair so old.”

“It was black,” Henry said. “Black as crow feathers.”

Ziibi-aawi gazed at him with deep interest. “What a thing it must have been.”

“My hair?”

The old man shook his head. “Whatever turned it white. It is a story I would like to hear.”

Henry told him about his battle with the windigo. The old man listened, and his daughter, too.

“Look at yourself.” Ziibi-aawi pulled away the bearskin.

Except for the wounds on his leg, which were healing, Henry saw no marks on his naked body.

“It was a vision,” the old man explained. “The windigo is a beast of the spirit. It feeds on hate, and it is never full. There is only one way to kill a windigo. You must become a windigo, too. But when the beast is dead, there is a great danger that you will stay a windigo forever. You must be fed something warm to melt the ice inside you, to melt you down to the size of other men.”

Henry looked toward Maanaajii-ngamo, who fed cleansing sage and cedar to the fire.

“I am Mide,” Ziibi-aawi said. “Maanaajii-ngamo is also Mide. You know the Grand Medicine Society?”

Henry knew of it. Healers of the body and spirit. Since the coming of the white men, those among the Ojibwe who understood the healing secrets had become few.

“This is an important vision. You have had visions before?”

Henry thought about the dream in which he was flown north by a snake with wings to a lake where a golden fire burned under the water. He thought about the kind of man Wellington was and the gold that had brought him far north, to the lake.

“Yes,” he said.

“Kitchimanidoo has guided you here. You understand?”

Henry said, “What if the windigo had eaten my heart instead?”

“You would be a different man with a different destiny.”

“Or you would be dead,” Maanaajii-ngamo said.

“You have been marked. You have been given the gift of visions,” the old man said. “You are welcome to stay with us as long as you need in order to understand this gift.”

Henry felt as if he’d already traveled to the end of the earth, but he realized he still had a very long way to go before his journey was finished.

“Migwech,” he said, and closed his eyes to rest.