Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

blown over onto the ice. He bent over the tree. Guy watched his dark arm move back and forth like a wing. At first there was no sound, then came the faint rasp of the saw. When Zhingwaak stopped cutting and stood up the saw continued to rasp without him. Guy imagined the cut still deepening. Sawdust still falling.

      As Tom and Mary Ann pulled the toboggan back uphill, Guy watched Zhingwaak. His dark figure against the white shoreline was connected to the black door of the fish house on the lake. Zhingwaak was a door.

      He watched as Zhingwaak gathered a few sticks in his arms and began the walk back to his fish house. Guy looked at the long toboggan sliding toward him on the ice, then back to Zhingwaak.

      The three of them approached Zhingwaak on the ice. The old Indian wore layers of plaid wool shirts and green wool pants that looked like army blankets. His pants were held up by suspenders made from braided strips of buckskin. On his head he wore a floppy cap of shiny black and white skunk fur. In the bright sunlight Zhingwaak’s face looked like oak bark with knotholes for eyes. He smelled like wood smoke and tobacco. He nodded to them and spoke some word Guy did not know.

      “We have the toboggan, we’ll haul your wood,” Tom said.

      Zhingwaak nodded, then placed his sticks on the sled.

      They hauled and stacked a large pile of dead branches beside the fish house. Zhingwaak’s little door remained closed. When they finished he swung open the door. He stared at the pile of wood. Then he said, “Come in, children.”

      Tom, Guy, and Mary Ann squeezed into the hot darkness of the little house. At first Guy could see nothing but the moon glow square of the spearing hole. While his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his nose took over. He smelled sweat dried in old wool. Tobacco. Pine pitch and creosote from the wood stove. And a sharper scent that was a cross between cedar shavings and something cooked for Thanksgiving but left too long in the oven, something burned.

      Soon he could see better. Zhingwaak sat on a stool at the far end of the fish house. He leaned over the spear hole and his face drew light from the water. A zigzag scar cut like a crow’s track across the furrows of his forehead. Guy thought of the policemen’s sticks that summer night in Flatwater, the flash of lights, the swirl of falling bodies.

      The big pike spear leaned against Zhingwaak’s shoulder. The spear was a narrow rod of iron, taller than Guy. Its tines were a wide hand of ten barbed fingers that pricked in the wood floor. The spear’s cord was draped across Zhingwaak’s knee, then tied in a noose knot around his ankle. That way if Zhingwaak speared a big pike he could easily walk it outside and let it flop and stiffen on the ice.

      Beside Zhingwaak was a wood stove, a five-gallon pail with a hole cut for a stove pipe on top and a door for wood cut in its side. On the wall beside Zhingwaak’s head was a long gray feather, a feather bigger than Guy had ever seen. Beside the feather was a small leather pouch. Tied to the pouch was a tiny tin man. Below the tin man, hung on nails, were three bright-painted decoy fish carved of wood and with tin, curved tails.

      A fourth decoy, a red and white one, hung in the water in the center of the hole a few feet beneath the ice. Guy stared down the bright door of the spear hole. The walls of the ice glowed white and smooth. The water welled slightly up and down, as if somewhere there were waves underneath the ice. Tiny, sand-sized bits of green moss hung in slanted drifts in the water like grain dust in sunlight. Faint white polka dots that could have been clam shells showed against the mossy-green lake bottom. Guy could not tell the depth of the water.

      Zhingwaak began to work the decoy line. The decoy fish darted forward from a spray of green dust, then began to loop in slow circles about the hole. Zhingwaak’s wrist clicked as he worked the line. In the dusty green water the decoy followed itself; its white sides left a ghost of phosphorescence that chased its real body in perfect circles below the ice. Guy watched Zhingwaak’s wrist rise and fall. Click. Rise and fall. Click.

      Then he realized Zhingwaak was watching him. The old Indian’s dark eyes drew light from the water.

      “You want to try?” Zhingwaak said, handing the line to Guy.

      The decoy jerked and bobbed as Guy pulled on the line.

      “Slower,” Zhingwaak said.

      Soon Guy had the red and white fish looping evenly about the hole.

      “I’m next,” Tom said quickly.

      “Then me,” Mary Ann said.

      The three of them took turns with the decoy line. Zhingwaak watched the decoy swim.

      “Not that way,” Tom said to Mary Ann, “that’s too jerky. Here. Like this.”

      Mary Ann stamped her feet on the floor and grabbed back the line from Tom.

      “Children,” Zhingwaak said, “we must be very quiet. The big pike Nimishoomis will hear us and he will not come to our hole.”

      They fell silent. They looked into the water, then back up to Zhingwaak.

      “You saw him once?” Guy asked.

      Zhingwaak nodded.

      “How big is he?” Mary Ann asked quickly.

      “As big as a man.”

      All of them stared back into the hole.

      “Nimishoomis. He is the grandfather of all pike,” Zhingwaak said.

      They were quiet for a while. Zhingwaak handed the decoy line to Tom, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a large potato. He held the potato over the hole and with his knife began to cut the potato into thin slices. The white slices splashed onto the water, then fell, wavering like leaves falling, to the bottom. Guy realized the water was only six or eight feet deep. Resting on the green moss, the potato slices drew light from the water and brightened the hole.

      “Why are you doing that?” Mary Ann asked.

      “Light for Nimishoomis,” Zhingwaak said. “So he can find his way to our house.”

      Nimishoomis did not come that afternoon. He did not come the next day, nor the one after. But Guy and Tom and Mary Ann came often to Zhingwaak’s fish house. When they tired of sliding or were cold, they crowded into Zhingwaak’s house. Often he told them stories, stories like “The Little Boy and the Windigoo.”

      Long ago there was an Indian village. The men in the village were all hunters. One day some of the hunters went into the woods but never returned. Other hunters went to look for them. But those hunters never returned.

      This kept on.

      In the same village there was a little boy who lived with Ookomisan, his grandmother. He listened to people talk. He watched the hunters leave the village.

      One day he said to his grandmother, “Ookomisan, may I go hunting in the woods?”

      “Don’t you know there’s a Windigoo in the woods?” she answered him.

      “A Windigoo is like a giant, only bigger,” Zhingwaak explained, then continued.

      “The Windigoo does not scare me,” said the little boy. “So give me a little sack of buckskin to carry my lunch in and let me go into the woods.”

      “The Windigoo will catch you and eat you,” Ookomisan said.

      “Not me,” the little boy said. “I will catch the Windigoo if only you will let me go into the woods.”

      The boy coaxed and coaxed Ookomisan. And finally she gave in. She knew the little boy was brave. She gave him a buckskin pouch and some dried venison for the trip.

      The little boy walked from the village into the forest. He walked among the rivers and trees for four days. On the fourth day he stopped to lean against an oak tree. The tree moved. The tree was not a tree at all, but was the leg of the Windigoo.

      The Windigoo thought, Here is a boy. But he is too small to eat. So I will invite him to my house. When he eats he will grow big. Then I will eat him.

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