Just North of There

© 2011 by W.D.Esser. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/19/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4685-2971-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-2970-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011962661

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

Epilogue

Dedicated To Papa and Gram,

Howard and Virginia, Lynn, Meg and Mike

Preface

Back when I was a kid, every summer most folks went on vacation, it didn’t matter where, just to get away from it all, just to be able to go back to work and say they’ve been, well, somewhere. Even families short on cash went somewhere, dads driving white knuckled and resolute, stopping at nothing to be sure to get there and back by next Monday. On one such trip a good friend of mine, then 10 years old and sitting front seat and starboard, complained frequently but unconvincingly to his father about the rather unsettled nature of his young and tender gastro-intestinal system. His father, hearing nothing and believing less, refused to stop. My young friend, left with few choices, opted to deposit the partially digested remains of an unusually unctuous breakfast out the opened window of their un-air-conditioned 1947 Desoto sedan. The car was traveling on Route 66 at 55 miles per hour or the other way around, it doesn’t really matter which, when the hot ooze of Mississippi River Valley air took hold of his offering and swirled the chum back through the car, hitting, in descending order of severity, his sister Kay, his Mother, holding Baby Bob and settled strategically in the automobile D.M.Z defining all siblings half of the back seat, his other sister Sue and ultimately the back of Pop’s neck who until that very moment had been blissfully thinking that they’d been making good time since leaving the central Missouri truck stop.

What in the hell? asked Pop as sisters cried and Mom wiped bacon and eggs, whipped to a frothy brew and liberally spiced with bile, from her face and that of Baby Bob. Baby Bob, being a baby on pabulum and used to half digested food anyway, didn’t seem to mind. Pop picked a large, hastily chewed bit of sausage of sausage and gravy fame from the back of his neck. Only brother Tom, seated front row center, escaped the just served breakfast buffet unscathed and added to everyone else’s relative misery by laughing uncontrollably.

Our trips, by comparison went quite smoothly aided, no doubt, by the fact that we traveled north into cooler and more hospitable air.

It made Dad more than a little proud when comparing destinations with other fathers to say, with the slightest of smiles that We’re staying just a little north of there, somehow trumping the competition and bringing him closer to the edge of civilization, of life and death and, more importantly, of better fishing. The farther we went the better he felt as if some tendon connecting him to his ancestors had been eased as we got away from it all

PART I

Earth

Seventy thousand years ago two massive glaciers began their ponderous descent from the Artic Circle bulldozing anything that stood in their path and covering what would not be moved in an impenetrable ice blanket. They became the dominant ecological forces on the North American continent.

At their peak they covered all of Canada and the border states of the U.S., reaching as far south as Illinois. They are estimated to have been as thick as two miles. Imagine looking up at an ice floe that would be 4 times higher than the tallest building in the world, Dubai’s Burj Kalifa. North America’s most prominent skyscraper, the Willis (nee Sears) Tower, at a mere 1451 feet, would have been dwarfed by the icy wall. Only nature’s most majestic peaks could outdo the ice mountains although even then the glaciers were at least 2/3rds as tall as Mount Whitney and fully half that of Mount McKinley. But those masses were stationary while the glaciers paced, unperturbed, back and forth across their range. And what they may have lacked in height they more than made up for in width stretching virtually from coast to coast.

The weight of the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets was incalculable.

A column of water one foot square at its base, and rising two miles high would weigh upwards of 600,000 pounds. The weight of the Laurentide glacier is believed to have been sufficient to dent the crust of the earth! Scientists believe that even today it is rebounding from this crushing load.

As it receded some 14,000 years ago it plodded back and forth, ebbing and flowing in its inexorable retreat, carrying huge chunks of rock ripped from the soft earth and locked in its cold, clenching grip. Stone teeth comprised of massive boulders, some two and three stories tall and fully pressed by the prodigious weight of the floe, ground back and forth across the yielding crust digging to bedrock where they could. The glaciers tore huge rifts in the land leaving in its retreat rubble piles of scree and depressions and melt water to fill them. A thousand clear water lakes in what was to become the Great Lakes Region of the United States and the Shield Lands of Canada were thus formed. The royal flush of these waters, at first disjointed but later connected, are the Great Lakes themselves holding even yet an estimated 1/5 of the world’s fresh water.

Following the terminal edge of these vast barren wastelands and against seemingly insurmountable obstacles were tribes of indomitable nomads roving from Siberian winters eastward toward the rising sun over a frozen Baring Straight and southward toward climates more hospitable or eastward yet chasing the sun to the Atlantic seaboard.

Small bands of them became the indigenous peoples of not only North America but Central and South America as well, joining together in larger units to become tribes of people loosely knit together by customs, language and traditions.

It was in this way that the Anishinaabeg clan who had lived in the Waabanaking (eastern lands) first established themselves and who later traveled, en masse, to the Great Lakes Region at the behest of one of their Migis who’d been instructed in a vision to do so. They traveled along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers to Lake Nippissing and eventually to Lake Superior, settling along the southern shores in what is now Wisconsin, and then expanded westward to the Rainy River in northern Minnesota and upward into western Ontario.

Here they flourished, unencumbered by white men or any other peoples in a semi nomadic fashion for thousands of years building, mostly by trial and error, the skills needed to cope and eventually thrive in a land of rich resources.

They foraged for food, learned to hunt, and fabricated weapons to help them do so. They designed and perfected the wigwam as a strong, light, portable and easily erected shelter. They found medicinal uses for tree roots, bark, mosses, herbs and plants of all kind. They built canoes which moved swiftly, were easily maneuvered and could be carried with little difficulty from one river route to another. These were the formative days of the First Nation people.

Unbeknownst to them by the 1700’s the times were changing in ways which they were ill prepared to handle.

The English and French were making inroads deep into the Continent, intent on claiming all for King and Crown. That the lands were already occupied were in most cases considered only minor inconveniences.

Alternate treaties with the English and French, both of whom were more interested in their resources than their well being, left the First Nation Peoples fighting for both their lives and their territory with white men and the Sioux, who, due to a series of badly timed allegiances had been pushed ever west.

Against the uncertainty of colonial unrest and territorial indigenous infighting, Agabe Gijik (Shining Cloud) pushed off in his well made canoe, along with his wife Morning Sky Woman and 20 other assorted Anishanaabeg men of all ages, replete with women and children, toward the annual gathering of bands at what are now known as the Apostle Islands.

It was the during the last days of the Flower Moon (May) when they left hoping to reach the summer meeting where they could palaver with kinsmen and trade their pelts, tobacco and copper for not only the hardware brought by English and French traders but for soft goods as well.

It would be a great adventure, even if conducted at no small peril, which would be sung about before their ceremonial fires for years to come. And in reality, all life was tenuous for the First Nation People, now called the Ojibbeway in the North and slurred to Chippewa in American English in the southern reaches of their lands.

They were prepared to travel. It was a way of life for them and as constant as the changing of the moon. They knew well enough where they were going and how to get there, following water courses, physical landmarks and signal trees, and they would be traveling in the cleverly engineered birch bark canoes whose design had been perfected over a thousand years.

It would be a varied group. There were 20 or so warriors, many young and inexperienced but making up for their lack of real combat with a surfeit of zeal. Some were prime bucks, battle tested, strong and alert. Still others were old men whose bark now was mightier than their toothless bite.

Accompanying them were several squaws, a handful of children and two or three dogs that always made good companions and in a pinch, could be used to make a reasonably tasty stew.

Though a mix of young and old, Shining Cloud viewed it rather as a good mixture of strength tempered by experience and if not a particularly swift group an agile one he’d guess.

Their way south and east was preceded by a great celebration where each warrior told tales of his brave deeds in counting coup. It was a festive evening, the last at the winter campgrounds, and went well into the night.

Shining Cloud told of his counting coup on three Sioux warriors who’d stopped midday with their kill to take a nap. Shining Cloud stole as quietly as a still lake into their midst and made off with the small carcass. When the Sioux awoke they were confused by their missing game and unsure as to what had happened. At that moment Shining Cloud ran through the middle of them swinging a hindquarter of the deer he’d just taken knocking two of them momentarily senseless. The third gathered himself and gave chase. Shining Cloud ran for a bit then suddenly turned, threw the haunch at his pursuer and, drawing his knife, killed the Sioux brave. By the time the other two gave chase they met with well aimed arrows.

Shining Cloud returned to the Ojibbeway camp with not only a side of venison but three new scalps hanging from his belt in the bargain.

Every one cheered at the telling and retelling of this. No one knew if it was true or not, braves had stretched tales before. Perhaps Shining Cloud simply came upon them in the dead of night and killed them in their sleep. Being Sioux and their arch enemies this would have been considered no less a feat but somehow Shining Cloud’s version always played better to the raucous gathering.

The second in command would be Amongs (Little Wasp) whose sting the Sioux had felt often. He recounted his tale of daring when he shot a Sioux warrior from his dugout, having waited until it reached a particularly treacherous set of rapids, so that the squaw and child accompanying him must surely die as well. Everyone cheered this wildly because the killing of your enemies, no matter how weak or small was a thing of glory to the tribe. Warring Indian factions gave no quarter and expected none in return. It was kill or be killed in this wilderness and as the Sioux sought to usurp lands that the Ojibbeway had called home for a millennium, the Ojibbeway were unrelenting.

Finally came old Makwa (the Bear). Everyone knew that the Bear’s best days, and those weren’t so special at that, were several years behind him. He always hunted with others, would usually put one of his arrows into downed and unmoving game and claim a tandem hit with the owner of the actual mortal dart.

All knew of his shortcomings but Bear was otherwise likeable enough and had spent many long winters with his squaw, Woman Who Sits All Day, who was generally more miserable than bear meat gone bad. They figured as a whole that Kitchi Manitou owed Old Bear something for putting up with her and the rest of the tribe was put on earth to give it to him. In truth none of them understood why Old Bear had settled for Woman Who Sits because in his youth he was tolerable good looking, reasonably strong and not unpleasant to be around. He could have married better. In fact almost any choice, it seemed, would have been better. But Old Bear, for all the advantages he saw in living his life as an Ojibbeway warrior, always hated being cold. He was comfortable enough in the summer months but come fall and winter, and a long winter it was in their corner of the North, he found himself, no matter how many clothes he wore or hides he slept under, plagued by a constant, nagging chill. It was a part of life he begrudgingly accepted as his insurmountable fate until the day he met Woman Who Sits. What he found out, and the rest of the tribe did not know, was that Woman who Sits, besides being a large woman, had, improbably, a metabolism that ran a little faster than most, manifesting itself in Woman Who Sits by a slightly elevated body temperature. To Old Bear a degree or two meant all the difference in the world so he married her with the expressed caveat that they would stay together so long as she let him cuddle naked against her each night under their robes. It was not sexual gratification he was after, which suited her just fine, but merely warmth. As proof, the union produced no progeny but a markedly more content Old Bear even if it meant having to bring home inordinately more game to keep her fed.

In any case, in the heat of a skirmish, old Bear, seeing a dead Sioux slumped in his boat, dove into the water and swam toward the dugout, keeping it between him and harms way, with an eye towards an easy scalp. When he grabbed the side of the dugout to boost himself up, and owing to the shift in balance, the dead warrior lurched toward Bear, scaring the sand out of him. Finally realizing what had happened, Bear took the hair of the warrior who was too deceased at the time to object. Even in the heat of battle old Bear’s Ojibbeway compatriots were laughing at his exploits. Of course in the telling of the story the Sioux was only feigning death and Bear was only pretending to be afraid. Bear claims that he knifed the outwitted Sioux and won the day for all with his heroism. Bear always received the biggest cheer, he thinking it was for his valor but the rest, in closely communed secrecy, were lauding him more for his inventiveness than his bravery. That old Bear would not be bringing his ill tempered wife on the trip was a prerequisite for his being asked along.

The morning would see the expedition head south to the rendezvous while the rest of the tribe would travel to their summer grounds.

Shining Cloud was bringing his wife, Morning Sky Woman, in hopes that the trip would reawaken in her the spirit that had been such a joy to him. She had still born their only child some weeks prior and had fallen into a lifeless