Usually, he just causes trouble, but sometimes he can be a messenger from the spirits.” The raven emitted several loud crackles. “What do you think he’s trying to tell us?”
“Maybe he just wants this back.” Though I doubted it belonged to the raven, unless he’d fallen into some bleach. I reached down to pick up a large black and white feather.
“Don’t!” Eric yelled.
My fingers stopped inches from the feather.
“Sorry, but you can’t touch it.”
“Why ever not?” I stared at him in amazement.
“It’s an eagle feather, one of our people’s most sacred objects. I didn’t mean to yell at you like that, but no one can touch it but the owner.”
“The bird?” I was confused.
He glared at me in disgust. “The elder or honoured person it belongs to, who else? You’ll anger the spirits if you touch it.”
“What? Just because I’m white?”
“Meg, you should know better than to say that.”
He placed his hands on the feather, closed his eyes and mumbled. Then he gently picked it up and held it by the tip with the vane pointing skyward.
“Kije manido, the Creator, chose the eagle as the leader because it, of all creatures, flies the highest into the heavens, up where the thunder and lightning roam. The eagle feather unites us with our spirit world. When a person becomes a keeper of an eagle feather, we conduct a special ceremony to notify kije manido. Once that is done, the spirits are appeased.”
“I thought you didn’t believe?”
“Well, I do, and I don’t. As the leader of my people, I feel I should. And, I guess you could say, there is a touch of superstition in me that makes me not want to tempt the anger of kije manido.”
“Then why are you holding it?” I wasn’t inclined to anger the gods either. I figured every little bit helped to keep things moving along on an even keel.
“Don’t worry. I think kije manido wanted us to find the feather. That was the raven’s message.”
“This feather belongs to the person who pushed the spruce tree over, doesn’t it?” I asked as the implications finally sank in.
“Yup.” Instead of smiling, Eric was strangely subdued.
“This means it really was one of your people?”
“Looks like it.”
“Why would he want to harm me?”
“No idea, but I’ll soon find out. I’ll make sure the person without his feather tells me.”
THIRTEEN
I glanced up at the raven, now perched on the tip of the pine’s highest branch. As if sensing my eyes, he unwrapped his wings, and with a final croak floated into the air. For a second he blotted out the sun as he drifted over our heads and upward into the sky. I shivered, and not from the cold.
“Any idea who it is?” I asked, thinking there couldn’t be that many owners of eagle feathers in a band of a thousand members.
“I do,” Eric replied grimly, “but I’d rather not say right now.”
I didn’t blame him. A false accusation would be worse than none at all.
I ran my eyes over the cliff wall, which looked no more climbable than yesterday and asked, “Where’s this ancient hunter’s track suppose to be?”
Eric pointed to a rock fall behind the raven’s pine, which just happened to be on the other side of the dead spruce. Without another word, he started smashing a gap through the bristling branches, while I tossed the broken ones out of the way.
We had almost created a passable gap when I noticed a flat straight-edged piece of wood lying under the trunk. Suddenly remembering, I wrenched it free and held it up. “Eric, do you know anything about this cross?”
For a moment Eric looked blank, was about to say “No”, then his face lit up. “Amazing, it’s still here. There should be another one.”
I nodded yes and asked whose crosses they were.
Eric replied, “Two Face Sky and Summer Wind, people of the Migiskan Anishinabeg. At least Summer Wind was. Two Face Sky came from elsewhere.”
“Seems strange they weren’t buried in the Migiskan Reserve cemetery.”
“They were, but these crosses were put here as a memorial.”
“That must mean they died on this beach. Do you know what happened?
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me, I love a good story.”
“I will, but let’s get out of here first. I don’t want to leave my men too much longer on their own. No telling what kind of trouble they’re getting into.”
Eric walked behind the pine and pointed to what looked to be a ladder of rock ledges climbing to the top of the cliff. Although it was much higher at this end, the wall sloped backwards making the climb seem more like a walk on a badly groomed trail.
If only I’d known yesterday, I could have saved myself a lot of grief. But then again, maybe it was just as well. I would’ve found myself face-to-face with the guy in yellow, and I would have been a lot easier to push off the cliff than a dead tree.
Within minutes, we were walking towards the interior of the island. It was a slow, steady climb through a relatively new forest of spruce, birch, poplar and the occasional young pine. Each step forward brought us closer to the whisperings of the old growth pines high on the backbone of the island.
While I struggled to keep pace, Eric told me the story of Two Face Sky and Summer Wind.
“I don’t know how much is true—you know how things get embellished and twisted over time, but this is essentially the story I was told by the elders when I was a child.
“One very harsh winter, many, many years ago, a mighty warrior named Two Face Sky came out of the north. He arrived after the Great Rain locked the land in ice. Because my people were unable to hunt for food, they were slowly dying. He saved them. Apparently, so the story goes, kije manido had given him a pair of magic snowshoes that floated above the ice. With these snowshoes he was able to search far and wide for the game trapped by the ice, and so he saved my people.
“In the spring after the snow melted, he left, but he didn’t leave alone. He stole the very young and beautiful Summer Wind from the arms of her lover. He carried her away in a silver canoe to his lodge hidden deep within the ancients’ forest on this island. And here she remained entrapped under the spell of Two Face Sky until killed by the fiery wrath of the angry spirits.”
“What a sadly romantic tale. I didn’t know you had such a Byronic streak in you.
