A Fire in Onondaga

XVI

Part Two of The Wampum Keeper, 
a work in progress

Shalinka gazed wearily at the devastation spread across Onondaga. A longhouse had caught fire in the night and a strong wind fuelled the flames. In less than two hours twenty longhouses were lost. Every man, woman, and child helped to pass kettles of creek water up the hill, trample out embers and make firebreaks, rescue the sick and the elderly, and salvage stores of food and tools. The entire town was in extreme danger, but at daybreak, when the winds calmed, eighty lodges and two sections of palisade remained intact.

Many residents lay sleeping in the late afternoon sunlight flooding the square outside the charred gates of the town. Others sat talking with friends, while others were still trying to salvage belongings from the wreckage. Huron, Chonnonton, Petun, Algonquin, and Montagnais women, closely supervised by Onondaga matrons, were busy at cook fires carefully spaced along one side of the square.

Six young Chonnonton Wolf captives, all former residents of Ounontisaston, slept close to Shalinka. All had exhibited enormous energy and skill in the battle to save the hilltop capital, and nothing but feelings of gratitude and good will toward these former enemies were on display by the Onondagas.

Complaints against Father Le Moyne were going the rounds. Huron traditionalists and renegade converts had lost no time in accusing him of using a magic spell to start the fire. He and his donné, after surveying the appalling damage - which it must be said they too had helped to contain - chose to temporarily vacate the town and seek the company of a family of Huron Christians in a nearby hamlet.

In the week since the Jesuit's arrival in Onondaga, Hurons had repeated accusations that once circulated in their own towns. The Black Robe was a sorcerer who used spells to ruin crops. He bewitched the names he recorded in his book of baptisms in order to make the bearers of these names die. He sought Iroquois converts so that their souls could be tortured in heaven. He could both cause and cure disease.

These accusations were made behind the Jesuit's back. To his face, smiles, welcomes, and a polite interest in the One True God were the order of the day. The reason for this duplicity was known to all, including Ouane. The entire will of the Onondaga, and of the Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca, was bent to a single purpose. Peace with the French so their Erie war could proceed without complications.

A group of Onondaga healers sat apart from the main crowd in the square. Slumped shoulders and unhappy faces were ubiquitous among these men and women. Calamity had struck them on all sides. Not only had precious Masks been lost in the fire, but the wind that fuelled the fire was believed to have been caused by one of their number carelessly letting some hair get loose from his Mask. A visiting Cayuga healer, the custodian of a lost whirlwind Mask, appeared especially distraught.

Sympathy for these dancing shamans welled up in Shalinka's breast. It was followed by a fresh burst of anger at Father Le Moyne. Two days ago, Ouane had cautioned him against attending a healing rite performed by these Hunchbacks. "Superstitious nonsense," the Jesuit growled.

He had not refused to attend the rite, nor had he wished to. It was requested by an Onondaga family for their adopted Chonnonton son. The child suffered from tremors and bad dreams, and looked at him with pleading eyes. He knew the boy, known his parents and grandparents.

Superstitious nonsense is the stock-in-trade of Black Robes too, he muttered, addressing the absent Ouane in his thoughts as he gazed at the dejected Hunchbacks. It is competition from these powerful shamans that you fear!

The healing rite he witnessed had astounded him. Not since participating in AG's shaking tree ceremony had he been so moved. He felt orenda flowing within these healers and within himself, and within the boy and his family and their attendants and guests. The next day the boy was much improved, his tremors gone, his heart lighter.

The Iroquois shamans performed their dances disguised as hunchbacks. All wore wooden Masks with contorted features and carried hickory canes and turtle-shell rattles. Their dancing and rattling had made hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

How much more sensible were the ways of the forest peoples! Ouane wasn't interested in curing bodies and souls. He only wanted to strike fear into hearts and minds with talk of the devil, of hell and damnation. He wanted people to feel bad about themselves, thinking such cruelty a kindness. Ooh ...ooh... if only the poor Savages would give up their foolish ways and become cowardly little fur trading Christians they'd go to heaven....

The mewling tone of this last thought made the Chonnonton chief smile. He'd overstated his case against the French shamans. In truth, he'd often felt a sense of peace and well-being listening to the Huron and Algonquin and Montagnais Christians singing their hymns... or when he watched the candlelight playing over the tall glass vessel that held the bread and wine....

A yawn erupted over Shalinka's sooty face. Giddy from exhaustion and lack of sleep, he lay back and gazed up at the cloudless sky. It's the senselessness of the French when they leave their chapels... except for a few... and the virgins who aid the sick and dying... and the black robes when they feed the poor and needy from their own kettles.... black robes... virgins... unnatural beings... they....

A short time later, upon awakening, he thought of the gentle rebuke Tsouharissen had made shortly before his death to a Huron Christian. Silently, reverently, he recited the words of the high chief,

"My brother, I, a Chonnonton, know that the great spirit Areskoui has given us all that we have, eyes to see, ears to hear, and a spirit to think of him and to understand the things he has created. I know that he is here, I know that he is elsewhere, that he is everywhere. I know that he sees us to the bottom of our hearts. I know that we ought to do his will. Each Chonnonton understands well these truths and many others, they are present to his spirit wherever he goes. This is not in books, my brother, that I have learned what I know. The great spirit has taught my elder and my elder has spoken to me of what the great spirit told him. I am happy to have had these teachings. I keep them in my heart and never will I renounce them."

The French have their ways and we have ours and there's the end of it, he muttered firmly as he sat up and looked around the square.

The Hunchbacks were still fretting over their lost and injured Masks. One of them, a former Huron from Kiota's Arendarhonon tribe, sat stroking the hair on his crook-mouth Mask. His wife sat next to him, waiting to slip cornmush into the Mask's mouth. Expressions of concern and affection swept over the faces of both healers as they fussed over the Mask.

The first Hunchback healer had been the famous Huron shaman Tsondacouane, Shalinka recalled, who'd died as a result of a fall on the ice during the Great Dying. A little man, extremely misshapen, he claimed power over a terrible contagion sweeping the Huron lands. In his efforts to help his people, he'd taken sweat baths, ordered feasts and dances, and thrown tobacco onto fires and blown hot ashes over the sick. Entire Huron villages followed his orders, and since not everyone died his cures were considered a success.

Soon after his death, other Huron shamans performed a healing dance disguised as hunchbacks. Kiota thought they were imitating Tsondacouane's affliction in order to gain the power accredited to him, or perhaps to confuse the disease-causing okis into believing that Old Broken Nose Tawiskaro still lived among them.

An elder brother of the late chief Annenraes tottered out of the town's charred gates. Spying an old friend sitting near Shalinka, he rushed over and held out a superbly carved bone gorget. "A gift from my murdered brother," he said sadly, "all I have left from this fire to honour his memory." The next moment his face contorted in fury and he cried out, "We'll soon avenge his death!"

The distraught elder slumped down beside his friend, an Onondaga chief known to Shalinka as a peacemaker and another like himself who wished to rid his people of the ghastly heart ceremony.

As the two old friends consoled each other, and the six young Wolfs slept on around him, Shalinka thought about the war raging against the Eries, a war that he believed was rooted in the fur trade.

The capture and death by torture of Annenraes was certainly the spark that ignited the war. A band of Eries, led by Hurons, pursued an Onondaga army - victorious and laden with furs - returning from the direction of the former Huron lands. The Onondaga's rearguard, eighty picked men, was cut to pieces. Not content with this success, some Eries pursued the main army almost to the gates of Onondaga. It was they who captured Annenraes.

In Shalinka's opinion, there were two reasons why the western Iroquois could not allow emboldened Eries in league with revenge-seeking Hurons and Chonnontons to disrupt their hunting and raiding forays north of the two lower inland seas.

One, Eries in league with Susquehannock allies were preventing western Iroquois from hunting and raiding in the Ohio valley and carrying furs to New Sweden. And two, wealthy Mohawk traders often prohibited their poorer western brothers from travelling across their territories to take furs to Dutch traders at Albany's Fort Orange.

The Senecas, largest of the four western Iroquois nations, were spoiling for a fight with the Eries. Recently, when thirty Erie envoys visited their capital Ganondagan to reaffirm a peace treaty, an Erie accidentally killed a Seneca. Angry Senecas refused reparations and slew most of the Erie envoys, thus challenging that nation to a fight.

Five of the six young Wolfs were now awake and avidly watching the long lines at the cook fires. The sixth Wolf, an adolescent with a sallow smallpox-ravaged face, was watching the Hunchbacks, who were discussing a plan to store their Masks in a secret place away from the fire-prone village.

This lad now turned to the wampum keeper and asked him to tell the story of Tsouharissen's dream of Old Broken Nose.

Shalinka agreed to his request, but before telling the story he reminded the young captives - all of whom had missed out on a lot of teachings from the Chonnonton Ancient Word - that there had been two world shapers. Jouskeha who always got his creations right and his twin brother Tawiskaro the bungler who got all his creations wrong.

In Tsouharissen's dream, he continued, Jouskeha met Tawiskaro disguised as a male man-being in a long black robe.

When asked what he was doing, the bungler replied that he was going about inspecting the earth to see if it was still just as he'd made it. Jouskeha replied that it was he who'd made the earth.

When Tawiskaro disagreed, Jouskeha offered him a challenge. A sheer mountain wall stood in the distance behind the twins. If Tawiskaro could move the mountain close to them, Jouskeha said, he would agree that he had made the world.

Tawiskaro failed to move the mountain and Jouskeha succeeded. The mountain wall stood just at their backs. Now Jouskeha told Tawiskaro to turn round and have a look. Tawiskaro turned and his nose struck the rock wall and broke and hung awry, leaving one side of his face crooked.

He then conceded that Jouskeha had indeed completed and established the earth. Tawiskaro now offered Jouskeha a bargain. If allowed to live he would aid Jouskeha forever by protecting the man-beings who were to dwell on his earth from illness.

Jouskeha agreed, saying, "Yes, man-beings shall call you Mask, or Grandfather."

When the story was finished, one of the youths looked up at Shalinka and said in a bewildered voice, "But uncle, why was the Evil One wearing a long black robe? And why was the mountain in the story? Mountains don't move!"

Shalinka heaved an inward sigh. This youth was mixing up the Wrinkle-Minded One with the Christian Devil. Huron Christians in Onondaga were busy proselytizing among the light-headed ones.

"Of course mountains move," he replied mildly, "and when they do they sound like the stones in the Hunchbacks' rattles, only louder. Mountains also change the shape of the earth when they move."

"But why was Tawiskaro dressed as a Black Robe?"

Shalinka gazed at the dull youth for a time and then motioned towards the disconsolate Cayuga healer whose whirlwind mask had been lost in the fire.

"A Mask depends on his healer for proper care, and the healer depends on his Mask to gain the extra power he needs to make his cures. If the Mask is given proper care and the healer dances and sings and acts in a way that touches Old Broken Nose, his cure may succeed. But if he mistreats his Mask, or if he is careless during a healing ceremony, a whole lot of trouble can happen."

Two of the youths turned and stared at the charred remains of Onondaga's ruined palisade.

"As for Tawiskaro's black robe," Shalinka said softly, "the diseases that killed off so many forest people began when French shamans went to live among the Hurons. No French shaman ever died from those diseases, and if one got sick he soon recovered. That's why a black robe appeared in Tsouharissen's dream."

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