THE PORTENT OF A DREAM
In the spring following Wen-dah-ban's journey to Fort Kenogami
Pe-tah-bo advised the boy that it was time to go into the forest,
build a small wigwam and remain there, fasting and alone, until he had
dreamed. The boy responded eagerly. Not only had he absorbed the Ojibwa
viewpoint but he had looked forward to this event as a portent of
emancipation. Although it really marked the beginning of adolescence,
he considered it the dawn of manhood.
Wen-dah-ban was large and strong. He could follow Pe-tah-bo all day
on snowshoes, carry a fair burden on the portages, handle a canoe
with skill, and hunt fur and food. Thus he entered upon his fast
with something more than the Ojibwa boy's superstitious faith in its
significance.
The suppressed longings of a starved childhood, the vague desire that
had assumed distinct form at Fort Kenogami, and a growing ambition
to abandon the ways of the people with whom he had always lived and
to become a white man--all were associated in his mind with this
auspicious period in the Indian's life.
Primitive though the custom is, it has a psychological foundation which
has served to perpetuate it in the minds of the Ojibwas. Memories of
boyhood, vague impressions, rise from the unconscious when freed from
the repressive influences of everyday life. Things long forgotten by
the parents are sometimes related with startling vividness and confirm
the Indians' belief in the dream as a supernatural portent.
Thus Nee-tah-wee-gan and Pe-tah-bo waited impatiently in their camp
as, day after day, Wen-dah-ban lay alone in his tiny birchbark wigwam.
Sometimes Pe-tah-bo came and sat at a little distance to watch. Usually
he brought a small piece of meat.
"But do not go near it or see that it is here until after the sun has
set," he would say. "You may eat it when the sun does not watch you."
For a week Wen-dah-ban remained in the wigwam. At first his nights
were peaceful and dreamless. Only during the day did visions come and
he built frothy, exotic castles that floated entrancingly in the soft
spring air--castles of white-washed logs inhabited by white people,
castles in which he himself lived. When he became weak from hunger
and his usually active body rebelled at the slothful existence, vague
impressions flitted through his mind at night, although none remained
with sufficient distinctness for him to reassemble them in the morning.
Wen-dah-ban strove desperately to remember these visions, for to
the Ojibwas the fasting at the beginning of adolescence is of much
significance. In this period the youth dreams of something that
becomes a charm throughout his life. Invariably it is a thing with
which he is familiar, as some forest creature, and afterward he kills
one of these animals, dries the skin or a piece of it and carries it
as a charm in his _pind-gee-go-san_, or medicine bag. It is called
_Po-wah-gom_, "The Thing You Dream About."
The seventh night the boy was rewarded. A dream came that was so vivid
and so real that he wakened before it ended. His imagination busy
reconstructing it, adding and retouching and reshaping until it fitted
more closely with his desires, he lay there until dawn and then arose
and went back to camp.
Wen-dah-ban's return was an event in the bare, dreary lives of
Nee-tah-wee-gan and Pe-tah-bo. They saw him coming along the shore that
morning and waited, motionless and expectant.
When he stopped before them his eyes were bright and his face was
radiant. He glanced once at good-natured Pe-tah-bo but it was to
Nee-tah-wee-gan, crouching beside the fire, that he turned resolutely.
"I dreamed," he said.
She caught a certain defiance in his tone but her eyes were inscrutable
as she arose and faced him.
"I dreamed," Wen-dah-ban continued slowly, "that I am white."
Nee-tah-wee-gan's body stiffened and then swayed backward. Her eyes
were wide and staring.
"I dreamed that my father was white and that I will become a white
man," the boy rushed on.
He was excited now and the fasting flame in his eyes was fanned to
fresh brilliance.
"I dreamed that I am not to be an Indian but that I will become the
manager of a fort for the great company and will live in a big house of
the white men and have servants to paddle my canoe."
Nee-tah-wee-gan had retreated a step as the eager words rolled from his
lips but when he stopped, breathless and jubilant, she sprang forward.
The fear that had gripped her was gone. The venom that had seethed
within her for so many years was suddenly unleashed. Incoherent at
first, her rage crowding the shrill syllables into jumbled bursts of
sound, she stood and screamed at him.
"You are not white!" she shouted at last. "You are an Indian and you
always will be. A dream does not make you a white man. With an Indian
mother you will never be anything except an Indian."
"But I have not told you all that I dreamed!" Wen-dah-ban exclaimed.
"I dreamed that you are not my mother but that my mother was like the
woman of the manager at Fort Kenogami."
Nee-tah-wee-gan staggered backward, holding out her hands as if warding
off some unseen evil, and her eyes, glazed with fear, never turned from
the eager face of the boy.
"I dreamed that my father and my mother lived in a fort with many
Indian servants, that my father was one of the big men of the company,"
Wen-dah-ban continued.
"You dreamed that?" Nee-tah-wee-gan whispered hoarsely.
The boy nodded.
"And then, after that, you dreamed--"
"There was much thunder and lightning and everything was red as if--"
A scream from Nee-tah-wee-gan stopped the words. She sank to the ground
and cowered before the boy. Pe-tah-bo, simple, kindly, superstitious as
are all his people, was dumfounded by this action of the woman who had
domineered his camp for so long--whose strong, hard, compelling spirit
had shaped the course of his own and Wen-dah-ban's lives.
As Nee-tah-wee-gan remained prostrate, moaning and rocking back and
forth, the man and the boy glanced at each other in bewilderment.
"I believe you dreamed the truth," Pe-tah-bo said in an awed voice.
"_Kah-win!_" Nee-tah-wee-gan screamed as she sprang to her feet. "The
whole dream was a lie. He did not have a white mother. I am his mother,
and he is an Indian. He always will be."
"But he dreamed this, the seventh night after he had begun to fast,"
Pe-tah-bo protested.
He and his people had accepted the portent of the fasting dream for
centuries and never before had he heard such heresy.
But Nee-tah-wee-gan had regained her self-control. She squatted beside
the fire and resumed her cooking.
"And what will he put in his _pind-gee-go-san_?" she asked scornfully.
"Should he kill a white man and dry his skin and carry that as a charm?"
"This is my _pind-gee-go-san_!" Wen-dah-ban exclaimed as he struck his
chest with all the dramatic fervor of the Ojibwa. "Here in my heart I
will carry that dream always. I need no other charm."
He stood before them, his eyes burning with the brilliancy of his
vision, his voice clear and high. He had fallen easily into the flowery
phrases of the poetic people among whom he lived. Weak from his fast,
seeing in his dream a fulfillment of the longing which had possessed
him ever since his visit to Fort Kenogami the previous summer, his
words were uttered with a fervor and an assurance which impressed the
simple-minded Pe-tah-bo and left him staring dumbly.
But Nee-tah-wee-gan only glanced scornfully at the boy, her features
twisted in an evil grin, and then resumed her cooking.
A few days later Pe-tah-bo prepared for his annual journey to the fort.
When he was ready to depart Wen-dah-ban, carrying the bundle of furs he
had caught in the previous winter, walked toward the canoe.
"I am going with you," he announced.
Pe-tah-bo glanced uneasily at Nee-tah-wee-gan, for he had learned to
dread her outbursts.
"Go!" she cried scornfully. "Tell the white people you dreamed you are
one of them and hear them laugh at you. Go and learn that the wind
whispered lies in your ears while you were sleeping the fasting sleep.
Go and learn that you are only an Indian, the son of Nee-tah-wee-gan."
Wen-dah-ban listened without comment and when she had finished he
stepped into the bow of the canoe. Pe-tah-bo took the stern and they
paddled away. As they rounded the first point the boy looked back.
Nee-tah-wee-gan was crouched beside the fire staring at them.
It was thus that Wen-dah-ban left his childhood home. Despite his
mother's farewell he was in ecstacy, yet he said nothing to Pe-tah-bo
of what was in his heart. Not only had he learned to keep his thoughts
to himself but he could not have explained the high resolve which
gripped him, the urge which had sent him forth, an unkempt savage, to
the home of the whites.
Soon after his arrival at Kenogami he followed Pe-tah-bo to the trade
shop and handed out his furs to be graded as the other's were. But when
Merton Layard announced the total, his eyes did not turn at once to the
shelves as those of hunters always do. Neither did he make that first
purchase of all Ojibwa boys, a rifle.
"I will not trade now," he said simply.
He turned and went out, leaving the manager staring after him.
"In fifteen years I've never seen that happen," Merton said to Emile
Finlayson, his half-breed assistant.
"It is Nee-tah-wee-gan's boy," Emile replied as if the statement
explained everything.
Being a good fur trader, Merton knew all the gossip about
Nee-tah-wee-gan but the explanation was not enough.
"Strange lad," he said and went on with the trading.
It was the busiest time of the year for the manager and he did not
think of Wen-dah-ban again, except to tell his wife of the incident,
until after the fur brigade had departed for Fort Bruce, the
headquarters post. Pe-tah-bo was one of the crew and the boy remained
at Kenogami. The day after the three York boats, carrying the entire
winter's catch of fur, had departed, Wen-dah-ban entered the trade shop.
"You have come to trade," Merton greeted him.
"No," Wen-dah-ban answered. "I do not need anything now."
Merton stared in amazement.
"What!" he said. "An Indian boy who does not need anything?"
"But I am not an Indian."
It was not a protest nor was it a declaration. Rather it was an
announcement as if of a purpose. He stood there, a typical child of the
wigwams, in shapeless moccasins, hatless, dirty, his scanty, ill-made
clothing hanging grotesquely, and yet there was something in his eyes
which gave the statement dignity.
For Wen-dah-ban's eyes were not the eyes of a native. They were clear
and unafraid. Merton searched them for the shadows and the furtiveness
of the aboriginal but they stared back steadily, glowing with a high
resolve.
"I am not an Indian," the boy repeated, "and I have come to live with
my own people."
"But Nee-tah-wee-gan is your mother."
"Her father was a Frenchman and my father was a white man. The white
blood in me told me to come and live as the white man lives."
For a moment Merton studied him. There was none of the demanding
insolence of the half-breed, presuming on a mixed heritage. In his
years as a trader he had learned how to handle that, but this boy
puzzled him.
"How do you expect to begin?" he asked kindly.
"I will work for the great company."
"But what can you do?"
"I will learn to do anything."
"You are too young to be a tripper. You don't know a word of English
and----"
"But I can learn!" the boy broke in passionately. "My dream told me
that I can be a white man."
"Your dream?" Merton repeated.
"Yes. This spring I fasted. You know it is the time when a boy becomes
a man. And the seventh night I dreamed that I am white. Before that I
thought much of it, even when I was little. But now I know. Something
within told me that my dream was true. If I were an Indian would I feel
that way? Would I wish to leave the hunting camp if I had only dreamed?
At the fasting time the heart does not lie."
Though he had clothed his impassioned outburst in flowery Ojibwa,
Merton was more than startled. The boy had spoken in the only language
he knew, but the mental processes back of the words were different--a
fact overshadowing in significance the strange longing harbored by a
wigwam-bred child.
The post manager stared for a moment in thoughtful silence. The boy
carried a smoke smell as strong as any Indian's but he did not have
the typical Indian's hair or features. And never had Merton seen an
Ojibwa's eyes glow as did Wen-dah-ban's. He recalled, too, all the
gossip about Nee-tah-wee-gan and her strange action in keeping the boy
hidden until at last he had run away. The whole thing spelled mystery
but above all there was something gripping and compelling in the brave,
confident declaration, something which convinced his heart, against the
knowledge gleaned in fifteen years of fur trading.
"My boy," Merton exclaimed in English, "I believe you are white!"