West Wind's Boy

Nanabosho, son of West Wind and Winona

Nanabosho, raised by grandmother Nokomis

Nanabosho, little white rabbit, protector of his people

Legend links the mischievous guardian of the Ojibwa to at least two landforms that bear his name on the Ontario shore of Lake Superior. Sleeping Giant in the eponymously named Provincial Park is said to be Nanabosho, turned to stone by the Great Spirit for creating a storm that killed two mining harbingers who had been tipped off about a silver deposit Nanabosho had hidden in the area. The giant is a towering plateau on the Sibley Peninsula in the northeastern corner of the lake. In places the cliffs soar to 700 feet above the water.

Across the lake is dark jagged island in the surf of Superior that is said to be where Nanabosho rested (photo) after jumping from one shore to another. There are two holes in the solid rock.

My first night out hiking the Coastal Trail in Lake Superior Provincial Park was spent camped in a tiny cove that gave view of the island. For a better view I crawled along the slabby littoral, swinging on cedars and leaping rock to rock, passed a point and walked easily into an even smaller harbor. My trip was young, but already sticky thoughts were snaking like spider’s webs across the trail. I asked Nanabosho to cure me from this anxious desolation.

Then I saw several cedar waxwings flitting from driftwood to shrub to stone. In between jumps they were glancing with small bird eyes at the sun as if it were a movie screen. Our star dropped behind the island and the water rippled blue splashing yellow; the sky ached pink. When the sun passed behind the second hole in the rock an orange star flashed and I made a before returning to camp.

On trail in the morning, instead of seeing a thimbleberry leaf and worrying about soreness in my ankle I saw its verdancy and thin straight veins. When two ravens cawed back and forth from fir perches, I thought not of uncertain future, but the oily black of their feathers and the great density of boreal forest. “CAAWwww,” I sounded throatily. One of them replied. I did it again and the same one responded. Unaware of the meaning, I kept going.