Crazy-White-Man (Sha-ga-na-she Wa-du-kee) by Richard Morenus

Author:Richard Morenus [Morenus, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, Rich & Famous, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, History, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781786254443
Google: _sNvCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2015-11-06T05:22:22+00:00

WINDIGO

THAT WINTER FOR the first time I began to creep up on a little profit from the typewriter. The pressure of writing against deadlines was gone. One lesson I apparently had learned well was to measure time in terms of seasons of the year instead of by the second hand of a watch. Even on my trips to town no one ever mentioned the date of the month. The day of the week or the season of the year was a close enough gauge of time. On one occasion when I had forgotten to cross off the dates of the month on my wall calendar I learned one day, when I was in town and checked the date I was living by with the actual one shown on the post-office wall, that I was two weeks of! and it hadn’t made a particle of difference. The life of the north was regulated more by the weather than by the dates on a calendar.

My only consideration of time was the amount of it available for purposes other than physical work. I had none to waste nor any in which to experiment, so what writing I did had to be commercially marketable. So I stayed with the simplest form of expression—dialogue for radio dramatizations. About all that could be said in its favor was that there were people who paid for it.

Many of my friends were suggesting in their letters to me that I gather material for a series of articles about the north or about the people I was meeting. I felt then that the less than three years I had lived there had hardly given me a proper acquaintance with the country to write with the feeling of intimacy that I felt was indispensable in telling a true story. There were so many, many things I had yet to learn and things I wanted to know. Things that no book I had yet seen had been able to show me; things that I should have to know far more about than I did before I would attempt a description with the minimum amount of fiction. I had done one or two articles which were published by MacLean’s Magazine, and Scott Young, then nonfiction editor, had given me considerable encouragement toward continuing with a series. But my writing had to be as commercially foolproof as possible, and speculative writing, as such, would have to wait. In the meantime I would continue collecting my facts and data.

Among the things I wanted to run down and learn something about were the mide-wi-win and the windigo. The mide-wi-win are the Indian medicine men. The wind through the trees is the windigo, the sigh of restless souls. The waves of the waters are the unquiet spirits. These also are windigo.

I had been thinking of these things particularly one evening that spring, shortly after break-up. It may have been coincidence that I heard the drums at that time. I had gone to bed, and the night air outside was still and quiet.

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