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and he tightened his grip on the gun. He waited.
    He stood that way for a long time, until the night was quiet save for the rhythmic chirping of the crickets.

Three
    Sault Ste. Marie was a garrison town set between wide, white-flecked straits to the north and a swampy cedar thicket to the south. Elisha and Mr. Brush arrived at noon on the
Catherine Ann
and took rooms at the Johnston Hotel. They were to stay four days, to purchase supplies and await Professor Tiffin’s arrival. That first afternoon the boy sat on the hotel porch, sipping ginger beer and sketching the half-breeds and Natives that passed on the muddy road. The edge of the white world, Elisha marveled. He could not stop grinning. It seemed impossible that they were but three days’ voyage from Detroit.
    By dusk he had summoned enough courage to leave the hotel, so he started past a mercantile and Baptist mission and bowling parlor, a leather goods shop, a saloon with shattered windows. The buildings were sturdy but in poor repair, the paint peeling and windows grimy. Outside a shop called Indian Curiosities, a bald, elderly Chippewa lay sleeping in the dirt. He was dressed in a breechclout and filthy broadcloth shirt. A string of saliva ran from his slack mouth. The sole full-blood Native in Newell, Joseph Gooden, lived in a white frame house and dressed in store-bought clothes, attended Baptist services every Sunday, though Elisha supposed he couldn’t properly be called Native anymore. A town Native, perhaps, as opposed to the true Natives found here. Two species of the same race.
    He continued through town to Fort Brady. The picket gate was closed; a bored-looking sentry leaned from a blockhouse window and called, “Tomorrow at sunup!” Elisha waved to the man then followed the fort’s perimeter to its western side, where an encampment of shanties and bark lodges were laid out, Native and half-breed women tending cookfires as children ran shrieking along the water’s edge, a thin yellow dog darting among them. A man’s laughter rose then trailed away. The air smelled deliciously smoky. Elisha slowed his pace to survey the women: they were tall and slender, dark-haired but fair, handsome in a coarse, foreign way. A different species again from the town women in Detroit.
    Some ways past the encampment Elisha came to a low hill topped with tiny bark houses. What in the world, he thought. He kneeled before one of the dwellings, then froze as if gripped by icy hands. They were Chippewa gravesites. The houses were meant to shield the graves from scavenging animals. Elisha stuffed his fists in his trouser pockets and hurried back toward town. In the slaty light Fort Brady’s pickets loomed like castle walls; above them the garrison flagpole was a black needle. He thought he had never been more grateful for such a sight.
    The next morning Elisha rose early, gathered some biscuits and cheese and his notebook and Professor Tiffin’s pamphlet, then set off to explore the swampland south of town. To his disappointment he recognized every birdcall: mostly warblers and brown creepers, a few cedar waxwings. He paused for lunch in a mossy clearing and opened Tiffin’s pamphlet at random.

    For example, we learn in Chippewa legend that the god of sleep is called
Weeng,
and has numerous tiny, invisible emissaries armed with
puggamaugons
(war clubs). At night these invisible spirits sneak into bedchambers and search for lying-down persons. On finding one, they ascend his forehead and smite the skull, thus inducing sleep.

    Readers will doubtless recognize
an identical image
in Pope’s creation of gnomes, in his
Rape of the Lock.
More interestingly, we find similar apparitions in the
hosheewa
of Mongol myth, as the esteemed Professor Linden of Harvard has noted in his
Survey and Notes on Ancient Mythologies.
In fact, if one inspects the known corpus of Native mythology, with an eye toward similarity of image and plot, one finds a great share of myths similar to our