On another night, after I tried but at last grew stumped for conversation, my father remembered that of course an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan, thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings. The crane, the bear, the loon, the catfish, lynx, kingfisher, caribou, muskrat—all of these animals and others in various tribal divisions, including the eagle, the marten, the deer, the wolf—people were part of these clans and were thus governed by special relationships with one another and with the animals. This was in fact, said my father, the first system of Ojibwe law. The clan system punished and rewarded; it dictated marriages and regulated commerce; it told which animals a person could hunt and which to appease, which would have pity on the doodem or a fellow being of that clan, which would carry messages up to the Creator over to the spirit world, down through the layers of the earth or across the lodge to a sleeping relative. There were many instances right in our own family, in fact, as you well know, he said to the crease in the blankets that was my mother, your own great-aunt was saved by a turtle. As you remember, she was of the turtle, or the mikinaak, clan. At the age of ten she was put out to fast on a small island. There she stayed one early spring, four days and four nights with her face blackened, utterly defenseless, waiting for the spirits to become her friends and adopt her. On the fifth day when her parents did not return, she knew something was wrong. She broke the paste of saliva that sealed her thirsty mouth, drank lake water, and ate a patch of strawberries that had tormented her. She made a fire, for although she was not allowed to use it on her fast, she carried with her a flint and steel. Then she began to live on that island. She made a fish trap and lived off fish. The place was remote, but still she was surprised at how the time passed, one moon, two, and no one came to get her. She knew by then that something very bad had happened. She also knew that the fish would soon retreat to another part of the lake for the summer and she would starve. So she determined to swim to the mainland, twenty miles away. She set off on a fair morning with the wind at her back. For a long time the waves helped her along, and she swam well enough, even though she had been weakened by her meager diet. Then the wind changed and blew directly against her. Clouds lowered and she was lashed by a cold driving rain. Her arms and legs were heavy as swollen logs, she thought that she would die, and in her struggle called out for help. At that moment she felt something rise beneath her. It was a giant and a very old mishiikenh, one of those snapping turtles science tells us are unchanged for over 150 million years—a form of life frightful but perfect. This creature swam below her, breaking her way through the water, nudging her to the surface when her strength gave out, allowing her to cling to its shell when she was exhausted, until they came to shore. She waded out and turned to thank it. The turtle watched her silently, its eyes uncanny yellow stars, before it sank away. Then she found her brothers and sisters. It was true about the disaster. They had been laid low by the devastations of the great influenza—as with all pandemics this struck reservations hardest. Their parents were dead and there was no way to know where their sister had been left off, in addition to which people were afraid to catch the deadly illness and had moved away from them in haste so that they, too, the children, were living alone.
There are many stories of children who were forced to live alone, my father went on, including those stories from antiquity in which infants were nursed by wolves. But there are also stories told from the earliest histories of western civilization of humans rescued by animals. One of my favorites was related by Herodotus and concerns Arion of Methymna, the famous harp player and inventor of the dithyrambic measure. This Arion got a notion to