Ojibwa
ONCE Shingebiss, the duck, lived all alone in his wigwam on the shore of a lake. It was winter and very cold. Ice had frozen over the top of the water. Shingebiss had but four logs of wood in his wigwam, but each log would burn one month and there were but four winter months.[17]
[17] And at night Kabibonokka
To the lodge came, wild and wailing,
Heaped the snow in drifts about it,
Shouted down into the smoke-flue,
Shook the lodge poles in his fury,
Flapped the curtain of the doorway,
Shingebis, the diver, feared not,
Shingebis, the diver, cared not;
Four great logs had he for firewood,
One for each moon of the winter,
And for food the fishes served him,
By his blazing fire he sat there,
Warm and merry, eating, laughing,
Singing, “O Kabibonokka,
You are but my fellow mortal!”
—Hiawatha
From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Picture Writing. An Ojibwa Meda Song.
Shingebiss had no fear of the cold. He would go out on the coldest day. He would seek for places where rushes and flags grew through the ice. He pulled them up and dived through the broken ice for fish. Thus he had plenty of food. Thus he went to his wigwam dragging long strings of fish behind him on the ice.
North West noticed this. He said, “Shingebiss is a strange man. I will see if I cannot get the better of him.”
North West shook his rattle and the wind blew colder. Snow drifted high. But Shingebiss did not let his fire go out. In the worst storms he continued going out, seeking for the weak places in the ice where the roots grew.