Gichi

“Hey, look, money!” One of Jesse’s friends reached towards the brass memorial plaque bolted to the knee-high chunk of rock. It was littered with various coins. 

Jesse caught his hand. “Don’t take those. People left them to pay their respects.” 

“At last don’t take the pennies,” Jake said, “or the lake monster’ll get you!” 

“What monster?” 

“The mishipeshu.” 

“Bless you!” 

Everyone laughed. 

“Or you could say gichi-anami’e-bizhiw.” Jake shrugged. “Same animal.” 

“I know ‘gichi’ means ‘great’,” Jesse ventured. “And ‘bizhiw’ means ‘lynx’.” 

Jake nodded. “The translations I’ve seen are ‘the great lynx’ or ‘the fabulous night panther’.”

“So what is it? Just a giant cat?“

“Some Indian myth. It’s like a mountain lion, but it’s got feathers instead of fur, or else it’s got fish scales made of copper, and its paws are like hands. It has deer antlers or hodag horns on its head. It lives in the Great Lakes—or maybe just Lake Superior, I don’t know—and it guards the copper. It can make storms, waves, rapids, and whirlpools, and it can crack the ice in the winter so people fall through and die. If a dead body is found with white sand in the mouth, that means it was killed by the water panther. So, at least leave the pennies alone,“ Jake concluded. 

“You shouldn’t mess with any of the money,” Jesse insisted. 

Jake pointed at one of the shinier coins, and looked around dramatically at the group. “Maybe we should at least take this one, so the thunderbirds don’t come down here!“

“Thunderbirds?” everyone but Jesse demanded obligingly. 

“Yeah, big, giant birds that make thunder when they flap, and lightning when they blink! If they see their lightning reflected in a mirror or any other shiny thing, they’ll think it’s one of their kin, and come down to meet them. What’s more, thunderbirds are the sworn enemies of the water panther! Storms on the lake mean they’re fighting each other!” Jake lifted his arms like outstretched wings. 

Jesse and his friends ducked as a terrific bang of thunder seemed to shake the ground under their feet. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard the nickels, dimes, and green-splotched pennies rattle on the metal plate of the memorial. 

One of Jesse’s friends swore. “I wonder where that lightning hit.” 

“Should we leave, since a storm’s coming in?” someone asked. 

Jesse frowned. “But we didn’t get down to the lake yet. Maybe it’ll pass.” 

“I’d rather get out of here and go find some food than hike all the way down there and maybe get rained on, or get hit by lightning.” 

Everyone but Jesse agreed that that wouldn’t be any fun, and going in search of food was a better idea. 

They all piled into the cars, telling Jesse to text them later if he wanted to meet them at a bar for dinner. 

He kept his hand raised in a frozen farewell until the vehicles were out of sight, then lowered it with a sigh. 

Jesse and his friends (though he was now questioning that title for those particular people) had been the only visitors to the Heath M. Robinson Memorial Cut River Bridge roadside park. Now, he was completely alone. 

Oh, well. He still wanted to go down to Lake Michigan, even if they didn’t.

He ambled down the paved path as more thunder boomed and lightning flickered.

As he started down the cement stairs, raindrops started to fall. Dark spots on the hard gray surface beneath Jesse’s feet quickly multiplied. 

Then the rain really started coming down. He stepped under the edge of the bridge, but wind was blowing rain under the overhang, so he moved all the way to the middle, by the green arched door with the nameplate T. Troll.

The big vertical wood planks were scored and scarred with countless names and initials, left both by pocketknives and pens. Jesse wondered why so many people would vandalize this one spot. Maybe, like him, people felt slightly creeped out by the troll door, and put their name on it in defiance of the T. Troll who they sincerely hoped did not exist. He personally couldn’t help thinking of Tom the troll from The Hobbit. Jesse shuddered at the idea of a big, ugly man-eating monster jerking the door open and grabbing him. 

“No such thing as monsters,” he tried to convince himself. His voice sounded odd bouncing against the stone abutment of the bridge and the green-painted steel girders above. The rain beyond was a wash of white noise.

Wanting to prove to himself that his unease was totally unfounded, Jesse sat down with his back against the door. 

His head bobbed, and he realized he was dozing off. Jesse shifted. Once he was slightly more comfortable, with his head cradled in one side of the door frame, and his legs stretched out diagonally, he folded his arms and listened to the rain. Occasionally, a car rushed over him on the deck of the bridge with a traveling rumble and ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom. 

The tree leaves rustled like living paper in the raindrops and wind. 

Thunder growled like faraway drums, not loud or sudden enough to startle Jesse. 

Petrichor—a smell released by rain striking soil—infused the air.

Jesse’s eyes closed. 

They opened again with a jerk. 

There’d been some noise…maybe a semi truck passing overhead? 

Jesse listened hard. The wind had dropped, but rain was still coming down. The light beyond the overhang was a muted, pastel blue-gray-green, leaning just a little more towards green. The smell of petrichor was still easily discernible in the air. 

Then Jesse noticed the wet marks on the cement, beyond his sneakered feet. 

The marks were a bit smudged, as if whatever had made them was dragging slightly rather than high stepping. Despite the smudging, they still looked a bit like…handprints.

And they seemed fresh. 

What had left these? He felt a shiver up his spine.

He was no hunter or tracker. Who was he to think the wet tracks on the pavement looked odd? It didn’t matter. Something or someone had walked past while he slept. Not a big deal. Whatever had gone past might have woken him up in its passing. Maybe it was a deer. 

Despite this self-scolding, Jesse leaned forward and looked to the right, where he’d come down from the parking lot, and where the tracks seemed to lead. 

A shape was on the paved path, seemingly having come down the stairs from the rest stop area. 

It advanced on him, and he tried frantically to figure out what the thing was. Not a person—too short for that, and the wrong shape. 

It came on at a steady pace. Already it was under the abutment.

No. 

The thing didn’t even glance at Jesse as it stalked fluidly past. He barely had time to glimpse the little spikes of antler, like on a nubber buck, protruding from its head. The yellow-orange armor-like scales rattled faintly with the movement of the legs. The long tail waved like a cat’s. It was past him, it was out in the rain again, and then it was out of sight down the steps to his left.

A gichi-anami’e-bizhiw. A great lynx, or a water panther, or…a cat-lizard. 

It couldn’t be real. 

But there was the dark splotched trail of dripping water left behind, and the indistinct footprints that looked almost the way he imagined a raccoon track. 

Jesse pulled his smartphone out and checked how much battery he had left. 

31%. And two bars. 

That thing’s body was shaped like a cougar’s. Cougars could kill you. 

But he’d read that cougars didn’t usually kill people. 

Jesse scrambled to his feet and took off to his left. 

Rain got into his eyes once he left the shelter of the bridge. It has been so warm out earlier, he hadn’t wanted any kind of hoodie over his t-shirt. Since he had no hood, Jesse wiped the rain out of his eyes, then held his left hand over them as a visor. 

The wooden staircase was wet and slippery, and he couldn’t move nearly as fast as he wanted to. Ahead, through the gray curtain, Jesse could see the thing lower down, getting farther away. 

The steps went down and down and down, like the reverse of the stairs of Cirith Ungol. That comparison almost made Jesse pause. 

Almost, but not quite. Jesse barrelled on as quickly as he dared. His sneakers thumped against the drenched wooden planks with a quiet squeak repeated over and over. The rain soaked into his clothes and he started to shiver. Step, step, step, step, over and over and over. Endless. Timeless. Like a dream.

Jesse stumbled and pitched forward. For one chest-aching second, he braced for the stinging slap of the slick, wet boards against his hands and a headlong head-first rush down the stairs, penguin-style. 

He gasped with relief as he found himself on his hands and knees, his fingers burrowed into sandy soil and slimy dead leaves, pebbles pressing into his knees through his jeans. He hadn’t even noticed he was coming to the bottom. 

His feet churned and slipped as he took off again, peering through the trees that were nowhere near as big as the ones up on the hill closer to the Cut River Bridge. He came to the little wooden plank bridge with sturdy handrails, painted dark by the tears of the heavens, and raced across it; the dark shape was in front of him. Jesse nearly collided with the wooden post set in the middle of the trail to keep off-road vehicles from using the bridge. 

The green waves of Lake Michigan were washing gently on the sand. The gichi-animi’e-bizhiw was hugely obvious as it padded across the beach towards the water. It was making a beeline towards a rock mostly hidden in the surf. 

The rock moved, and Jesse skidded to a stop. 

Something heaved out of the water. It had a spreading rack of deer-looking antlers, and the body was greenish, the color of the Statue of Liberty. 

Jesse yanked his phone from his pocket, unsure if it would record anything in the rain; it had no case, but he was willing to risk wrecking it to get this on video, or at least a picture. 

On the tiny screen, he saw a tiny image of the smaller gichi-anami’e-bizhiw which he had chased down the stairs wading into the surf, directly towards the bigger one. 

Later, at the bar, everyone peered at Jesse’s phone screen as he played the video again and again. 

“See, that’s the little one,” Jesse explained, pointing to the shape moving deeper into the water. “And that’s the big one, I think it’s an adult and the smaller one is a juvenile. The little one that I was following is a yellow-copper color, like a mug or jewelry you find in a gift shop. The bigger one is green, so its scales must be oxidized copper, which means it’s older.” 

Jake was squinting and tilting his head. “Hm.” 

Jesse could see them all glancing at each other, waiting for someone to say “I see it!” and explain the right way to look, like with an optical illusion. 

“Right there! The big one’s antlers are right there.” He paused the video and pointed at the things he could see so clearly.

“I think that’s a piece of a tree,” Jake said finally. “It’s soaking wet from floating in the lake, so it looks weird. The part sticking up is a branch.” 

“You’re the one who described it to us,” Jesse said, setting down his phone. “Why can’t you see it?” 

“The mishipeshu is just a myth,” Jake said with a shrug. “I don’t get why you’re suddenly trying to prank us about having seen it.” 

“Well, then, look at this.” Jesse snatched up his phone and flicked through his pictures, then thrust it at his friends again. 

“The memorial plaque,” someone observed. 

“But now the pennies are gone!” Jesse proclaimed triumphantly. “ I took this after I came back up to the parking lot.”

Some of them chuckled awkwardly, and they all turned back to their food. 

Jesse watched the video one more time. 

He could see it right there. The little one, and the big one, disappearing into the lake. 

Two gichi-anami’e-bizhiws, heading back north to their home in Gichi Gumi.