Misi-ginebig

The trail in the wet sand was too wide for anything that belonged there. It came up out of the lake, crossed to the empty lodge, and turned back to the water, one deep dragging furrow with no footprints beside it. The man who read it knew the mark, and he knew what it meant. While he had been away, the Great Serpent had climbed out of the deep and taken the boy who lived with him, and had carried him back down into the cold. There was only one creature in that country that left a track like that.

Misi-ginebig is the Great Serpent, the horned monster of the deep water, and its name in Ojibwe says exactly that and nothing more ornamental: great snake. It belongs to the Anishinaabe and, under a scatter of related names, to Algonquian peoples across the northern woodlands and the Great Lakes. It lives where the light fails, in the black bottoms of lakes and the still holes of slow rivers, and it is counted among the manitous of the world below, the powers of water and earth whose dealings with people run mostly to harm. Where it stirs, the water answers. A flat calm buckles into standing waves; a channel that ran smooth all summer opens a whirlpool; the spring ice that held yesterday gives way underfoot today.

To see it whole is rare in the stories, because it prefers to be a shape half-guessed under the surface, but the pieces are consistent. It is a serpent grown past all natural size, longer than a canoe and heavy through the coils, and its scales are said to shine like beaten copper, the sacred metal of the Lake Superior country that the water powers were held to own. On its head it carries horns, curved like a stag’s or a bison’s, and its tail is weighty enough to loop around a swimmer or slap the lake into a sudden squall. In some tellings it has short legs or fins; in others it is pure snake. The Great Serpent and the Great Lynx, Mishibizhiw, were once two separate manitous, the horned snake and the horned water cat, but over generations the Anishinaabe let the two run together, until the serpent shape and the lynx shape became two faces of the same terrible master of the depths.

Whether Misi-ginebig is one being or many depends on who is telling it. Sometimes it is a single ancient serpent with a lair and a name; sometimes it is a whole race of underwater horned snakes, coiled in every deep lake in the country. What holds across the versions is its place in the order of things. The Anishinaabe world is split between the powers above and the powers below, and the two are matched enemies. The Thunderbirds rule the upper air, the storm, and the lightning; the horned serpents and the water lynx rule the depths, the ice, and the drowning pull of the current. They hate each other without end, and that hatred is not a flaw in the world but the thing that keeps it standing, since neither side can finally win. When lightning strikes the surface of a lake, it is the Thunderbird stooping on the serpent, and the serpent diving for the bottom to escape it.

For the people who lived on and around the water, this was never a story told only for pleasure. It was a hazard to be managed. Travelers setting out across a big lake would offer tobacco to the water before they pushed off, a payment to the powers below for a whole hull and a safe landing. Children were kept back from certain shores and certain deep, still places where the serpents were thought to lie. Drownings, swamped canoes, a body that went under and did not come up again, all of these were the Great Serpent collecting. It ate people. That is the plain center of the thing, under all the copper and the horns.

Its most famous appearance is also its death, in the story the Ojibwe tell of Nanabozho, the transformer who shaped much of the world. When the Great Serpent seized and devoured the young cousin who shared his lodge, Nanabozho followed the drag-mark to a gloomy lake the people came to call the Lake of Spirits, and there he set an ambush. He waited on the shore through the heat of the day, and when the serpents rose to bask, he stood among them disguised as a broken stump, so still that even their watchful guards took him for dead wood. Then he drew his bow and drove an arrow into the Great Serpent’s heart. The dying monster convulsed, and the water rose behind it. It came in a wall, over the forests and the hills, chasing Nanabozho up the highest mountain and up the tallest pine on it, until the whole old world was drowned and only a handful of floating creatures survived to help him raise the land again from a little mud. The serpent that had taken one boy answered with a flood that took everything.

Its powers are the powers of the water itself, absolute within its element. It commands the waves, the whirlpools, the rapids, the undertow, and the rotten ice; it is master of the lesser snakes and the creatures of the lakebed; and it holds the copper, and with the copper a dangerous current of strength that a person daring and respectful enough might be granted rather than killed by. Its limits are cut to the exact shape of its enemy. It belongs to the world below and cannot hold the surface for long against the sky. The Thunderbirds are its match and its hunters, and their lightning is the one weapon that sends it fleeing to the deep every time. It is nearly untouchable in the black water at the bottom and desperately exposed the moment it climbs toward the air. Even Nanabozho could only kill it by coming to its own shore and waiting there, on foot, for it to leave the water it ruled.

One serpent, many Algonquian names. The being is not confined to Ojibwe country. Cree speakers know it as Misi-kinepikw, from kinepik, snake, and misi, great, which is the same plain compound as the Ojibwe name and carries nothing more ornamental than that. Oji-Cree, Shawnee and Abenaki forms sit beside it in the same language family. These are one word travelling between related languages rather than a roster of separate monsters, and the traditions that use them keep the serpent in the same place: the deepest water, and the enemy of the thunderbirds above.

The horn, and the price of taking it. In the Cree and boreal tellings the serpent is above all the keeper of a horn. A scraping of it counted among the strongest medicines a hunter or a healer could carry, a substance said to draw game, to cure, or to turn a person’s luck. Getting it meant taking a shaving from a living monster that ruled the water it lay in, and the stories of that theft are tight with tension, because the serpent felt the blade and came after what was stolen. The same understanding governs ordinary travel. A traveller kneeling where a portage begins lets a pinch of tobacco fall into the black eddy before shouldering the canoe and walking the long trail around the white water, rather than run a rapid owned by something that does not forgive an unpaid debt. Power of that kind was never free and never safe.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Misi-kinepikw the same being as Misi-ginebig?

Yes. Misi-ginebig is the Ojibwe and Oji-Cree form and Misi-kinepikw the Cree form of one Algonquian compound meaning “great snake.” Shawnee Msi-kinepikwa and Abenaki Gitaskog belong to the same set. They name one being across neighbouring languages rather than several, so this site covers them on a single page.

What is Misi-ginebig?

Misi-ginebig, whose name means “Great Serpent,” is the great horned underwater serpent of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and broader Algonquian tradition in the Great Lakes region. It is a water manitou, one of the powers of the world below, and it lurks in the deepest lakes and rivers where it drowns and devours the careless. It is feared as one of the most dangerous beings of the northern waters.

What does the Great Serpent look like?

Misi-ginebig is described as an enormous serpent, far longer and thicker than any natural snake, with scales that gleam like beaten copper and curved horns like those of a stag or bison on its head. Its heavy tail can coil around a swimmer or lash the surface of a lake into a storm. Some accounts also give it short legs or fins, while others describe it as a pure snake.

What is the difference between Misi-ginebig and Mishibizhiw?

Misi-ginebig is the great horned serpent and Mishibizhiw is the Great Lynx or underwater panther, and the two were originally separate manitous in Anishinaabe belief. Over time their identities blurred, so that the serpent form and the cat form came to be seen as two faces of the same underwater power. Both dwell in the deep water, prey on people, and stand opposed to the Thunderbirds of the sky.

How was Misi-ginebig killed?

In the Ojibwe story, the transformer Nanabozho killed the Great Serpent to avenge the young cousin it had seized and devoured. He tracked it to a lake, disguised himself as a broken stump on the shore, and shot an arrow into its heart when it came up to bask. As the serpent died it thrashed and unleashed a great flood that drowned the old world, from which the land was later rebuilt.

Why is Misi-ginebig the enemy of the Thunderbird?

In Anishinaabe cosmology the world is balanced between the powers above and the powers below, and the Thunderbirds of the sky and the horned serpents of the deep are matched, eternal opponents. Their hostility keeps either force from overwhelming the world rather than being a simple contest of good against evil. When lightning strikes the water, it is understood as the Thunderbird attacking the serpent and driving it back down into the depths.

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Mishibizhiw, Thunderbird, Horned Serpent, Wendigo, Piasa, Champ, Ogopogo, Bunyip, Kelpie