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The net was held between them; and its spirit, or oki, was harangued by one of the chiefs, who exhorted him to do his part in furnishing the tribe with food. Besides ascribing life and intelligence to the material world, animate and inanimate, the Indian believes in supernatural existences, known among the Algonquins as Manitous, and among the Iroquois and Hurons as Okies or Otkons.
Even the Iroquois Indian, born without fear, stoic, indifferent to physical pain, even he wrapped his blanket closer about his head, held his pipe pendent in nerveless fingers, and softly chanted an appeal to the Okies of his forebears, forgetting the God of the black-robed fathers in his fear of never again seeing the peaceful hills and valleys of Onondaga or tasting the sweet waters of familiar springs.
Objects which the missionaries possessed inspired awe in the savages; a handmill for grinding corn, a clock, a magnifying lens, and a picture of the Last Judgment were supposed to be okies of the white man. For a time eager audiences crowded the little cabin.
He was, he said, not a man, but an oki, a spirit, or, as the priests rendered it, a demon, and had dwelt with other okies under the earth, when the whim seized him to become a man. Therefore he ascended to the upper world, in company with a female spirit. They hid beside a path, and, when they saw a woman passing, they entered her womb.
The Manitou of the Algonquins, and the Okies or Otkons of the Hurons and Iroquois were not always superior, mysterious beings endowed with supernatural powers, like the Algonquin Manabozho, the Great Hare, the king of all animals; or a deified hero, like Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, and Glooscap, the favourite of Micmac legends.
The chief man of the household treated them at first with the decencies of Indian hospitality; but when he saw them kneeling in the litter and ashes at their devotions, his suppressed fears found vent, and he began a loud harangue, addressed half to them and half to the Indians. "Now, what are these okies doing?
Then there was his daughter's hiding in winter to make what she called her retreats, and her proposing to take a new name from some of the priest's okies or saint-spirits, and to be called "Sister." "I will never call my own child 'Sister," vowed Madockawando. "I could be a better Christian myself, if Father Petit had not put spells on her."
In the following year , when Brebeuf and Chaumonot went among the Neutrals, they found Huron emissaries there inciting the Neutrals to kill the priests. These Hurons, while themselves fearing to murder the powerful okies of the French, as they regarded the black-robes, desired that the Neutrals should put them to death. But no such tragedy found place as yet.
Their country was full of pretended maniacs, who, to propitiate their guardian spirits, or okies, and acquire the mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved stark naked through the villages, scattering the brands of the lodge-fires, and upsetting everything in their way. The river Niagara was at this time, 1640, well known to the Jesuits, though none of them had visited it.
The Host was raised aloft; the worshippers kneeled. Then their rough voices joined in the hymn of praise, Te Deum laudamus; and then a volley of their guns proclaimed the triumph of the faith to the okies, the manitous, and all the brood of anomalous devils who had reigned with undisputed sway in these wild realms of darkness.
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