The Mishipeshu: The Horned Water-Panther Beneath the Great Lakes
On a cliff-face at Agawa Rock, where the granite drops sheer into the cold water of Lake Superior, there is painted in red ochre a creature that the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes have honoured and feared for uncounted generations: a great cat-like beast, horned, its back and long tail ridged with spines or plates like a saw, spikes down its spine — the Mishipeshu, the "Great Lynx," the underwater panther, master and monster of the deep waters. It is one of the most important beings in the whole cosmology of the Great Lakes nations, and one of the most precisely conceived. It has the body and snarling head of a cat — a lynx or cougar grown vast — but armoured with the scales of a serpent or fish , crowned with the horns of power, and ridged all down its spine and its enormous tail with copper spines; and it dwells in the deepest and coldest water — the depths of Superior above all, and the dangerous straits and rapids where the lakes pour into one another. It is t...