In the summertime, the people left the shelter of the bush country and set their lodges along the shores of Lake Winnipeg. Here, they fished from their canoes and set nets overnight.
The women who remained on shore dried the fish over slow fires and then placed them in deerskin bags. With a stone, they pounded the dried fish to powder. This was mixed with fish oil and ripe berries to make a tasty fish pemmican. In the wintertime, when food was scarce, the fish mash was used to make soups and stews and tasted very good.
There was a young man who lived with his widowed mother in this Band of Saulteaux. His name was Manasan, which means a shell. He was a wonderful fisherman until one day he returned home with an empty canoe. This happened for seven days and Manasan became ashamed as all the other men were pulling in full nets.
“Do not worry,” his mother tried to comfort him. “Tomorrow, you will make a good catch. My medicine is strong today.”
When Indians said their medicine was strong they meant they had a premonition that things would turn out well.
The next morning, when Manasan went out to the lake where he had set his net, he became very excited for he noticed it was heavy. His heart leapt with pride as he thought of the many fish that he had caught, and he began to pull in the net.
“Aiy, what is this?” he asked as he pulled in the net.
Manasan saw that he had caught a beautiful girl, but much different from any he had ever seen before. The upper half of her was like a woman but the part from the waist down was like a fish. He had caught a mermaid.
“Let me go! Let me go!” she said.
She wrestled with him, trying to leap back into the water from the canoe. But Manasan was very strong, and he tied her hands behind her back and looked at her long fishtail legs.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.
“I am going to take you to my lodge and I am going to make you my wife.”
“You had better let me go,” the mermaid said. “It will not be good for you to take me to your home.”
But Manasan would not listen to her and he started to paddle back to shore and the lodge that he shared with his mother.
When the people saw that he had captured a mermaid, they did not like it.
“Take the under-the-water woman back and put her in the lake,” they told him sternly.
He would not and kept the mermaid with him for four days and four nights. All that time she pleaded with him to take her back and let her down into the water in his net.
“If you do this thing I will make a bargain with you. There will be fish always in your net,” she said.
So Manasan took her in his canoe and gently let down his net so that she could escape into the lake. He watched her disappear into the deep green water, and he was very sad. But the next morning, when he went out to look at his net, true enough it was filled with all sorts of fish. The next day and the next it was the same: his canoe was filled with fish. But on the fourth day, when he went out he never came back. The mermaid tipped his canoe and took it and the paddles and the nets and Manasan down to the bottom of the lake where she lived.
Manasan’s mother was very sad. “I have lost my son to the under-the-water woman,” she wailed. “Let this be a lesson that no one ever again captures a mermaid. If a fisherman finds such a woman in his net, he must let her go free.”
At last, when there was no chance of Manasan being freed from the woman, the people moved back into the bush for the winter.
From Tracking the Past Through Legends & Stories by Alex Grisdale, MFNERC, 2015.
