In this myth Michabo, the Light-God, was represented to the native mind as
still fighting with the powers of Darkness, not now the darkness of night,
but that of the heavy and gloomy clouds which roll up the sky and blind
the eye of day. His weapons are the lightning and the thunderbolt, and the
victory he achieves is turned to the good of the world he has created.

This is still more clearly set forth in an Ojibway myth. It relates that
in early days there was a mighty serpent, king of all serpents, whose home
was in the Great Lakes. Increasing the waters by his magic powers, he
began to flood the land, and threatened its total submergence. Then
Michabo rose from his couch at the sun-rising, attacked the huge reptile
and slew it by a cast of his dart. He stripped it of its skin, and
clothing himself in this trophy of conquest, drove all the other serpents
to the south.[1] As it is in the south that, in the country of the
Ojibways, the lightning is last seen in the autumn, and as the Algonkins,
both in their language and pictography, were accustomed to assimilate the
lightning in its zigzag course to the sinuous motion of the serpent,[2]
the meteorological character of this myth is very manifest.

[Footnote 1: H.R. Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, Vol. i, p. 179, Vol.
ii, p. 117. The word _animikig_ in Ojibway means "it thunders and
lightnings;" in their myths this tribe says that the West Wind is created
by Animiki, the Thunder. (Ibid. _Indian Tribes_, Vol. v, p. 420.)]

[Footnote 2: When Father Buteux was among the Algonkins, in 1637, they
explained to him the lightning as "a great serpent which the Manito vomits
up." (_Relation de la Nouvelle France_, An. 1637, p. 53.) According to
John Tanner, the symbol for the lightning in Ojibway pictography was a
rattlesnake. (_Narrative_, p. 351.)]