Four Souls (19 page)

Nanapush

T
HE BIRDS
are gone, and with them, on their wings, the thunder and the lightning. The skin of ice grows farther out onto the lake and the wind turns the raindrops to dust. The dogs born on the reservation look like Shesheeb’s famous mutt now—all round-headed runts. I take credit for their ugliness. I am at peace. My tracks drag. This is old age, at last. My eyes are weary. My heart is full. My favorite parts of me limp and undemanding. Finally, I can see the shape of all that’s happened and all that is to come. Within me there has always burned an urge to see how things turn out. To know the story.

Now that I know the story, I can rest.

The woman once called Fleur Pillager, and now named Four Souls as well as another name nobody speaks, is now understood by the spirits. Like the spirits, she lives quiet in the woods. No road leads to her place. Hardly even a path. She doesn’t drown men anymore or steal their tongues, she doesn’t gamble. She doesn’t rub her hands with powders of human bones. She doesn’t sing, at least we can’t hear her above the rustle of dollar bills flying from our hands to the government and papers and more legal forms flapping down to cover us in return. Change is chaos and pain. There was no order in our making. This reservation came about in a time of desperation and upon it we will see things occur more desperate yet. When I look at the scope and the drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This leftover. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.

Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken, snow will obscure us all, but, my sons and daughters, sorrow is a useless thing. Much as the grass dies, the wind exhausts its strength, the tree topples in a light breeze, the dead buffalo melt away into the prairie ground or are plowed into newly scratched-out fields, all things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become.

L
OUISE
E
RDRICH
is the author of ten novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

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Designed by Elliott Beard

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of
The New Yorker
, where portions of chapters 9 and 11 first appeared in slightly different form as “Love Snares.”

Nothing in this book is true of anyone alive or dead.

FOUR SOULS
. Copyright © 2004 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books;.

ePub edition January 2005 ISBN 9780061744020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erdrich, Louise.

      Four souls: a novel / Louise Erdrich.—1st ed.

        p. cm.