Four Souls

NINE. Love Snare Nanapush

A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope. That is how it happened with me. There was more to these years than what happened to Fleur, of course, in her faraway mansion in the city. Out of Margaret’s linoleum there developed a life-and-death struggle of my own, right here on the reservation. No sooner had Margaret Kashpaw installed her new floor, and no sooner had I taken a dizzy swallow of air and at last forgiven her for it, than our joy was disrupted. Our peace was shattered. Our love was challenged. My life’s enemy, Shesheeb, returned to set up his house down my road. He lived yet, though I’d tried to kill him many times.

Nothing is complete without its shadow. Shesheeb was the older half brother of Pauline Puyat, who’d left to pray herself into a lean old vulture. Perhaps Shesheeb came to take her place on the reservation — otherwise I suppose we would have been too light, too sun-filled, too trusting, and floated up without our anchors of dark.

Ever since he was born and guns sounded across the lake, Shesheeb had been my special foe. My mother said that when I heard those guns crack I cried and went stiff with rage in her arms. Even when we were babies, I believe he lay waiting to singe me in his cradle board, his tikinaagan. Or to whip me with a lash made of deerhide strips off his mother’s tanning frame. For he did these things. While we were still small, he stood on the far edge of a slough in late fall, after a light dust of snow, and called me across the ice with a frantic wave and cry so that I bounded onto the thin crust, skidding with alarm, and went through. If he’d only laughed! But he just looked at me from the other side with sly, gloating wonder.

He was given to his aunt, Iron Sky, to raise. She gave him the charcoal, the burnt stick, the ashes, which was a sign for him to fast and find his vision and his spirit helpers. One morning, he darkened his face and went off into the woods to ask for help, which never came. His aunt gave him the charcoal again, and then again. Nothing. Finally he snatched it from her grip with a glare and went out to fast until he grew so gaunt his nose stuck out and his eyes were big and staring in his head. Iron Sky would not give up — she knew already that the mind of her boy was a complex knot. Only for the manidoog to untangle, she said, or to cut. The last time she sent him out he was nearly dead once he returned. He staggered and dropped flat over on the path. It was on that trip that something happened to him we can’t say, we don’t know, we haven’t a name for and don’t want one. Listen.

When he came back, he stared straight at everyone as if to capture or pierce. Only, if you looked back, as I dared to do, his eyes flickered away — flat, nerveless. He needed to get near people. He would not be alone, and glanced around in a constant, anxious way to see who noticed him or as though he was followed. What did he see? Form of the owl, flight soundless, a ruffled heart. Night-seeing and invisible. Balls of crackling light. A man paced swiftly with his head twisted backward on his neck. Two rabbits screamed from the same snare. Shesheeb discovered cruelty. He cut the tongue from a slow, harmless porcupine and watched it stand in surprise there at his feet, bleeding until it toppled. He laughed, and Iron Sky understood that to laugh at the pain of a harmless animal is the sign of a mind twisting in on itself. She sent him from her place soon after, with her thoughts shut carefully on what he had become.

He took up wandering, from one house to another, always sent to the next place, until he came to us. My family took him in for a short time, to our sorrow. I remember the sap was running when he got his name. My father wore two earrings, and bending over the boiling sap one fell off into the kettle. He didn’t notice until the boy who was staying with us reached in to grab it. His hand plunged down. He let out a sly and greedy quack. The noise startled us. He made the sound again, looking at his boiled hand, the earring. Quack! And so Shesheeb was named for the black duck, greasy and sly.

How he got my sister to marry him, I don’t know. For he grew up to look like a duck, fat and juicy, with a potbelly and a broad, flat nose, a shovel face, gleaming feathers for hair and a bowlegged hunch. His eyes used to be small and bright, though it was said that now he was almost blind. His laugh was doubtless the same sardonic quack he used when, much younger, he had struck his young wife with a burning stick. The blow marked the side of my sister’s lovely face with a knot of flesh that grew darker and darker, until it swallowed her. Then came the winter of our last starvation, when she disappeared. I know what happened. The truth is this: Shesheeb went windigo. That he killed and ate my sister was never proved in a whiteman’s court, so he went free. But the rest of us knew.

Shesheeb married into the Lazarres. He dragged his second wife out onto the plains, into Bwaan country. So he was yet aligned with them, and now, he had come back to doctor them and to lead them in their opposition to all I stood for on the council, as the tribal chairman, and as myself.

Ever since the first snow, he had settled down the road in a little gray house that used to belong to Iron Sky. How he put his hands on her tiny, handsome, tidily kept place I do not know. But from there, I could sense him. He was a splinter in my foot that pierced me when I stepped down hard. A darkness that rose just beyond the edges of the woods. I could feel him out there and I could smell his charred feathers. Crippled in one foot, he limped and duckwalked through the bush gathering black medicines. Lazarres came visiting him, but they avoided Kashpaw ground. And from his front door, from wherever he could, the old dog tried to steal my Margaret.

Margaret’s churchgoing piety dictated that she always beat Father Damien to Mass, and her tendency to scold and worry always made her late in leaving me. Therefore, it was her habit to take shortcuts across the land of Shesheeb, to pass near his cabin. More than once, she had returned with a report that he’d tried to waylay her with clever talk. Maybe he needed someone to keep his old bones warm in his cold winter blankets. Or perhaps he had seen her once too often, noticed the bold secret of her look, felt the prickle of her provocative scorn.

“You stay away from him today,” I warned her as she put warm wrappings on her legs and bundled on her heaviest coat.

Margaret’s gaze sharpened and she smiled into her beaded drawstring bag, counting the coins she was so save-y with. Her hair had not grown back as thick after her braids were severed, and her strength was less because of it, but strands of inky black still shone even in the winter light, and Margaret still possessed the mental fever that acted on me like a love charm. She blew hot, then cold, chilled me, scorched my fingers on those rare times she welcomed my touch. Never hiding her thoughts, her words were playful as arrows.

“Shesheeb?” Margaret made her voice falsely innocent. “He talks sweet to me when I pass by, I like the things he says.”

I gripped the knob of my willow stick, thrust it hard at the swirling pattern of Margaret’s floor.

“Don’t poke my linoleum!”

“Your linoleum, your spanking new linoleum, that’s all I hear! What does the stringy old duck tell you?”

“He says I have a round cheek,” she explained with some pride. “I have a young walk, my legs look plump, my thighs sweet and tender.”

“He’s just hungry.” I dragged my stick in a deliberate scrape and banged it on the floor to anger her. “Besides, I’ve heard the old prick’s half blind.” She kicked my cane from my hands.

“The only stiff thing you own!”

Margaret puckered up her lips and left me, her walk swift and firm. Shesheeb was right about her cheek and legs and thighs, and I was wrong not to follow her that day. For maybe he got an answer, a glance from her eye that encouraged him, a pout from those lips he would probably call juicy, though toward me they were thin, set, and stern. Maybe that, or Shesheeb could have done some darker work. It could be that he hid a love packet in the snow of the path she walked — clippings of his hair and nails, the coughball of an owl, Margaret’s and his own hair twisted together. Stepping over it, perhaps Margaret felt a low warmth, a hot breath along her neck, a chinook wind flowing through her arms, her blood, an early spring. I could see it! Her thoughts melted and softened, too sudden. She raised her basket and sang an old French tune.

The time she was gone to Mass lengthened and its passage seemed too slow. I tried singing. I tried chopping wood. I tried to distract myself by drumming and then by mudding the log sides of our cabin. But my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy. And then, when she finally returned with the smell of incense in her clothes, I watched her with close, testing eyes. I thought that she looked too cheerful — in her cheeks wild roses flushed. Winter chinook, for sure, I decided in an inner fury. He’d used his love ways, his bad old powers on her, used his clever tonics and suggestions, or that black stare from under his eyebrows said to draw women to him like chaff to a knife.

That night Margaret turned her back to me as we lay wrapped in our blankets. She knocked my hand off her breast, pressed her lips shut against my kiss. I couldn’t sleep, and so I was alert when in her dreams she mumbled something slow and soft that could have been his name. Shesheeb! Hearing that, I sprang up, away from her side, my throat choked with blazing poison. Again, I was young and hot-blooded, ready to grab and kill with my bare hands. Of course, he wasn’t in reach and in fact I wasn’t even sure I’d read Margaret’s sigh correctly with my fuzzy hearing. Still, in my doubt, I was unable to settle next to her in peace and so I went out the door. The night cold was deep, the icy wind dry and sharp. I breathed desperate, cold drafts, sucking in the air. At last, a calmer, puzzled spot cracked open deep in my heart, and I remembered my sister.

IN THAT MONTH of the year when the snow is rotten and the deer starve, Shesheeb had come to court my sister. She was round as a prairie hen, with a surprised mouth, always laughing and curious. Her eyes were soft and wondering. Simple ways, she had her simple ways. Fifteen summers she had bobbed on the stalk of her family like a sweet blossom, unfolding her petals. Fifteen autumns had taught her sorrow and to work hard, to put away all she could save for the winter. Fifteen springs she had budded with tender inner life. But the year of Shesheeb would teach her more than I know, even now, when I have seen four seasons go around fifty times and more.

I was only one year older, so she and I shared a mind. Children do that when they are left alone to dream up their games. I was half grown before I knew her feelings weren’t my feelings, her thoughts were not my thoughts, her laugh came out of her mouth alone and not mine. Still, the closeness lingered, so that when Shesheeb came calling, slouching in to sit near her on the ground, sliding his finger up her arm, darting his eyes down the side of her throat until her cheeks went hot, I understood her fascination. Hated, but understood. The mind of my sister was beautifully wound, a fine skein, a perfect spool. Shesheeb took hold of the end of the string and then, slowly, he unraveled her.

I SHOOK my head to clear it of old sorrows. My thoughts came up out of my mind like the steam from a bear’s winter den. I tried to calm myself. Perhaps I gave Shesheeb too much credit for his powers. Perhaps he was not as clever as I feared. There was no sound in the woods and it was perfectly dark. Tonight, at least, the old man traveled in no ball of light. I heard no evil calls or whistles of medicine pitched out from his direction. It occurred to me that perhaps I should look at Shesheeb’s return in a different way. What if I began to view the old man from a position of strength? What if I had drawn him back to me in order to take vengeance? What if I triumphed? These were sudden and heady thoughts. In the black silence of the night they made my blood hot, my eye keen. I tasted fresh blood and I saw my enemy in pain, begging for his life.

I would medicine him, poison him, kill him. I knew how to do it from the old man who taught me everything — Mirage. Right then, right there, I sat down. I planned my medicines. I even mixed some from a pouch and the ground beside me, for I knew a recipe. That night, I sent the greasy old duck, Shesheeb, a dream in which his penis hopped off his body then became a cricket and was snapped up by a thrush as he lunged to save it. A dream where his rear end spoke and his lips were sealed. Where the road turned to stew and he bent to eat it and broke his few remaining precious teeth on the rocks. I went further. The blackness overcame me then. I sent a dream where I sank my teeth into his throat and ripped through his guts with claws grown as sharp as an eagle’s. I laughed without mercy and crushed him with my slow weight. I tied him up and spat on him. I humbled him. I devoured him and I spat out the bones.

When morning came I made my way back into the cabin to crawl, spent from my imaginary victories, into bed beside Margaret. My mind was still crowded with ghosts. But thinking of my sister had strengthened my heart. I would not be beaten. Not again. Not this time. I would save Margaret whether she liked it or not.

THE NEXT MORNING was the Feast Day of some purse-mouthed saint or other, and to the surprise of Margaret, I was nothing but pleasant as she readied herself for Mass. Even when she put on her great black coal-hod bonnet, the one she believed gave her an irresistible allure, I only complimented her.

“It casts a mysterious shadow upon your face,” I said. “It makes a man wonder just what you might do next.”

“This, probably,” she said, and whacked my shin with the stick she used for walking. But I could tell she was unnerved by my sudden too-affable acceptance of her flirtation. Maybe she was even disappointed. For sure, as she left the cabin, she was just a little anxious, since she may have sensed the cold truth of what my plan called for. Having taken advantage of the situation, having decided to turn things my way, I decided to use Margaret as bait.

I would ruin him before he harmed her. I would wreck him with my power. Already, he was probably sick and reeling from the dreams he’d suffered. He hadn’t a hope once I started on him in earnest with my medicine. Now, before Margaret put on her old gray wool blanket coat, I took from my sack of powders and teas a packet that held the gall of a mink. A pinch of that mixed with ground mica, so his eye would be dazzled. The ashes of two dogs killed in copulation. I dusted the back of Margaret’s coat, as she walked out, with the deadly attractant. I hoped that when he made a false move, and she lambasted him, she’d not only leave a mark but he would leave something with her. I needed a swatch of hair, a button, a few threads of his clothing, something he wore close to his body, in order to best him.

Now I have hardly ever had to fiddle with dark medicine, and I didn’t feel that good about using Margaret. But an old man who has survived this long does so at some risk to his principles. I couldn’t afford to stack myself above the problem when the stakes were the woman I loved.

I sat on my bench just outside the cabin door where I could see the crossroads and while she was gone I anxiously watched the world pass by. There went George Bizhiew with his blood palomino. There went Short Little Sweetheart. There went Mrs. Cardinal. I waited. I tried to let my mind travel after Margaret, but I think she knew it. She blocked my vision. Hung a curtain down across my sight. For I was left in a dark frustration until at last I saw the black curve of her bonnet as she returned through the scrub oak and alder that grew across the road.

She wasn’t steaming forward in a heat of indignation. She wasn’t in a cold and offended dudgeon. She wasn’t in a fury of motion and she didn’t poke at me with her stick or make a single sharp comment as she passed by me and into the house. I heard the scrape of pots, her careful arrangements as she prepared to cook. I stood behind her, examining her back for signs of Shesheeb. But there was nothing. Not one hair. Had he made a move on her? Had the bait worked? I couldn’t tell, and finally gave up. She served me food. I tasted cautiously. I tasted with careful thought. And what I tasted was not the careless and bitter old porridge she’d serve to me when angry, nor was it the succulent tidbit she’d save in the lean-to for those rare times I fell into her favor.

That afternoon, Margaret cooked me a decent stew composed of a rabbit she had snared and skinned just that morning. She boiled it with an onion, a few potatoes, a can of Red Jacket Beans, and a little bacon and pepper just for seasoning. I ate the first bite with curiosity, the next with gratitude, and joy, but every spoonful after that with increasing suspicion.

This was all too much the stew of a dutiful wife, which Margaret was not. The rabbit indicated humble industry on her behalf, planning, forethought. She must have set her snare last night and risen very early to check it. For days before that, even, she must have followed and noted the trails of rabbits. The can of beans had been waiting on our shelf for an occasion. And the onion. Where had she hidden such a thing? Had she perhaps brought it home from Mass in the cup of her bonnet? Was it a prize acquired from the nuns? Or was it, and here a bleak pang of outrage choked me, could this onion be a little love gift, an offering, a sly come-hither threat from Shesheeb?

I put my spoon down. My blood was thickening in my veins. My voice went ragged with fearful speculation. I should have kept my mouth shut, but couldn’t help myself.

“There is dirt in this stew,” I said to Margaret.

She shook her head as though she couldn’t have heard right, and then gave me a sour but still friendly look, as though my little joke had missed its mark. That was when I should have stopped. But then I tasted the potatoes. They were soft on my tongue, silken with gravy. I couldn’t remember where we kept the potatoes, whether we had potatoes, if potatoes had ever been inside our house, or within my reach, or if they ever existed anywhere on earth.

“Rotten to begin with!” My voice came out a shriek. Jealousy, that spider, sank its fangs in my heart. I jumped up and began accusing Margaret of small things and, when she laughed in contempt, of large and then outrageous things I knew were far beneath her. “And if you think that this stew will quench my fire,” I finished, “you are mistaken. I will definitely kill that greasy duck.”

Margaret calmly rose, took the stew outside, and dumped it. “For the dogs,” she said. “They deserve it more than you.”

I sat down, my face to the wall, trying to contain myself. I hadn’t thought that she would dump the stew, which was, after all, delicious. We so rarely had anything good to eat that her action shocked me back into my senses, as it was meant to. Only by exercising the utmost restraint did I keep myself from rushing outside with my spoon, beating off the dogs, scooping what was left into my mouth before it soaked into the earth. It took more effort yet to keep from expressing my regrets about my hasty words. To apologize to Margaret was to give her a sharper knife to cut me with, and since the whole thrust of my life was to dull her blade, I shut my mouth.

LOVE POWDERS sometimes double back and land upon their maker, which is why an expert is always required in their use. I learned what I know from the greatest of them all, Mirage, who peopled a tribe. The next day, I worked hard on a love medicine, smoked and thought over the ingredients. I had decided to put together the most potent batch I’d ever concocted, and use it. I’d lost all pride and only wanted a secure hold on my love, my Margaret, but something worked against me. Something or some person.

There was a pack of dogs that roamed the reservation, sometimes vicious, sometimes craven, and always starving. One of them was Shesheeb’s dog — the skinniest and saddest of them all. The dogs had gulped the stew. Of course, finding such good pickings, they came the next day for more and hung around watching with careful eyes. I sat on the bench beside the door, my ingredients beside me. As I worked on the medicine, they drew near. I suppose that my grinding up roots and burning off the ends of hairs and wetting and singeing leaves got their juices flowing, quickened their responses, made them pant. I turned away from my work, once, went inside the house to fetch something. When I came back outside again I saw that the leanest, saddest, runtiest-looking little gray dog of them all had leaped onto the stump just before the bench where I’d put the tray of finished medicine. That dog, Shesheeb’s dog, was licking up the powder.

“Awus!” I yelled and chased him off, but he’d been too quick for me. The stuff was gone. The dog had just eaten a batch of love powder stronger than any other I had ever made, and although the loss was hard I couldn’t help wishing that I could tell what just happened to Margaret. She would laugh. The poorest, weakest-looking, scroungiest, ball-headed mutt of them all had had the quickness and cleverness to make his move! I wondered for a moment what would come of it, but soon forgot. I had my own pressing troubles. Margaret. I wanted Margaret. I wanted to make her eye spark. To make her turn toward me like a plant toward sun, a child to the drum. She would be mine, I decided, and started all over with the preparations for the medicine. No dog would get it this time. But I couldn’t rely on medicine alone. I had to make up for the insult I’d delivered with my suspicions about the reasons for that stew. And I tried, but I think I was too close. Or perhaps I was trembling with an old man’s desperation. She was my last love, and the most challenging of all my life.

We were meant to face death together, Margaret and I, for what else is love in old age? On those occasions when our animosity melted and turned golden, I brimmed with such comfort that death lost a portion of its wretched power. I am an elder. Supposedly wise. Supposedly I am resigned to, familiar with, prepared for the end of my life. But the more I know of death, the more I fight death. I am at war, angry at death’s greed for the living. In fact, I’ve vowed to elude death as long as possible, to spite and despise death, along with Margaret. We are alike — tough, slippery, shrewd, unrepentant — though of course she showed a different face to the priest.

Perhaps my hand slipped as I ground up my powder, or my mind was distracted, and I got my proportions disarranged. For even as I was working a new medicine beneath the blade of a knife, and smoking off the ingredients with sage, I felt myself losing control. I felt the rage taking over, the poison, the sorrow over what Shesheeb had done to my sister long ago and what he was intent on doing now. A red fury seized me, heating up the marrow of my bones. I transferred the powder from the table to a twist of cloth. I had never before needed medicine to snag my women. They came to me! This humiliation was his fault, as was the anguish of my sister’s death.

I put down the powder, then stashed it away.

I’d had enough of him, too much for a lifetime, I decided. Before I was forced into the shame of putting a succession of love powders on my old lady, I would go out, hunting duck. I would find Shesheeb and kill him.

Only what method should I use?

I ticked off the most effective as I walked the wood. Poisoning was good, but I’d have to gain his trust, get near him, and that I didn’t think I could stomach. I wasn’t much good with knives— my arms had lost their strength and my grip was weak. I could shoot him, but killing with a gun wasn’t very manly and besides, it was a fast and undeservedly merciful death. I went through them all and wasn’t satisfied with any one of them until I chanced to remember that I had once snared a man — Clarence Morrissey. That snare had been effective, satisfying, cheap. True, I had let the dog live, but I would have no such pity on Shesheeb.

That day, my walk took me into the trading store to buy a good long length of wire for a snare. I put the wire on credit, which both Margaret and I paid up as rarely as possible, in the hope that if we did have to die we would go with a whopping bill. I looped the wire and carried it in my shirt. On the way home, I investigated all the paths I thought Shesheeb might walk, crept close enough to his place, his den, his lair of shame so I could smell the burnt grease of his cooking. It took some time.

I didn’t set my snare the first day, I didn’t set it the second day either. I waited and I thought, crept back to look for tracks and ascertain his habits. I knew that I’d have only one chance. The drop beneath the snare I had used on the Morrissey was made in winter, much easier to dig out from beneath. Much easier to hide. This would be difficult. I finally settled on a slim trail near his house, a straight bit with a bend just beyond. A natural place to look up, and pause, just in case a bear or who knows what might be coming around the corner. And after looking to step ahead freely. To brush through a fringe of leaves. In those leaves, the narrowest part, I would set the wire loop. But first I dug a shallow pan into the ground — here Shesheeb’s toes would dance, touch earth with a tantalizing desperation, twitch, die. My heart flinches in me now that I think of the strict care I took. How I made sure the noose slipped easily, shut lethally, squeezed, cut. How I calculated and removed all that his hands might clutch and made the hole extra wide and deeper than necessary. It was just a good thing I calculated heavy — for his potbelly and his fat head and his duck feet. Fortunate a wind dropped a light branch across my deadfall trap. Oh yes, very lucky!

FOR THREE DAYS, nothing. The sky was bleak and gray. I kept a strict watch and checked often. But maybe Shesheeb’s old bones ached and he’d stayed in the house. Maybe he was making some underhanded medicine of his own, maybe he was just smart. On day four a wind stirred and blew the clouds off. Through the scraps of white the sky blazed out, welcome and blue. I sat down on the little bench I had placed beside the cabin door and let the sun hit me. The warmth baked my old bones. I smelled the calm freshness of the rain drying off the leaves. I let myself dream, as I do so often now, of the old days and old people. The women gambling beside the lake. The summer gatherings when we picked berries and made our babies. The winter fires and the aadizokaanag, the stories that branched off and looped back and continued in a narrative made to imitate the flowers on a vine. I thought of tracks, joyous, dense, when we camped along the river, and how our tracks were now scattered and few. I relaxed against the sun-soaked wood of the cabin’s southern wall. I lived in my thoughts. I remembered my sister’s gentle and indulgent laugh — she was never harsh — and I felt the light touch of her fingers on my hair. A sound penetrated my fog of memory, a high-pitched and prolonged squeak not unlike the death yell of a rabbit.

I jumped up, made my way into the woods. The sound wasn’t human, but I didn’t expect Shesheeb to die with dignity. Indeed, I’d made as certain as I could that he’d die in shame. As I ran through the woods, or at least hobbled fast as my old bones would take me, the squeal increased its penetrating intensity. The pitch grew higher, wilder, shaking me to the core, even though I’ve hunted all my life, and fought, and seen men die in difficult ways. It was not a man, however, whose death rang through the leaves. Rounding the corner, I looked and skidded to a halt in wild shock, for it was Margaret I’d snared.

She strained on perfect tiptoe, like a zhaaginaash ballerina dancer, on the flimsy branch that had fallen across the shallow square that I had carved in the path. Her hands were up around her neck attempting to release the tightening wire. Her face was dark red. When she saw me she went silent. For the first time, ever, I had her complete attention. Even in my horror I was somehow gratified, and of course I was on fire to save her. She looked at me with such appeal and in such a state of frantic desperation that I would have done anything, changed places with her if I could. I threw myself down, and crept forward. Terrified to lose her balance, she froze. I edged closer until I was crouched nearly underneath her. She understood my plan and stepped onto my back. Though it might break me, I intended to rise. I marshaled every bit of my strength and lifted her enough so the wire loosened and she was able to pull it over her head. Once she was free, she fell, retching and gasping, beside me in the ditch.

Now that I had saved her, now that she was assured of life, I had only a few moments in which to work on her logic. Because I had included young Nector in plotting and executing my long-ago revenge on the Morrissey, I’d never told Margaret that I was the one who’d set the snare. I positively didn’t want her to connect me with the snare now. Not that I really wanted to lie. I’d tell her later, I decided, when the memory of her experience had dulled. For now, I could see no harm in assigning blame where it would work to my advantage. Therefore, as I scrambled for my walking stick, I cried out, “Shesheeb! Can’t he stick to bad medicine? Must he also set snares all around his house?” Then I gasped, and wheezed, pounded the earth, and vowed I would tear into him right away, crack his skull with my diamond willow stick, beat him senseless for trying to snare my wife.

“Your wife?” said Margaret, rubbing her neck, tough-minded in spite of her near death. “Even now I am holding out for a church wedding, old man, so we’ll get to that ‘wife’ part later. For now, quiet down. Akiwenzii, I have had a vision.” Margaret dragged me to her, grasped my jacket, spoke face-to-face in an earnest and serious voice. “Bizindan. Listen to me, Nanapush.”

As we walked back together, dragging ourselves home through the woods, both weak and giddy with relief, Margaret told me the substance of her revelation. Many times we had to stop, for she spoke with great force, breathing hard. What she’d seen was

no less than a spirit gift, a revelation that could change her life and mine, too. I didn’t know whether to be horrified or proud that I had caused it, I only knew I should for once be quiet as she spoke.

“As the dark closed in around me, as I choked, as I was near death,” Margaret said, “here is what happened, old man. I saw my great-grandmother from the old days. You know the one. They used to call the old lady Medicine Dress. She came to me, looking different from when she died. In my vision she was young and strong. She wore her dress, the medicine dress that she was known for. That dress was powerful. That dress was known for its healing powers. And then she told me its secret, which she’d never told a living person. That secret had died with her but she was giving it to me now, she said, in order to save my life. Here is what she told me. Nothing upon that dress was ever touched by a human, much less a chimookomaan. It was sewn for her by the spirits, she said. Then she told me I must sew my own dress, just like it. Since she couldn’t get the spirits to do the whole thing, I had to follow the other rules she would set out. She said once I had made this dress, I would have great power. In this dress, I could heal anyone. I’d see things when I wore this dress. I’d know things beyond the reach of my mind. After she told this to me, blackness closed around my eyes. I could see no longer. I experienced great sorrow, believing that I would die before I could create this healing dress. I looked up into the sky, and there I saw a circle of women. I heard them dancing— their soft footsteps slapping the earth. I was pierced by the wish to live, opened my eyes, and then saw you! Old man, you have saved me to outfit this vision, to make myself the medicine dress!”

Margaret’s eyes widened and then softened to a deep maple color, and her gaze stuck to me, charming me close. “Dear old man,” she said softly now. “You saved my life and made it possible to sew my vision. Let me show you my thanks.”

As we walked down the path toward our cabin, she clasped my hand in hers and I decided there was no reason at all for her ever, ever, to know I’d set the snare.