Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their eleven-year-old daughter huddled with her now, under the same greasy blanket, trying to hide. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound, fastening the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote in an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper.
Wolfred had left his home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business—a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He was just seventeen. He missed her, and he missed the books. He had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s “Anabasis and Memorabilia,” which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions.
Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace, and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous.
Don’t go out there. I forbid you, Mackinnon said. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble.
The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness.
Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well.
That rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, Mackinnon said.
Mink’s voice was horrid—intimate with filth—as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. He went down to the hole he kept open in the icy river, crossing himself as he walked past Mink. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, crouching in the corner underneath a new blanket, her head down, still as death.
I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said.
Wolfred stared at the blanketed lump of girl. Mackinnon had always been honest, for a trader. Fair, for a trader, and showed no signs of moral corruption beyond the usual—selling rum to Indians was outlawed. Wolfred could not take in what had happened, so again he went fishing. When he came back with another stringer of whitefish, his mind was clear. Mackinnon was a rescuer, he decided. He had saved the girl from Mink, and from a slave’s fate elsewhere. Wolfred chopped some kindling and built a small cooking fire beside the post. He roasted the fish whole, and Mackinnon ate them with last week’s tough bread. Tomorrow, Wolfred would bake. When he went back into the cabin, the girl was exactly where she’d been before. She hadn’t moved a hair. Which also meant that Mackinnon hadn’t touched her.
Wolfred put a plate of bread and fish on the dirt floor where she could reach it. She devoured both and gasped for breath. He set a tankard of water near her. She gulped it all down, her throat clucking like a baby’s as she drained the cup.
After Mackinnon had eaten, he crawled into his slat-and-bearskin bed, where it was his habit to drink himself to sleep. Wolfred cleaned up the cabin. Then he heated a pail of water and crouched near the girl. He wet a rag and dabbed at her face. As the caked dirt came off, he discovered her features, one by one, and saw that they were very fine. Her lips were small and full. Her eyes hauntingly sweet. Her eyebrows perfectly flared. When her face was uncovered, he stared at her in dismay. She was exquisite. Did Mackinnon know?
Gimiikwaadiz, Wolfred whispered. He knew the word for how she looked.
Carefully, reaching into the corner of the cabin for what he needed, he mixed mud. He held her chin and spread the muck back onto her face, blotting over the startling line of her brows, the perfect symmetry of her eyes and nose, the devastating curve of her lips.
Mackinnon spoke to the girl in her language, and she hid her muddy face.
All I did was ask her name, he said, throwing up his hands. She refuses to tell me her name. Give her some work to do, Roberts. I can’t stand that lump in the corner.
Wolfred made her help him chop wood. But her movements displayed the fluid grace of her limbs. He showed her how to bake bread. But the fire lit up her face and the heat melted away some of the mud. He reapplied it. When Mackinnon was out, he tried to teach her to write. She learned the alphabet easily. But writing displayed her hand, marvellously formed. Finally—at her suggestion—she went off to set snares and a trapline. She made herself well enough understood. She planned to buy herself back from Mackinnon by selling the furs. He hadn’t paid that much for her. It would not take long, she implied.
All this time, because she knew exactly why Wolfred had replaced the grime on her face, she slouched and grimaced, tousled her hair, and smeared her features.
She picked up another written letter every day, then words, phrases. She began to sprinkle them in her talk. For a wild savage, she was certainly intelligent, Wolfred thought. Pretty soon she’s going to take my job. Ha-ha. There was nobody to joke with but himself.
The daughter of Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and my blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs.
The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles seemed only to give the drooling dog strength, and he knew exactly how to pin her, how to make her helpless.
The birds were silent. She had scrubbed her body red with snow. She threw off everything and lay naked in the snow asking to be dead. She tried not to move, but the cold was bitter and she began to suffer intensely. A person from the other world came. The being was pale blue, without definite form. It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makizinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens, and you shall live.
Wolfred hacked off a piece of weasel-gnawed moose. He carried it into the cabin and put it in a pot heaped with snow. He built up the fire just right and hung the pot to boil. He had learned from the girl to harvest red-gold berries, withered a bit in winter, which gave the meat a slightly skunky but pleasant flavor. She had taught him how to make tea from leathery swamp leaves. She had shown him rock lichen, edible but bland. The day was half gone.
Mashkiig, the girl’s father, walked in, lean and fearsome, with two slinking minions. He glanced at the girl, then looked away. He traded his furs for rum and guns. Mackinnon told him to get drunk far from the trading post. The day he’d killed the girl’s uncles, Mashkiig had also stabbed everyone else in the vicinity. He’d slit Mink’s nose and ears. Now he tried to claim the girl, then to buy her, but Mackinnon wouldn’t take back any of the guns.
After Mashkiig left, Mackinnon and Wolfred each took a piss, hauled some wood in, then locked the inside shutters and loaded their guns. About a week later, they heard that he’d killed Mink. The girl put her head down and wept.
Wolfred was a clerk of greater value than he knew. He cooked well and could make bread from practically nothing. He’d kept his father’s yeast going halfway across North America, and he was always seeking new sources of provender. He was using up the milled flour that Mackinnon had brought to trade. The Indians hadn’t got a taste for it yet. Wolfred had ground wild rice to powder and added it to the stuff they had. Last summer, he had mounded up clay and hollowed it out into an earthen oven. That was where he baked his weekly loaves. As the loaves were browning, Mackinnon came outside. The scent of the bread so moved him, there in the dark of winter, that he opened a keg of wine. They’d had six kegs, and were down to five. Mackinnon had packed the good wine in himself, over innumerable portages. Ordinarily, he partook of the trader’s rum that the voyageurs humped in to supply and resupply the Indians. Now he and Wolfred drank together, sitting on two stumps by the heated oven and a leaping fire.
Outside the circle of warmth, the snow squeaked and the stars pulsed in the impenetrable heavens. The girl sat between them, not drinking. She thought her own burdensome thoughts. From time to time, both of the men glanced at her profile in the firelight. Her dirty face was brushed with raw gold. When the wine was drunk, the bread was baked. Reverently, they removed the loaves and put them, hot, inside their coats. The girl opened her blanket to accept a loaf from Wolfred. As he gave it to her, he realized that her dress was torn down the middle. He looked into her eyes and her eyes slid to Mackinnon. Then she ducked her head and held the dress together with her elbow while she bit into the loaf.
Inside, they sat on small stumps, around a bigger stump, to eat. The cabin had been built around the large stump so that it could serve as a table.
Wolfred looked so searchingly at Mackinnon that the trader finally said, What?
Mackinnon had a flaccid bladder belly, crab legs, a snoose-stained beard, pig-mad red eyes, red sprouts of dandered hair, wormish lips, pitchy teeth, breath that knocked you sideways, and nose hairs that dripped snot on and spoiled Wolfred’s perfectly inked numbers. Mackinnon was also a dead shot, and hell with his claw hammer. Wolfred had seen him use it on one of the very minions who’d shadowed Mashkiig that day. He was dangerous. Yet. Wolfred chewed and stared. He was seized with sharp emotion. For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable.
Wolfred sorted through the options: They could run away, but Mackinnon would not only pursue them but pay Mashkiig to get to them first. They could stick together at all times so that Wolfred could watch over her, but that would make it obvious that Wolfred knew and they would lose the element of surprise. Xenophon had lain awake in the night, asking himself this question: What age am I waiting for to come to myself? This age, Wolfred thought. Because they had to kill Mackinnon, of course. Really, it was the first thing Wolfred had thought of doing, and the only way. To feel better about it, however, he had examined all the options.
How to do it?
Shooting him was out. There might be justice. Killing him by axe, hatchet, knife, or rock, or tying him up and stuffing him under the ice were also risky that way. As he lay in the faltering dark imagining each scenario, Wolfred remembered how he’d walked the woods with her. She knew everything there was to eat in the woods. She probably knew everything not to eat as well. She probably knew poisons.
Alone with her the next day, he saw that she’d managed to sew her dress together with a length of sinew. He pointed to the dress, pointed in the general direction of Mackinnon, then proceeded to mime out picking something, cooking it, Mackinnon eating it, holding his belly and pitching over dead. It made her laugh behind her hand. He convinced her that it was not a joke and she began to wash her hands in the air, biting her lip, darting glances all around, as though even the needles on the pines knew what they were planning. Then she signalled him to follow.
She searched the woods until she found a stand of oaks, then put a cloth on her hand and plunged it into the snow near a cracked-off stump, rotted down to almost nothing. From beneath the snow she pulled out some dark-gray strands that might once have been mushrooms.
That night Wolfred used the breast meat of six partridges, the tenders of three rabbits, wild onions, a shrivelled blue potato, and the girl’s offering to make a highly salted and strongly flavored stew. He unplugged a keg of high wine, and made sure that Mackinnon drained it half down before he ate. The stew did not seem to affect him. They all went to their corners, and Mackinnon kept on drinking the way he usually did until the fire burned out.
In the middle of the night, his thrashing, grunting, and high squeals of pain woke them. Wolfred lit a lantern. Mackinnon’s entire head had turned purple and had swollen to a grotesque size. His eyes had vanished in the bloated flesh. His tongue, a mottled fish, bulged from what must have been his mouth. He seemed to be trying to throw himself out of his body. He cast himself violently at the log walls, into the fireplace, upon the mounds of furs and blankets, rattling guns off their wooden hooks. Ammunition, ribbons, and hawksbells rained off the shelves. His belly popped from his vest, round and hard as a boulder. His hands and feet filled like bladders. Wolfred had never witnessed anything remotely as terrifying, but he had the presence of mind not to club Mackinnon or in any way molest his monstrous presence. As for the girl, she seemed pleased at his condition, though she did not smile.
Trying to disregard the chaotic death occurring to his left, now to his right, now underfoot, Wolfred prepared to leave. He grabbed snowshoes and two packs, moving clumsily. In the packs he put two fire steels, ammunition, bannocks he had made in advance. He doubled up two blankets and another to cut for leggings, and outfitted himself and the girl with four knives apiece. He took two guns, wadding, and a large flask of gunpowder. He took salt, tobacco, Mackinnon’s precious coffee, and one of the remaining kegs of wine. He did not take overmuch coin, though he knew which hollowed log hid the trader’s tiny stash.
Mackinnon’s puffed mitts of hands fretted at his clothing and the threads burst. As Wolfred and the girl slipped out, they could hear him fighting the poison, his breath coming in sonorous gasps. He could barely draw air past his swelled tongue into his gigantic purpled head. Yet he managed to call feebly out to them, My children! Why are you leaving me?
From the other side of the door they could hear his legs drumming on the packed earth floor. They could hear his fat paws wildly pattering for water on the empty wooden bucket.
On snowshoes of ash wood and sinew, Wolfred and the girl made their way south. They would be easy to follow. Wolfred’s story was that they’d decided to travel toward Grand Portage for help. They had left Mackinnon ill in the cabin with plenty of supplies. If they got lost, wandered, found themselves even farther south, chances were nobody would know or care who Mackinnon was. And so they trekked, making good time, and set up their camp at night. The girl tested the currents of the air with her face and hands, then showed Wolfred where to build a lean-to, how to place it just so, how to find dry wood in snow, snapping dead branches out of trees, and where to pile it so that they could easily keep the fire going all night and direct its heat their way. They slept peacefully, curled in their separate blankets, and woke to the wintertime scolding of chickadees.
The girl tuned up the fire, they ate, and were back on their way south when suddenly they heard the awful gasping voice of Mackinnon behind them. They could hear him blundering toward them, cracking twigs, calling out to them, Wait, my children, wait a moment, do not abandon me!
They started forward in terror. Soon a dog drew near them, one of the trading post’s pathetic curs; it ran alongside them, bounding effortfully through the snow. At first they thought that Mackinnon had sent it to find them, but then the girl stopped and looked hard at the dog. It whined to her. She nodded and pointed the way through the trees to a frozen river, where they would move more quickly. On the river ice they slid along with a dreamlike velocity. The girl gave the dog a piece of bannock from her pocket, and that night, when they made camp, she set her snares out all around them. She built their fire and the lean-to so that they had to pass through a narrow space between two trees. Here, too, she set a snare. Its loop was large enough for a man’s head, even a horribly swollen one. They fed themselves and the dog, and slept with their knives out, packs and snowshoes close by.
Near morning, when the fire was down to coals, Wolfred woke. He heard Mackinnon’s rasping breath very close. The dog barked. The girl got up and signalled that Wolfred should fasten on his snowshoes and gather their packs and blankets. As the light came up, Wolfred saw that the sinew snare set for Mackinnon was jigging, pulled tight. The dog worried and tore at some invisible shape. The girl showed Wolfred how to climb over the lean-to another way, and made him understand that he should check the snares she’d set, retrieve anything they’d caught, and not forget to remove the sinews so that she could reset them at their next camp.
Mackinnon’s breathing resounded through the clearing around the fire. As Wolfred left, he saw that the girl was preparing a stick with pine pitch and birch bark. He saw her thrust it at the air again and again. There were muffled grunts of pain. Wolfred was so frightened that he had trouble finding all the snares, and he had to cut the sinew that had choked a frozen rabbit. Eventually, the girl joined him and they slid back down to the river with the dog. Behind them, unearthly caterwauls began. To Wolfred’s relief, the girl smiled and skimmed forward, calm, full of confidence. Though she was still a child.
Wolfred asked the girl to tell him her name. He asked in words, he asked in signs, but she wouldn’t speak. Each time they stopped, he asked. But though she smiled at him, and understood exactly what he wanted, she wouldn’t answer. She looked into the distance.
The next morning, after they had slept soundly, she knelt near the fire to blow it back to life. All of a sudden, she went still and stared into the trees. She jutted her chin forward, then pulled back her hair and narrowed her eyes. Wolfred followed her gaze and saw it, too. Mackinnon’s head, rolling laboriously over the snow, its hair on fire, flames cheerfully flickering. Sometimes it banged into a tree and whimpered. Sometimes it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of neck, or its comically paddling ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its awkward, interminable progress.
Fighting, outwitting, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog travelled. They wore out their snowshoes, and the girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and lined them with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.
The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers, into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, as if over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible, even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw that the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare to open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, lifting his head only to sip the water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.
He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.
All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl heating the blade of the axe red hot and gripping the handle with rags. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside again. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke, and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.
It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life.
He must have heard wrong, or misunderstood. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose their intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition. The drum corrected some interior rhythm, a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.
Again, that night, he heard the battle outside, anguished, desperate. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, when she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woollen turban. That night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned.
You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing.
Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body he was not afraid to lift off the ground alongside her. They travelled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast that no cold could reach them. Below them, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body that he would not leave again until he had completed half a century of bone-breaking work.
Two days later, they left the deep wilderness and entered a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the lakeshore. On a street of beaten snow, several wooden houses were neatly rooted in an incongruous row. They were so like the houses that Wolfred had left behind out East that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He knocked at the door of the largest house. Not until he had introduced himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a white man.
She and her husband, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him.
When you grow up, he said.
She smiled and nodded.
Again, he asked her name.
She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower.
The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school, in Michigan, that was for Indians only, and he offered to send the girl there, too, if she wanted to become educated. She agreed to do it.
At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her again. But there was no answer. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But that was all of herself. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now—Indian. As in, Do not speak Indian, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening.
The other children smelled like old people. Soon she did, too. Her woollen dress and corset pinched, and the woollen underwear made her itch like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she had to eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else.
She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things—forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world.
She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, and told her that she would live.
Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held her foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll. ♦
