The Porcupine Year (14 page)
Read The Porcupine Year Online
Authors: Louise Erdrich
O
n a point of land across the bay, there was a stand of old sugar maples that the Anishinabeg had looked after for as long as they had been living there. Muskrat announced that it was time to travel to that camp. Now they would meet Anishinabeg from the other islands. Everybody met during sugar camp and tapped the trees and boiled down their own syrup over great fires that they tended day and night. Now Deydey would get together with other men, relatives, and work out their traplines and hunting areas. Miskobines, too, would sit and talk to the older men and find out when their medicine ceremonies would begin and where his place might
be, how he could help. The women would find their cousins and meet new Anishinabeg, who came from the southern shores and even from the Plains. Miskobines said that the mother of Animikiins had been a Metis woman from out near Pembina. Perhaps he would find relatives, even cousins. Everyone found relatives and caught up with friends they hadn't seen during sugar-making time.
Omakayas made excited plans with Twilight.
But just before they were to leave, Omakayas came to Nokomis and told her that she'd found the sign she was becoming a woman. It was her first moon.
Nokomis put her arms around her.
“My girl,” she said, “we'll go to sugar camp later. For now, we'll stay together in the little house I have made for you.”
The two walked down a narrow path, around the side of the rocky outcrop, to a place sheltered by calm pines. There was a perfect little bark lodge, made just big enough for two or three women. It was floored with new fir boughs and rush mats. That day the women brought Omakayas there, all together, and presented her with their gifts. Nokomis had carved a new wooden bowl and a new spoon, which had a little bear on the end of the handle. Yellow Kettle had made her daughter a new dress to wear when Omakayas came out of the lodge. Angeline gave her sister a brass thimble so that she would always be good at sewing. Muskrat gave her a paddle that Miskobines had
made so that she would be a good traveler. Twilight and Amoosens had made a handsome carrying bag for her. It was sewn of soft doeskin, and a little red bird was beaded upon it. Two Strike had even made her somethingâan awl. It was a long, thin spike stuck in a piece of wood. She handed it over and stalked away. The women brought water for her to drink. She would fast for two days, then eat lightly. Yellow Kettle held her, looked into her face, and stroked her hair.
“When you come out of the lodge, you will have a beautiful ceremony. The feathers you gave Deydey are in his medicine bundle, carefully kept for you.”
Omakayas hugged her mother and then embraced her sister, aunt, and cousins. They were all leaving for sugar camp. Nokomis would stay with her. All that day Omakayas sewed and thought. When she was tired, she lay back on the winter dry grass outside the hut and stared into the moving branches high above her.
THE GIRL WHO LIVED WITH THE DOGS
“N
okomis,” asked Omakayas, “you told me that one day you would tell me how Old Tallow got to be so strong and fierce. Will you tell me now?”
Nokomis nodded. “If there was a name for the story, it would be âThe Girl Who Lived with the Dogs.' This is not an adizookaan, a sacred story, or a magical story. I can tell it to you now. Sadly, it is the truth.”
M
y girl, I grew up with Old Tallow. I played with her the way you play with your cousins. She was my best friend, and she was not called Tallow then. Her name was Light Moving in the Leaves, a beautiful old name passed down to her by her grandmother. She and I played together until we were ten winters old. That was the year the smallpox came for the first time among our people. When the sickness appeared, our village scattered off into the bush. My family went as far as we could. Not until we returned the next year did we find what happened to my friend Light Moving in the Leaves. And not until many years after that did I hear the story from her lips. But that was once she'd become Tallow.
Light Moving in the Leaves was the only one of her family to survive. So you see, Omakayas, she had that in common with you. She rescued you as a baby, for she felt your loneliness within her own heart. After the sickness, everything her family owned was burned. She had nothing left. Some unscrupulous person sold her to a voyageur, a mangeur de lard named Charette who was so evil no other men would work with him. He lived near a long portage, and was hired to keep the voyageurs' dogs and to help carry their packs when needed. He decided to use
Light Moving in the Leaves to lift and carry those packs. He took the girl, saying she must carry for him. He truly thought he'd get his money back by killing her with work.
Charette piled a pack on her shoulders that would have staggered a grown man. It took Light Moving in the Leaves all day and long into the night to catch up with him. She crawled into camp on the first night, then tried to crawl into the tent.
“Get out, you dirty mutt,” he cried, striking her with his gnarled fist. “Sleep with the dogs.”
She slept outside his tent. At first the dogs would not have her. They had their own troubles. In the morning, the mangeur de lard threw the bones of his dinner to the dogs and screamed at her. “Eat with the dogs!”
Hungry, she fought over the bones. In no time, she grew quick as any dog at snapping food from the air. And, instead of being crushed under the weight of the packs, she grew stronger that summer, until she could carry what a man does. And she was still a young girl.
“Ah,” said Charette, seeing she'd managed to crawl into the camp before dusk one night. “So.”
The next day, he piled on twice the weight.
Light Moving in the Leaves wept, for she could hardly drag one foot before the other. It felt like her bones were breaking. She snatched berries along the way, drank the water of streams, stole bird eggs. But she could hardly keep her strength up, being fed no more than a dog. But then the dogs began to accept her. They taught her to crack the bones Charette threw them and to eat the marrow. When he found her doing this, Charette laughed, gave her a blow that made her skull ring, and called her Tallow.
Now when he drank rum and caroused with his fellows, he boasted of his dog Tallow, and how she could carry twice what a man could carry.
She lay outside the tent, surrounded by the dogs, and scratched her fleas and licked her sores. She waited for the men to throw their bones her way. They liked to see her catch them, break them, suck the tallow. She was growing strong, but she didn't know it because every time she caught up with him Charette added to her load. If she fell, he beat her with a jagged stick. Her hair was long and matted, and she smelled like earth and fur. She had forgotten in fact that she was not a dog. All she knew of life was that moment of despair every morning when the old man fixed a weight upon her backâa weight that
was too great to carry, and she carried it anyway.
Winter came, and she helped Charette with his dog sledâsometimes he harnessed her, too. She ran and ran with the dogs, pulling Charette along the trail. She still slept outside with the dogs. She wound scraps of skin around her feet. Charette would not grudge her one single fur from the mountainous packs she hauled. He gave her a thin blanket and ignored her icy moans. She was just a girl. He was tired of her and hoped she would die.
But she did not die. The dogs curled around her and kept her warm. Charette beat them too, and starved them, but they were loyal as dogs are. No matter how badly they are treated, they serve their master. That winter passed, and then another summer, in which the girl everyone knew as Tallow served her master as the dogs did and never complained, once, when she took up the load that should have killed her.
Her father had been tall, and Tallow grew tall as well. She sucked bones as she trotted along and her own bones grew strong as a man's. Still the old man made
fun of her when she snapped a scrap from the air or when he found her curled with the dogs. He kicked her awake and laughed to his fellows, drunk, that her teeth were sharp as a dog's and they should not get too close lest they catch her fleas.
Then there came a day, a strange day.
This was the day Tallow understood that the weight she'd carried had become the weight of life itself. She understood her own strength. She looked at Charette when he threw a bone at her and realized that she was free. She caught the bone in the air with one hand, stood up, and stilled him with her gaze.
She walked toward him. As if in a dream, he stumbled backward. The dogs had risen. They had lined up alongside her and surrounded her as a pack does its leader. They stared at Charette. He cowered and lay flat beneath their contempt. Soon after, he took sick. He became weak and old. Then, one day, the old man said, “Help me, my girl. I have not been so good to you, I know. But I did feed you, something. A little. And I gave you that blanket. I did give you something, you know. Now I need you.”
So here it was, the biggest question of Tallow's life. Perhaps the biggest question any of us face.
What do you do when a person who has been cruel to you becomes helpless?
Tallow had to thinkâshould she kill the old man, help him, or just turn and walk away and leave him to his fate?
Here, Nokomis paused. She and Omakayas were silent for a long while, in thought.
“I think I would have just left him,” said Omakayas.
“That is the way to kill him without killing him yourself,” said Nokomis. “Yes, it is what most people would do. But Old Tallow, what do you think she did?”
“Killed him,” said Omakayas.
Nokomis shook her head, slowly, looking into Omakayas's eyes.
“My girl, she did not kill him. In fact, that night she fed him. She was kind to him.”
“What happened next?”
“She consulted with his dogs. For a long time, she sat with them. In their mutual pain and starvation, she had come to understand their language, and they understood her, too. The dogs told Tallow that they had long ago taken her as their master, but that she, Tallow, must leave Charette to them. After all, they had suffered his blows longer than she had, and he had worked to death their mothers and fathers, and beaten to death their brothers and sisters. The tribe of dogs was adamant. This was not
Tallow's decision to make. It was the decision of the dogs.”
“What did they do?”
Nokomis said, “What dogs do. Dogs are wolves, with some attachment to us. Dogs guided the first human. Dogs know us as no other animal does. They are not motivated by pity. Theirs is the justice of hunger. Dogs knew what to do with Charette. They did it that night, while Tallow slept.”
“What did they do?”
“Let's just say they ate well, for the first time in their lives. They devoured every scrap of Charette. Then, out of pity for their new master, the dogs took his bones and buried them out in the woods so that Tallow would not have to do it. The dogs returned and lived with her and guarded her with their lives, as you know. In their presence, she was always happy and when those dogs died, their children served her, then their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was kind and fair with those dogs and fed them better than she fed herself. As she became more human, she told me, their language sounded more like barks and howls. But she always loved them more than most people. Better than her husbands. She had no children except the dogs. The only person she ever loved more than her dogs, Omakayas, was you.”