Makoons

by Louise Erdrich

  Omakayas nodded toward the river, nearly half a mile away. She was cooking along with Zozie, who was the boys’ adopted big sister and Omakayas’s treasured daughter.

  “The wood is low, my boys. Take your ropes.”

  Although their bellies pinched, Makoons and Chickadee grabbed the ropes they would use to bundle the dead wood they’d pick up along the river. They ran, for the delicious scent of cooking duck moved them powerfully. Chickadee slowed to keep pace with his faltering brother. Although he could ride with enormous skill, Makoons couldn’t run very far. He was still struggling to find the balance and strength he had lost during sickness. He bent over once to catch his breath, dizzy, and from then on could only walk. Chickadee saw that his face had turned pale gray again, and he worried.

  “Give me your rope, my brother. I’ll get the wood and we can carry it back together. Don’t run or you’ll get sick again.”

  Makoons nodded and smiled at the ground. His whispered thanks was hardly audible to Chickadee, who ran lightly down to the Red River. There, he found a large washup of dry dead branches and broke them easily into carrying lengths. By the time Makoons reached the river, he’d made two bundles they could carry on their backs. But when Makoons hefted his bundle, the strain in his face was too much for Chickadee.

  “I can take them both,” he said.

  Exhausted, Makoons trudged alongside his overburdened twin.

  When they were in sight of the camp, their grandmother Yellow Kettle, saw them first. She was sitting with Nokomis, who was so old her hair glowed white and her clouded eyes reflected light. Nokomis had soft skin and a soft voice, except of course for her exuberant laugh. Nokomis was kindness through and through. She was very happy these days because a remarkable thing had occurred.

  One day, Nokomis had admired the plantings of another old woman. This woman told her that a man named Albert LaPautre had sold her a bag of seeds.

  Stunned, Nokomis told how LaPautre himself had stolen everything the family had owned back in Minnesota, including the seeds she had been saving ever since the family left their original home on Madeline Island. The woman had divided her garden seeds with Nokomis. With great joy, Nokomis accepted the seeds—old friends! These were the great-great-grandsons and -granddaughters of the seeds of the plants she’d nurtured so long ago in her gardens on Madeline Island. She recognized the varieties—the colored corns and blue potato eyes, the spotted beans, the delicate shapes of the thickly fleshed varieties of squash. Nokomis had been yearning to grow a garden once again, as she had many years before. Now she would have her original garden back.

  Today, the family had worked until the earth was turned up, black and rich. Nokomis had planted her garden. Now Deydey, the husband of Yellow Kettle, grandfather of the twins, was carving the last touches on a cane for Nokomis. He was making garden tools for her as well, tying antlers to saplings, fixing a piece of bent metal into a hoe. He, too, had become kindlier with every passing year. But, true to herself, Yellow Kettle had grown ever more irritable with time. She’d always had a temper. It used to flare out of her and then disappear, but now it seemed she was always harboring a bed of dark red coals. She jumped up and hurried out to scold the boys as soon as she saw them.

  “Why did you go down to the river, Makoons? You’ll get sick again. And you, Chickadee, why did you let your brother go down to the river? What’s wrong with you? He could have gotten all sick again. Do you want to kill him? Is that what you want?”

  That’s how she always talked—her tongue could scorch. Chickadee was used to it. But how unfair! Yellow Kettle hustled Makoons toward the fire, patting his hands and scolding him all the harder. Chickadee scowled, even though the food smelled so good he almost shouted with joy. Here he was with two big loads of wood, expecting praise, and all he got was blame. But again, that was Yellow Kettle. Gitchi-Nokomis, his great-grandmother, peered at him as he came near the fire. She opened her eyes wide and said, “Howah! Look at my grandson! He carries enough wood for two strong boys! Enough to roast a whole flock of ducks!”

  Deydey rose and tousled Chickadee’s head. He helped pile the sticks when Chickadee dropped them to the ground. Deydey was restless in his old age and kept moving all day, which kept him strong. He never seemed angry or annoyed like Yellow Kettle, but he rarely spoke. Silence had settled deeper around him with every year. His great shoulders and powerful neck had dwindled, but his eyes were surprisingly sharp. Long ago, he had been treated with a special medicine for eyesight and Nokomis lamented that the tree she needed grew back in the woods and forest, where they had come from, and not here, on the great plains, where they made their new life.

  Still, the medicine had worked well and his vision remained clear.

  The boys’ Auntie Angeline, her husband, Fishtail, and their adopted daughter, Opichi, or Robin, burst around the corner of the cabin. Opichi was like her namesake bird. She was a round, happy, sunny-faced girl with glossy braids and a tendency to sing. Just when her mother and father were convinced they would have no children because of Angeline’s illness, smallpox, which had left her lovely face scarred, Opichi was given to them to brighten the world. She had wandered into the camp, nobody knew from where. She was clearly Amishinaabe, but her origins were a mystery. Angeline and Fishtail had rushed to keep her.

  “We are rich with food!” sang Opichi as they walked into camp.

  She and her new parents had been out digging wild onions. Fishtail carried the sack, which was much too light for his strong arms. Opichi also carried a skin container made from buffalo rawhide—Omakayas had learned to make these containers the year before from a Metis, or a French and Ojibwe mixed-blood woman. Now that the family had left behind the great stands of birch trees, whose bark they’d used to make carrying baskets, they relied upon a new source—the buffalo. Opichi had filled her container with the eggs of ducks, cowbirds, prairie hens, coots, and other birds. These she brought to Yellow Kettle, for they were her favorite food. Yellow Kettle even preferred the eggs that contained the unhatched baby birds, and devoured them whole, smacking her lips. Yellow Kettle was fierce in everything, including what she ate. But the last person to enter the camp was fiercer yet.

  Two Strike was a powerful, arrogant storm of a woman. She respected Omakayas’s skills but had never been interested in cooking, gardening, making baskets, or beading. She didn’t sew. She did not enjoy babies. Two Strike did as she pleased and was happy. She preferred to hunt, ride, shoot, and steal. Two Strike slept on the ground, lived in the open, washed when it rained, smelled like a wild animal when it didn’t. She loved knives, and carried them on her person at all times. She had a knife in her legging, two knives at her waist, a knife on her arm in a special band. They were safely stowed in beaded knife sheaths that Omakayas made for her. The two women had grown up together and were fiercely loyal. Two Strike was the birth mother of the twins’ older sister, Zozie. But the baby terrified Two Strike so badly that she’d thrust the infant into Omakayas’s arms and fled the scene. If anyone remembered that Two Strike was a mother, they’d forgotten. The term just didn’t fit.

  Two Strike leapt off her alert brown horse. She tethered him and strode into the camp. Everybody looked up expectantly. You never knew what she’d say, never knew what she’d be carrying, never knew what she might have found or killed or stolen. Now, from underneath her coat, which lengthened to a sort of pants/dress sewn specifically for Two Strike’s needs by Omakayas, she pulled something curly and pale. Everyone went silent. It was a creature. With uncharacteristic gentleness, she set it upon the earth. She wore an odd expression, a look nobody but Omakayas had ever seen before—it was a look of confused tenderness. Two Strike’s massive hand stroked the curly hide and nudged the animal forward. It stepped toward the others on fixed, wobbly, tentative legs, and said, “Baa!”

  “Maanishtaanishens!” exclaimed Gitchi-Nokomis. She had heard, and seen sheep long ago on their original home, Madeline Island. Those funny-looking curly animals had belo
nged to the missionary family on the island. Where had this one come from?

  “I found it,” said Two Strike with bashful tenderness. “The mother had died of eating arrow grass. The baby stood over it, making this beautiful strange music.”

  “Music?” Chickadee nudged Makoons. They looked wide-eyed at each other, trying to contain their laughter. They peered over at their mother, who was staring at Two Strike, mystified.

  “Baa!” the lamb bawled again, more piteous and insistant.

  Two Strike bent over it with a handful of shredded grass, and tried to feed it.

  “The maanishtaanishens needs milk, not grass,” said Nokomis.

  Everyone was quiet with a sense of wonder at Two Strike’s behavior. Disappointed, she dropped the grass from her hands. Frowning, she filled a piece of deerskin with water, poked a hole in the end, and pressed the water into the lamb’s hungry mouth. Two Strike looked scared. She looked uncharacteristically confused. She had fended off the advances of many men, including two brothers whose horses she had stolen, but who had nevertheless pursued her for months with desperate pleas of love. Ferociously, she’d finally beaten them off. She hadn’t wanted anyone near her but her dogs. But now she was behaving with tenderness toward this odd curly thing. She scowled hard at the family’s two dogs, who skulked around the outskirts of the fire, looking ready to devour the lamb. Both dogs caught her deadly look, yipped, and disappeared. Two Strike’s voice was harsh, and she often growled or even snarled for emphasis. Yet when she turned back to the lamb, there came from her lips a sound that could only be described as a croon.

  “Unbelievable,” Zozie whispered, shaking her head, hiding her smile. There was a bit of awed hurt in her face. Obviously, Two Strike couldn’t feel this way about any human being, including her own daughter. Oh well. Zozie shrugged. She’d always been better off with Omakayas, whose nature it was to love children. She praised Zozie every day and told her that she was a wonderful daughter.

  Animikiins adjusted the fire. Omakayas tested the birds, removed them from the pot, and put them onto the pieces of elm bark they used as plates. There were sixteen birds, enough with some left over for those who could eat two—that would include Uncle Quill, who now emerged from the grassy place he’d spread his blanket to rest after hunting.

  Quill immediately reached for the food in his sister Omakayas’s hand. What a brother! She spanked away his fingers. He was Quill. All his life he had grabbed food, usually straight from a hot stewpot. When Omakayas was a young girl, Quill had often snatched the food directly from her hand as she was about to eat it. So she was always prepared for his greedy, happy, snatching ways. Quill just shrugged and sat down, grinning with surprise at the lamb.

  “Are we going to roast it tomorrow?” he asked Two Strike. He smacked his lips and rubbed his hands.

  The look of utter loathing and rage that Two Strike turned upon him might have blasted a lesser man to dust. Quill just laughed. His laugh was so warm and affectionate that nobody (except Yellow Kettle) could hold a grudge or feel anger more than a moment with Quill. He could steal the very food from your fingers and still get smiles.

  When everybody had their food, Nokomis blessed it with thanks to Gizhe Manidoo, the great kind spirit that moves and lives in all things. As soon as the words left her mouth, everyone dug in and then there was just the sound of satisfied eating. The dogs crept close again because they knew Uncle Quill and the boy twins would sneakily throw the bones to them immediately. Omakayas would scold them because she always collected the duck carcasses after they had devoured the meat and soupy broth, into which she put wild onions, potatoes, or wild rice. She collected them because Nokomis had taught her to return their bones to the water as a sign of respect, and also so that there would always be ducks.

  “So tell us, Two Strike,” said Quill, after he’d eaten the first duck on his plate, “where did you steal your curly little sweetheart?”

  “I didn’t steal him,” said Two Strike in a voice with an undertone of surprised hurt. “I stole his mother. But she went and ate bad grass and died. She left me this clever little being.”

  She tickled the lamb under the chin, but in desperation it took her finger in its mouth and tried to get some milk out of it.

  “Poor little thing,” said Angeline. “Let’s bring it to Fly.”

  Fly was a mare who belonged to Angeline and Fishtail. The poor mother was moping because her most recent foal had died. She was a spotted roan, a very unusual and beautiful horse, and she was much beloved by the couple. She was so gentle that even Opichi could ride her.

  “Maybe Fly will nurse this lamb. Maybe it would make her happy.”

  “I would be so grateful,” said Two Strike seriously. Her voice choked up a little. She had been attempting to feed the lamb some cooked duck.

  Angeline and Fishtail looked at each other, biting their lips and trying hard to stay as serious as Two Strike. They had never seen such behavior in their wild friend. They were determined to save the cause, the lamb.

  They went off to the horse pasture—Two Strike carried the lamb, and Opichi rambled merrily beside her.

  “If only Fly will adopt my little being,” said Two Strike gently, stroking the lamb’s head.

  “She will,” said Opichi sympathetically, holding the tiny hoof.

  They followed Angeline and Fishtail, who had an idea. Before they got to the pasture, Angeline nodded at Fishtail. When the foal had died, he’d taken its skin and stretched it out, anchored by stones. He had put it out to dry on a scaffold, out of reach of the dogs. Now he took it down, flopped it like a sad limp shirt over his arm, and walked beside them to the pasture.

  Quill had created an interesting brush fence for the animals—it was concocted of every sort of barrier he could find, from driftwood to balled-up roots and weeds, to fence rails abandoned by settlers whose farms had failed. To get into the pasture, he had a real gate that he’d found on the riverbank. It must have drifted off in some flood, from some forgotten house somewhere, built too close to its banks—it was a beautiful gate and Quill was proud of it.

  Fishtail ceremoniously opened the gate and whistled to Fly. She was standing on the other side of the pasture. When she heard the whistle, she flicked back an ear and slowly turned with mournful eyes. She stared at them as if reproaching them for disturbing her unhappy meditations. With a sigh, she plodded over to them, head held low.

  Angeline stepped up beside Fly, stroked her neck, and scratched gently behind her ears. Fly was especially sensitive in her loss. Suddenly, her head jerked around. She smelled her baby. Fishtail had draped and tied the foal’s hide around the lamb, and with quick dexterity put the lamb to her aching, swollen teat. Instantly, the lamb began to nurse. Angeline stepped back as Fly’s eyes bulged. The sad mare bent around to put her soft nose to the lamb. She knew something was not right. She pulled away, suspicious. But the lamb trotted forward, nuzzled her, insisted on nursing. Fly stared in consternation. She looked at the humans, at Two Strike, who stood by anxiously, wringing her hands. Fly’s expression was almost comical. What is happening, she seemed to say with her shocked eyes, startled ears and flaring velvet nostrils. She took a final look, down, at the sinister baby. Oh well, she seemed to shrug. Then she put her head down to crop grass as the lamb drank and drank.

  Two Strike almost strangled Fishtail with her hug. Angeline grabbed Opichi and they stepped out of reach. Two Strike’s hug was always bumpy with hidden knives.

  THREE

  THE SIGHTING

  After the meal Nokomis burned the bark plates and stirred the kettle of leftovers that would make tomorrow’s soup. Although she was ancient, with hair so white and wispy the sun shone through like the seed head of a dandelion, she enjoyed any work that she could do—and she did it with great calm and cheer. As for Yellow Kettle, she worked hard too, but as she worked she usually talked to herself, chewing over things that people did wrong, hissing her outrage. As she sewed a new pair of pants for Uncle Quill
, her grown son, she muttered.

  “He just never grows up, never grows up. Still acts like a crazy boy. Look how he rips his pants up. And he had a woman who fixed things for him but she left him. Now he’s alone. What woman would want such a bad boy, that’s what he was, bad! Now his mischief got him into trouble. Never listened to me! I told him! I told him!”

  While she was sewing beside the fire, the evening had grown cool. As she talked, Quill stole up behind her. He grabbed a little stick off the ground and touched her head.

  “Wha! These flies!” She whacked at her head.

  Quill touched her head gently on the side with the stick.

  “Aagh!”

  Yellow Kettle whipped the pants around her head.

  Quill touched her back. She slapped her back. Her elbow. She scratched her elbow. He was enjoying his game enormously by the time Omakayas came and put a stop to it. She grabbed the stick out of his hand.

  “Will you never grow up?”

  “Why should I?” he cried, yelping in mock injury. “And how can I grow up when all of my women relatives treat me like a child!”

  He ran to look after his horse. He loved Wing, and he loved his Red River oxcart. He had made it himself, every bit, learned from an expert at oxcarts. There wasn’t one piece of metal used in its construction. He could fix it by stopping near a tree and using hand tools to create a new part. During the summer, he parked his oxcart and lived beneath it. When there were too many mosquitoes, he surrounded himself with fires. When it rained, he put blankets up on the sides of the cart and slept beneath. His wife had tried to tame him, to make him live indoors and do things properly. Quill had refused. She couldn’t throw him out of the house, because he wouldn’t live in one. But she did toss him out of her life. Now he sat outside on a little chair he’d carved from a stump and smoked his pipe, gazing out into the distance. Soon he’d take down the two blankets that had been airing on top of the cart. He felt the luxury of two blankets, one to fold beneath his body, the other to cover him against the dew. He had an arm for a pillow. What else could a man need? Soft puffs of smoke wound into the dusky shadows.