Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

The book was safe. He put it in his coat. Embarrassed at himself, he took the otter to a dry place and skinned and dressed it out. He’d got hold of himself by the time he brought the meat to English Bill, but he was unnerved by the great emotion he’d felt. For he’d had the instant horror that he had committed a murder. And that conviction still filled him. The creature was an emissary of some sort. He’d known as they held that human stare. Joseph himself was part of all that was sustained and destroyed by a mysterious power. He had killed its messenger. And the otter wasn’t even edible. English Bill tried to roast the meat without parboiling it first, and the otter’s taste of rotting fish gagged the men. Not so the terrier, who had a feast.

The dog was so full that the next day she didn’t eat even one of thirty-six snow buntings that she found huddled in a pile, frozen dead and perfectly preserved. The Buckendorfs heaped the birds in their laps and with swift hands plucked them bare. Then the men put the birds on spits, roasted them, and ate, shivering with pleasure as they cracked and sucked the tiny bones. Joseph praised the dog, who flipped her ears up and seemed quite proud. Three times after that, the dog uncannily brought food. She dragged two great catfish, still gasping, off a piece of ice. She caught a squirrel and tried to pull a snapping turtle off a log by holding on to its tail. When Henri saw the turtle, he grinned and did not allow English Bill to touch it. He baited the turtle until it bit down on a stick, then sawed its head off. The head did not let go of the stick and the eyes continued to blink even after its body was chopped into a ravishing soup.

The Millions

SO THE MEN were comparatively fit when Bull crawled back into the camp — a ghost, a skeletal thing, a flailed creature with great pools of eyes and a gaping mouth. His beard had grown all over his face and his chest had sunk. His knees and elbows were grotesquely swollen, his muscles shriveled onto the bone. He had lost his boots and socks and his feet had frozen black. Sick with pity, Joseph put his arms around the wasted man and lowered him onto a buffalo skin. He held Bull like a baby and let a bit of the soup trickle down his throat. As soon as the soup hit Bull’s stomach, he straightened his legs out, kicked twice, and perished. Bull died looking up into the trees over them, just budding. Countless golden tassels winked in the sun, and the millions reflected in his baffled gaze.

Lafayette Peace

THE BUDS SOON opened and the trees were wearing a denser film of green one week later, when B. J. Bolt arrived on foot, looking not much better than had Bull. Over a month before, B. J. Bolt had started with four men, three pack ponies, plus their own mounts, only to run into the melt. From then on, there was nothing but half-frozen mush and icy slough. After an argument over whether to continue, the other men deserted B. J. and left him just one horse, who ran right off. B. J. had eaten what he could of the food but then — remarkably, given that he could have made it back to St. Cloud — he strapped the rest of the food onto himself and headed west. There were times he waded chest-deep through ice water, holding the food over his head. Other times he cracked through fragile ice. Somehow, he continued. But he had to eat in order to walk. So by the time he arrived at the camp and unbuckled his pack, there was nothing left but a dozen hard biscuits. The men divided them and that night, as he slowly let each crumb dissolve on his tongue, Joseph thought of the otter and of his saved book, which he knew by heart. One phrase whirled in his head: Wait for death with a cheerful mind .

If only there was something afterward. Bull hadn’t seemed to see anything in the branches and Marcus Aurelius had left that question up in the air.

“I envy your faith,” Joseph said to Henri. The Buckendorfs slept in a heap. The night was clear and the flames of the outdoor fire snapped high. The two guides took turns playing soft music, and Joseph thought that if only they were not near death this would be a very pleasant night.

“Me,” said Henri, putting down the fiddle and slowly stirring the fire with a stick, “I haven’t much faith. The saints love my brother here.”

Lafayette smiled, polishing his gun, and leaned over to breathe on the barrel. He had grown extremely beautiful and frail. Yet of them all he had remained most like himself in wit and action. His music had gained in depth. He alone seemed capable of effort.

“Do you believe we will die?” Joseph asked Lafayette, who continued to clean the gun with an absorption much like prayer. “Will you promise to bury me if I do?”

Lafayette suddenly leaned over, took the crucifix from around his neck, and with a tender gesture put it onto Joseph. The fire leapt in his extraordinary, sharp-bladed face. Three times he tapped Joseph on the chest and Joseph felt his heart leap, then Lafayette turned and walked off into the woods.

“Where is he going?” said Joseph, touching the cross at his throat. “What is he going to do?”

“We will have meat tomorrow,” said Henri. That was all.

The Buckendorfs’ eyes glowed with hunger like mystic stones and their yellow fangs had grown. There had been talk of eating Bull, and the guides had promised to kill anyone who tried. They were the ones who buried poor Bull and set a great pile of stones over his grave. They knelt with their rosaries and prayed to the Virgin Mary to rest his soul. Joseph had tried to help them, but had fallen down repeatedly. He was really asking Lafayette and Henri to do the same for him as for Bull. He was very tired now. Sitting beside Henri, he took the locket that held Dorea’s picture from his inner pocket and he opened it to show the guide. Before this, he’d always looked at her picture when he was alone, ashamed, perhaps, of the fact that she was plain and older. Ashamed, perhaps, that someone might think she was his mother.

Henri placed the fiddle with great care into its velvet nest, and stroked it before he shut the lid. Then he took the locket from Joseph’s hands, and looked into the face of Dorea for a very long time. At last he gave her back to Joseph.

“Such a pretty woman,” he said. “Très jolie. You will be happy. She will give you many children and keep you warm at night.”

This was the only untruth that Joseph heard Henri Peace to utter, for after that night in which Lafayette killed a crazed old female moose, and after the next week in which another outfit arrived with flour and they all stuffed themselves sick on pancakes and syrup then rolled in agony out in the woods, and after Joseph made his way back to St. Anthony more broke than he’d started out and with a deed for two hundred acres of worthless land in his pocket, he showed up at Dorea’s doorstep only to be met by a man who introduced himself as her new husband, to whom he wordlessly gave the locket.

The Saint

FOR A LONG time after the expedition, Joseph was sick, in a general way, and he gazed long at Lafayette’s crucifix nailed onto his wall. He wondered where English Bill, his dog, the Buckendorfs, and Lafayette and Henri Peace were now. Except for B. J. Bolt, who looked in on him sometimes, the only one whose whereabouts he was sure of was Bull. So after he recovered, Joseph went to visit the doctor’s housekeeper with the dark brown hair, sweet, coffee-milk skin, and freckled nose. She sat with him in the receiving parlor where the doctor’s patients waited. From behind the shut door they could hear the clack of instruments and some muffled yelps. Joseph told the doctor’s housekeeper all about Bull and how he had spoken of her looking at the horizon and how he had set off to walk across the dead swamp of the late winter prairie to be with her. She gazed at him with clear brown eyes and nodded when he had finished telling her about the turtle soup and how Bull had died looking up into the budding branches, with her name on his lips. The last part about the name was, he hoped, a pardonable embroidery. She did look sad, and a bit surprised. At last, she spoke.