Louise Erdrich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“We are not war parties! Hear me! We are laden with meat to survive. Both of our caravans would be wise to depart in peace. But since it is our hotheaded women who are looking to shed blood, and as we are French and Ojibwe men who always satisfy our women, let two of the women race to the death. The winner of the race, we all agree, shall have the other’s life. After this is accomplished, we will go our separate directions and meet to fight, as men and warriors, another day.”

The child heard this speech by her father with an inner sense of glee, as did the others in the camp, for all knew that Pauline’s mother was a superb and unbested runner. She had, in fact, challenged the young men who came to court her to footraces, claiming that she would not stoop to marry a man who could not beat her. She vowed she would marry the one who could. Her boast was the reason she eventually wed the unprepossessing, even ugly, deer-legged, voyageur who was her much despised husband. He had embarrassed her by winning, a bad way to start a marriage. Her swiftness had only increased since that day, as had his own. Although, at his speech, her pride rose up instantly, she experienced an inner pang that he, the father of her child, could so arrogantly put up her life. What if there were by chance a better runner among the Bwaan women? Anger beat its wing inside of her. As she walked to the race ground to take her place, she decided to lose the race. In pride before his compatriots, her man would have to offer up his life for her own. At last, and how well he deserved it, she would be rid of him!

The enemy camps, having laid down their weapons, ranged to either side of a finish mark. The Bwaan woman who was to race was short of leg but light boned. Both women wore dresses of light calico. At the starting point, they divested themselves of what might hamper them — the Bwaan woman wore a long bone breastplate, a clapperless cowbell, a cradle board into which a fat infant was bound. Both women put down their skinning knives; over the razor-edged slender blades of steel their eyes met briefly in opaque agreement. They turned away. Pauline’s mother carefully lifted strand after strand of trader’s beads over her head — those beads, from Africa and Venice, Bohemia and Quechee, Vermont, she put into her daughter’s hands. She unbuckled a wide belt of bull leather studded with brass, but did not remove from her ears the shining cones dripping small tinklers of German silver, so that, when the women began to run, her mother’s swift progress began with light music that silenced in the smooth wind of her movement.

Running, that first Pauline’s mother felt a tremendous ease and freedom. The earth purred underneath her makizinan that day. She reached the turn a bit before her desperate opponent, picked up the stick she was to take with one swift movement, and in returning found it very hard to force herself to lose.

When she did, Pauline, though treated by her mother with no kindness, heard as if from outside herself an animal howl that tore her chest. The incredible noise ripped her breath out by the roots. Her lungs shut. She fell upon her mother in a haze of yellow spots and clutched her dress so tightly that her fingers pressed through the soft weave and her knuckles ground against her mother’s thighs. It was, then, more the weight of his treasured daughter’s horror than love for his merciless wife or even male pride that caused Pauline’s father to step forward just as the Bwaan woman raised her skinning knife, and to offer, as his wife had known he would, to substitute his own life for hers.

The Bwaan woman drew back, her eyes roamed over the man with the pelt on his chin and the child, equally ugly, who so obviously belonged to him. She wanted very much to kill this woman of the Ojibwe because of her own losses in the immemorial blood feud between their tribes, and because she had sensed, in running beside her, that the woman held back her power and could easily have beaten her. Such an ignominy scorched her stone roaster’s heart. But then, as the child’s grief turned with even more violence upon her father, whom, to be quite frank about it, the girl preferred, the Bwaan woman, recalling the pain of losing her own father at the age of this child, in a nighttime raid by Ojibwe, decided instantly that if she could balance this girl’s grief with her own, like a stick on her finger, she would be solved of her need for revenge.

“ Washtay, ” she said in her language. She stood aside to let the other woman rise.

A gift for clever thought, a certain talent for talking, a swiftness with the language, became a Puyat trait inherited from this quick Frenchman who then spoke to save his life. He spoke clearly, as though suddenly struck with his idea.

“Of course, if any of you big-bellied Bwaan men can beat me in a running race, then each of you can murder half of me. The woman can have my left side to cut my heart out, and eat it, too, if there’s anything left — after all, my wife has sharpened her teeth on it for years. The man can have my right side because wiinag swings there, long and heavy. When I run, I’m forced to tie it up or it will strike my thigh and bruise me. But today, since this may be the last race I’ll run, I’ll let it gallop free!”

By the time he finished speaking the two sides were laughing and there was no question that the race would occur. The only problem the Bwaanug had was in choosing a runner. There were two, and equally matched. One was a powerful bull-chested hunter with legs that bulged with fabulous muscles, and the other was an ikwe-inini, a woman-man called a winkte by the Bwaanag, a graceful sly boy who sighed, poised with grave nuance, combed his hair, and peered into the tortoiseshell hand mirror that hung around his neck by a rawhide thong. The wife of the hunter refused to let her valued husband risk his life in such a ridiculous game, and she yelled, browbeat, pulled her knife on him herself, while the others were lost in a debate. Was the winkte a man or a woman for the purposes of this race?

Some of the Ojibwe, who judged his catlike stance too threatening, rejected him as a male runner on account of his female spirit. Others were wary of the scowling hunter and argued that as the winkte would run with legs that grew down along either side of a penis as unmistakable as his opponent’s, he was enough of a male to suit the terms. The hunter’s wife finally won, delivering to her husband such a blow with the butt of his own rifle that he fell senseless and gagging. The winkte narrowed eyes rimmed with smoky black, shrugged off a heavy dress of fine-tanned deerhide, and stood, astonishingly pure and lovely, in nothing but a white woman’s lace-trimmed pantalets. At the signal, then, both commenced to race.

They tested each other, pulling a step ahead and dropping a step behind, speeding and slowing to throw the other off pace, and found themselves equally matched. It would be a race of wit as well as strength, then. When to spend the ultimate energy and when to conserve? Draw ahead to the last reserve of strength, in order to discourage the other? Or save some for the final kick? The clever Montrealer decided by the time he grasped the stick at halfway that he’d tag a pace behind and wheeze to confuse his opponent and then in his last lengths, sign of the cross, kiss of God, he’d fly past, surprising the Bwaan, and show him the heels of his feet. This would have worked more easily had not his opponent, whose job it was as a woman to study men and whose immediacy of manhood gave him an uncanny understanding, read the mind of the Frenchman and slowed to conserve his own ability to finish. They both knew, then, that their strategies came down to a hot finale and they each determined to blister straight through their lungs and guts to cross the line ahead and live.