Louise Erdrich - The Round House

The two slept that night. They slept and slept. When they woke, they were so weak that they thought it would be easier to die. But Nanapush had some wire for a snare. He crawled out and set that snare a few feet away from their little shelter.

If a rabbit is snared, it will tell me where the animals are, said Akii.

They went to sleep again. When they woke, there was a rabbit struggling in the snare. The mother crept to the rabbit and listened to what it said. Then she crept back to her son with the rabbit.

The rabbit gave itself to you, she said. You must eat it and throw every single one of its bones out into the snow, so it can live again.

Nanapush roasted the rabbit, ate it. Three times he asked his mother to take some, but she refused. She hid her face in the blanket so he would not see her face.

Go now, she said. I heard the same song from the rabbit. The buffalo used to churn up the earth so the grass would grow better for the rabbits to eat. All the animals miss the buffalo, but they miss the real Anishinaabeg too. Take the gun and travel straight into the west. A buffalo has come back from over that horizon. The old woman waits for you. If you return and I am dead, do not cry. You have been a very good son to me.

So Nanapush went out.

Mooshum stopped talking. I heard his bed creak, and then the light, even rattle of his snoring. I was disappointed and thought of shaking him awake to find out the end of the story. But at last I fell asleep too. When I woke, I wondered again what had happened. Mooshum was in the kitchen, sipping at the soupy maple-syrup-flavored oatmeal he loved in the morning. I asked Mooshum who this Nanapush was, the boy he spoke of in the story. But he gave me another answer entirely.

Nanapush? Mooshum gave a dry, little creaky laugh.

An old man prone to madness! Like me, only worse. He should have been weeded out. In the face of danger, he was sure to act like an idiot. When self-discipline was called for, greed won out with Nanapush. He was aged early on by absurdities and lies. Old Nanapush, as they called him, or akiwenziish. Sometimes the old reprobate worked miracles through gross and disgusting behavior. People went to him, though secretly, for healings. As it happened, when I was a young man I myself brought him blankets, tobacco, and acquired from him secrets on how to please my first wife, whose eyes had begun to stray. Junesse was slightly older than me, and in bed she craved patience from a man that only comes with age. What should I do? I begged the old man. Tell me!

Baashkizigan! Baashkizigan! said Nanapush. Don’t be shy. Take your time with the next, and if another stand comes on think about paddling across the lake against a stiff wind and don’t stop until you’ve beached your canoe.

And so I kept my woman and came to respect the old man. He acted crazy to sort his friends from his enemies. But he spoke the truth.

What about his mother? I asked. What about the woman no man could kill? When she sent him for the buffalo. What happened?

What caca are you talking about, my boy?

Your story.

What story?

The one you told me last night.

Last night? I told no story. I slept the whole night through. I slept good.

Okay then, I thought. I’m going to have to wait for him to fall asleep good and hard again. Maybe this time I’ll hear the end.

So I waited the next night, trying to keep awake. But I was tired and kept dropping off. I slept for a good while. Then in my dreams I heard the sound of a light sticklike gnashing, and woke to find Mooshum sitting up again. He’d forgotten to take out his dentures and they were loose. He was clacking his teeth together, not speaking, as he sometimes did when he was very angry. But at last the teeth fell out of his mouth and he found words.

Ah, those first reservation years, when they squeezed us! Down to only a few square miles. We starved while the cows of settlers lived fat off the fenced grass of our old hunting grounds. In those first years our white father with the big belly ate ten ducks for dinner and didn’t even send us the feet. Those were bad years. Nanapush saw his people starve and die out, then his mother was attacked as wiindigoo but the men could not kill her. They were nowhere. Dying. But now in his starved condition the rabbit gave him some strength, so he resolved to go after that buffalo. He took up his mother’s hatchet and his father’s gun.

As he dragged himself along, mile after mile, Nanapush sang the buffalo song although it made him cry. It broke his heart. He remembered how when he was a small boy the buffalo had filled the world. Once, when he was little, the hunters came down to the river. Nanapush climbed a tree to look back where the buffalo came from. They covered the earth at that time. They were endless. He had seen that glory. Where had they gone?

Some old men said the buffalo disappeared into a hole in the earth. Other people had seen white men shoot thousands off a train car, and leave them to rot. At any rate, they existed no longer. Still, as Nanapush stumbled along, mile by mile, he sang the buffalo song. He thought there must be a reason. And at last, he looked down. He saw buffalo tracks! He found it hard to believe. Hunger makes you see things. But after following these tracks for some time, he saw this was indeed a buffalo. An old cow as crazy and decrepit as Nanapush himself would become, and me, and all survivors of those years, the last of so many.

The cold deepened steadily. Nanapush trudged on, following the buffalo’s tracks as it staggered into and out of a rough wooded area of brush and heavy cover in which, thought Nanapush, it would surely take shelter. But it did not. It moved out onto a violently flat plain where the wind blew against them both with killing force. Nanapush knew he would have to shoot the cow at once. He gathered every bit of will from his starving body and pushed on, but the buffalo stayed ahead, moving easier than he could against the snow.

Nanapush sang the buffalo song at the top of his lungs, driving onward. And at last, in that white bitterness, the buffalo heard his song. It stopped to listen. Turned toward him. Now the two were perhaps twenty feet apart. Nanapush could see that the creature was mainly a hide draped loosely over rickety bones. Yet she’d been immense and in her brown eyes there was a depth of sorrow that shook Nanapush even in his desperation.

Old Buffalo Woman, I hate to kill you, said Nanapush, for you have managed to live by wit and courage, even though your people are destroyed. You must have made yourself invisible. But then again, as you are the only hope for my family, perhaps you were waiting for me.

Nanapush sang the song again because he knew the buffalo was waiting to hear it. When he finished, she allowed him to aim point-blank at her heart. The old woman toppled over still watching Nanapush in that emotional way, and Nanapush fell beside her, spent. After a few minutes passed, he roused himself and plunged his knife into the underbelly. A gust of blood-fragrant steam stirred him to life and he worked quickly, wrenching away the guts, cleaning out the rib cavity. As he worked, he chewed on raw slices of heart and liver. Still, his hands shook and his legs kept giving out. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. Then the snow came down. He was caught in the blind howl.

Hunters on the plains can survive a deadly storm by making a shelter of buffalo hide skinned straight off, but it is dangerous to go inside the animal. Everybody knows that. Yet in his delirium, blinded and drawn by its warmth, Nanapush crawled into the carcass. Once there, he swooned at the sudden comfort. With his belly full and the warmth pressing around him, he passed out. And while unconscious, he became a buffalo. This buffalo adopted Nanapush and told him all she knew.