The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (41 page)

To survive their marriage, they developed many strategies. For instance, they rarely collaborated on any task. Each hunted, trapped, and fished alone. They could not agree even on so little a thing as how and where to set a net. The gun, which belonged to Nanapush, was never clean when it was needed. Traps rusted. It was up to Margaret to scour the rifle barrel, smoke the steel jaws. Setting snares together was impossible, for in truth they snared themselves time and again in rude opinions and mockery over where a rabbit might jump or how to set the loop. Their avoidance hardened them in their individual ways, and so when Margaret beached the tough old boat and jumped ashore desperate for help, there was no chance of agreement.

Margaret sometimes added little Frenchisms to her Ojibwemowin just the way the fancy sounding wives of the French
voyageurs
added, like a dash of spice, random
le
’s and
la
’s. So when she jumped ashore screaming of
le mooz
, Nanapush woke, irritated, quick reproof on his lips, as he was always pleased to find some tiny fault with his beloved.

“
Le mooz! Le mooz!
” she shouted into his face. She grabbed him by the shirt so violently that he could hear the flimsy threads part.

“Boonishin!” He tried to struggle from her grip, but Margaret rapidly explained to him that she had seen a moose start off, swimming across the lake and here were their winter’s provisions, easy! With this moose meat dried and stored, they would survive the clutch of starving windigoog in fine style. “Think of the stew! Get up, old man!” She screamed in fretful incoherence now, grabbed the gun, and dragged Nanapush to the boat, forcing him in before he even properly prepared himself mentally to hunt moose.

Nanapush pushed off with his paddle, sulking. Besides their natural inclination to disagree, it was always the case that if one of them was particularly intrigued and eager about some idea, the other was sure to feel the opposite way just to polarize the situation. Contradictions abounded between them. If Nanapush asked his wiiw for maple syrup with his meat, she gave him wild onion. If Margaret relished a certain color of cloth, Nanapush declared that he could not look upon that blue, or red—it made him mean and dizzy. When it came to sleeping on the fancy spring bed that Margaret had bought with this year’s bark money, Nanapush adored the bounce and she was stingy with it so as not to use it up. Sometimes he sat on the bed and joggled up and down when she was gone, just to spite her. For her part, once her husband began craftily to ask for wild onion, she figured he’d developed a taste for it and so bargained for a small jar of maple syrup, thus beginning the obvious next stage of their contradictoriness, which was that each asked the opposite of what they really wanted and so got what they wanted. It was confusing to Father Damien, but to the two of them it brought serene harmony. So when Margaret displayed such extreme determination in the matter of the moose that morning, Nanapush was feeling particularly lazy, but he also decided to believe she really meant the opposite of what she cried out, and so he dawdled with his paddle and tried to tell her a joke or two. She was, however, in dead earnest.

“Paddle! Paddle for all you’re worth!” she yelled.

“Break your backs, boys, or break wind!” Nanapush mocked her. Over the summer, as it wasn’t the proper time for telling Ojibwe aadizokaanag, Father Damien and Nector had taken turns telling the tale of the vast infernal white fish and the maddened chief who gave chase all through the upper and lower regions of the earth.

“Gitimishk!” Margaret nearly choked in frustration, for the moose had changed direction and they were not closing in quickly enough for her liking.

“Aye, aye, Ahabikwe,” shouted Nanapush, lighting his pipe as she vented her fury at him in deep strokes of her paddle. If the truth be told, he was delighted with her anger, for when she lost control like this during the day she often, also, lost control once the sun went down, and he was already anticipating their pleasure.

“Use that paddle or my legs are shut to you, lazy fool!” she growled.

At that, he went to work, and they quickly drew alongside the moose. Margaret steadied herself, threw a loop of strong rope around its wide, spreading antlers, and then secured the rope fast to the front of the boat, which was something of an odd canoe, having a flat, tough, wood bottom, a good ricing boat but not all that easy to steer.

“Now,” she ordered Nanapush, “now, take up the gun and shoot! Shoot!”

But Nanapush did not. He had killed a moose that way once before in his life, and he had nothing to prove. On the other hand, his namesake, Nanabozho, had failed in the old moose-killing story, which began much in the same way as the event Nanapush found himself living out. He decided to tempt fate by tempting the story, for such was his arrogance that he was certain he could manage better than his namesake. He would not kill the moose quite yet. He hefted the gun and made certain it was loaded, and then enjoyed the free ride they were receiving from the hardworking moose.

“Let’s turn him around, my adorable pigeon,” he cried to his lady. “Let him tow us back home. I’ll shoot him once he reaches the shallow water just before our cabin.”

Margaret could not help but agree that this particular plan arrived at by her lazy husband was a good one, and so, by using more rope and hauling on first one antler and then another with all of their strength, they proceeded to turn their beast and head him in the right direction. Nanapush sat back smoking his pipe and relaxed once they were pointed homeward. The sun was out and the air was cool, fresh. All seemed right between the two of them now. Margaret admonished him about the tangle of fishing tackle all around his seat, and there was affection in her voice.

“You’ll poke yourself,” she said lovingly, “you fool.” At that moment, the meat pulling them right up to their doorstep, she did not really even care to pursue her husband’s idiocy. “I’ll fry the rump steaks tonight with a little maple syrup over them,” she said, her mouth watering. “Old man, you’re gonna eat good! Oooh”—she almost cried with appreciation—“our moose is so fat!”

“He’s a fine moose,” Nanapush agreed passionately. “You’ve got an eye, Mindimooyenh. He’s a juicy one, our moose!”

“I’ll roast his ribs, cook the fat with our beans, and keep his brains in a bucket to tan that big hide! Oooh, ishte, my husband, the old men are going to envy the makazinan that I will sew for you.”

“Beautiful wife!” Nanapush was overcome. “Precious sweetheart!”

They looked at each other with a kindling ardor.

As they were so gazing upon one another, holding the rare moment of mutual agreeableness, the hooves of the moose struck the first sandbar near shore, and Margaret cried out for her husband to lift the gun and shoot.

“Not quite yet, my beloved,” said Nanapush confidently, “he can drag us nearer yet!”

“Watch out! Shoot now!”

The moose indeed approached the shallows, but Nanapush planned in his pride to shoot the animal just as he began to pull them from the water, thereby making their task of dressing and hauling mere child’s play. He got the moose in his sights and then waited as the animal gained purchase. The old man’s feet, annoyingly, tangled in the fishing tackle he had been too lazy to put away, and he jigged attempting to kick it aside.

“Margaret, duck!” he cried. Just as the moose lunged onto land he let blast, completely missing and totally terrifying the moose, which gave a hopping skip that seemed impossible for a thing so huge and veered straight up the bank. Margaret, reaching back to tear the gun from her husband’s hands, was bucked completely out of the boat and said later that if only her stubborn no-good man hadn’t insisted on holding on to the gun she could have landed, aimed, and killed them both, as she then wished to do most intensely. Instead, as the moose tore off with the boat still securely tied by three ropes to his antlers, she was left behind screaming for the fool to jump. But he did not and within moments, the rampaging moose, with the boat bounding behind, disappeared into the woods.

“My man is stubborn, anyway,” she said, dusting off her skirt, checking to make sure that she was still together in a piece, nothing broken or cut. “He will surely kill that moose!” She spoke in wishful confidence, but inside she felt stuffed with a combination of such anxiety and rage that she did not know what to do—to try to rescue Nanapush or to chop him into pieces with the hatchet that she found herself sharpening as she listened for the second report of his gun.

Bloof!

Yes. There it was. Good thing he didn’t jump out, she muttered. She began to tramp, with her carrying straps and an extra sharp knife, in the direction of the noise.

In fact, that Nanapush did not jump out was not due to his great stubbornness or bravery. When the moose jolted the boat up the lake shore, the tackle that already wound around his leg flew beneath his seat as he bounced upward and three of his finest fishing hooks stuck deep into his buttocks as he landed, fastening him tight. He screeched in pain, further horrifying the animal, and struggled, driving the hooks in still deeper, until he could only hold on to the edge of the boat with one hand, gasping in agony, as with the other he attempted to raise the gun to his shoulder and kill the moose.

All the time, of course, the moose was wildly running. Pursued by this strange, heavy, screeching, banging, booming thing, it fled in dull terror through bush and slough. It ran and continued to run. Those who saw Nanapush, as he passed all up and down the reservation, stood a moment in fascinated shock and rubbed their eyes, then went to fetch others, so that soon the predicament of Nanapush was known and reported everywhere. By then, the moose had attained a smooth loping trot, however, and passed with swift ease through farmsteads and pastures, the boat flying up and then disappearing down behind. Many stopped what they were doing to gape and yell.

Mr. Onesides saw it and said that his attention was attracted by a blast from the gun of Nanapush and that he saw the moose stop still in its tracks a moment, as though struck by a sudden thought. As there was nothing to aim at for Nanapush but the rump of the huge animal, he had indeed stung its hindquarters. But other than providing it an unpleasant sensation, all Nanapush succeeded in doing was further convincing the moose that he’d best flee, which he did suddenly, so that the boat jumped high in the air and cracked down as the moose sped forward, again, raising a groan from Nanapush that Onesides would always remember for the flat depth of its despair. Still, although he ran for his rifle, he was too late to shoot the moose and free poor Nanapush.

One day passed. In his moose-drawn fishing boat, Nanapush toured every part of the reservation that he’d ever hunted, and saw everyone he’d ever known, and then went to places he hadn’t visited since childhood. At one point, a family digging cattail roots were stunned to see the boat, the moose towing it across a smaller slough, and a man slumped over inside, for by now poor Nanapush had given up and surrendered to the pain which, at least, he said later, he shared with his beast of the shot rump. He’d already tried to leave the best part of his butt on the canoe bench, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t tear himself free, so he had given up and went to sleep as he always did in times of stress, hoping that he’d wake up with an idea of how to end his tortured ride.

He did have a notion. He lifted the gun and this time tried to shoot the rope, which, being a target nowhere near the size of the moose’s great hairy, heaving cheeks, he missed, again stinging the moose who, as he told it later, soon commenced shooting back at him, the moose pellets zinging to the right and left as the moose began again to run, heading now for the very most remote parts of the reservation, where poor Nanapush was convinced he surely would die. He began to talk to the moose as they strode along—the words jounced out of him.

“Niiji!” he cried, “my brother, slow down!”

The animal flicked back an ear to catch the sound of the thing’s voice, but kept on covering ground.

“I will kill no more!” declared Nanapush. “I now throw away my gun!” And he cast it aside after kissing the barrel and noting well his surroundings. As though it sensed and felt only contempt for the man’s hypocrisy, the moose snorted and kept moving.

“I apologize to you,” cried Nanapush, “and to all of the moose I ever killed and to the spirit of the moose and the boss of the moose and to every moose that has lived or will ever live in the future.”

As though slightly placated, now, the moose slowed to a walk and Nanapush was able, finally, to snatch a few berries from the bushes they passed, to scoop up a mouthful of water from the slough, and to sleep, though by moonlight the moose still browsed and walked, toward some goal, thought Nanapush, delirious with exhaustion and pain, perhaps the next world. Perhaps this moose was sent by the all-clever creator to fetch Nanapush along to the spirit life in this novel way. Just as he was imagining such a thing, the first light showed and by that ever strengthening radiance he saw that his moose indeed had a direction and intention and that object was a female moose of an uncommonly robust size, just ahead, peering over her shoulder in a way apparently bewitching to male moose, for Nanapush’s animal uttered a squeal of bullish intensity that was recognizable to Nanapush as pure lust.

Nanapush now wished he had aimed for the huge swinging balls of the moose and he wept with exasperation.

“Should I be subjected to this? This too? In addition to all that I have suffered?” And Nanapush cursed the moose, cursed himself, cursed the fishhooks, cursed the person who so carefully and sturdily constructed the boat that would not fall apart, and as he cursed he spoke in English, as there are no true swear words in Ojibwemowin, and so it was Nanapush and not the devil whom Zozed Bizhieu heard passing by her remote cabin at first light, shouting all manner of unspeakable and innovative imprecations, and it was Nanapush, furthermore, who was heard howling in the deep slough grass, howling though more dead at this point than alive, at the outrageous acts he was forced to witness there, before his nose, as the boat tipped up and his bull moose in the extremity of his passion loved the female moose with ponderous mountings and thrilling thrusts that swung Nanapush from side to side but did not succeed in dislodging him from the terrible grip of the fishhooks. No, that was not to happen. Nanapush was bound to suffer for one more day before the satisfied moose toppled over to snore and members of the rescue party Margaret had raised crept up and shot the animal stone dead in its sleep.