Tracks

Pauline Puyat, a girl several years younger than Fleur Pillager, narrates this chapter. Like Nanapush, she relates the events of Fleur’s life along with those of her own. She begins by telling of the two times that Fleur drowned in the lake but lived.

The first time, Fleur was a little girl, and two men rescued her. According to Pauline, whose source is the gossip in town, one man disappeared and the other man died shortly thereafter. The second time Fleur drowned but lived, no one tried to save her. She was thrown up on the shore and cursed the man who approached her to see if she was alive, saying he would take her place. This man slipped and drowned the first time he used his new bathtub.

Men stayed away from Fleur Pillager after that occurrence because the water monster, Misshepeshu, according to the people, wanted her for himself. Everyone in town believed that Fleur, living alone in Matchimanito, was experimenting with dark medicine or magic, and refining her methods of creating chaos, mischief, and misery for others—that Fleur personified evil.

Then Fleur moved to Argus, where she obtained a job working at the butcher’s for Pete Kozka. Pete employed three men: Lily Veddar, Tom Grunewald, and Dutch James. Dutch lived with Pauline’s father’s sister, her aunt Regina. Pauline is already working for the butcher and caring for her younger cousin Russell when Fleur comes to town.

Pauline also narrates her own past: she left home at 15 because she wanted to live in the world as a white person, not as Chippewa. Her family were “mixed-bloods,” and Pauline wanted to take advantage of her light skin and opportunities in the wider world (14). Pauline was a lonely, dreamy, and imaginative girl, but homely and “invisible … to the men” (16), in contrast with Fleur’s fiery energy and beauty. In Argus, Pauline follows Fleur around, wanting her attention and affection. She soon grows jealous of Fleur’s effect on men.

Fleur disappoints all her critics, who have been working up the courage to throw her out of the tribe and off her land, where she has been living quietly and working hard. When she begins gambling at cards, playing twenty-one and 5-card poker with the men from the butcher shop, she wins every time they play—exactly one dollar. The men grow suspicious and angry; they believe that she is cheating, but they do not know how. They also realize that she cannot bluff, as she sighs and her cards shake in her hand when she has nothing.

The men arrange stratagems to throw Fleur off her game, but she keeps on winning. That August, Pete Kozka, who has been playing with them, goes on vacation with his wife, Fritzie, to escape the heat. Lily becomes determined to confront Fleur. She wins all of their paychecks—the whole pot—on one last winner-take-all turn of the cards. Lily and the other men believe Fleur is bluffing, but she is not. She has tricked them all.

She gathers up her money and goes to feed the sow on her way home to the unused smokehouse. The men drink Pete’s liquor and plot their revenge on Fleur. Lily attacks her in the sow’s pen, but Fleur escapes as the sow attacks Lily. The other men run after her: they catch her before she can reach the safety of the smokehouse. They rape her while Pauline and Russell listen outside. Pauline regrets not having tried to stop her uncle, Dutch James, from joining in the attack. Fleur calls for Pauline and Russell, but they do not come.

Fleur is gone in the morning. The men lie about, hung over. The weather turns threatening, and a tornado runs through the town. The men run to the meat locker for safety, locking Pauline and Russell outside, at the mercy of the weather. In turn, Russell and Pauline lock the meat locker from the outside, and Russell’s face shows a “complicit look of peaceful satisfaction” (28).

The town escapes the tornado relatively unscathed except for the flattened smokehouse and butcher shop. The Kozkas’ living quarters are completely untouched. The Kozkas return three days after the storm. No one has noticed that the three men are missing until Fritzie asks about them. The townspeople rally to free the meat locker from its debris: the door being locked from the outside is taken as a sign of the tornado’s whim. Inside, the three men lie in each other’s arms, frozen: Lily and Tor dead, and Dutch James barely alive.

Pauline returns home to her parents, and she helps Fleur when her baby is born. The town gossips do not know who fathered her child, a bold girl with green eyes and skin the color of “an old penny” (31). Rumors fly about Fleur as people wonder whether she married the lake monster, or lived in sin with a white man or a windigo, or whether she killed all the men or monsters who pursued her.