Four Souls Read online

  Now that I know the story, I can rest.

  The woman once called Fleur Pillager, and now named Four Souls as well as another name nobody speaks, is now understood by the spirits. Like the spirits, she lives quiet in the woods. No road leads to her place. Hardly even a path. She doesn’t drown men anymore or steal their tongues, she doesn’t gamble. She doesn’t rub her hands with powders of human bones. She doesn’t sing, at least we can’t hear her above the rustle of dollar bills flying from our hands to the government and papers and more legal forms flapping down to cover us in return. Change is chaos and pain. There was no order in our making. This reservation came about in a time of desperation and upon it we will see things occur more desperate yet. When I look at the scope and the drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This leftover. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.

  Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken, snow will obscure us all, but, my sons and daughters, sorrow is a useless thing. Much as the grass dies, the wind exhausts its strength, the tree topples in a light breeze, the dead buffalo melt away into the prairie ground or are plowed into newly scratched-out fields, all things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become.

  About the Author

  LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of ten novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

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  ALSO BY LOUISE ERDRICH

  NOVELS

  Love Medicine

  The Beet Queen

  Tracks

  The Bingo Palace

  Tales of Burning Love

  The Antelope Wife

  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  The Master Butchers Singing Club

  WITH MICHAEL DORRIS

  The Crown of Columbus

  POETRY

  Jacklight

  Baptism of Desire

  Original Fire

  FOR CHILDREN

  Grandmother’s Pigeon

  The Birchbark House

  The Range Eternal

  NONFICTION

  The Blue Jay’s Dance

  Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

  Credits

  Designed by Elliott Beard

  Copyright

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of The New Yorker, where portions of chapters 9 and 11 first appeared in slightly different form as “Love Snares.”

  Nothing in this book is true of anyone alive or dead.

  FOUR SOULS. Copyright © 2004 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books;.

  ePub edition January 2005 ISBN 9780061744020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Erdrich, Louise.

  Four souls: a novel / Louise Erdrich.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

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