The Birchbark House: Chapters 5–8

Andeg even frightened off an owl, and once, perched on the head guard of baby Neewo’s cradle board, craackacraccked loudly and repeatedly until Mama came running to find a curious raccoon trying to steal from the bundles of dried fish and venison she was preparing to cache.

He fancied himself quite a medicine man and wore at his throat a circle of bear claws.

The bowl was red pipestone in the shape of an otter’s head, his clan.

Dark blue pony beads hung down a swatch of fringe, and Fishtail touched them carefully and lovingly as he stepped quietly along.

“That’s right,” her father said at last, contempt in his voice, “that’s what they are saying. The useless ones.”

In the brush, Angeline and Omakayas clapped hands over their mouths to stifle their glee.

Yes, there were hazards on the way—Dakota war parties, hunger, the threat of winter’s dire weather.

Watching in the bushes, Omakayas and Angeline waited for them to resume their talking, but that day, mulling over Fishtail’s difficult words perhaps, the men kept their silence.

His eyes got beady and his lip turned out. He pouted at her, but she paid his lowered looks no mind.

“I’m spreading these berries on the bark sheaves so they will dry,” she went on, and then she proceeded to spread out the berries on clean birchbark, in the warmest patch of sun she could find.

Pinch pointed up and sure enough, Andeg, sitting out of reach on a high branch, certainly looked guilty as he glared down and preened his new growth of feathers.

Gently but firmly, she took his hands in hers, uncurled them, saw the telltale juice marks of bruised chokecherries that darkened his fingertips, then the pitiful, berry-stained smile that sealed his guilt!

One of the bears ventured out too far, curious, and tumbled right out of the tree.

Then Mama saw both little bears loping and bounding through the woods toward Omakayas.

Mama was further surprised and frightened when without a sound of warning a huge sow bear fattened for winter rambled out of the brush and passed Omakayas without acknowledging her, a human, as the least bit strange or out of place.

She smiled at their bumbling, chubby bodies.

Over the summer, they had grown until they outweighed her by a great deal, though they still were bashful and hung back, just beyond the reach of her fingertips, as she spoke to them.

His vigilance and hatred for mice helped the whole family in their efforts to ready the cabin for winter.

They sought other cabins and wigwams, where there was not a frightful crow to bother them.

Now it was time to harvest the wild rice that grew across from the island in the great sloughs of Kakagon, where Mama’s brother and one of her sisters lived.

That space, they hoped, they would fill with the wild rice, the manomin, the good seed that would sustain them through the winter.

They reached the shores of the camp, and there, amid the general happiness at seeing one another, the grown-ups learned the rice was indeed sparse that year.

Her face was flushed and thrilled with effort.

All day, and the next, Two Strike's legs moved up and down, her feet, in clean new makazins, crushed the tough hulls.

While Nokomis worked on the corn, Tallow gutted fish and dried them on a big scaffold that she set up over a special fire she would feed day and night with cedarwood to give the fish a special flavor.

Mixed together, the stuff made caulking for the seams of their canoes.

Holding her bundles in her arms, she gazed at Omakayas until, understanding the gravity of Nokomis’s nature, Omakayas stood still.

She spoke so earnestly, with such emotion in her voice, that Omakayas was always to remember that moment, the bend in the path where they stood with the medicines, her grandmother’s kind face and the words she spoke.

Mama had a fire going in the fire pit, a small hearth that Deydey had made for them of the smoothest, thickest, heaviest stones.

She never quite warmed, kept shifting as cold drafts seized a foot or iced her knees.

Mama was worried that Deydey would not manage to make the crossing before the freeze-up. If he didn’t, if he couldn’t, he would have to wait in camp until the ice was solid and he and his men could pull their toboggans of stretched furs across to sell to the traders.

She held her long rifle loosely under one arm, and growled her Ahneen at Omakayas as she tramped into the brush.

Surprised and taken aback at this, Angeline and Omakayas could only stand still and watch him as he walked swiftly, gracefully, back to his home.

But now, even though the cold already bit in the mornings, she wore only her one earth-colored dress with the raveled hem.

That night, the children went upstairs and slept in the loft, and Nokomis slept there, too, instead of downstairs beside Mama.