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.