Original Fire Read Free

come again to the low hills.
    We heard them traveling, heard the frozen birches
    Break before their long retreat
    Into the red sleep.

The Birth of Potchikoo
    You don’t have to believe this, I’m not asking you to. But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.
     
    There was a very pretty Chippewa girl working in a field once. She was digging potatoes for a farmer someplace around Pembina when suddenly the wind blew her dress up around her face and wrapped her apron so tightly around her arms that she couldn’t move. She lay helplessly in the dust with her potato sack, this poor girl, and as she lay there she felt the sun shining down very steadily upon her.
    Then she felt something else. You know what. I don’t have to say it. She cried out for her mother.
    This girl’s mother came running and untangled her daughter’s clothes. When she freed the girl, she saw that there were tears in her daughter’s eyes. Bit by bit, the mother coaxed out the story. After the girl told what had happened to her, the mother just shook her head sadly.
    “I don’t know what we can expect now,” she said.
    Well nine months passed and he was born looking just like a potato with tough warty skin and a puckered round shape. All the ladies came to visit the girl and left saying things behind their hands.
    “That’s what she gets for playing loose in the potato fields,” they said.
    But the girl didn’t care what they said after a while because she used to go and stand alone in a secret clearing in the woods and let the sun shine steadily upon her. Sometimes she took her little potato boy. She noticed when the sun shone on him he grew and became a little more human-looking.
    One day the girl fell asleep in the sun with her potato boy next to her. The sun beat down so hard on him that he had an enormous spurt of growth. When the girl woke up, her son was fully grown. He said good-bye to his mother then, and went out to see what was going on in the world.

Potchikoo Marries
    After he had several adventures, the potato boy took the name Potchikoo and decided to try married life.
    I’ll just see what it’s like for a while, he thought, and then I’ll start wandering again.
    How very inexperienced he was!
    He took the train to Minneapolis to find a wife and as soon as he got off he saw her. She was a beautiful Indian girl standing at the door to a little shop where they sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco. How proud she looked! How peaceful. She was so lovely that she made Potchikoo shy. He could hardly look at her.
    Potchikoo walked into the store and bought some cigarettes. He lit one up and stuck it between the beautiful woman’s lips. Then he stood next to her, still too shy to look at her, until he smelled smoke. He saw that she had somehow caught fire.
    “Oh, I’ll save you!” cried Potchikoo.
    He grabbed his lady love and ran with her to the lake, which was, handily, across the street. He threw her in. At first he was afraid she would drown but soon she floated to the surface and kept floating away from Potchikoo. This made him angry.
    “Trying to run away already!” he shouted.
    He leaped in to catch her. But he had forgotten that he couldn’t swim. So Potchikoo had to hang on to his wooden sweetheart while she drifted slowly all the way across the lake. When they got to the other side of the lake, across from Minneapolis, they were in wilderness. As soon as the wooden girl touched the shore she became alive and jumped up and dragged Potchikoo out of the water.
    “I’ll teach you to shove a cigarette between my lips like that,” she said, beating him with her fists, which were still hard as wood. “Now that you’re my husband you’ll do things my way!”
    That was how Potchikoo met and married Josette. He was married to her all his life. After she made it clear what she expected of her husband, Josette made a little toboggan of cut saplings and tied him upon it. Then she decided