The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

Crystal’s laugh was rich and warm, a whiskey-soda laugh, though she rarely drank. Jeniver’s laugh had been a raucous bray in high school, but practice of the law had squeezed it to a sharp series of knowing woofs—not dog woofs, but another kind of animal. A night animal. Jeniver’s laugh was the sort of laugh that might emerge from dense shrubbery and sink your heart. Her laugh always impressed Crystal, comforted her. She was in capable, clawed hands.

‘You always throw money in my face,’ he’d said. ‘Because you spend all your money on yourself. You’re stingy with your family,’ said Crystal. Stingy was the worst thing you could call a Michif. She’d hoped to shut him up. But he hadn’t even blinked before he said, ‘Better stingy with money than emotion. You’re coldhearted.’ Coldhearted was the second worst thing you could call a Michif. And it was true. She was sometimes too tired to have emotions and had started acting rationally. She knew how men hated rational women.

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle—the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. ‘You may judge now the richness of these prairies,’ he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.