Free The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich Page B

cannot be swayed. But she’s dealing with her own descendant in its purest form—pure girl. Puppy-loving girl.
    “ Grandmagrandmagrandma! ” she shrieks.
    “Eeeeh!”
    “GIMMEDAPUPPY!GIMMEDAPUPPY!”
    Now it’s time for me to wiggle, all over, to give the high-quotient adorability wiggle all puppies know. This is life or death. I do it double time, triple time, full of puppy determination, desperate to live.
    “Ooooh,” says another grandma, sharp-eyed, “quick, trow him in the pot!”
    “Noooo,” says yet another, “she wants that puppy bad, her.”
    “Give her that little dog,” says a grandpa now, his grandpa heart swelling up. “She wants that dog. So give her that little dog.”
    That is how it goes pretty much all the time, now, theseadays. In fact I’ve heard even grandmas have softened their hearts for us and we Indian dogs are safe as anywhere on earth, which isn’t saying much.
    My girl’s doll-playing fingers are brushing my fur. She’s jumping for me. Spinning like a sweet maple seed. Straining up toward her grandma, who at this point can’t hold on to me without looking almost supernaturally mean. And so it is, I feel those ancient dog-cooking fingers give me up before her disappointed voice does.
    “Here.”
    And just like that I’m in the most heavenly of places. Soft, strong girl arms. I’m carried off to be petted and played with, fed scraps, dragged around in a baby carriage made of an old shoe box, dressed in the clothing of tiny brothers and sisters. Yes. I’ll do anything. Anything. This is when my naming happens. As we go off I hear the grandpa calling from behind us in amusement, asking the name of the puppy. Me. And my girl calls back, without hesitation, the name I will bear from then on into my age, the name that has given so many of our breedless breed hope, the name that will live on in dogness down through the generations. You’ve heard it. You know it. Almost Soup.
    Up to the Present
    Having introduced myself, I believe that it is now appropriate to bring time and place back into the picture. Time the judge has released Augustus Roy to easy death. Zosie and Mary have also trudged with their brothers toward the spirit world. Peace lived quietly, like her name. She was a shy old woman married to a shy old man named Waabizii, The Swan. She bore one son and feared to have more children lest they turn out twins. Her mothers always made her enough trouble. But her son grew up safely in her care and then fathered twin girls at too young an age. Their mother disappeared and Peace raised them. Until Zosie and Mary died, Peace was caught between two sets of yoked wills. At least she had the numbers, the bank, her father’s desk, and a changing array of colors that flowed beneath her pencil. Her father had taught her to love the sun on her shoulders and wind in every mood. She named the twins for these pleasures, Giizis and Noodin, hoping for happy spirits. But they turned out shrewd, sour, and sometimes ferocious, like their great-grandmothers. In the end, Peace just gave up.
    There was a wave of giving up, and then there was a new government policy designed in the kindest way to make things worse. It was called Relocation and helped Indians move to cities all over the country. Helped them move away from family. Helped them move away from their land. Helped them move away from their dogs. But don’t worry. We followed them down to Gakaabikaang, Minneapolis, Place of the Falls. I will return. But I am sorry to say that I must leave you now.
    I must give the story over to one particular descendant, Klaus, a man whom we dogs have failed to shape. Though named for the German, an industrious man, Klaus was a sorry piece of work from the get-go. Even though his elderly father counseled him with care, Klaus was lazy, needy, skilled from a tender age at self-deceptions, according to impartial dogs. He was always pining for something over the horizon. I am only letting him speak because