[In the following essay, Gish identifies how hunting functions as a central motif in Love Medicine.]

Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison; And make me savory meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.

—Genesis 27:3-4

Now, watch me, ungilisi, grandson,
as I prepare this deer
which the Great Spirit has given to us.

—Geary Hobson, “Deer Hunting”

Contemporary American Indian fiction relies consistently on hunting and the role and character of the hunter. Such a preponderance of attention to hunting by Indian authors is only natural since American Indian literature in all its forms, oral and written, mythic and historical, reflects indigenous and aboriginal cultures—societies almost always linked closely to the land, to sustenance from it and to cultural identity reciprocal with it, especially with fishing and hunting. (Not-withstanding the differing injury or death awaiting the prey, hunting is regarded here as also generally subsuming trapping in that traps and snares are inevitably set in an act of hunting.)¹

Part of the “story” and many of the plots of contemporary American Indian fiction involve how hunting as an indigenous and primal act affects and interacts (psychologically and in overt behavior) with modern urban cultures wherein hunting, for the most part, is either ignored or, if acknowledged, championed as New Age shamanism or condemned as atavistic and only dimly remembered in the controlling technological and scientific modern world. In sum, if hunting is acknowledged today it is usually perceived reductively and condescendingly by self-perceived “civilized” readers, as blood sport or murder. And some zealots who know animals mainly as pets clamor stridently for animal “rights” in protest of the crass huntsman—Indian or non-Indian characters, real or fictive, regarded with the same abhorrence directed to medical researchers who experiment on dogs and monkeys.

Of course, the metaphor of the hunt and the real and attributed motives for hunting go much beyond American Indian literature, and much beyond the individual or cultural human hunter/killer of animals. The ironies and implications of life as hunt, of hunter becoming hunted, of killing to live, of animal life transformed through food and sustenance, resurrected and regenerated through death, of the sacred and ceremonial initiations of the hunt, and of the more profane rituals of self-quests, genealogical hunts, man hunts, job hunts, house/home hunts, investment hunts—all such “hunts” are recognized in the activities and lexicons of modern life.

It is, however, predominately American Indian authors who interpret, redefine, and focus the more fundamental metaphors and motives of hunting, not just for traditional and adaptive Indian peoples but for modern, non-Indian metaphorical hunters. These authors, like Isaac's sincere fatherly request and instruction to Esau, seek to bless us with their soul-felt fictions of the hunt.

Because the hunt and its plots and players are everywhere in life and in literature, it is thus worthwhile to comment on the imaginative and creative resource that hunting provides to Indian authors. This is especially true in a work such as Love Medicine—a novel that in its themes and structures, plots and patterns, in its own motive and metaphor positions the centrality of the hunt in the essential act of writing and reading, of author and reader on the hunt in and beyond the worded ways of the “hunting stories” in this half-century family saga for the affirmation of love over hate, life over death—the affirmation of art and of humanity which the novel provides.²

The heart of hunting as motive and metaphor in Love Medicine is found in the chapter “Wild Geese” and in the especially important titular chapter, “Love Medicine.” Surrounding and supporting these two central hunting chapters are expansive and reflexive images and motifs—at once naturalistic and romantic, tragic and comic—which deal with human death and life in relation to animals and their hunting. Moreover, the crucial connection between the first chapter, “The World's Greatest Fishermen,” and the eleventh chapter, “Crown of Thorns,” demonstrates surrealistically but convincingly the hunter/hunted, animal/human convergence.

The plots (or subplots) of these two key sets of chapters and their imagistic and thematic undergirding throughout the novel work to secure its controlling metaphor: erotic and familial love, the power and “love medicine” of characters facing life's temporal and transcendent transmutations, not so much like players on a stage but like hunters and hunted, acceding to the ironies and paradoxes of the hunt—life into death, and death into life, hunting as crucifixion and resurrection. The purpose here, then, is to demonstrate how much of the motive and metaphor, the sequence and linkage of the “love stories” of Nector Kashpaw and Marie Lazarre, of June Morrissey and Gordie Kashpaw are established amidst the polarities and associations of hunter/hunter, the crucified and the resurrected.

Eli Kashpaw, twin brother to Nector Kashpaw (with certain affiliations and likenesses to the biblical hunter Esau and his deceptive brother, Jacob, and like Erdrich's legendary medicine man, Old Man Pillager, and grandpa Kashpaw's mother, old Rushes Bear), haunts the peripheries of the novel as a representative of the older and more obscure traditional Cree (and Chippewa) mythic ways known in the novel's present mostly through the nuances and glimmerings of family scripts, and by the more central characters in the novel such as Nector Kashpaw. As seen in his own account of the seductions of Marie Lazarre, of her “trapping” of him, Nector plays the dual role of hunter and hunted. Lipsha, although not the hunter his uncles are, does have the “touch,” the gift of healing—or so he wants desperately to believe in his own hunt for his identity, and for the identity of his parents. In this motive he becomes a more metaphorical hunter.

In such a richly reflexive and recursive novel as Love Medicine, the fated capture and metaphorical sexual “snaring” and “killing” of Nector in “Wild Geese” is both anticipated in earlier and remembered in later portions of the novel. Not just hunting imagery but bird and waterfowl, duck and geese, deer and fox, skunk and gopher descriptions and associations rise and fall rhythmically, build and diminish in architectonic pattern and counterpoint. It is clear that metaphorically, through Erdrich's use of “objective correlatives,” Nector and Marie are made to be the human, metaphorical counterparts to wild geese. Similarly, June and Eli, but especially June, are portrayed as deer, wild eaters of pine sap and nibblers of buds.

Through the two dead geese tied to Nector's wrists, the killing and “death” of sexual orgasm (as associated in the metaphorical correspondences of Renaissance and Courtly Love literature particularly) occurs in reflexive association with the first death dramatized in the novel (the death of June Kashpaw, Lipsha's mother)—the love medicines of the novel work their way. And since Love Medicine is not a strictly linear novel, rather at once synchronic and diachronic, this death of June, preceded, perhaps precipitated by another instance of “hunter/hunted” figurative death in intercourse, the associations of that seminal scene (in two senses of the word) serves to impregnate, to germinate the “Wild Geese” chapter and its sequel chapter, “Love Medicine.” June too sought, partook of, and bequeathed her own special love potion. Thus her promiscuous Williston “boomtown” love(s) and death—narrated comparatively more objectively, more cosmically (in third person), informs all of the prior and subsequent prescriptions and doses (i.e., chapters) of love medicine(s) in the novel.

June's death and mourning, described in the chapter “The World's Greatest Fishermen,” reflect the ironic scrawl on Lipsha's half brother's, King's, hat and point toward discussions at June's wake, and elsewhere in the novel, that the world's greatest fishermen, like the world's greatest hunters, are long removed from the older more authentic and triumphant traditional times of Cree/Chippewa elders and ancestors. Eli, not as old as Pillager and Rushes Bear, though acclaimed by the family as “the greatest hunter” (30), when the reader first meets him, is old and wizened, and a man of diminished appetites. Although Eli is a semi-modern hunter who relies on a gun and shells, albeit sparingly, he is still the nearest link to the old ways, the old hunters, and is complimented as such: “‘Only real old-time Indians know deer good enough to snare,’ Gordie said to us. ‘Your Uncle Eli's a real old-timer’” (LM [Love Medicine] 28).

June grew up roaming the woods with Eli and both shared a wildness common to older times and animal affinity. Marie notes the commonality: “Sometimes I thought she was more like Eli. The woods were in June, after all, just like in him, and maybe more. She had sucked on pine sap and grazed grass and nipped buds like a deer” (LM 65). And, somewhat ironically, given her snaring and monitoring of Nector, Marie has more use for Eli than his more dissolute (and deceiving) brother, Nector, with his predilections for pool halls and home-brewed wine. In his quietness, in his ways with children, and especially in his lessons for June, Eli impressed Marie:

Spring and summer, when the furs were thin, we'd see more of Eli around home. He lived in a mud-chink bachelor shack on the other end of the land. He was a nothing and-nowhere person, not a husband match for any woman, but I had to like him. Eli drank but he never lost his head. He rarely spoke. Sometimes we sat in a room all evening, hardly talking, although he spoke easy with the children. I'd overhear. He had a soft hushed voice, like he was stalking something very near. He'd showed them how to carve, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how to whistle on their own fingers like a flute. He taught June.

(LM 69)

Marie asserts that, in her own special wildness, it was probably June who taught Eli. But she confesses that Eli's abilities as a hunter went beyond stalking and luring game. He knew the old ways, and the old songs, hunting songs, haunting siren songs, which could even attract the likes of her:

They [Eli and June] went into the woods with their snares and never came home empty-handed. They went to the sloughs to shoot mudhens and brought home a bag of the tiny, black greasy birds. Nector was rarely home then. He worked late or sneaked to gamble. We'd roast the birds and make a high pile of their twig bones in the middle of the table. Eli would sing his songs. Wild unholy songs. Cree songs that made you lonely. Hunting songs used to attract deer or women. He wasn't shy when he sang them. I had to keep to my mending.

(LM 69)

June, a child of nine when taken in by Marie, goes to live with Eli soon after, lured to him and the wild and the attractions embedded in Eli's songs, by “pine sap and grasses.” June, as an abandoned child, intuits that there is more love, more caring in life in the wild with Eli than even with Marie and all of her adoptive, motherly ways. June's material and spiritual legacy to Marie—although not necessarily intended as such—is the string of beads, a misappropriated rosary hung on her to ward off the devil, the spirits that the debauched Morrisseys attributed to be inside her. When touching those beads Marie feels small stones rolled and grinded aimlessly by the lake waves until they disappear. It is an image of submergence first encountered by the reader in the account of June's death, along with other images of birds and wildness that come to be associated with her in her death and its aftermath, especially the howling animal madness, the punishment, the crucifixion and “crown of thorns” it brings on her one-time husband, Gordie Kashpaw.

If Marie sees no real kindness in June's symbolic, abandoned rosary beads, June's death brings a special kind of crucifixion and damnation to Gordie and a faith-shaking sense of life's angst to the tragicomic, clarinet-playing nun, Sister Mary Martin de Porres, who tries, briefly but devotedly, to assuage him in his deluded and delirious confession that he has murdered his wife, murdered June. Here, in the “Crown of Thorns” chapter, June's resurrection becomes a haunting into madness, leaving Gordie, a kind of Indian Lear, howling beyond the Edenic orchards and pines, amidst the grass and woods behind the convent, hunter become the hunted, predator become prey to the hounds of heaven: “She [Sister Mary Martin] followed him, calling now, into the apple trees but lost him there, and all that morning, while they waited for the orderlies and the tribal police to come with cuffs and litters and a court order, they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open fields” (188).

Gordie comes to such straits of madness and mistaken reckoning in drunken grief and guilt for his beating and abuse of June when they were married—failed Golden Gloves boxer turning his fists on the wrong, wifely opponent. One month after her death “the morning before Easter Sunday,” Gordie begins drinking. He visits Eli who, in an action with reflexive imagery associated with June's death, offers him an egg that he cannot eat. From drinking beer at Eli's, Gordie walks home (with more reflexive imagery from June's stark and similarly inebriated fateful walk into the snow), where he calls his cousin Royce for some quarts of home-brewed wine.

After hours or days of drinking filled with regrets and reminiscence, he calls out June's name in a drunken love song—the violation of a taboo that frightens him and sets the stage in his mind for June's ghostly reappearance: “Her name burst from him. He wanted to take it back as soon as he said it. Never, never, ever call the dead by their names, Grandma said. They might answer. Gordie knew this. Now he felt very uneasy. Worse than before” (177).

Soon June does answer. While Gordie is trying to evade her by shaving, June's face appears at the window and when he runs to the kitchen she pounds at the window in anger. He turns on all the lights then overloads the circuits by plugging in the toaster and there in the darkness of the house she enters, stalking him room to room, coming for him, tearing the sheets off the bed, arranging the perfume bottles. Gordie, in a panic, runs to his car and guns it into the night for a five-mile escape into town and the hope of another bottle. But he hits a deer and, thinking the hide would be worth a bottle of booze and unable to open the car trunk, he drags the deer, a doe, into the back seat. And Erdrich continues reflexively to re-create the inside of the truck where June has sex with the “mud-engineer,” Andy, a heater-infused cab which she leaves only to walk to her frozen death (and resurrection). Here, however, in a Malibu Chevy June is resurrected in Gordie's mind as a stunned rather than dead deer that stares its way into his very soul in the terror of the visage he now sees in the rear-view mirror:

Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a rattling thicket of bones. She saw how he'd woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he'd jammed this relief on his brow. Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black. He did not understand what he was going to do. He bent, out of her gaze, and groped beneath the front seat for the tire iron, a flat-edged crowbar thick as a child's wrist.

(LM 180)

Gordie then concludes, in total emotional and mental breakdown, that he has not just bludgeoned a deer, he has killed his wife, June, and that leads him to seek the help, and to offer the confession, rendered with flourishes of black comedy, which only heighten the poignancy of events. For Sister Mary Martin, thinking she will see the corpse of Gordie's wife, sees what he sees and finds herself in strange communion in the back seat of the Malibu with the dead deer, involved, like Gordie, like June, (like her own great Savior, the Greatest Fisherman) with humanity's suffering and the relentless, inevitable pursuit of mortality, of being born into death with only the promise of life after death to light and lighten the way.

June's death one week before Easter Sunday becomes even more significant in light of Gordie's crazed “crucifixion” and Mary Martin's comic but gruesomely serious catharsis (epiphany). June dies with a ticket home in her possession. In the literal sense she never makes it home, not to the home and family which the rest of the novel “resurrects” for the reader, as the times and places and family members are revealed across time, almost as if June, transcendent and resurrected herself through the techniques of fiction, is somehow able to see simultaneously with the reader. That she is transcendent and resurrected, that she does make it home—to a more heavenly albeit imaginatively fictive home (novel as heaven)—is clear in her walk into but over the frozen, numbing snow-scape of the Dakota plains. Gordie too makes a walk, an escape across a similar landscape; however, he never makes it home (novel as hell) in the same sense that June does. Her life is in a sense her ticket “home.” She walks, doe-like, deer-like at first, then Christ-like:

By now it was unclear whether she was more drunk or more sober than she'd ever been in her life.

… Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.

(LM 5-6)

Much of the reflexive imagery of June's brief time with Andy, the “down-vested mud engineer” clusters around some of the geese and waterfowl imagery that takes full control in “The Wild Geese” and “Love Medicine” chapters. Perhaps it is not too farfetched to suggest, also, that subliminally there is something of the myth of Leda and the Swan at work as well. Admittedly, mud engineers are not mud-hens, and geese are not swans, but the consensual “rape” of June by Andy in the truck, and the mutual “seduction-rape” of Nector and Marie as youths and the later old-age, manipulated seductions (with the misguided assistance of Lipsha's goose heart/turkey heart aphrodisiac) suggest, at least to this reader, such anthropomorphic and mythic, metaphorical correspondences. The predominance of Easter eggs, their repeated peeling and eating, the mention of turtles, robins, and reptiles in Erdrich's rendering of June's final hours all reinforce the significance and function of the wild geese and deer at the top of the novel's evolving hierarchical bestiary.

“Wild Geese” and “Love Medicine,” as narratives of the love relationship of Nector Kashpaw and Marie Lazarre, are linked together, fittingly, by images of the hunt and of a pair of geese. The dead geese, shot by Nector and his brother, Eli, and taken into town to sell by Nector, are more than literally tied to Nector's wrists. Just as geese, unique in relation to more promiscuous waterfowl, mate for life, Nector and Marie are destined to remain paired early and late in their marriage of tribulation and trial. Despite Nector's lifelong attraction for Lulu Nanapush and their love dalliances, a relationship that makes them a wild pair of lovers as well, Nector chooses not to leave Marie. The “love medicine,” songs and potions with which Lipsha and Eli claim some special touch, some special knowledge, alternately work and don't work their ways on the Marie-Nector-Lulu lover's triangle. Eli and Marie have their moments of lustful attraction, but, as alluded to above, Marie keeps to her knitting.

Erdrich, in beginning “Wild Geese” with mention of Eli's hunting prowess, sets the tensions of the novel again along the lines of the hunt not just for animals but for a mate. The results of the hunt mean different things for each brother as they turn death into commodity and diverse pleasure. Nector narrates the story of Marie's snaring of him on what turns out to be a not-so-ordinary departure from the weekly, Esau-Jacob ritualized divided labor of the hunt:

On Friday mornings, I go down to the sloughs with my brother Eli and wait for the birds to land. We have built ourselves a little blind. Eli has second sense and an aim I cannot match, but he is shy and doesn't like to talk. In this way it is a good partnership. Because I got sent to school, I am the one who always walks into town and sells what we shoot. I get the price from the Sisters, who cook for the priests, and then I come home and split the money in half. Eli usually takes his bottle off into the woods, while I go into town, to the fiddle dance, and spark the girls.

(LM 57)

This particular day Marie Lazarre, running frantic and wounded from her gothic and frightening encounter with Sister Leopolda at the Sacred Heart Convent, collides with Nector. He is thinking amorously about, “aiming” for, Lulu Nanapush but hits (and gets hit by) Marie. It is an errant errand for Nector, albeit fateful, but Marie (injured and “winged” herself) wings Nector as surely as a blast of birdshot. The “sacred heart” image, too, is a significant and expansive/reflexive “heart” image which carries over not just to the affairs of the heart of “Wild Geese” but the actual goose heart Lipsha tries to isolate and prepare as an aphrodisiac for the continuing struggle of wills of Nector and Marie.

Nector thinks of Lulu in hunting terms, singling her out (e.g., “I have already decided that Lulu Nanapush is the one,” LM 58), and taking what he sees as difficult aim (e.g., “She is small, yet she will never be an armful or an eyeful because I'll never get a bead on her,” LM 58). But Nector, among such lustful thoughts and aims, becomes prey to another's “aiming,” to Marie who is also described in shooting terminology: “Because I am standing there, lost on the empty road, half drowned in the charms of Lulu, I never see Marie Lazarre barrel down” (LM 58).

Nector, contributing to his own snaring, insists that Marie slow down, and he essentially stops her, thinking she is on the lam from stealing some of the convent's silver. The geese tied to Nector's wrists hit upon Marie's hips and she resists his hold. Her tears cause him to let loose of her twisted, injured arm. Erdrich describes the release, again, in hunting terms: “So I let up for a moment. She moves away from me. But it is just to take aim. Her brown eyes glaze over like a wounded mink's, hurt but still fighting vicious” (LM 59). She charges him and then they are on the ground exchanging insults about person and family. Then the dead geese assist in the ensuing “rape”; Marie suddenly (like Leda) engulfed by wings, attracted to and yet repulsed by another kind of feathered gore (glory): “The geese are to my advantage now [says Nector]; their weight on my arms helps pin her; their dead wings flap around us; their necks loll, and their black eyes stare, frozen. … Her eyes are tense and wild, animal eyes. My neck chills” (LM 60). Then the control shifts and Marie, in effect, catches and holds Nector with her own sexual power, her breasts like soft bullets grazing him, arousing him:

I stiffen like I am shocked. It hits me then I am lying full length across a woman, not a girl. Her breasts graze my chest, soft and pointed. I cannot help but lower myself the slightest bit to feel them better. And then I am caught. I give way. I cannot help myself, because, to my everlasting wonder, Marie is all tight plush acceptance, graceful movements, little jabs that lead me underneath her skirt where she is slick, warm, silk.

(LM 60-61)

Marie, described in colors of black (her skirt) and white (her pillowcase-wrapped hand), is associated with both a wild Canada goose and a crow (her “crow's rasp” voice and her alleged meanness). Nector, feeling like a “stupid fish” with failing breath, holds the two dead geese (analogical fig leaves) in front of him to hide his Adam-like sense of guilt and shame. And once Nector sees the painful wound in Marie's hand (resulting from her, in effect, crucifixion by the sadistic Sister Leopolda in the convent), a shot shoots through his own hand and he drops the geese and gives them to Marie, gifts of atonement and commiseration for her to take home to roast and eat—gifts for her sustenance and resurrection. Nector, holding Marie's fevered hand, views her, attends to her mercifully in a manner akin to putting a wounded animal out of its misery:

I'm not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trapline, I find a wounded animal that hasn't died well, or worse, it's still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it's just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.

This is how I take Marie's hand. This is how I hold her wounded hand in my hand.

(LM 62)

June too is associated reflexively with Nector and Marie through the imagery of the dead geese, their necks in leather bands. Once in childhood Gordie and Aurelia had “a rope around her neck and looped over a tree” (LM 20), and her dead but resurrected image abides throughout not just in Gordie's mind but also in the reader's.

At June's wake the men discuss (both truths and lies) all the animals they have killed—from skunks to fox—and including a discourse on how to skin and boil a skunk by Eli, the old hunter and last man on the reservation that could snare a deer. June's son, King (Lipsha's half-brother and killer of “gooks” when in the Marines), also boasts, in the tradition of hunting tall tales, of killing a fox with bow and arrow and hitting it right in “that little black hole underneath a fox's tail” (LM 29). When challenged, King tells what he jokingly proposes as a truer hunting story: “I heard of this guy once who put his arrow through a fox then left it thrash around in the bush until he thought it was dead. He went in there after it. You know what he found? That fox had chewed the arrow off either side of its body and it was gone” (LM 30).

No longer a clan of true hunters, the men nevertheless still rely on hunting stories, remnants of more purposeful accounts and more authentic deeds, to bring some perspective on June's death, on the death in life and life in death known to the hunter.

A year after June's death and nearly fifty years after Marie Lazarre snared Nector Kashpaw, another traditional ritual is resurrected in an attempt to rekindle the love of Marie and Nector. Like Eli, Nector's grandson, Lipsha Morrissey, has “the touch” of the old ones, of the old ways. In his case it is the touch of healing: “I got the touch. It's a thing you got to be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask. … The medicine flows out of me” (LM 190).

Nector, in his second childhood, stands in the woods and cries out—primal cries to be sure, albeit for different reasons than Gordie's howling because of June's death. Nector also reverts to his old ways of making visits to see Lulu, “to have his candy” (LM 191). It is Marie, out of enduring jealousy and love, who enlists Lipsha to put the touch on Nector to make him stay home. Lipsha, although angry at the injustices done to Indian peoples generally and to June and Gordie more specifically, consents to “cure” Nector in the hope of bringing some greater happiness to his grandparents in their old age.

It is Marie who mentions the possibility of love medicine to Lipsha and although he knows such remedies are an old Chippewa specialty he doesn't particularly want to visit Old Man Pillager for a refresher course in the recipes. Hunting for the best remedy, Lipsha realizes that hunting itself will provide the appropriate means. Erdrich's way of providing this solution for Lipsha is through patterning and extending her earlier use of geese as objective correlatives for Marie and for Nector. Lipsha's realization of how to proceed is, again, abetted by Marie:

Well I got it. If it hadn't been the early fall of the year, I never would have got it. But I was sitting underneath a tree one day down near the school just watching people's feet go by when something tells me, look up! So I look up, and I see two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life. I see them flying right over my head naturally preparing to land in some slough on the reservation, which they certainly won't get off of alive.

It hits me, anyway. Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part—say the goose heart—of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn't that work? Maybe it's all invisible, and then maybe again it's magic. Love is a stony road. We know that for sure. If it's true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we'd be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn't harm nobody anyway. I thought it was worth my effort, and Grandma Kashpaw thought so, too. She had always known a good idea when she heard one. She borrowed me Grandpa's gun.

(LM 200)

It is because of this motive that Lipsha becomes a hunter. And the reader is back once again in the times a half-century earlier when Nector and Eli hunted for geese and when Nector first encountered Marie on a literal “stony road of love,” with two dead geese tied to his wrists, and a lifetime's weight of marriage.

Lipsha takes his grandpa's gun, goes to a slough, improvises a blind, and sits and waits among the rushes, patiently watching the herons hunt for their own prey. Erdrich's description of Lipsha's moment of truth as a hunter ends in anticlimax and disappointment:

I was still hunkered in the slough. It was passing late into the afternoon and still no honkers had touched down. Now I don't need to tell you that the waiting did not get to me, it was the chill. The rushes was very soft, but damp. I was getting cold and debating to leave, when they landed. Two geese swimming here and there as big as life, looking deep into each other's little pinhole eyes. Just the ones I was looking for. So I lifted Grandpa's gun to my shoulder and I aimed perfectly, and blam! Blam! I delivered two accurate shots. But the thing is, them shots missed. I couldn't hardly believe it. Whether it was that the stock had warped or the barrel got bent someways, I don't quite know, but anyway them geese flown off into the dim sky, and Lipsha Morrissey was left there in the rushes with evening fallen and his two cold hands empty. He had before him just the prospect of another day of bone-cracking chill in them rushes, and the thought of it got him depressed.

(LM 202)

Lipsha is depressed not only because he misses two “accurate” shots but because the two geese, described as devoted, eye-gazing lovers, emphasize his own aloneness. But he rallies and rationalizes that store birds would work just as well. He buys two frozen turkeys. And it is this violation, what he calls an “evil shortcut,” which causes his love medicine to backfire. It isn't the love medicine itself, he tries to convince himself, that counts—rather it is the faith in the cure which brings results. He compounds his error by asking a priest to bless the two hearts which he wraps in a clean handkerchief. He is referred to the same Sister Martin who took Gordie's confessional and prayed him all the way into the hospital in Bismarck. Like Jacob's lies and deceptions about his own hunting to Isaac, Lipsha first tells Sister Mary Martin that the turkey hearts are intended for the statue of Saint Kateri, and failing to convince her of that motive leads her to believe they are love charms for himself. And when she tells him he doesn't need such assistance, he leaves, reaching into a cup of holy water and blessing the turkey hearts himself. Such an act, such a poignantly comedic scene brings new, extended, and ironic meaning to the name of the “Sacred Heart Convent.”

Lipsha can't watch the spectacle of Grandma Marie eating the turkey heart raw and then trying to trick Grandpa Nector into eating it on doctor's orders to enrich his blood. But the comedy increases and when Nector taunts Marie by rolling the heart around in his mouth and then displaying it on his tongue, she gets up and slugs him between the shoulders to make him swallow it. The comedy turns blacker when Nector chokes—and dies.

Then in a wonderfully reflexive moment, Marie, rushing back to Nector, stumbles and falls to the floor too. The circle is full and complete. Now they are both prey to the throes of death rather than young lust and love—life into death, death into life. Lipsha passes out—reviving to see the regret in Marie's eyes that she too has been resurrected from her near death by the Senior Citizen staff. Lipsha shares the guilt for his grandfather's death with Marie at the funeral.

The resurrection theme continues, however, and in a way recursive and reflexive to June's return to haunt Gordie, Nector returns to invite Marie to follow him, as Marie explains it to her grandson: “‘It's the love medicine, my Lipsha,’ she said. ‘It was stronger than we thought. He came back even after death to claim me to his side’” (212).

Then the true love medicine of the novel works its own conjuring way and Erdrich gives Lipsha the heart and courage to tell his grandmother the truth—that the love medicine was a fake, and that it was true love which brought Nector back to Marie to allow him to tell her how he loved her. In her love and appreciation of Lipsha's confession and his own state of hunting for his parentage and for love, Marie gives him June's rosary beads which hang on her bedpost. And just as Nector had once held Marie's wounded hand, Marie holds Lipsha's hand in utter love:

She took the beads off the bedpost, where she kept them to say at night, and she told me to put out my hand. When I did this, she shut the beads inside of my fist and held them there a long minute, tight, so my hand hurt. I almost cried when she did this. I don't really know why. Tears shot up behind my eyelids, and yet it was nothing. I didn't understand, except her hand was so strong, squeezing mine.

(LM 214)

The reader understands. Erdrich's wondrous techniques of utilizing expansive and reflexive image and symbol, her fine orchestration of pattern and rhythm whereby the paradoxes, the motives and metaphors of hunting and the hunt, life into death, death into life, converge into the regenerative and reaffirming potency of Love Medicine to bring new life and insight to the reader through the clear and accurate aim of the artist—straight to the heart, mind, and soul of the waiting, wanting reader.

Notes

1. See my related essays on hunting and American Indian literature: “Rights Gone Wrong: Indigenous Hunting Rights in Contemporary American Indian Fiction” and “Ironies of Consent: Hunting and Heroism in The Surrounded.” See also my book Songs of My Hunter Heart: A Western Kinship; Marshall, On Behalf of the Wolf and the First Peoples; and Hobson, The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature, 90-108.

2. I use the original publication of Love Medicine (1984) instead of the new and expanded 1993 version because I consider the original publication to be a better novel than the revised one and a good example of “less as more.”

Works Cited

Gish, Robert F. “Ironies of Consent: Hunting and Heroism in The Surrounded.” The Legacy of D'Arcy McNickle. Ed. John Purdy. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. 102-14.

———. “Rights Gone Wrong: Indigenous Hunting Rights in Contemporary American Indian Fiction.” North Dakota Quarterly 61.4 (Fall 1994): 11-25.

———. Songs of My Hunter Heart: A Western Kinship. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1992.

Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1979. 90-108.

Marshall, Joseph, III. On Behalf of the Wolf and the First Peoples. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1996.