--Margaret Fuller, writer and transcendentalist,
Fort Holmes, Mackinaw Island, Michigan, August 1843--

Rags and dried boughs mark where last week
I lost myself among busy Chippewa women
as they pound corn in a crude mortar.
Their soft voices coo a teething baby asleep.
I wasn't content to watch this, but gathered
twigs for their fires--stooped over a cookfire

imbibing the pungent aromas, hospitably
accepting a bowlful offered. Some bitter
herb mixture of forest scents strong
on my tongue. It eased the hunger I had
each day feeling so useless beside
a squaw bent down with a child strapped

to her back. I mused what my dearest Henry
might make of my sojourn in this land,
or these women. I've proven myself his equal
here if only in spirit walking alone
a honeycomb of beach lodges. Unexpected visitor
from the East, who communicates only by signs--

what my hands touch: cedar strewn on the dirt,
the animal-hide blankets hung for a door;
and then the squaw's coarse black braids, her
busy fingers releasing my own bonnet-bound curls,
as her children play in shallow lake water,
two girls cut wood. I'd sit with my notebook,

no one to take care of, no one to take care of me.
Oh, wouldn't Henry be surprised at how I once
braved the rapids at the Sault, not scared,
while my Indian guide scoop-netted fish
for our breakfast, the current carrying us
lightly as if I were with him at Walden pond?

Surprised at how last night I supped
on dry bread and drier meat, washed down
with water from a stream that flowed hard by?
Such adventures in these wild regions I have
often dreamed of, but shall not have again.
It does not depend on me, when has it ever

that a woman shall write of such things?
My summer ends here at this abandoned beach
littered with refuse, their fire ashes.
And that woman I came to see as myself has
set up home elsewhere, has shown me in her daily
devotions how one life folds into another.