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He tells the Agent and Bernadette that Nector and Margaret paid the fees on the Pillager land last spring. The land Agent explains that Margaret only paid for the Kashpaw allotment, and that the government received a fair price for the Pillager allotments. Stricken by this betrayal, Nanapush can hardly believe it. He strikes out, asking whose pockets were lined with the money from the Pillager land sale—those of the land Agent himself, Bernadette’s, or other Morrisseys’ or Lazarres’? Bernadette rudely tells him to go home.

When Fleur hears the news, she fills her pockets with stones, grasps a large stone across her chest, and walks into the lake. Startled, neither Nanapush nor Eli react at first. Nanapush sends Lulu for a blanket, while Eli drags Fleur out of the lake, gray and not breathing. She does open her eyes to lay a curse on Nector, telling Eli that Nector will take her place. Eli runs away to join a logging crew, wanting to earn the money to buy back a piece of the Pillager land.

Nanapush implores Lulu to behave like a daughter and go to see her mother and father, to make them see and understand one another once again. He bluntly tells her that she will need a mother once the Morrissey she desires leaves her with child and disappears.

Fleur stays in her home and acts calm, as if nothing is wrong or is going to change. Nanapush goes to live with Margaret, though he admits that he can never love her as much as he did before she betrayed Fleur. The gossips once again savagely accuse Fleur when the body of Napoleon Morrissey is discovered, blaming her for drowning him. Supposed corroboration soon comes when Clarence receives a visitation from his uncle, saying that Fleur killed him, “one hundred proof and straight from the bottle” (215).

When Nanapush visits Fleur, he finds that she has stolen an axe and hidden a saw tooth saw under the house. He frequently has to wait for her, as she comes out of the woods trailing sawdust and cats, and he finds woodchips in the forest.

Fleur sends Lulu away to the government boarding school, just as Margaret sends Nector: to protect them. Nanapush demands that Lulu understand that her mother did not give her up willingly; instead, she saw that there was no safety for Lulu in a world of Morrisseys and Lazarres. Fleur could not even predict what would happen to her.

On the final day, only the acre of trees surrounding Fleur’s cabin remains. Nanapush walks to see her, and on the way he sees all of his families’ spirits in the woods—his wives, his children, and his father, crushed together and whispering in the only remaining trees.

When he reaches the clearing near Fleur’s house, he finds a circle of loggers and a wagon ready to take Fleur and her belongings away. Eli has been brought to talk her into leaving, but she does not appear to listen to him. Fleur stands in her tended yard, smiling. She drags Nanapush into her yard when he arrives, as one by one the trees start to fall in a quickening breeze. Nanapush yells for the men to run, but it is too late. In one fierce gust of wind, the rest of the trees, cut through at their bases, fall at once, outward in a circle. The ancient oaks trap the loggers, the horses, and their equipment under their full weight.

Fleur brings out a cart built to be pulled by one person. The grave markers of her family hang off the side, and the cart contains stones from the lake, a coil of fabric, and the black umbrella she used to shield her dead child in his tree. She asks for Nanapush’s blessing and heads off on her own, south.

As soon as Fleur has gone, Nanapush and Margaret start the process of bringing Lulu home. Nanapush finally succeeds after he becomes a tribal chairman; once he is part of the bureaucracy, he uses the church’s proof of his fatherhood to enforce his rights to bring her home. She comes home in 1924, running to greet Nanapush and Margaret.