Solar Storms

From the time of her arrival at Adam’s Rib, Angel has a sense of the interconnectedness of human and animal life and even develops a special gift for seeing inside water. Though she has previously been terrified of the element, she learns to swim in the cold lake by pretending that she is a turtle.

Fur Island is full of eerie and wild sounds, sounds that the first white settlers were afraid of because they were unfamiliar. For Native Americans, “hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for [white settlers], hell was this world in all its plenitude” (81). During an autumn when animals and humans were busy preparing for winter, Angel does tasks such as chopping logs, drying and canning fruit. She begins to see how she, Bush, Dora-Rouge and Agnes are all “on some kind of journey out from that narrowed circle of [their] history” (93).

Bush tells Angel about Hannah and the night she washed up on Old Fish Hook, where Bush and Agnes were living at the time. Hannah had Loretta’s almond smell and Angel’s predisposition to theft and insomnia; “[s]he was a body under siege” from all the terrible voices she heard, and her body was a meeting place for history and genocide, giving

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