The Song Of Hiawatha 17 The Hunting Of Pau Puk Keewis - Analysis

A chase that is really a judgment

The episode reads like an action story, but its deeper aim is judicial: it stages a moral trial in motion, where Hiawatha’s anger becomes a force of fate and Pau-Puk-Keewis’s shapeshifting becomes a record of his character. From the start Hiawatha is not merely offended; he is possessed by a public, almost cosmic wrath, “hot and humming,” and he promises that distance itself cannot protect the culprit: “Not so long and wide … my vengeance shall attain.” The poem keeps testing that claim by letting Pau-Puk-Keewis run farther, change forms, and recruit other beings to help him, only to show that the very cleverness he trusts will turn into the mechanism of his capture.

Hiawatha’s wrath: righteous, relentless, and a little frightening

Hiawatha’s tone is the first strong note: his breathing “through his nostrils” and “through his teeth” makes him sound more like an animal or a storm than a calm leader. Even his speech has an insect sting, “like a hornet.” This matters because the poem never really asks whether Pau-Puk-Keewis deserves pursuit (we’re told of “mischief” and “malice,” but not shown the exact acts here); instead it asks what happens when anger becomes single-minded. The repeated vow—Hiawatha calling from “the summit of the mountains” that his wrath will overtake—functions like a law being recited: the world is declared too small for evasion.

Yet there’s a tension built in: Hiawatha is “noble,” but his vengeance is not gentle. When he finally beats Pau-Puk-Keewis in beaver form, it is startlingly physical and humiliating—“pounded him as maize”—as if punishment must be made visible to the whole community. The poem wants us to feel both the satisfaction of order being restored and the chill of how absolute that restoration is.

The beaver lodge: disguise becomes a trap of appetite

Pau-Puk-Keewis’s first major refuge is the beaver world, and Longfellow makes it seductively peaceful: “still and tranquil” water, lilies floating, rushes “waved and whispered,” sunshine falling in “little shining patches.” Against Hiawatha’s harsh breath and hard pursuit, the pond seems like a hiding place outside human conflict. Pau-Puk-Keewis even speaks like a guest trying charm: “O my friend Ahmeek,” praising how “cool and pleasant” the water is.

But the key flaw that keeps surfacing is his desire not simply to hide, but to enlarge himself. Twice he asks, “Make me large” and then “make me larger,” and the beavers comply until he is “ten times larger.” The irony is blunt: the gift he begs for becomes the reason he cannot escape. When the hunters break the dam and the lodge, “the mighty Pau-Puk-Keewis / could not pass” the doorway because he is “swollen like a bladder.” In other words, his own inflation—pride, feeding, the wish to be king—literally blocks the exit. The poem’s moral logic is not subtle here: cleverness without restraint turns into self-sabotage.

Death doesn’t stick: the ghost keeps running

One of the episode’s strangest pressures is that Pau-Puk-Keewis keeps dying and yet keeps going. After the brutal killing, we’re told the “ghost, the Jeebi” still “thought and felt” as Pau-Puk-Keewis. The spirit “fluttered” like wigwam curtains in winter wind, then re-forms and vanishes “into the forest.” This makes the pursuit feel less like arresting a single body and more like trying to extinguish a force—restlessness, prankishness, the impulse to disrupt.

That’s an important contradiction: Hiawatha’s vow insists vengeance can reach anywhere, but the poem keeps showing how mischief is not only a person; it’s a pattern that slips into new shapes. Each new escape suggests that punishment of the body may not be enough, and that Hiawatha is chasing something that has a life beyond ordinary mortality.

The brant: spectacle, vanity, and the fatal glance downward

When Pau-Puk-Keewis becomes a brant among “many islands,” the poem shifts into air and spectacle. Again he asks for impossible scale—“Ten times larger”—and he receives it: wings “broader than two doorway curtains.” The brant warn him with an oddly specific rule: “look not downward”, as if survival depends on refusing the human world’s gaze.

He fails precisely because he can’t resist being recognized. From below, people shout in wonder; he “knew the voice” of Hiawatha and Iagoo, and “forgetful of the warning” he looks down. That tiny act—curiosity, pride, the itch to witness the effect he’s having—lets the wind catch his “mighty fan of feathers” and throw him into a spinning fall. The death is theatrical: “Dead out of the empty heaven” he drops “among the shouting people.” The poem’s logic tightens: his need for attention makes him vulnerable to physics, to gravity, to laughter. Mischief becomes its own crowd-pleasing undoing.

Whirlwind and oak: trickster speed versus blunt force

Back on land, the chase becomes almost cartoon-fast: Pau-Puk-Keewis “fanned the air” into a whirlwind, “danced the dust,” and springs into a “hollow oak-tree,” changing into a serpent. Hiawatha answers not with subtlety but with raw strength, smiting the oak until it lies “in fragments.” It’s a vivid pairing: Pau-Puk-Keewis uses transformation and agility; Hiawatha uses direct impact.

And yet even here, brute force doesn’t finish the problem; Pau-Puk-Keewis returns “once again in human figure.” The poem keeps building the sense that human strength alone can splinter trees but can’t fully pin down a shape-changer. Hiawatha’s determination is heroic, but also obsessive, as if the chase cannot end until the world itself agrees that it is over.

Pictured Rocks: when vengeance recruits the elements

The most decisive turn comes at the Pictured Rocks, where Pau-Puk-Keewis receives shelter from the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a power older than either man. Hiawatha is suddenly blocked: the “doorways closed,” no answer from “silent crags.” His rage has met a boundary. To break it, he calls up larger forces—Waywassimo the lightning and Annemeekee the thunder—and they arrive with “night and darkness.” The chase expands into weather.

This is where Hiawatha’s vengeance becomes fully impersonal: lightning “smote the doorways,” thunder shouts “Where is Pau-Puk-Keewis!,” and the crags collapse. Pau-Puk-Keewis is killed “in his own human figure,” as if the poem insists he must finally be reduced to the self he’s been avoiding through disguises. The mischief-maker who tried to live as beaver, bird, serpent, and wind is ended by stone—weight, finality, the opposite of quickness.

A final irony: Hiawatha preserves what he destroys

After the killing, Hiawatha speaks not only as avenger but as transformer: “I will change you to an eagle,” making him “Chief of all” the war-birds and, with a surprising domestic jab, “Chief of Hiawatha’s chickens.” The insult is almost comic, but it contains the episode’s strangest resolution. Hiawatha wants to end Pau-Puk-Keewis’s “new adventures” and “jest and laughter,” yet he grants him a new form that still circles the heavens. Even the closing folklore—people seeing snow eddies and saying “comes Pau-Puk-Keewis”—confirms that mischief remains as a name and a motion in the world.

The poem’s last tension is that victory does not erase its opponent. Hiawatha can crush bodies and call down thunder, but the story admits that trickster energy is the kind that returns as weather, as memory, as a winter dance around the lodges. The chase ends, but the song keeps moving.