The Orenda Joseph Boyden (3 page)

My hands are numb enough now that I can’t feel my fingers as I try to remove my rabbit and deer robe. At first I do this slowly so the hairy one won’t notice, but he doesn’t see much as he stumbles and whines and struggles through the heavy snowfall. His black beard is covered in white and I can imagine him as an old man, but he won’t live long
enough for his hair to turn white. I try harder now to pull my robe over my head and only when my elbow digs hard into his gut does he stop and lower to his knees and drop me. His eyes stare down into my own, searching for something as his breath rasps into the air in white puffs. I sit up. He wants to ask what I am doing, I know. Instead, I pull off my robe and then my rabbit leggings. He stares strangely at me as I remove the last of my fur. I lie back shivering into the snow, and I stretch my arms out, one to the east, the other to the west. I place one foot over the other and try to relax into death. I stare up at the hairy man, for surely he will understand, stand up and walk away. I smile at him, my teeth chattering beyond my control, and it’s only then that his hands reach down and take mine with something like anger.

He tries to put my leggings back on and reaches for my robe, and when I struggle against him, he raises his arm high and slaps me hard across the mouth. I freeze now, for real, unable to move. The only thing I can feel is the warmth of blood on my chin. I can’t move as he pulls the robe over my head and picks me up. I’ve never been struck before. My hands are numb and I try to tuck them into my sleeves. I look up at him for just a second, and his eyes are focused like I’ve not seen them before, slitted against the falling snow as he pushes along a stretch of birch that tells me a big lake must be nearby. We’re entering their country. I know now I will die soon and only wish it was how I had decided.

I want my mother to hold me. I want my father to rub my nose with his. I want my brother to carry me across the creek so my feet don’t get wet. I want my father’s brothers to kill all these men who have killed my family. I want my father’s brothers to make these men feel the same pain I do. I want my father’s brothers to take days to do it.

There is nothing now but hard snowfall and then the smell of distant fires. My end must be coming quicker, and I reach up to this man’s chest and struggle with my frozen hands to take my sparkling father into them, his body so small and perfect, and I think I can feel his heat leak into me like a burn that doesn’t hurt. I clutch my tiny
father harder and his warmth begins to crawl up my arms and into my body until I feel like I’m lying under a summer sun. My teeth still chatter and my body keeps shaking, but I’m warm. I look up at the man and he looks down at me and sees that I hold my father in my hands. The stinking man stops walking. I’m scared he will yank my father away but instead a white flash of teeth blossoms in the black hair on his face and he whispers something to me that I don’t understand, caressing my forehead with his long thumb. We stare at each other, not afraid anymore.

Our stare is broken only when I feel others around us. I can smell their anger before I see them. A gang of Wendat emerges from the birch, as silent as the trees themselves. Their hair rises up from the centres of their heads proudly, and all of them carry weapons. They’ve been waiting for us. I know this for their faces are painted in strips the colour of charcoal and squash blossom. The hairy one continues to stare down at me, whispering to me and running his thumb over my forehead every few seconds, his voice droning in a tongue that sounds like a fast spring creek. He has no idea that these others have surrounded us until one Wendat rips me from his embrace and another behind raises a club to strike him down.

WHEN THE BEAR HAS HER YOUNG

My welcome home is at first muted by what I’ve brought back with me. The winter’s been quiet here, with little drama, I’m told, and my neighbours seem as content as I remember them being this late in it. Normally, food supplies are running low and the promise of spring is distant. But the autumn harvest was a good one for all of us this last year, and the Anishnaabe came down from the north in strong numbers, their hunters loaded with deer meat and pelts to trade for Wendat corn, their medicine people building shaking tents in the birch forests outside my village in order to communicate with their families back in the north.

I’m a respected man in this community, but I know that my decision to take a war party out when the boredom of winter set in was frowned upon during the moon when the bear has her young. Relations with the Haudenosaunee have always stunk like sick bowels, though for the last while, raids between us haven’t been an issue. Why stir up a sleeping bear in the months when we all should be fasting and dreaming and gathering strength? I’ll tell you why, my love. For you. To avenge you. It really is as simple as that. When the pain of you not being beside me in bed at night is too strong, I can do nothing but walk and walk until I find them and kill a few. A hundred will die for each member of my family taken by them. Three hundred will die before I even consider resting.

My heart’s darkest in the long winter months. In that moon when the cold settles so deeply into the poplars that it causes them to moan
their pain out loud, my own pain at the loss of you, beautiful wife, and of you, beautiful children, makes my legs ache so badly that nothing stops it except a long walk to their country.

I don’t like to brag, but these vengeance walks have become the stuff of legend among the young men of the village, who wish one day to warm their hands in the split chests of our enemies, and I’m never short of those who wish to test their mettle on that path. I’m old enough now that I know if Fox were ever to refuse this walk with me, I’d probably quit doing it too. But, like me, he still remains thirsty for adventure and for bounty. And certainly two captives are a decent haul.

At first I’m forced to keep the Crow guarded at all times, not allowing him to wander freely but instead making the curious of the village come to see him. And there are many. They bring little gifts to leave by my fire, woven baskets, ochre for face paint, strips of leather soft from chewing, even smoked fish. All of this I share with the other members of the longhouse, for they, too, have much to put up with; day and night the longhouse is lively with those who sit cross-legged and watch the Crow try to speak with them in their own language, something that never ceases to bring amazement and laughter. He speaks as if his mouth is full of birchbark, and his vocabulary is less than a child’s, but I only need remind the ones who laugh the loudest to try and speak even a few words of the Crow’s tongue to see how gifted this one truly is.

Few pay attention to the girl, who seems to blend into the walls and smoke of our house. I see that she’s sad for her family and misses them very much. When she is ready, I’ll apologize to her for what I did to her blood, and then explain that her life can be full and happy and content now that she is my daughter. I will throw her a great welcoming feast and invite all the important people of the village and will exhaust my riches in doing so, for riches can always be replaced. And in this ceremony the girl will become my new daughter, and my heart will heal just a little bit from the loss of my own.

But for now she remains curled up in her sleeping robe, a special one I had sewn for her from many beaver pelts. She spends her days wrapped in it, listening to the Crow caw out his words. She won’t eat. She barely drinks water. I’ll have to intervene if this behaviour continues.

Since your departure, dear one, our longhouse now contains eight fires, eight families, mostly nephews and nieces and their little ones who constantly run around playing, chasing one another and the dogs that wander in. Fox and his wife and four children keep their fire beside mine since your death, closest to the door, a good place for a man like Fox, a natural protector. Now that all of you are gone, I like nothing more than to return home from a long journey with my friend and watch him become like a child again, wrestling and chasing his children, telling them stories of his adventures that are carefully stripped of the violence he has perpetrated and witnessed. A child’s life is too short for such lessons just yet. My life at home is good, despite no longer having you here, and I’m like a grandfather to dozens, a grandfather who will teach them the laws of the humans and the laws of the forest.

—

THIS MORNING
, I wake up early to wind whistling along the longhouse. I look beside me and am relieved to see that the girl finally visits the place of dreams. Sitting up, I climb from my perch where the warmth accumulates. Peering into the dark corner where the Crow sleeps, I can hear the rhythmic draw of his breath. This, too, is a good sign. We’ve been back home for five days now, and this is the first that I’ve seen either of them sleep. These two are strange beings indeed, but something in my chest tells me that they both will prove worthwhile. At least this is what I hope. A niggling doubt has been worming into my ears the last days, and maybe this is what causes me to wake so early. Am I holding on to these two for the wrong reason, for only the pleasure of ownership?

I stoke the fire with more wood and lift my robe to my shoulders. You would understand, dear one, what I need right now. After all, we made the promise to each other that if one were to die too young, the other, after appropriate mourning, should feel free to take care of physical needs. It’s time to pay Gosling a visit.

No light yet, and the snow blows sideways, building high against the west side of the longhouses, helping to insulate them from the lake’s wind. This is the time when our people go to the dream world most deeply, and normally I’d be there too. But I awoke to Gosling’s image in my head, and I knew she beckoned me. She lives alone near the southern palisades, and no one dares build a home near her. She is the only one in a community of thousands to live alone.

She’s not born of our people but is an Anishnaabe, a Nipissing from the north. She arrived one winter with a group of their traders on a day not long after you were killed. These ones were very slow and careful with the building of their shake tents and had something stronger in their magic than I’d ever seen before. They knew of the last year’s troubles with the Haudenosaunee, and of my pain, and some of them invited me to their shake tent and told me they’d spoken to you, that you and the girls had moved safely to the spirit world. They knew details of our enemy’s raids on our hunting camps that late autumn that they had no way of knowing. They talked of how you were killed last, after the girls had been killed in front of you while I battled for my life a hundred steps away. They told me this not to brag but to allow me to understand you were now safe. With no reason to offer such kindness, they still did. The Anishnaabe medicine people told me that one day they’d take many of us in after we were dispersed like cornhusks in the wind.

After their holy people left with the gift of all the corn they could carry, we began to notice that one had stayed behind. This woman, Gosling, had for days managed to walk by the sentries as if invisible, was seen entering and leaving different longhouses before disappearing again. Each home that she visited contained a person close
to death. Within a week, each of them sat up and took food again by the fire.

She continued these visits through the winter, living alone outside our palisades in a bark wigwam, and each time she was spotted in the community, something else seemed to bless us. We became used to her presence over the cycle of moons that followed. The harvest that year was bountiful, not one warrior perished to the Haudenosaunee or in fast waters on the long summer trek to trade with the Iron People so far away by the great rapids. We Wendat gathered and agreed to build her a true home in the hope that she’d stay with us and continue to bless us.

When I slip in, she’s sitting by her fire, facing me with a coy smile on her face. She allows the beaver robe around her shoulders to fall down, and in the firelight her naked body appears to me that of a young woman, her breasts plump and high, the nipples hardened, and in turn I harden at this sight. It’s been too long since our last visit. I allow my own robe to fall to the floor and then walk to her, kneeling for her embrace. I’ve often wondered if I am the only one allowed such pleasure with her, or simply one of many. In a village where nothing goes unnoticed, no one’s ever mentioned, even in jest, my visits to Gosling. And I’ve never heard of another bragging of exploits with her.

After, she lies on her back with her eyes closed and a half smile on her face as I tell her of my most recent adventures, tracing the outlines of the tattoos on her arms. My favourite is the carefully depicted owl that perches with large eyes, peering from the crook of her arm.

“The Crow you’ve brought home with you like some pet is the talk of the community,” Gosling says. “Be careful, though. Crows are very difficult to tame.”

I frown at this. I have no desire, I want to say, to own this Crow.

“They are tricksters,” Gosling continues. “They love to steal. You won’t even know what you’re missing until it’s too late.”

“He’s got something to him,” I say. Something I might be able to use.

“It’s the girl I worry about most,” Gosling says after a time.

“What do you mean?” I ask this too quickly, suddenly fearing that Gosling senses some illness in the girl that I can’t see yet.

“She comes from rare blood. Her people miss her. They want her back. They’ll go great distances to get her back.”

I’m about to answer defensively, but pause.

“You should give her back before you allow her to become your daughter.”

“I’d rather give the Crow back,” I finally say.

“No. We need to keep the Crow, unfortunately,” Gosling says. “Keeping him here is good for relations with the foreign ones. He will draw their traders to us rather than to others.” She laughs. “The more crows you allow, the stronger your ties with them will become.”

On my back now, I know she stares at me after saying this, daring me to follow the path of her reasoning. She’s left the obvious unspoken. It’s what the crows bring with them that our people haven’t yet seen that Gosling is asking me to consider.