The Orenda Joseph Boyden (6 page)

—

A WIND THAT
isn’t very cold blows in from the west. It takes the storm away with it and brings a sun so bright it calls me outside. I don’t ask Bird’s permission. I just rise from my sleeping mat, slow because my body hasn’t moved in so long. My body doesn’t want to listen to me as I try to get down the ladder and my legs feel as if they’re frozen but eventually I’m on the ground again. Children playing in the longhouse stop and stare. I rise up on my toes and stretch, making a sound that begins in my belly and escapes like a loud hiss. The children’s eyes go wide. They go wider when I crouch by the fire and rub soot on my face until it’s dark as night. I stand and glare at them until, one by one, they turn away in fear. A couple of old women who watch over the children study me as they sew, glancing up every few seconds to see what I’ll do next. I find my outside clothing stiffened and hanging, ready. Bird is off somewhere this morning, and I’m sure word will travel to him fast.

The possibility of spring is in the snow. I walk through it as it softens in the sun, the bright line of it outlining the paths of the village, and it scares me how big this place is. It’s bigger than my own by far. Many, many longhouses with the smoke of the fires of all the families reaching into the air. How will my father’s brothers defeat all of these people? Although not too many are outside yet, I can tell that as many as a great flock of finches live here.

My darkened face must stand out because people stop and look as I walk by. I growl deep in my throat when a young man laughs. He’d be good-looking if he wasn’t so stupid. I move around the village for a long while, circling its outside twice before exploring the pathways inside. The palisades are three rows deep and tall and thick and the tips are sharply pointed. The longhouses are built well, are built much like our own. A few bored lookouts stare at me as I walk by them. I can feel their eyes on my back. I must learn the place of my enemy.

When I begin to tire, I sense someone following me. I had no real plan in all of this but to get outside and look around, then imagined I’d walk until I fell to the ground with exhaustion. I’m weak from so little food, but I want my enemies to think I’m even weaker than I am. I want them to pity me. I want them to worry for me.

I know who it is that follows. Word has reached him. He’ll certainly worry for my head, and this is what I want. I’ll keep him wondering about me until I’ve figured out how I’ll return to my people and he’s so confused by me that he’ll be happy I’m gone. He makes no secret of walking behind me. He hums a song that sounds like spring, and I like it despite wanting to hate it. I walk faster, but he keeps pace. After a while, I begin to feel as though he’s leading me, not me him. I don’t like this man. I don’t want to admit it, but he has powers too.

I turn down a smaller path that by the sun’s place I think will take me back to his longhouse, and I consider slowing so that he’ll catch up and walk with me. Kneeling in a snowbank, I begin to draw circles and wait for his shadow to stretch across me, blocking out the glare of sun on snow. As I turn my eyes to him, all I can see is a black outline. It isn’t his. Bird is tall and this one who follows is small, her form as thin as a snake’s. My head tells me to stand, and I do, but when it tells me to run, my legs go weak, weaker than when I climbed down the ladder from my bed this morning. As if commanded, I sit on my haunches, my hands folded on my knees, though my eyes remain on the thin woman who has been following, my eyes adjusting so I can make out the strands of her messy hair, the cheekbones that look sharp enough
to cut me, the bare hands with long fingers. She stares at me, and this stare holds me down. My legs begin to shake, my knees knocking against each other. She raises her hand and my legs go still.

“You aren’t afraid?” she asks. “Cold?” She doesn’t wait for my response. “My name is Gosling. I could ask if you wanted to be here but I already know you don’t.”

I look up at her, the sunspots dancing, her face becoming focused. I think it’s beautiful, but her words, her voice, make my legs start shaking again. She raises her hand once more. They stop.

“You will cause your new father much pain,” she says. “I can see this, too.” She smiles.

“He’s not my father,” I tell her. The idea that he is makes me sad and confused.

Although her mouth stays the same, I see her own confusion in her eyes. “I didn’t ask you to speak, Snow Falls,” she says.

I want to tell her that she isn’t my mother, either. And how does she know my name? I try to find it in me to open my mouth and say this but it’s as if it’s been sewn shut with deer sinew.

“You’re a strong girl, but not that strong,” she says. “If you would like me to prove this to you, I will.”

I suddenly feel as if my head’s been shoved under water. I stare up at her, struggling with her, and I’m gasping for breath. The confusion in her eyes is now gone. She looks at me blankly, watching me drown. My mouth moves like a pike’s that’s been tossed onto shore. I feel my eyes bulge.

She blinks, and a rush of air fills my lungs so fast that I begin coughing and gasping.

“I’m not cruel,” she says. “But I won’t allow you to think that your strength can defeat mine.” She sits beside me. I want to run screaming but I’m paralyzed.

She cups snow and pats it. “Spring will come earlier than last year. If you concentrate you can feel it in this.” She nods at her hands. “The last night’s snowfall was like our bodies when they reach that time. It’s
breaking down. It’s dying.” She keeps patting the snow as she speaks, one palm cupping the other. “Your brother,” she says. “The special one.” Her hands stop moving and she cradles the packed snow now. I look, and my brother’s face stares back at me, as if carved by the most talented artist. His mouth slopes down at the edges, and his eyes, a little sunken, just as in real life, stare at me, unseeing.

The woman talks again. “If your brother hadn’t been killed by Bird, if you’d all made it home this winter, he would have drowned two summers from now on a trading mission with your dead father.”

She covers my brother’s face and begins patting the snow again. When she opens her hands once more, my mother’s face, her small nose, even the laugh lines at the edge of her eyes, astonishes me. “Your mother still had twelve or thirteen more winters but then would have been taken away by the coughing sickness.”

She pats the snow again and there is my father, smiling at me as he always had when I climbed into my parents’ sleeping robe and tugged his hair to wake him. “This is the most difficult loss of all,” Gosling says. “Your father, had he not been killed, would have lived to be a very old man. He would have seen you marry, would have seen you give birth to many grandchildren, would have seen your hair begin to turn grey.” I can feel her looking at me, but my eyes remain on my father’s face in her hands. “And what’s most difficult to realize,” she says, “is that had he lived past this winter, he was to become the one strong enough to prevent the slaughter that now approaches.”

Before I can protest, she covers my father’s face with her hand. I want to ask her to tell me more but my mouth remains sewn shut. She pats her hands quickly, showing me glimpses in the packed snow of my cousins who were killed with my parents, explaining their other deaths, too, some by warfare, some by disease, one by old age. “The time’s finally arrived,” she says. “It’s the most brutal that we’ll ever witness. Your father’s death has sealed that.”

We sit in the snow, both of us quiet now, and watch as the day unfolds. Chickadees land close to us and blink, opening their beaks as
if to say something important before flying away. The sun crawls across the sky almost fast enough that I can see its slow march. And yet for hours we sit there silently, the woman studying me without having to look at me. I don’t feel cold or cramped or damp from the snow.

When she finally stands up, the sun is already weakening, and her shadow looks long. I stand too, and it’s only now that I feel the winter has seeped into my bones and made me heavy with it.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Spring is close.” She turns to me. “You can speak now.”

“Make my family alive again,” I blurt, and my voice sounds old and scratchy.

She gives me that blank look once more, and I become frightened she’ll take my breath away again, or worse. “I can’t do that. That isn’t my world.” She smiles, but it isn’t warm. I don’t know if she can smile that way. “I’ve heard word that the Crow openly tells people that he can, though. He says to anyone who’ll listen that the man he most admires came back from his murder three days later. I’ll have to go and listen to him speak.”

My ears perk at that. I, too, will have to start listening to the Crow and his sad attempts with Wendat words.

“Go back to your father now,” she says. “He’ll be worried for your safety.”

“He isn’t …” But then I stop, fearful of her reaction.

She stares at me, and her lips curl a little at the edges. “You think I mean Bird.” She looks away. “I’m not referring to him,” she says. I want her to look back at me but she won’t. Then she says, “I’m talking about the Crow.”

—

AND SO AN IDEA
begins forming in my head as winter thaws, dripping into spring. I take long walks every day, sneaking out by squeezing through a break I found in the palisades, and I know this makes Bird
mad. He tells me I’m not to do this anymore. It’s dangerous beyond the village, he says. Out there is a place the humans don’t control. I tell him I’ll wander where I please, and if he doesn’t like it, he’ll be forced to tie me up, for that’s the only way he’ll keep me in his stinking home.

The village lies on a river that, if you walk it for not very long at all, takes you to a great lake that looks so big it must be impossible to cross. I walk out onto the ice, listening as it moans, speaking, I guess, to the season about to come. I go as far as I can before my feet refuse to take me out any farther, and I gaze down at the black river of water that snakes through the lake where the stronger current must be. It grows wider each day, lapping at the ice that sometimes cracks so loud it makes me jump. I speak to the water, asking if it wants me to come into it. My father told me never to do this when I was a child because the spirit that lives in the water will hear me and want to meet me, and if that happens, well, it would be the end of me. But I do it anyway, in part because if I’m to leave this world for another, I can’t imagine it being worse. Maybe I’ll find my family. Maybe I’ll find the place where the path turned in the wrong direction.

On my walks, this idea continues to form, and I find something like peace away from my enemy’s home. I will make him hurt for hurting me so badly. Today, instead of following the river to the lake, I cut into the forest where the women collect wood. I want to memorize all the details of this land so that when the time is right and my people swoop in, they’ll know it, too.

Just ahead of me, I see bloody snow where something was killed. As I get close, tufts of fur blow when the wind picks up. A large deer, it must have been, by the mess that’s left behind, fur and so much blood that of course I think of your deaths. I search out the area with my eyes, trying to imagine what happened so recently. Last night, maybe? A pack of wolves must have followed a deer this big for a long time, bothering it, nipping at the tendons in its legs when they got close enough, biting at its belly, keeping a wary eye for the quick flick of hooves that can break ribs or crack skulls. The wolves would take turns
pursuing, a couple driving the deer at a fast pace, the others hanging back and holding on to their energy. My father was careful in teaching me all of this.

You told me, Father, that wolves will pursue for days, will wage a war that’s slow and patient, that wolves are so frightening not because of their fangs and claws but because of their intelligence, because of their hunger. I see this now, right here. I see the moment in the snow when the deer finally has nothing left, and the wolves join together as a pack, hungry and smart. I see the deer knowing that its fate has arrived and yet it prepares itself to fight as hard as it can for the slim chance its gut is telling it wrong, for the simple fact this is what it’s meant to do, this fighting to live. The deer’s tongue sticks out from its mouth it’s so tired, and in this clearing in the half moon of last night, the wolves slip around the animal, weaving like shadows, growling directions to each other, the lead wolf holding back, allowing the younger ones to keep the deer’s attention. And then the time presents itself. The lead wolf, having slowly, slowly crept close as the others snap and growl, the deer pawing snow and pinned between them and the cedar too thick to pass through, then lunges low and hard and from the side when the deer turns its head away, and the lead wolf latches onto the deer’s thigh as hard as he can, feeling his teeth penetrate the coarse fur of the winter coat. He holds on to the thick strap of skin and muscle he’s taken into his mouth and the others know as sure as they know anything that he has the deer as it tries to bolt away through the pack, screaming out in fear as the others descend and begin biting, too, their teeth as sharp and pointed as flint knives, the deer being dragged to the ground now, trying to kick itself back up but exposing its belly in the process and the strongest of the pack, so hungry, so desperate to feed, snap hard at the soft flesh, ripping skin and tasting the blood that drives them to snap and rip more.

This animal’s death wasn’t a pleasant one. But I begin to understand it probably never is. How can it be? But it has to happen, doesn’t it? Can you hear me, Father? Do you believe what the woman named
Gosling said? That your dying will cause so many more deaths? It’s not fair. This world isn’t fair.

The wolves eat, and when they’re so stuffed they can barely move, they drag what’s left of the carcass away from this place that smells of humans and fire, leaving only the fur. If it were up to them they wouldn’t have eaten here at all, but they’re happy to be given the gift of more days of life. Wolves can’t live on berries and twigs, after all, and their viciousness is what allows them to keep going, and will allow those who will one day follow to do the same. I bend to pick up a tuft of the deer’s fur and lift it to my nose, and it’s then I see that had this deer not died last night it would have before spring, in just as panicked and horrible a way, by breaking through the ice as it crossed a lake, kicking and struggling for a long time to get out, its eyes wide with terror until the exhaustion consumed it and it allowed itself to slip under, its last snort bubbling the water, its last breath drawing the cold water into its lungs. No, it’s not that life isn’t fair.