The Orenda Joseph Boyden (2 page)

I took no pleasure yesterday in killing the last two women. They were already so wounded we knew they wouldn’t survive the trip home. Even though I asked Fox to do it, my asking is the same as if I myself had done it. Fox cut their throats with his knife so that they’d die quickly, ignoring the taunts of Sturgeon and Hawk and Deer to make it slow. When the three called Fox a woman for making the first leave so fast, he positioned the second woman, who was quite pretty, so the blood from her throat sprayed their faces. That shut them up, and despite feeling badly for these dead, I laughed. For all I knew, it was this group who was responsible for the slow and awful deaths of you, my wife, and you, my two daughters. There’s been no peace since. I no longer care for peace.

As we gathered the few Haudenosaunee possessions worth taking, I caught the sound of a sniffle behind me in a clump of cedar. I didn’t turn immediately, for I was too tired to have to chase what was clearly a child through the forest. Fox looked at me and then walked away
and around behind the cedar, circling it in a wide arc and cutting off the child’s escape. He emerged with the girl in his arms, her body as straight and stiff as if she were frozen solid. She stared ahead with eyes that didn’t seem to see but maybe saw everything. Was it this that stopped me from killing her, allowing Fox to suggest that I take her and make her my own child? Despite the pock scars from an old sickness, she’s beautiful, and will only become more so in the next few years.

We shouldn’t have followed our own tracks back out. This certainty of direction gives away too much to an enemy who’s quick to learn. By late last night, a much bigger group of Haudenosaunee had found the killing grounds and were following us. It’s not that I could hear or see them. The cold air took on another quality, though, and the hair at the back of my neck had begun to stick out, something tickling me like blackflies buzzing my ears, waking me from an afternoon slumber. That’s when I hurried my pace last night and my hunters knew then, too, what we all now faced.

Despite her slowing us down all night and as her people pursue us this morning, I still don’t regret taking her. She contains something powerful. This has become more and more clear in the last while. I’m willing to take this great risk because of the promise of what’s inside her. And if the Crow is able to not only keep up with my hunters but also keep the girl alive, he will have proved to me that both of them have something worth studying.

Now that the Crow appears through the trees, the girl in his large arms, I decide to push forward. It’s a good plan. If the Haudenosaunee catch up, they’ll find the Crow first, and when they see their child in his arms they’ll celebrate her survival with a feast that ends in the consumption of the Crow. Yes, they’ll immediately send a much smaller party to pursue the rest of us, but these odds are better than what we now stare at. I point out the snare to the Crow as he stumbles up, breathing heavily.

When he sits in the snow, the young girl stiff again with her eyes staring straight ahead, my men and I stand. The Crow’s confused
expression fast turns to anger, and I like this sign very much. He has energy left and maybe he will make it through today after all. My four hunters and I walk to where I see a sharp drop to a creek below. Crouching and leaning back, I slide down the hill on the heels of my snowshoes, and feel like I’m flying as I pick up speed to where the creek will offer us a much faster route. I feel happy. A man should feel happy on the day that will be his last.

DREAMS

I dreamed all of this. I told my father but he was too tired, too hungry, I think, to listen. I told my mother as well, but she, too, was tired and hungry. I see the arrow that strikes my father’s neck before it even flies. I see the blood on the snow, steaming for just a bit before freezing into something that looks like a soup he fed me when the shaking sickness came. Before my mother bites the small man who is like a lynx or maybe a fox and he smashes her head and she falls to the ground and shakes like she dances in the snow, I have already dreamed her being held roughly by them and finding my eyes as I hide in the cedar. She tells me with her eyes that she’s going to do something important, and when she does I am to run as fast as I can and not stop until I find my father’s brothers and their children who aren’t far from here. I will run faster than I ever have and I won’t stop until I find my father’s brothers or I am dead. Her eyes flash to me that if these ones here catch me I will wish I had died already. And then she bites the man like she’s a crazed wolf and he screams out and begins smashing her in the head with his club and she flops in the snow like a pike pulled from a hole in the ice or maybe a rabbit that has been clubbed and shakes toward her death, feet thumping the ground. It’s a good thing my father lies dead on the ground near her with an arrow through his neck or he would not stop until all of them are dead. But he is dead and my mother shakes toward him and my oldest brother, who is blind and deaf and cannot see or hear our parents dying, leaves the world with them when the big older
man clubs him in the head. My whole family shakes on the ground today before leaving me and this is something I’ve already dreamed, the shaking of my family in the snow, feet and arms thumping, then vibrating, then humming before eventually going still.

I will not shake into my death, I tell myself in my dream, and again when I’m swallowed up in the arms of the fox man, who sneaked up behind me quick as a lynx, so I go stiff and wait for him to smash me on the head. Instead, he carries me to the big man who struck down my brother, and as I pass the others who are dead, my father, my mother, his two young hunters and their wives who squirted blood onto the men laughing at them, I keep my eyes forward and try not to see any of it, pretend I am my brother who cannot see, who I’ve mimicked since I can remember, that look of seeing nothing and seeing everything. But I do see. I see that my father lies in the snow, a ring of blood circling his head like a bright ring around the moon in autumn, and his arms stretch out from him as if he’s pointing with one to where the sun rises and with the other to where the sun sets, and I see one foot crossed over the other as if he can finally relax now that he has slipped through to the other side. I remain stiff, though, believe that if my body stays still and hard as I can make it that these men will lose interest and they’ll think I’ve turned to wood or ice and they’ll leave me in the snow because my weight is not worth carrying, especially when my father’s brothers and their sons and their dogs find out what’s happened. These men who have killed my family, these men who I’ve dreamed of, they better start running now, for my father’s brothers and their sons who will pursue them soon will never stop chasing until they’re done with it. And so I’ll stay heavy and stiff and let my feet and arms and head catch on the branches as these men try to carry me away. If I stay frozen they’ll eventually be forced to drop me.

This morning my plan has worked and I watch my family’s killers leave me soon after my father’s brother’s strongest dog sings out that he can smell me. But the other prisoner bends down to me, and he smells so bad that I want to throw up, his breath stinking like rotted
meat. The wolf’s hair on his face and his clothes the colour of charcoal scratch me and there’s no way I can stay stiff and dead anymore and just when I open my mouth to scream, when I begin to swing at his face and claw at his eyes and bite like I watched my mother bite, I see my father, grown tiny and sparkling, hanging on a leather cord from this thing’s neck.

It’s my father, lying in the snow with a circle around his head and his arms stretched out and his feet relaxed, one crossed over the other. As the hairy man bends over me, I watch my tiny father arc toward me, his face catching the first morning light and his body meets my lips and it feels warm and I see now that he’s still alive because he’s warm and I try to kiss him as he swings away and the stinky man picks me up and I hear my father’s brother’s dog in the distance sing out once more.

PROTECTION

I know that the one called Bird and his warriors can’t be far ahead. I wish to God they’d wait. The dogs mustn’t be far behind either, having gone quiet now that they’re closer to me, their prey. The stiff girl in my arms is brutally awkward to carry, and as I follow the Hurons’ snowshoe trail to a steep embankment, I pause to calculate the best way down. So steep, this drop, that I wonder if Bird hasn’t tried to trick his pursuers and taken another route. I look around for other tracks. Nothing. Christ, please help me. The dogs will come soon, they will howl out my presence, and with that noise will come the men who pursue, with their flashing teeth, their red and black and yellow painted faces and hatchets and flint knives to cut off the tips of my fingers in preparation for the true torture. I know all about these ones I’ve never met. They love to caress their enemies with red coals and razor flint so slowly that days pass before Jesus comes to take the victim.

The small of my back spasms as I stand looking out at the frozen stream beneath me. I consider dropping the rigid girl and letting her tumble down to the bottom, and am sick to realize I might consider this because if she makes it then I, too, will survive it unscathed.

And then I see the tracks below, Bird’s snowshoe tracks, small as pigeon claws, etched along the distant bank and disappearing into thick brush. I lift my charge higher in my arms and step forward to test the footing, feeling steadier now with a faint glow of salvation.
The toe of my snowshoe catches a bit of branch or rock, something below the white, and I tumble fast, over and over, down the hill, my ribs and left arm hitting rocks at the bottom in the frozen creek bed.

I stand and feel the shock of snow down my back. The girl is clearly no catatonic. Quick as a hare, she scrambles to her feet and begins scratching her way up the embankment, its incline steep enough that when she makes it no farther than her own length, she slips back down again. It would almost be comical if not for the glare she shoots back at me, her eyes alight like some animal’s. These ones can behave so inhumanly. Despite our dear Pope’s teachings that possession of a soul raises all of us to men, I have seen with my own eyes what they’ll do to an enemy. Forgive me, Lord, but I fear that they are animals in savagely human form.

I sit in the snow of the creek and fit the snowshoes back on my feet, tying the hide cords as best as I remember the Hurons showing me. I stand up and think to say something in parting to the desperate girl still struggling desperately to climb away, but then think better of it. She won’t understand my French, and my head is far too panicked to attempt the Huron tongue, which Bird claims she understands. I will leave this girl to her people, to my pursuers, and surely this will quell their appetites.

But no more than ten paces along the creek and I realize that to leave without her leaves me without protection. My legs ache so badly and my breath already comes in such short spurts that I know today might be the beginning of my last. The ones behind me are too strong. I turn back and shuffle through the snow to the girl who still frantically tries to climb up and toward her people. She looks at me as my arms reach out, and as I tense for her to claw at my eyes, she instead goes stiff as if dead and drops to the snow with a thump. I would laugh if I had the energy. I bend over and pick her up, struggling now with her scant weight, then turn and drag my heavy and awkward snowshoes along the trail left by Bird.

LIKE PRAYERS

By mid-afternoon my warriors and I begin to lag. We’ve had nothing warm in our bellies for two days, and the idea of even a small bowl of ottet makes me groan for it. The wind from the east has picked up and the freeze in the air relents some. I see the low clouds on that horizon. Snow considers coming, and I know that snow is what will save my life today. If it comes hard enough it will cover first my tracks and then my direction, and finally it will offer me its safety of cover to slip into the protected lands of our home village, a place the pursuers will not dare enter. I whisper to the Sky People for their help.

My reflecting on possibilities causes my pace to slow and I watch Fox slip by to take the lead, looking at me as he does and spitting his mock disgust on the snow, which makes me smile. Fox is a good man. A very good man. He is a great war-bearer. He is a great friend. Smaller than the others, he’s always had to prove himself. This he’s done well. There’s no better war-bearer in all the Wendat nation, and if he is to be captured today, the Haudenosaunee will rejoice as loud as they ever have, and they will pay close attention to Fox, torturing him with a love saved only for the truly special ones. They’ll keep him alive for days because they know he has the strength, and he will die a particularly brutal death. As will I. I push these thoughts away and focus on one step after the other, following the trail Fox has cut into a stand of birch as the first snow, like prayers, tickles my face.

SPARKLING FATHER

My chance to get back to my father’s brothers is gone now. The snow falls so thick it will cover our tracks fast. I stare up and it makes me blink my eyes. The shining thing that my father has become rides on the chest of the hairy man, tied to a cord around his neck. My father remains outstretched, and I picture his real body in the snow, his arms to east and west, his legs relaxed. The shining being he has become is nearly naked, I now see, and in this way he tells me what I must do. I wasn’t strong enough to climb that hill, so now I decide I will go to the place where my mother and father have gone. The hairy one who carries me doesn’t notice when I pull my mittens off with my teeth and spit them into the snow. He just keeps breathing heavily and whispering to himself, sometimes choking on his spit and crying. I don’t understand this creature. Despite how large he is and the obvious strength of his body, he acts as if he’s in the skin of a child younger than me. When he should be focusing his stride, he whines to himself instead. He’ll never make it in this world. Yet he somehow manages to follow those who killed my family. It’s just dumb luck, I can hear my father say, that this one walks the route he’s supposed to.