The Orenda Read online

  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.

  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 contro
l, 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 tha
t 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.