The Orenda Joseph Boyden

by Joseph Boyden

  Fox smiles. “There’s no denying that Snow Falls is a strange one.” He realizes his words, and looks up to me, a little embarrassed. “I admit that my wife worries sometimes for the girl’s head. And she certainly appears to cause you to sleep poorly.” He shrugs. “I can’t speak for my wife, but I can’t imagine she would say no.” Fox scrapes his ottet bowl with his fingers and licks them. “Of course,” he says after a few moments. “We are all family, no? And now that it’s been decided to move the village this summer, the extra hands will be good for my wife.”

  —

  LIFE APPEARS NORMAL to me as spring grows warmer. I’ve asked another household to keep the Crow for a short while, as I secretly fear that I’ll strike out and kill him if I see him touch my daughter again. The household, on the far side of the village, is happy to do it. They’re patient and sit for days on end with him, trying to teach him our language. They hope this will attract more visitors who always come bearing gifts in order to watch and hear the spectacle. At first I remember what Gosling said about his learning our tongue and what it will hasten, but then I realize it’s all fine. Soon enough, he’ll be dead.

  I send Snow Falls out planting most days, and she’s good with a digging tool and carefully soaks and then counts out the kernels of corn for each hole in the dirt. I worry for the lack of rain, though. At this time last year there was almost too much, but the earth today is drier than I like it. And the air is noticeably warmer. When midday comes I find myself removing my clothes to the sun, something I don’t normally do until summer. My usual job is to clear trees for more land, but now that we’re moving the village, there’s no need. Instead, I go back to the longhouse to decide what will be taken and what will be left behind.

  Both in these fields and the new ones a day’s walk from here, we plant the three sisters. The corn, if rains come, will be waist high when I leave in the summer, the beans showing off their lush leaves, and the squash blossoms blooming the colour of the setting sun. This is what I hope but would never dare speak out loud for fear of offending any of their okis.

  —

  FOR THREE WEEKS we catch barely any fish, and this, combined with the lack of spring rain, has all the houses worried. Normally at this time of year both are plentiful. Each house has asked the one who understands the fish the strongest to pray with all of us for it to return. Our man is Fox, and I listen intently each night as spring dwindles away, as he talks and sings to the fish, begging our brother to come back to us. How have we offended you? Let us know and we will correct our behaviour. Fox, a very good fisherman, has a special relationship to them, and even has a sturgeon on his stomach that his wife took a whole winter tattooing their first year of marriage. Each night he asks us to lie on our backs as he does, fifty of us in the longhouse, adult and child alike, to listen to what he has to say to the oki of the fish. And each night he begs of us never to burn the bones of fish but to bring them back to the water instead. Fox pleads with the fish that we respect it deeply and that we, the people, would never burn its bones.

  Perhaps I’m getting used to the girl’s odd behaviour. She’s unhappy that the Crow no longer stays here. She’s become sullen and even more quiet. This is certainly better, though, than her pissing in my bed. When she catches me looking at her, she sometimes puts her thumb to her forehead and makes the sign that the Crow showed her. I always turn away. Like a fever, this too will burn off. I continue taking her to the fields each day, and am always surprised when she doesn’t refuse but instead throws herself, focused, into the work.

  And despite the absence of rainfall and the fish having left us, I finally feel a sense of peace that I haven’t known in a long time. The girl won’t speak to me, but she stays by my side like a real daughter should, my darling, and I feel some of the hole that’s so deep inside me begin to fill in, if only just a little. I also daydream that the girl will become whole as she gets used to living with our clan, that she’s just going through the brutality of adolescence. I’m willing to wait the few years it will take before she’s able to call me Father, before she’s able to sit and talk and laugh with me, or to cry on my shoulder when she has her heart broken. I can wait, my love, because she’ll take that place beside our dead daughters, the place they did not live long enough to inhabit. You, of all people, know that despite my hot head I’m the most patient of men.

  —

  FOX FINDS ME by the river this afternoon and tells me I’m requested at the council fire. He looks me in the eyes when he says it, searching, I think, to see if I’ve done something out of the ordinary. To be called to the fire carries much weight. It means that I’ll be asked many of my opinions. Fox knows me almost as well as I do, and he certainly knows that I’m not being forthright with him. For the first time in my adult life, I feel like a child about to be called out in front of his peers.

  At first I fear my plan to rid us of the Crow has been discovered, but only Gosling knows of it. Why would she dare speak of it? What, I wonder as we walk back through the palisades, would she gain by stabbing me in the heart this way?

  To give myself a bit more time to breathe, I tell Fox I must go back to the longhouse and pick up some tobacco for the elders. He nods and follows me, and I wonder if they’ve asked him to stay with me and ensure that I arrive. I’m not used to this feeling, fearing that I’ve done something wrong and now will be punished.

  As I climb up to my sleeping place, I tell myself that this isn’t who I am, and even if Gosling has betrayed me, I’ll argue that killing the Crow is the most important thing I can do for our nation. I feel my spine straighten as I imagine telling them they can punish me however they see fit, but I’ll still die knowing I did the right thing. I grab my pouch from beside my sleeping mat and walk with Fox to the great longhouse.

  The door on each side is open for the air to come through, and shafts of sunlight filter into the big room, illuminating the fish that float above me, saved for a future communal feast, tied drying to the beams alongside the special ears of corn reserved for future plantings. The smell here is different than in other longhouses. Each of this village’s dozens of longhouses has a specific scent, the smell of mingling humans who’ve long lived together. Ask anyone to close his or her eyes and wander from home to home, and they’ll all know immediately whose they’re in. But this longhouse, much bigger than the others, is lived in only by okis. And okis, my love, don’t have much need or care for scent, do they? The dust tickles my nose, the corn and fish make my stomach grumble, and the sight of the old ones sitting around the low fire makes me feel once again like a little boy caught doing wrong.

  Taking my place, I sit cross-legged and listen as they talk and laugh. That the women sit alongside the men today rather than holding their own separate council means something very important has happened.

  I take tobacco from my pouch and sprinkle some into the fire, whispering a short prayer, and then pass the pouch to old Earth Woman, who we call Ata, asking that she take a pinch as a sign of my respect and then pass it around to the dozen or so others who have now gone silent and glance at me before looking away.

  “Has the spring planting gone to your liking, Tsawenhohi?” she asks, using my formal name, Osprey, as she takes her small clay pipe from its pouch and packs tobacco into it. Her hands are so dark and wrinkled that I wonder if the fallow fields might look like this if I were to fly like a raven above them.

  “I fear for the lack of rain,” I say. “This is my greatest concern.”

  She nods, taking a long hardwood stick from the fire and lighting her pipe. She puffs and puffs until her head disappears in the smoke.

  For a long while we all sit and chat about everything and nothing. We talk of the impending move to a new village and I realize all that I must accomplish before the summer’s travel. It’ll be much work but everyone is excited for it. We smoke until the air around us is threaded with sunlight and so beautiful I can’t stop looking at it, wanting to reach out and run my hand through it. My
head’s dizzy, and when my gut begins to sicken from it, I only barely puff on the odd pipe that’s passed along to me.

  Eventually, like a meandering river that begins to straighten and narrow, the discussion turns to the Iron People and our relations with them and why I would wish to take such a large party with me to their place this summer. They don’t ask me to defend my thinking but instead speak openly about the good and the bad of it. Several of the elders observe that the trip might cause me to owe more than I am owed.

  I nod then and speak. “Relations with our enemy have only grown worse in the last years, and I’m afraid that travelling safely in the future is impossible except in large parties. This is how I see it.”

  The others mull this over. “Our trade with the Iron People,” the oldest, Aronhia, Sky Man, says, “has brought us oddities that have now become necessities.” He reaches with his stick to the fire and taps the copper pot sitting there. “Our people just love this stuff. We can’t get enough of it.” The others laugh. Beside it squats a poorly made birch basket, and I wonder if it’s been placed there to make a point. “If we are to remain the ones at the centre of the trade,” Aronhia continues, “we’d better do whatever we can to keep those hairy creatures happy.” Again, more laughter. Mine isn’t nearly so loud because I know what’s coming next. “And that means allowing the Crow to hop around the village and caw.” There’s a low growl of approval from the others, and I’m angry that no one cares to see the danger of this.

  After a long silence, it’s Yenrish, the Cougar, your mother’s brother, my love, who finally speaks out. “Are we allowing our desire for profit to blind us? The people south of us who have lost so many to new illnesses, they know where the illnesses stem from.”

  “No one’s fallen sick since the arrival of the Crow,” Marten, the youngest of the circle, says. I know him only slightly, but his family’s fearlessness in travelling through enemy lands to trade with the Iron People is legendary. They’ve become rich from it, though have lost many of their clan to the warfare and the worst of tortures. Marten himself was captured and escaped, but not before losing his right hand and most of the skin from his back.

  “Maybe it’s more than that, this idea that no one is sick yet,” the oldest woman, Ata, says. The others wait for more, but she’s wiser than that. I recognize how she attempts to lead the conversation. I want to speak but must purse my lips.

  “Maybe it is more than that,” Aronhia echoes.

  The others around the circle begin to speak when it’s their turn, some siding with Marten that if we are to maintain our dominance of trade over both our allies and our enemies, we have to move forward with these Iron People and their charcoal. “If they’re all as powerful as the crow we keep now,” Marten says, “I don’t think we have much to worry about,” and a few of the others laugh.

  “So they are an evil that we have to absorb?” Yenrish asks. I take a pipe offered to me and puff lightly on it, wondering how Marten will answer this.

  He simply nods.

  “Is anything in the world that simple?” Yenrish asks.

  Everyone around the circle sits without speaking for a long time. The light of dusk is already fading to night when Ata finally requests the fire to be stoked. There’s still business to discuss. I want to stand and stretch but that will have to wait. A gourd of water is passed around, refilled, and passed around again.

  “Let’s talk about the most recent trouble,” Aronhia says. No longer happy, he looks up at me, then, just as quickly, away. “Bring him in.” He nods at the young guard squatting by the west door. The warrior stands and exits.

  “One of our hunting parties was ambushed a few days ago,” Ata says.

  My stomach drops.

  “The Haudenosaunee killed most on the spot, took a few home to caress with coals, and sent one back to us with their message.”

  I know this message can’t be a good one. Impatient now, I mutter under my breath for the guard to hurry up and bring in his charge. No one speaks. We all just stare into the fire.

  He returns with a second guard, the two of them supporting a heap of flesh, all but carrying him to the fire. They place him on a fur beside your mother’s brother Yenrish, and that’s when I realize he must be a relation of yours, dear one. He can barely raise himself to sit, and Yenrish leans over and helps hold him up.

  I’m a war-bearer, but even I am taken aback by his injuries. He must be a very strong young man to have made it home alive at all. The strip of hair that once ran down the centre of his head has been removed with a sharpened clamshell or knife, which has caused the skin of his forehead and above what were once his ears but are now just bloody holes to sag and wrinkle. The hair was clearly replaced with hot resin from a pine to cauterize the wound so he wouldn’t bleed to death, giving the young man forever the appearance of a pathetic baby bird with a thick and ugly scar splitting its head. They removed his left eye, obviously, for it is swollen nearly shut, a thin line of oozing red. The three longest fingers of his left hand have also been removed. He must be of that side and will never draw and sight a bow again. At least, I think, he could learn to do so with his right hand, but when he lifts it to his mouth to wipe away the drool, I see that his bow fingers have been removed from that hand as well. I don’t want to see his back, for I can imagine it’s been removed of much of its skin, as I’m sure his thighs have been.

  “Can you repeat to us,” Ata asks loudly so that he can hear, “what those who did this to you want you to share with us?”

  The young man peers one-eyed into the fire, then mumbles that its heat hurts him too much and he wants to sit back in shadow. Yenrish stands and helps him up so the two warriors can move him into the dimness beyond the fire’s light. The fire’s too small and we sit too far back from it for him to feel any real pain, and I understand right now the true damage our enemies have done to him. He will go through the rest of his life being whispered about and pointed at by others. He will be shamed prematurely into his own death. The anger at those who created this blossoms, as it always does, in the deepest part of my belly.

  When he’s able, the young man speaks, his voice full of spit and blood. He tells us of how the enemy acted as though they knew his party, a dozen strong, had split into small groups, heading to different places within a day’s travel of their home camp to pursue deer. He and his brother were captured a short walk from the land they’d tracked, and his brother was beaten to death in front of him with clubs. The Haudenosaunee then dragged this young man back to his camp and began torturing him with clamshells while waiting for the others to return.

  “The rest of that day I tried to stay alive,” he says. “I sang my death song and tried not to cry out when they cut or burned me.” He stops to draw in his rasping breath. “The first thing they did when each of our hunters came back captured was cut both his ears off and place them in a birch basket.” My eyes wander to the poorly made one placed beside the copper pot. “They told me when they left that this was to show you how important it is for you to listen to them.”

  He explains how he watched them kill each of his companions over the next few days in the most painful ways they could come up with. All had the flesh stripped from their chests and backs before being hanged by ropes over hot coals. When they passed out, cold water was poured over them to revive them and they were fed ottet to regain their strength before being roasted again. Some had their eyes carved out with burning sticks, others had hatchet heads reddened by the fire’s heat seared into their armpits or between their legs. Five of the eleven gave in and began to scream for mercy, the young man reports, but six chanted their death songs and were able to smile into that place while staring their enemies in the eye.

  “So tell us, brave one,” Ata asks, “what did they ask you to share with us?”

  The young warrior asks for water, and as I listen to him slurp at it with his damaged face, I realize I should do him the favour of finishing him if this is what he desires.


  “We hold one of their own as a prisoner,” he finally says. “Clearly she’s special to them. They want her back.” We can hear his strained breathing in the shadows. “I’d like to go now,” he says. “Can I go now?”

  “Of course, dear one,” Ata says. “We will hold a feast to celebrate your bravery on the longest day of the year. You are an example to the young men coming up. The enemy chose you to be the messenger because of your fortitude.”

  The others respond with their Ah-ho!, and I lower my head when the young man is carried away because I know he’s staring at me.

  For a long time I listen as the elders confer. They talk about sending out another party to track down and kill the Haudenosaunee if they foolishly haven’t left. They speak about how the land around us can no longer support a community this large. One proposes dividing ours into smaller entities spread out but not too far from one another, and this is rebutted by the fact that a very big village repels invasion by its sheer existence. They talk more of the French and the various tactics in dealing with them. They keep the fire stoked and speak of our enemies who’ve dared come this far into our country so early in the raiding season and talk around, I finally realize, the issue of why I am here.

  The first of the morning birds have begun to call out, letting us know the sun is on its way, when finally my name is spoken.

  The youngest, Marten, is the first to say it. “Tsawenhohi has clearly taken a girl who means much to them.” I’ve been waiting to hear this. Now it’s said. And so now it will be considered by all.

  “What would Marten do?” Ata asks.