Bearwalker by Joseph Bruchac Read Free Book Online Page B

northwest near Saranac Lake. It’s one of the old-style Indian museums, not like one ofthose big new ones funded with casino money. The Six Nations Museum was built by a Mohawk elder named Ray Fadden, constructed by him and his relatives with their own hands. It’s a big old log cabin, in the shape of the longhouse. It’s only open in the summer because it doesn’t have modern heating or air-conditioning. Its only “climate control” is a woodstove. Simple as it is, though, it’s full of information about the history and culture of our Iroquois people. The walls and even the ceiling beams are hung with so many things—posters and wampum belts, gustowehs (the traditional feathered cap our men wear), moccasins, clothing of all kinds—that you feel dizzy trying to take it all in.
    Ray Fadden had been a teacher at Akwesasne back when my dad and mom’s parents were young people. In fact, he taught all four of my grandparents. He was their favorite teacher because he passed on so much about our old ways at a time when everyone else was turning away from our traditions. Finally he quit teaching and built the museum to keep on sharing those old ways with the new generations. Being taken to his museum by my mom and dad was kind of a family tradition, eventhough Mr. Fadden himself, who was in his nineties by the time I went there, was living in an elder care center up on the reservation.
    The best part about the place for me was the stories that Mr. Fadden’s son, Kahionhes, told us. He’d been an art teacher in the Saranac Lake schools but he was now retired and had taken on his father’s job of keeping the museum open in the summers. Some of those stories were very old—but the ones I liked best were the ones about his dad and the animals, especially the bears.
    Food had become scarce for the birds and animals because of the acid rain in the Adirondacks, so for years and years, Ray Fadden provided food for the animals in the woods he owned all around the museum. He would buy birdseed and had an arrangement with the markets to pick up their food scraps. Sometimes as many as thirty black bears would come to the big rock back in the woods where he placed food for them.
    He never fed them by hand or followed them around or tried to make them into pets. He respected them too much for that. But he sort of learned how to talk their language. There are all kinds of vocalizations that bears use. Like,there is a growl a bear makes to warn you to keep away. And when a bear is greeting you in a friendly way it kind of sways its head back and forth and makes a kind of unnh-unnh, unnnhh-unnhhh sound. A little smile came over Kahionhes’s face as he told us how whenever his father met a bear in the woods he would do that—bend over and sway back and forth and go “Unnhh-unnh, unnnhh-unnhhh”—and the bear would do it back to him. Then they would each go their own way. Bears also hoot to each other—just like owls.
    There are some sounds that can mean you’re in danger. The first is a deep cough that is a threat. “Get away from me or else” is what it means. And then there is actually a sort of whistling, chirping sound that a mother bear uses when she is calling her cubs. You need to walk away from that sound, too. The worst place anyone can be is between a mother bear and her cubs.
    Kahionhes took us out behind his father’s house and pointed out the big rock where the bears came to eat. So much fat had soaked into it over the years that it shone in the sun like it was made of glass. But we stayed way back from it because it was the bears’ place and not ours.And we didn’t see any bears that day.
    Mom and Dad promised me they would take me back to the Six Nations Indian Museum again. But that autumn my dad was sent to Afghanistan and never came back. And then the summer after that Mom did her first tour in Iraq. So most of what I have learned