The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin Read Free Book Online

expand. Constant, constant. Constantly changing. Always the river, yet never the same. Slowly, the waters claim her, and her thoughts dissolve into the current. Gone is Bullhead, mother of three. Gone daughter, sister, clan member, widow. There is just the swift water as it twirls and glides, moves in smooth sheets that carry her downstream.
    The sky lightens for a brief moment, illuminating Grey Rabbit’s hands and the patches of lichen, squash-orange and green, and then the light is gone and the rock face goes dull. Grey Rabbit looks to the sky as the long yellow crack in the cloud mantle passes, moving swiftly toward the big water. She must finish her work and get back to Little Cedar. She’d left him lying quietly by the fire, whispering to the cattail warrior in his hand.
    Deep into the night she sits with him, willing herself to keep a close watch. But each night sleep overtakes her, and another child appears. The last was a girl, crying in her cradleboard. She disappeared into the woods, carried off by a creature made of ice.
    Food. They need food. They had talked of moving on, in hopes of finding the animals in another place. Soon they will have to. Grey Rabbit rubs snow across her scraped knuckles, then wipes clean the long edge of her bone.
     
    Bullhead makes her way toward the rasping sound. Her time at the river has soothed and calmed her, allowing her to see more clearly, to notice the wind-carved snow behind tree trunks, and the soft pink patterns in the bark of the red pines. “Ah, good.” She spots a dark vole in the snow, its feet curled and frozen, its head half eaten. She turns the rodent over in her hand, and drops it into the fish basket.
    Her son’s wife looks small standing before the rock wall that rises from the forest. She has scraped a good amount of lichen already. She works hard every day, focused as a hawk, yet she stays as distant as one, too. Something troubles the girl. Something more than Little Cedar. Bullhead ducks below a snow-laden bough. She has tried sharing a number of stories about hunger, of times when she’d worried over her own children, but none of them have nudged Grey Rabbit to speak. She can only trust that the girl will confide if she needs.
    “Don’t be so lazy.” Bullhead sets her basket on the ground. “Get those, up there.” She pouches her lips toward a high spot on the rock. “Those are the good ones. Those taste like beaver tail.”
    Grey Rabbit smiles at the joke, though her smile fades when she sees what is in the fish basket.
    Bullhead takes a scraping bone from Grey Rabbit’s bag and chooses a spot of her own to work. It’s an ancient rock with a solemn spirit, home to moss and lichen, and two small cedars growing out of a high crack. She places an offering at the base of the rock.
    The two work in silence, tending their own thoughts, while their scraping falls into a shared rhythm.
    Herring on a stick, slowly crisping near the fire. A line of herring, one more succulent than the next.
    Little Cedar crying in his cradleboard, disappearing into the woods.
     
    A bird’s call breaks the silence. It echoes off the high rock wall. Bullhead and Grey Rabbit stop scraping, and turn to meet each other’s eyes. Again, the bird calls, and they look to the trees, smiling at each other with growing delight. They search the bare limbs and the green pines for the one that cawed, black crow—whose return marks the coming of spring.

1902
     
    Gunnar straps on his skis, then hoists his pack. The warmer days are turning the snow wet and heavy, so the more distance he can cover before the sun rises, the better. He’s no stranger to the hour before night gives way to day, as he’s up and rowing to his nets as soon as the sky holds enough light to navigate. Sure, it’s not exactly the same in the woods. Woods cling to darkness longer than water.
    He winds the scarf Berit knit around his face, straps his poles on his wrists, and shoves off. For a time he can follow