The Orenda Joseph Boyden by Joseph Boyden Read Free Book Online

Champlain himself that they would deliver me safely to the Hurons. I forgive them now, as I write this to dear Superior in my book. After all, I admit I’m a weak paddler and despite my size, couldn’t carry nearly as much as them. I remember them grumbling and complaining amongst themselves for the ten days. One heathen even began to loudly suggest I was a demon in human form. But it’s when we came across a barely cold Iroquois campfire that the Algonquin made their decision. That afternoon, after they inspected the camp, silent and cautious as wolves, and just as I was relieving myself behind a clump of willow, they climbed into their canoes. They’d deposited my black cloth bag containing my chalice and diary and few personal possessions on the shore, along with a small sack of food. I emerged from the bush and watched as they paddled away at speed.
    The more I shouted for them to come back, the faster they worked to get away. I quit only when it dawned on me they wouldn’t return and that my shouts might very well alert the Iroquois, who couldn’t be far away, to my presence.
    The terror consumed me those first hours as I huddled behind that same clump of willow, peering out at the lake in hopes the Algonquin might return for me, pleading to You, Lord, that this not be the way I was to perish. Might not dying alone, slowly starving and going mad, lost in the tangle of forest as the mosquitoes ate me alive, be even worse than to die the death of a martyr at the vicious hands of the Iroquois? This morning, as I sit ignored in the corner of the longhouse, I truly come to understand that my life, and my death, are preordained, and I come to the understanding that fretting over all of this will not aid my mission but cripple it.
    This third morning of chastisement, I kneel on the hard ground shivering, and I finally feel the fear that’s consumed me release and begin to lift from my back, a fear that’s burdened me since I first setfoot in this foreign and desperate place. With my left hand, I force my right arm up the wall until it’s above my head, my shoulder braying its anguish. I whisper now to You as I throw my weight hard into the wall. I feel the ball popping into its joint again as I collapse. I fall to the floor and bite my hand to stop a scream from escaping and awaking the house.
    I will die. We’ll all die. How many times have I narrowly escaped it in the past few months? The last few days? My death most probably will happen here in this foreign world, away from my family, at the hands of these people. So be it, Lord. So be it.

THE WESTERN DOOR
    I am the western door of my people. My mother’s and my father’s brothers will not forget about me. They will rescue me. I don’t know how to mourn my parents properly. I miss my mother’s kisses, her whispering my name so close in my ear that it tickles. I miss my father kneeling down and rubbing his nose against mine. When I’m sad and scared like this, I remember what he told me to speak out loud. I am Snow Falls. I am the western door of the five nations of my people. I am a Seneca, an Onondawaga of the Haudenosaunee.
    Near the end of my grandfather’s long sickness, he told my father and his brothers that he’d die in seven days, and so they showed him the fine leggings and robe and moccasins he’d wear at his burial, and on the sixth day he asked my father to paint his face the colour of blood because his closest friend had been to the afterworld and saw that this is how the people looked, and on the seventh day, just as he said, he slipped into that world. There was a great rain of sadness. The women in my family wailed all night and for ten days after. My father and his brothers didn’t cry but made very sad faces. They painted my grandfather more, and then curled him up like a baby in his mother’s stomach, and then they wrapped him snug, tight in his robe, and laid him back on his sleeping mat. I watched all of this. I watched my father