Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Read Free Book Online

sky is on fire.

NOOHTAAWIY
My Father
    X AVIER TWITCHES AND MOANS in his sleep. I arranged it so that he lies back in the canoe, his head on his pack. I found him this morning on the beach, shivering and half conscious. What happened over there has wrecked him. He thinks I don’t see him putting those needles in his arm. They are a part of what’s killing him. But something far worse is consuming Xavier from the inside. It’s this that I must figure out how to remove. I wish it were simply a matter of finding the right root in the bush. This is a sickness I’ve not had to face before. I must figure out the right cure or I will lose him, and he’s the last of my family.
    The river water is black this early in the morning before the sun has a chance to warm it and the light to turn it the colour of tea. My father used to tease my mother and younger sister and me, telling us that we were the colour of the river water in high summer but that in winter we turned as pale as the Hudson Bay traders and he was afraid he’d one day lose us in the snow. My sister—your mother, Xavier—we called her Rabbit. We’d look at my mother’s brown face as her eyes narrowed in laughter and then look to my father smiling back. He was the last great talker in our clan. He told stories softly so that you had to lean close to him to hear, so close you could smell the smoke in the hide ribbon my mother weaved into his hair, the scent of his neck like the wind coming off the Great Salt Bay. I usedto imagine that he weaved his stories all summer, his words forming invisible nets that he cast over us on the long winter nights, capturing us and pulling us in closer together so that we collected each other’s warmth. And sometimes his stories were all that we had to keep us alive.
    I steer the canoe into the faster current and let us drift with it, using my paddle only as a rudder. The mist is disappearing now and I can see a long way down the bank, can keep an eye sharp for the movement of animals along the shore. Nephew cries out but then goes silent again. The sound of it, the animal fear at the very bottom of that cry, makes me think something I haven’t thought about in a long time. It is the story of my childhood. Now I tell it to you, Xavier, to keep you alive.
    The snows were settled in so deeply that winter had become a part of us. This was long before you, Xavier, when I was still a child. Thirty Anishnabe lived on the traplines that season, half of us children. All the past winters we’d survived in much smaller numbers. This time we had no choice. Three families’ hunters had been taken away the autumn before, two by the North-West Mounted Police, one by Hudson’s Bay Company rum.
    I was a young girl with waking dreams of all the trouble that was to come into my life, sharp pains like ice arrows through my temples that dropped me to my back and caused me to convulse. Except for Rabbit, the other children avoided me. Damaged is what I was to them, but they wouldn’t say this to my face. I was lean and bony with knotted black hair that I refused to let my mother comb. If they thought I was crazy, I let them. Laughed at them.
    Autumn had been promising, many geese and ducks shot, four beaver families snared, and many grouse and sturgeon. But no moose, and the old women among us immediately began their chatter that no moose early in winter meant starvation later. Me, I think it was their idle complaints, their greedy talk as they chewedtheir hides and drank their tea, that put a curse on us. And in the harsh North Country near what the wemistikoshiw call Hudson Bay, shaking a curse once it settles upon you is like trying to shake a fat bloodsucker from your hand.
    Early winter, the time of the blowing moon, sat upon us. Our hunters came back wide-eyed and frozen, reporting to my father the absence of animals, even of tracks. They worried by my family’s fire. I know all this because I watched them from the corner of our askihkan,