Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Read Free Book Online Page A

hidden under my father’s moose robe, quiet and observant like a hungry lynx.
    By the end of that month, all of us scrounged for food. The women peeled tamarack bark for tea, dug through the deep snow in hopes of finding a few dried fiddleheads. The men continued to go out on the traplines and to hunt, returning silent, their blank stares scaring us children.
    I was nearing the time of my strawberry ceremony, when the women closest to me would keep me in our askihkan all day, talking to me, praying, telling me stories, preparing me for my first blood of womanhood. Until the spring came, I was allowed to wander. But I wanted nothing of that. I wanted to stay close to my father, to watch over him.
    When talk began that soon we would be forced to boil our moccasins, a group of hunters returned with a small black bear slung on a pole between them. Some of the old ones among us were bear clan and muttered bitterly. Who would dare disturb a brother’s winter sleep? They brought the bear directly to my father. I hid in my usual place and watched as he spoke with them about where they’d come across the den, how they had recognized it in the deep snow.
    Marius, the oldest hunter, spoke first. “We followed its tracks.” My father looked puzzled, but he remained silent. Marius continued. “At first I thought I was mistaken, but there they were for all of us to see. We followed them.” My father and the four hunters sat silent fora long time, staring at the crackling fire. “The tracks ended near a cliff by the river,” Marius said after a while.
    My father waited.
    “They just stopped,” one of the younger hunters blurted. “We walked with them, and in the middle of an open field they just stopped.”The others stared at him.
    “We’d been led to a den,” Marius went on, as if the young one hadn’t spoken at all. “We could see its indent on the side of the cliff. But the tracks stopped short of it at least the length of a tall man. Clearly the den had not been disturbed since autumn. We dug and we roused the bear and took it quickly. We wouldn’t have disturbed it, but we were hungry.” My father nodded and again they all stared at the fire.
    I looked over at the bear hanging from the pole, tied by its hind paws so that its nose pointed to the ground and its tongue lolled out. Normally they would have skinned and quartered the animal where they took it, but this time was different. The bear was thawing now near the fire. I smelled the musky smell of piss. I could see from where I lay that it was only a little taller than me.
    The young hunter spoke again. “All of this is not good!” His name was Micah. He had a pretty wife who’d had her first child the summer before. I thought he was handsome, and I blushed whenever he was around.
    “Do we continue to starve or do we eat the animal that has been delivered to us?” my father asked. “If no other game is found in the next day, the choice will be apparent.”
    I listened to this as the wind threw itself against our askihkan . An early storm wind, young and strong. Even I knew that. There would be no hunting for the next day at least.
    The following afternoon my mother and father prepared the bear for us. Normally we did our butchering outside, but the bear was our brother, and so he was invited in. Nothing was rushed. Nothing wasto be wasted for fear of angering him. The knife used couldn’t touch anything else. Any of the hair that the bear shed was carefully collected from the floor and clothing, and burned in the fire, whispered prayers drifting up with the stinking smoke. My parents carefully laid the animal on his back on freshly cut spruce boughs, talking to him, whispering prayers for what seemed like hours. They rocked back and forth on their haunches, my father sprinkling bits of powder into the flames that brought into the room a sweet smell I recognized as cedar. I was alarmed when at one point my father began to cry. I’d never seen this before