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

and was frightened, but I remained beneath his heavy moose robe.
    When the prayers were finally done, the bear was pulled up on the pole by his hind paws once again and a large cooking pot placed below him. My father took his knife and ran it along the bear’s stomach. With a ripping sound the askihkan filled with the powerful smell of insides. The guts filled the pot. Then he and my mother cut along the inside of the bear’s legs and gently peeled the fur from his body, cutting carefully where they had to separate flesh from fur, until the animal hung there naked. He looked like a small, thin man dangling from his feet, blood dripping from his head. For the first time I realized why we were told the bear was our brother.
    For many nights after, I was jolted from sleep by dreams of this bear-man waking from his death slumber, bending up to untie his feet and then jumping onto the floor, eyes bulging from his fleshy skull, pacing on two legs between the bodies of my sleeping family, sinew of white muscle glistening in the moonlight as he searched for his fur.
    With the skinning and cleaning done, the hunters who’d killed him were invited in to prepare the meat for roasting. He was a winter bear, grown thin in his sleep, and although young, was tough already. But we were hungry, and all thirty of us crowded in and ate until every part of the animal was gone—his meat, brain, heart, kidneys,liver; his bones cracked open for their marrow and carefully collected to be boiled down later. We ate until our stomachs grew taut as drums, until beads of sweat dotted our foreheads and our cheeks flushed red. My father warned all of us that not a scrap should be wasted. Even the smallest piece of gristle that no one wanted was collected in a bowl and added to the bones or burned in the fire over prayers. We were always careful not to waste for fear of insulting an animal, but this time stood out to me. I did not understand my father’s concern, his eyes following everything, anxious. Later I would come to understand.
    The young hunter Micah took his new baby girl from his wife’s lap, then chose a bit of flesh and put it in the baby’s mouth. “Your first taste of meat,” he said to the child, who hesitantly, then hungrily began to chew. We all smiled at the expression on her face, but then she turned red and began to gasp. Micah shook her upside down to try and dislodge the meat. Like lightning my mother grabbed the child, sticking a finger in her throat so that she gagged and threw the meat up. I saw the meat drop to the floor. I glanced at Rabbit, but she did not pick it up and place it in her bowl. No one else seemed to have noticed.
    We didn’t taste fresh game again for a very long time. It got so that I would remember the tough bits of gristle that I had not wanted at the feast and my stomach would grumble moodily.
    The real cold settled in with the moon of the exploding trees. This was the time of the year that we depended on the hare to help us live. Its hides were sewn together and worn fur-side-in from our feet to our heads. Its meat was tender. We ate the stomachs that were filled with bitter greens to stave off the coughing disease and the yellow disease. But like everything else this particular winter, even the hares began to abandon us. The hunters continued to return with very little or nothing at all. Marten partially eaten by wolves, the odd grouse, a skinny and starved beaver. Some of the men began tocomplain about what we already knew, that there were too many of us for this part of the bush to sustain. They were going to head off with their families in hopes of surviving. In the end only the head-strong young Micah and his wife and baby walked into the bush alone.
    The next day broke bright and cold as any I’d ever felt. The children who had energy played a game where they let spit drool from their mouths and measured how fast it froze once it hit the air. Micah pulled a toboggan with their few possessions,