Читать книгу The Long-Shining Waters - Danielle Sosin - Страница 17

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“And the birds rose up all together, laughing and talking and congratulating themselves.” Bullhead lifts her hands in the air. “And each and every one flew away.”

“What happened next?” Little Cedar asks. “What happened to the man?”

Bullhead reaches over and pinches his leg. She laughs and adds a piece of wood to the fire, causing shadows to bounce higher on the wall. “He was flung into the night sky. I’ll show him to you at Sugarbush.”

The sound of Bullhead’s laughter meant more to their survival than Grey Rabbit had realized. Once more, she thanks the animals who had offered their lives to feed her family. At first the meat felt bad in their stomachs, like hard balls of clay slow to dissolve. Now its good effects are evident. Standing Bird stares at the flames, his arrow-sharp focus back. And Little Cedar is playing again.

Warm light wavers on Night Cloud’s face. The tightness in his jaw has relaxed as well. He’s no longer stony eyed and quick with gruff words. His feelings come through his eyes so strongly. The morning he awakened from the dream where he was shown the echo rock wall in the woods, his eyes were filled with such gratitude and relief that she knew of the gift before he had spoken.

“Are we going to hear another one?” Standing Bird asks his grandmother without looking up from the space between two pieces of wood where the flames appear and disappear, creating an eye, a row of teeth, or two tall twirling dancers. He reaches over and pinches his little brother’s knee, and mouths the words, “Windigo, windigo, windigo.”

Grey Rabbit silences her oldest with a look as Little Cedar squirms and covers his eyes. She, too, would rather not hear of the windigos, the horrible winter specters with man-eating ways. She puts her arm around Little Cedar, feeling the thinness of his shoulder. She tilts his face and feels his cheeks for warmth, but he twists his head free of her.

Even though they have food enough, the dreams of endangered children have continued. In the last there’d been a lost boy who wandered into a clearing full of bad medicine. Girl or boy and whatever the age—somehow the dreams seem to point to her youngest. She can’t explain why this is. She has never been known as a powerful dreamer. She knows she should ask Bullhead to help her interpret, yet each time she means to, she falls silent.

“We’ll leave for Sugarbush as soon as the time is right,” Night Cloud announces. Grey Rabbit meets Bullhead’s eyes across the fire. Most of the preparations are already finished. What’s left can’t be done until the end.

“And when we get there, we can open the cache,” Little Cedar pipes up. “Tell us everything that’s buried in it?” he asks, but then he recites the list himself. “Rice, and fish, and beaver, and maple sugar, sugar, sugar.” His eyes squint shut with pleasure. Again, Grey Rabbit puts her hand to his cheek.

Bullhead sucks her teeth and then clears her throat with a short cough. “The time has come for me to tell a story that happened as a small party of canoes were on the way to their Sugarbush.”