The Orenda

Joseph Boyden

One

We had magic before the crows came. Before the rise of the great villages they so
roughly carved on the shores of our inland sea and named with words plucked from
our tongues—Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Ottawa—we had our own great
villages on these same shores. And we understood our magic. We understood what
the orenda implied.
But who is at fault when that recedes? It’s tempting to place blame, though loss
should never be weighed in this manner. Who, then, to blame for what we now witness,
our children cutting their bodies to pieces or strangling themselves in the dark recesses
of their homes or gulping your stinking drink until their bodies fail? But we get ahead
of ourselves. This, on the surface, is the story of our past.
Once those crows flew over the great water from their old world to perch tired and
frightened in the branches of ours, they saw that we had the orenda. We believed.
Oh, did we believe. This is why the crows, at first, thought of us as little more than
animals. We lived in a physical world that frightened them and hunted beasts they’d
only had nightmares of, and we consumed the mystery that the crows were bred to
fear. We breathed what they feared. But they watched intently, as crows are prone
to do.
And when they cawed that our magic was unclean, we laughed, took a little
offence, even killed a few of them and pulled their feathers for our hair. We lived on. But
that word, unclean, that word, somehow, like an illness, like its own magic, it began to
grow. Very few of us saw that coming. So maybe this is the story of those few.

HUNTED

I awake. A few minutes, maybe, of troubled sleep. My teeth chatter so
violently I can taste I’ve bitten my swollen tongue. Spitting red into
the snow, I try to rise but my body’s seized. The oldest Huron, their
leader, who kept us walking all night around the big lake rather than
across it because of some ridiculous dream, stands above me with a
thorn club. The weight these men give their dreams will be the end
of them.
Although I still know little of their language, I understand the
words he whispers and force myself to roll over when the club swings
toward me. The thorns bite into my back and the bile of curses that
pour from my mouth make the Hurons convulse with laughter. I am
sorry, Lord, to use Your name in vain.
They’d all be screaming with glee, pointing and holding their
bellies, if we weren’t being hunted. With a low sun rising and the air so
cold, noise travels. They are clearly fed up with the young Iroquois girl
who never stopped whimpering the entire night. Her face is swollen
and, when I see her lying in the snow, I fear they killed her while I
slept.
Not long ago, just before first light, we’d all paused to rest, the
leader and his handful of hunters stopping as if they’d planned this in
advance, the pack of them collapsing against one another for the heat.
They whispered among themselves, and a couple glanced over at me.
Although I couldn’t decipher their rushed speech, I sensed they talked
of leaving me here, probably with the girl, who at that moment sat
with her back to a birch, staring as if in a dream. Or maybe they talked
of killing us. We had slowed them down all night, and despite trying
to walk quietly I’d stumbled in the dark through the thick brush and
tripped over fallen trees buried in the snow. At one point I removed
my snowshoes because they were so clumsy, but then sank up to my
hips in the next steps, and one of the hunters had to pull me out, biting
me hard on the face once he’d accomplished the deed.
Now the snow covering the lake glows the colour of a robin’s egg
as sunlight tries to break through cloud. If I live through this day I will
always remember to pay attention to the tickle of dryness at the back
of my throat at this moment, the feeling of a bad headache coming.
I’ve just begun to walk to the girl to offer her comfort, if she’s still alive,
when a dog’s howl breaks the silence, its excitement in picking up our
scent making me want to throw up. Other dogs answer it. I forget how
my toes have begun to blacken, that I’ve lost so much weight I can
barely support my gaunt frame, that my chest has filled with a sickness
that’s turned my skin yellow.
I know dogs, though. As in my old world, they are one of the few
things in this new one that bring me comfort. And this pack’s still a
long way away, their voices travelling easy in the frozen air. When I
bend to help the girl up, I see the others have already disappeared into
the shadows of trees and thick brush.
My terror of being left behind for those chasing me, who will make
sure my death is slow and painful, is so powerful that I now weigh
taking my own life. I know exactly what I must do. Asking Your divine
mercy for this, I will strip naked and walk out onto the lake. I calculate
how long all this will take. It’s my second winter in the new world,
after all, and my first one I witnessed the brutality of death by freezing.
The first ten minutes, as the pack races closer and closer, will certainly
be the most excruciating. My skin will at first feel as if it’s on fire, like
I’m being boiled in a pot. Only one thing is more painful than these
early minutes of freezing, and it’s the thawing out, every tendril of
the body screaming for the agony to stop. But I won’t have to worry
about that. I will lie on the frozen lake and allow the boiling cold to
consume me. After that handful of minutes the violent shaking won’t
even be noticed, but the sharp stabs of pain in the forehead will come,
and they will travel deeper until it feels my brain is being prodded with
fish spines. And when the dogs are within a few minutes of reaching
me, I will suddenly begin to feel a warmth creeping. My body will
continue its hard seizures, but my toes and fingers and testicles will
stop burning. I will begin to feel a sense of, if not comfort, then relief,
and my breathing will be very difficult and this will cause panic but
that will slowly harden to resolve. And when the dogs are on the lake
and racing toward me, jaws foaming and teeth bared, I will know that
even this won’t hurt anymore, my eyes frozen shut as I slip into a sleep
that no one can awaken from. As the dogs circle me I will try to smile
at them, baring my own teeth, too, and when they begin to eat me I
won’t feel myself being consumed but will, like You, Christ, give my
body so that others might live.
This thought of giving, I now see, lifts me just enough to pick up
the girl and begin walking away from the lake’s edge. After all, if she’s
alive, won’t her people—my pursuers—consider sparing me? I will
keep her alive, not only because this is what You demand but also to
save myself. The thought of betraying Your wishes feels more an intellectual
quandary than what I imagine should physically cause my heart
to ache, but I’ll worry about that later. For now I follow the others’
footsteps as best I can, my thick black robe catching on the branches
and nettles, the bush so thick I wonder how it is that the men I follow,
and those who follow me, are not part animal, contain some black
magic that gives them abilities beyond what is natural.
You seem very far away here in this cold hell, and the Superior’s
attempts to prepare me before I left France, before my journey to this
new world, seem ridiculous in their naïveté. You will face great danger.
You will most certainly face death. You will question Jesus’ mercy, even
His existence. This is Lucifer whispering in your ear. Lucifer’s fires are ice.
There is no warming your body and your soul by them. But
Superior doesn’t have any idea what true cold is, I realize, as I allow
myself and the girl to be swallowed by the darkness of trees that the
bitter sun fails to penetrate.

Excerpted from THE ORENDA by Joseph Boyden. Copyright © Joseph Boyden, 2013. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Canada Books Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.