Ember of a New World Read Online Free PDF

any day warm enough to do so. Every ten-day from the start of the cold season until the start of the warm season, a large fire would be set by the water and those who needed extra cleaning would take a quick dip in the cold waters, or hand wash themselves. The fire would provide the instant warmth needed to allow such cleaning during the cold season. When the cold season proper fully came, the water would become too cold for an y one, fire or no. Washing was then performed by hand, one body part at a time. Ember's land was a cold place, but People of the Great Ri v er were hearty and tough.
    Besides the fishing and gathering, the tribe grew some simple crops in several small demarcated squares of land. However, nearly half of their food still came from hunting, fishing, and foraging. One of Ember's favorite dishes, boiled lentils with salt, came from those fields and every few days her turn came to spend a full day working them. In this way the work was distributed amongst the people jus t as the crops.
    With thoughts of boiled and heavily salted lentils on her mind, Ember skipped happily down the path feeling the cool earth on her bare feet. Most people wore shoes made of hide wrappings or woven reeds, but a person walking barefoot was not all that uncommon when it was warm. During most of th e seasons it was much too cold.
    Along the way to the river, Ember ventured off of the path and behind a copse of trees where she found the small bushes of red co l ored “sour berries”, as they were called, which she had been picking for quite some time. She squatted with her reed basket and began s e lecting the best berries, those free of insect damage. The berries were warmed by the sun and ripe for the picking. Ember quickly placed nearly as many berries in the little reed basket as she placed in her mouth, and trotted off down the path towards the river. Her stomach grumbled from the tartness but she didn't care.
    Ember always made the worst work of harvesting. She generally stuffed herself with the majority of what she had picked. As a result, her duties often included fishing, which she was good at, and finding flint pieces at the rivers shore. It was doubtful she would stuff a fish in her mouth raw, though she had done so a few times with small shellfish she found. Ember paused for a moment to savor the mem o ries of tasty raw mussels. She often found them in the mud by the banks, and ate them raw. The taste was sweet but chewy. Her mother seemed more amused by her daughter's inability to forage, with any net returns, than angered by her antics. With a smile, Ember burped loudly and continued to skip lightheartedly down the path towards the river where she knew her mother would be working.
    Ember heard the river before she saw it: a rushing sound of water mixed with the muffled sounds of children playing and women laug h ing. As she rounded the bend, the river came into view in all of its glory: a great expanse of water nearly twice as wide as the village with pebbly shores and gently moving waters. At the shore, women were cleaning caught fish and herding the children out of the more dangerous deeper waters and into the small shoals where they might look for the finely colored stones which cou ld be crafted into trade wares.
    Mostly the women wore woven reed skirts and an occasional w o ven plant fiber shirt or fish skin leather clothing, while the children ran about the same way they came into the world. Some of the youn g er women, hoping to catch the eyes of any man from neighboring village s who might wander by the river , or even tempt a local man, wore fine necklaces of multicolored beads or even a colorful bird feather in their hair. Their faces were painted with more striking pa t terns, zigzagging lines or dots, than the married women. Ember thought the finery beautiful, if not totally cumbersome in the water.
    In the deeper water , several of the older boys could be seen with small spears catching fish. Like the