Kiss of the Fur Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

standing.
    That night, Mariesis lay half-covered by her enormous goose-down sleeping robe, the light of a kerosene lamp dancing on her perspiring face. To Abraham, hanging a white flannel bed-sheet across the middle of the small room to give his wife a measure of privacy, she looked beatific, the darkness of her deep-set eyes bottomless wells of love. From a carpet of newly cut spruce boughs, a fresh, moist, minty aroma filled the room to overflowing.
    He tested the twine that held the sheet, then bent to put more wood into the stove he had fashioned out of a once-red oil drum, black from years of use. Abraham had to keep the hardy little appliance going, for if it stopped, they froze to death, it was as simple as that. Having refilled the stove, the hunter went outside to chop more wood.
    Champion lay on the other side of the hanging sheet, his head next to the accordion he loved so much that he refused to be parted from it, day or night. Josephine and Chugweesees wiggled like worms beside him. Covered by a puffy down-filled sleeping robe, they whispered furiously.
    “The Great Spirit must be holding our little sister up by her big toe by now,” said the bossy Chugweesees. “Getting ready to drop her, right from the centre of the sky.” She left no room for anyone to argue that the new arrival might be a boy; Chugweesees Okimasis simply assumed she could predict the future.
    Across the lake, a lone wolf raised its howl, the string of notes arcing in a seamless, infinitely slow, infinitely sad glissando, then fading into silence, leaving the hearts of its listeners motionless with awe. Then two wolves joined the first in song. One of Abraham’s dogs, tethered to trees behind the tent, answered, then a second dog, and a third, until a chorus of weeping souls, as if in mourning for one irretrievably lost, filled the night air, numbing the pain of the woman now deep in her labour in this snow-covered tent on this remote island.
    Stifling a yawn, Champion looked up at the hanging bed-sheet and made up his mind that he was not going to miss a second of whatever shadows played on it. He made the mistake of blinking, however, just once, which was enough to send him slipping across a river to the world of dreams, where he had long ago learned how to fly, where he might fly up to meet the falling baby halfway and tell him to go back. For was not this brazen new arrival about to depose the unique Champion Okimasis from his status as not only baby but star of this illustrious caribou-hunting family?
    On the other side of the island, Chichilia Okimasis was dragging a one-hundred-year-old woman through knee-deep snow.The crone’s spine was as crooked as the gnarled pine walking stick with which she propped herself up; she was not much more than four feet tall and so fearfully thin that eleven-year-old Chichilia looked as large as a moose. Abraham had heard from another hunter that the campsite two miles away might harbour just such a woman and so had dispatched his strapping daughter to fetch her. Peroxide Lavoix by baptism, the midwife of births so numerous that she had long ago lost count much preferred her Indian name, which was Little Seagull Ovary.
    “Not so fast, my girl,” Little Seagull Ovary wheezed, like an accordion. “These spindly old legs of mine aren’t what they used to be.” The black silk kerchief she wore tied tight over her snow-white head — the trademark of all good mid-wives everywhere, she explained to her extremely impatient young escort — lent her the air of a fearsome one-eyed pirate.
    To shorten their passage, the elder of the pair entertained the younger with a tale that her listener had heard at least one hundred times yet would never tire of hearing. This was the tale of newborn babies falling from beyond the stars, rousing cantankerous, hibernating bears, magnanimous lyric-poet rabbits, and such. Chichilia giggled as the midwife embellished the ancient yarn as only her very advanced age earned