The Dawn Country Read Online Free PDF

perhaps seven or eight summers. The girls were a little older, ten or eleven. All had been captured during the Bog Willow Village battle, and sold to Gannajero. They were Dawnland People. At the sound of the old woman’s voice, the boy curled into a tighter ball and started crying. The two girls continued to sleep fitfully.
    “Are you all right?” Wrass asked the boy in the Dawnland tongue. He was good at languages. He had always listened intently when Traders came through, trying to learn as much as he could.
    The boy turned to peep at Wrass from beneath a skinny arm. He was half Wrass’ size, with a narrow face and an unkempt mass of chin-length black hair. His blade-thin nose kept quivering and dripping. A ratty cape—made from woven strips of weasel hide—covered his shoulders. “No, I’m c-cold, and my throat hurts.”
    Wrass inched forward, lifted his cape, and draped it over the boy like a blanket. The boy slid backward, pressing against Wrass as he cried.
    Wrass drew him closer. “Shh. Don’t cry.”
    “I can’t stop.”
    “Believe me, it doesn’t do any good.” Wrass stroked his arm. “You need to get some sleep. You have to be strong.”
    Above the rocky riverbank a shrubby blanket of winged sumacs seemed to roll on forever beneath the dark maple trees that fringed the winter sky. The campfires of the dead gilded the shrubs with an opalescent sheen that made them appear to shimmer as the canoes passed.
    The boy whispered, “What’s your name?”
    “Wrass. I’m Bear Clan from Yellowtail Village of the Standing Stone People.”
    “I’m Toksus of the Otter Clan from Bog Willow Village.”
    “Toksus? That’s a good name. How old are you?”
    “Eight summers.” The boy suddenly twisted his head to look up at Wrass. “My parents are coming, aren’t they? They must be right behind us by now? Have you seen them?”
    Wrass let out a deep breath. When he’d first been captured, the strangling mixture of fear and hope had been unbearable. “Toksus, I’m not going to lie to you. You have a lot of hard days ahead. But I know this for sure: Someone is looking for you.”
    Toksus stared up with swimming eyes. “And … they’ll find me soon?”
    “I’m sure they will.”
    “My parents are alive. I saw them! When the Flint warriors rounded up all us children after the battle … as they marched us away … I saw my parents standing in a line with twenty other people. They were being guarded by six warriors.”
    Wrass’ headache made it difficult to think, let alone speak coherently and gently. The scene Toksus had described was common enough. The captives would be divided up, given to warriors who had shown merit on the war trail or during the fight. The warrior who ended up with Toksus’ mother could kill her, or keep her for a slave. Were the latter the case, she was already being marched away to the west, hands bound behind her. The only value his father would have would be as a source of body parts to be carried home as trophies. But he couldn’t tell the boy that.
    Wrass wet his lips. “Someone is looking for you, Toksus. That means you need to stay alive, or all their efforts to rescue you will be for nothing.”
    Toksus wiped his eyes on his sleeve and blinked at Wrass. “Are you just saying that?”
    The warriors paddling in the rear chuckled, amused.
    Wrass turned his back to the men and softly said, “Among my people, if anyone survives an attack, they always form a search party to try and get their families back. Don’t your Dawnland people do that?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then if your parents are alive, they’re trying as hard as they can to find you.”
    Some of the tension went out of the boy’s shoulders. “But how will they find me, Wrass? If we were traveling on land they might be able to track us. We’re in a canoe, headed downriver toward the lands of the People Who Separated.”
    Wrass nodded. “It will be more difficult, but a good warrior would still be able to find