The Storyteller Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

during this year’s hunts. His own wife did not need the hides. Her lodge was new. He would not have his daughter live in shame because she was second wife and because her husband would rather sleep than hunt.
    He scratched at the doorflap, but no one came. Finally, he crawled in through the entrance tunnel—something he would not have done except in his own daughter’s lodge. The lodge was empty.
    Fox Barking, Day Woman’s husband, was a man whose thoughts were always turned toward himself. He had no doubt taken both wives to see the Cousin River Dzuuggi, thinking the Dzuuggi would assume he was someone important. If a man was too lazy to hunt, what good were wives? When you let your wife live in a lodge that stinks of mildew, who could think you were important?
    Tsaani’s knees and ankles ached, but he made himself walk more quickly. The shaman’s lodge was on the far side of the village. Tsaani’s caribou hide moccasins seemed to slip more than necessary, but finally he came to the lodge, to the crowd that had gathered around it.
    When the people saw him, they parted to allow him inside.
    The lodge was warm, too warm, with too many people, each adding to the heat with words and laughter. Tsaani stayed at the edge of the group, though several urged him toward the comfortable fur mats and willow backrests reserved for the elders, but he remained where he was, watching, listening.
    His eyes fell first on the Cousin River Dzuuggi, and in that moment of seeing, he wondered why Ligige’ had asked him to come. There was nothing he could do. The young man stood with feet bare, the otter foot and webbed toes uncovered for anyone to see. But even if the man’s feet had been covered, how could he hide his high forehead, his wide cheekbones, his well-formed eyes? This was Gull Wing’s son. The young man laughed, and it was Gull Wing’s laughter. Were they blind? Were they deaf?
    He looked at the faces in the lodge. There was no one from the Cousin River Village. Had the man come alone? Perhaps, like Tsaani and Ligige’, he realized that too many young hunters longed to become warriors, and so decided to risk only his own life.
    Tsaani watched the man for a time, listened as he spoke to the people. Perhaps he looked like his father, but he had wisdom far beyond any Gull Wing ever possessed. It must be the wisdom, Tsaani decided, that closed everyone’s eyes to who he was.
    Slowly, Tsaani studied each face, the men and women of his village, old and young, wise and foolish. They listened as the Dzuuggi spoke of the ties between the two villages, as he told stories of the battles and the hunts, the grandfathers and warriors who bound them together into one people.
    Then Tsaani’s eyes found his daughter, and he saw that she knew. There was pain in her face, sorrow etched in long lines down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and Tsaani was afraid she would speak, would say something to break the spell the Dzuuggi was weaving, but though her mouth moved, no sound escaped.
    Tsaani began to work his way through the people, toward his daughter, to warn her, to explain that she could not claim this man as son, that she must make a sacrifice, as she had when this son was born, to protect their village.
    More people crowded into the lodge, pressed against Tsaani, so that it seemed as though he were in a dream, each step taking him nowhere, but finally he was only three women from her, then two. He reached out to clasp her shoulder, but before he could touch her, the cry came, a long, loud keening.
    As though the cry were a wall, Tsaani felt himself being pushed away. Day Woman flung herself at the young man’s feet, clasped his ankles and called out, “My son, oh my son, you have come back to me.”
    “You think I want a husband who was thrown away?” said Snow-in-her-hair. “You think I want children who are cursed? My children may already be cursed, just because I looked at you. Just because I sat beside you!”
    “No one in