The Orenda Joseph Boyden

Advance praise for
The Orenda

“Joseph Boyden has taken our memory of the past—myth and fact—and ripped it inside out with elegance, violence, emotion, and understanding until before us stands a new myth, a new memory, of how we became who we are.”

—John Ralston Saul

“Every so often, a book can bring the past back to life so vividly that it ceases to be history and becomes a part of the living world. Joseph Boyden has done this with haunting beauty and visceral strength, repopulating a destroyed world with characters so real and striking it is hard to think of them as fictional.
The Orenda
is not only Boyden’s finest work, it is one of the most powerful novels I’ve ever read.”

—Steven Galloway, author of
The Cellist of Sarajevo

“Joseph Boyden writes with muscle and magic in impossible balance, and this profound exploration of the war between competing civilizations is his finest novel to date.
The Orenda
is a story so powerful it seems to belong to the very land itself, as brutal and beautiful as the Canadian Shield from which it feels carved, and you will read no better book this year.”

—Andrew Davidson, author of
The Gargoyle

“I have spent almost forty years of my life studying both the archaeology of the Huron-Wendat and the annual accounts of the Crows, and only now, having read Joseph Boyden’s brilliant novel, do I feel the majesty and the horrors of the lives of these people. His work should be required reading for every Canadian.”

—Dr. Ronald F. Williamson, co-author of

The Mantle Site: An Archaeological History of an Ancestral Wendat Community

and managing partner of Archaeological Services Inc.

“
The Orenda
is a powerful story from history, folklore, and the imagination, based on the universality of human cruelty, superstition, and perseverance. Wonderful writing.”

—Linden MacIntyre, Scotiabank Giller

Prize–winning author of
The Bishop’s Man

“An important and engrossing novel. Boyden invites the reader to re-imagine a Canadian story you thought you knew.”

—Jim Balsillie, co-founder of BlackBerry

ALSO BY JOSEPH BOYDEN

Through Black Spruce

Three Day Road

Born With A Tooth
(stories)

THE

ORENDA

JOSEPH

BOYDEN

AMANDA

Gnaajiwi nwiidgemaagan

BLANCHE

Gnaajiwi nmama

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.

A MAN SHOULD FEEL HAPPY

I stop to look up because the sun breaks, puffs of my breath shimmering in the first light. It’s you who shimmers, my love, in this first morning light. The sun will illuminate all of it. I know this most of all. The sun will show the Haudenosaunee who chase us exactly where to go, how many of us there are, what condition we’re in, and especially that we drag a crow with us. The sun today is not a friend. If we all die today, it will be because of it. And the sun won’t give true heat for three more moons, so it’s useless. The Crow who tries to follow is worse than useless. And the girl. Taking her was a bad idea. I knew this yesterday like I know it now. I’m older, my love, but still haven’t learned to listen to what my chest tells me.

I ask Fox to set a sinew snare where the path narrows, just high enough to strangle the first of their dogs, now howling across the lake and not so far away. With any luck, the others will be hungry enough to stop and tear apart their friend, for surely they’ve not been eating much this last while. I dreamed all of this and spoke of it as the sky began to darken last evening. I know, my love, that yesterday you watched from somewhere above when my group stumbled across the smaller party of our enemy, both pursuing the same deer. Luck and the bit of tobacco I’d offered to Aataentsic the Sky Woman the night before allowed me to find our enemy’s tracks first, and we followed nimble and fast. By the drag of the Haudenosaunee’s snowshoes I knew
they were close to starving. And by the lack of dog prints I knew what their last meal had been.

I tied the Crow to a tree and then attacked the hunting party when we found them in a gully. It was almost too easy. We shot arrows through two and the other two could barely put up a fight. They didn’t even seem to care when Fox clubbed down one of the women, who at least bit him hard through his hide. I myself walked up to the biggest man, already singing his death song, and swung my thorn club into his temple, angry he wasn’t willing to fight for his woman. I will not forget having to stand on his head to wrench my weapon free. Yes, I’m older, but still strong. The only one as tall as me is that Crow who I can now hear stumbling through the snow and whining, trying to catch up. He’s big, thick through the chest and clearly strong, but is he not the most awkward man I’ve ever met? He is a holy one, though. I’ve watched him pray to his sky people for long stretches at a time, thumbing wooden and white metal beads that I think I want to possess once I understand their power.