The Orenda Joseph Boyden by Joseph Boyden

happy I’m gone. He makes no secret of walking behind me. He hums a song that sounds like spring, and I like it despite wanting to hate it. I walk faster, but he keeps pace. After a while, I begin to feel as though he’s leading me, not me him. I don’t like this man. I don’t want to admit it, but he has powers too.
    I turn down a smaller path that by the sun’s place I think will take me back to his longhouse, and I consider slowing so that he’ll catch up and walk with me. Kneeling in a snowbank, I begin to draw circles and wait for his shadow to stretch across me, blocking out the glare of sun on snow. As I turn my eyes to him, all I can see is a black outline. It isn’t his. Bird is tall and this one who follows is small, her form as thin as a snake’s. My head tells me to stand, and I do, but when it tells me to run, my legs go weak, weaker than when I climbed down the ladder from my bed this morning. As if commanded, I sit on my haunches, my hands folded on my knees, though my eyes remain on the thin woman who has been following, my eyes adjusting so I can make out the strands of her messy hair, the cheekbones that look sharp enoughto cut me, the bare hands with long fingers. She stares at me, and this stare holds me down. My legs begin to shake, my knees knocking against each other. She raises her hand and my legs go still.
    “You aren’t afraid?” she asks. “Cold?” She doesn’t wait for my response. “My name is Gosling. I could ask if you wanted to be here but I already know you don’t.”
    I look up at her, the sunspots dancing, her face becoming focused. I think it’s beautiful, but her words, her voice, make my legs start shaking again. She raises her hand once more. They stop.
    “You will cause your new father much pain,” she says. “I can see this, too.” She smiles.
    “He’s not my father,” I tell her. The idea that he is makes me sad and confused.
    Although her mouth stays the same, I see her own confusion in her eyes. “I didn’t ask you to speak, Snow Falls,” she says.
    I want to tell her that she isn’t my mother, either. And how does she know my name? I try to find it in me to open my mouth and say this but it’s as if it’s been sewn shut with deer sinew.
    “You’re a strong girl, but not that strong,” she says. “If you would like me to prove this to you, I will.”
    I suddenly feel as if my head’s been shoved under water. I stare up at her, struggling with her, and I’m gasping for breath. The confusion in her eyes is now gone. She looks at me blankly, watching me drown. My mouth moves like a pike’s that’s been tossed onto shore. I feel my eyes bulge.
    She blinks, and a rush of air fills my lungs so fast that I begin coughing and gasping.
    “I’m not cruel,” she says. “But I won’t allow you to think that your strength can defeat mine.” She sits beside me. I want to run screaming but I’m paralyzed.
    She cups snow and pats it. “Spring will come earlier than last year. If you concentrate you can feel it in this.” She nods at her hands. “The last night’s snowfall was like our bodies when they reach that time. It’sbreaking down. It’s dying.” She keeps patting the snow as she speaks, one palm cupping the other. “Your brother,” she says. “The special one.” Her hands stop moving and she cradles the packed snow now. I look, and my brother’s face stares back at me, as if carved by the most talented artist. His mouth slopes down at the edges, and his eyes, a little sunken, just as in real life, stare at me, unseeing.
    The woman talks again. “If your brother hadn’t been killed by Bird, if you’d all made it home this winter, he would have drowned two summers from now on a trading mission with your dead father.”
    She covers my brother’s face and begins patting the snow again. When she opens her hands once more, my mother’s face, her small nose, even the laugh lines at the edge of her eyes, astonishes me. “Your mother