Book of the Little Axe Read online

  Also by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  ’Til the Well Runs Dry

  Lauren Francis-Sharma

  book of the

  little axe

  a novel

  Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Cover design by Becca Fox Design

  Cover photographs: sunset: Simon Bray/Millennium Images, UK; leaves: Sonny Ross/Offset

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  This text was set in 12-pt. Granjon LT

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2936-9

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4703-5

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Anand

  “A little axe can cut down a big tree.”

  —African and Caribbean proverb

  “And many strokes, though with a little axe,

  Hew down and fell the hardest-timber’d oak.”

  —William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, Act II, Scene 1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Bighorn

  II

  Isle of Trinidad

  III

  West of Apsáalooke Territory of North America

  Creadon Rampley

  Rupert’s Land

  IV

  Siksikaitsitapi Territory of North America

  V

  Isle of Trinidad

  Creadon Rampley

  Leavin Rupert’s Land

  VI

  Salish Territory of North America

  VII

  Isle of Trinidad

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  VIII

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  IX

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  X

  Isle of Trinidad

  XI

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  XII

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  XIII

  Isle of Trinidad

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  XIV

  Isle of Trinidad

  Creadon Rampley

  Isle of Trinidad

  XV

  Isle of Trinidad

  XVI

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Creadon Rampley

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  XVII

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Acknowledgments

  I

  Bighorn

  1

  1830

  Only six of the seven boys saw it. From the branches of a chilled cedar. Through blades of frosty golden grasses. The boys watched its teasing figure stilled in the silver light of that cold winter morning, its horns like serrated half-moons dying at its muscular jaw, the crackling ice echoing over the thrum of the boys’ hearts.

  The elders had told them to bring back all their horses could carry. But the elders had not meant for the boys to hunt everything. Bighorn sheep were not for the taking. This they were told as small lads, and the boys knew well the warning. They’d heard of men who’d killed sheep on the mountain, knew what those men’s fates had been. And so the dilemma for the boys that morning was how to ask and answer the hunter’s eternal question: Does one from an abundance breed scarcity?

  So upon this land of shining mountains, each waited for the others, listening for quickening breaths of impatience or steady sighs of acquiescence. And from the branches of the cedar, Victor searched below for his friend, Like-Wind, who had been the first to mark the ram. The first to outstretch his solid arms to halt the party’s movement, signaling for Victor to climb up between the cedar’s limbs for a better look. Once Victor had settled onto a bough, Like-Wind had peered up at him and smiled. Victor knew then that Like-Wind remembered too the story of the boy, a thousand years earlier, taken up onto a ridge of Bighorn by his stepfather and pushed off a steep cliff. The boy’s mother mourned, not knowing her son had been rescued and raised by a small flock of bighorn sheep who’d tell the boy, when he became a man, to return to his people and inform them that the collective survival of Apsáalooke and bighorn sheep would thereon be mutually dependent.

  “If I live, you live” was what Like-Wind and Victor had decided was the moral of the story. Laughter bubbled inside their noses when they first said this. It was a joke they were certain wouldn’t be amusing to their elders.

  Now, Victor counted the boys below. There were only five. Their dark squarish heads with sweeping hair, so different from Victor’s were almost indistinguishable from one another, but Like-Wind’s head, now missing in the count, was different. His head cast a perfect oval. This Victor knew, for he had studied Like-Wind since they were small boys, had watched him grow taller than Victor’s reach, observed the muscles in his legs hardening though they’d run the same distances, jumped from the same boulders into the same rivers. As he sat upon the branch, Victor quieted himself, crushing all the wind’s words into one long hum, listening for Like-Wind’s thick breaths, the sound of a near-man among boys. He found the cragged notes in the tree beside him, where he made out Like-Wind balanced on the edge of a limb, brushing hair from his eye before steadying his arrow. The boys below began moving about, the skins of their moccasins crunching through day-old snow, causing the ram to start. Victor watched as Like-Wind leapt from the tree, his bowed legs like a spider’s, carrying him over the white terrain, while the others looked on, their expressions filled with equal parts terror and awe as Like-Wind took aim at the sheep, sized like a bear, that now ran so fast and so hard into the distance it seemed it might run itself into the coming night’s sky. But then, it was as if the ram had come upon a mighty boulder, for it stopped upon its cloven hooves, inside a perfect circle of sunlight with rays so comely and brilliant that they shone on the milky fleece of the ram’s rump as though gifting the forbidden to Like-Wind.

  Months earlier, alongside the mouth of the canyon, Victor sat with the same six boys to begin his first fast. Below them was the sky, painted sapphire blue, and a sea of red earth not yet covered in frost but at the mercy of low diaphanous clouds that lingered like protective mothers. The rock wall
behind them, barbed and looming, protected the boys from an early winter’s wind and the rugged peak above them, known as Where They See People, seemed to promise, as it had for generations of boys before, that their visions would soon appear. But several days passed and while the other boys began to see their baaxpée, Victor beheld nothing but bigger sky. He maintained his fast, sweated for additional days, prayed with an earnestness and fervor unmatched, and still Victor’s vision did not come. And though this should not have been a source of dishonor, Victor could not be convinced that his humiliation was unfounded.

  “Perhaps I had the vision but did not know.” Father had laughed with disgrace in his throat, for the other men in the smoke lodge had looked upon them both with quick, sharp glances, reminding them, though it may not have been intended, that they were not Apsáalooke by blood.

  “Black-skinned.” This was how Father described himself. Half black-skinned, half some unknown tribe, Edward Rose was a revered Apsáalooke war chief who served also as a guide to foreigners. Men who thought themselves explorers, profiteers, compensated Father handsomely to push them beyond the expeditions of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. And they did so because Edward Rose, though, indeed, black-skinned, had been with the clan most of his life and was nothing short of Apsáalooke.

  Victor’s mother’s birthright could not be so easily explained. Rosa Rendón was of a far different people. A people she’d tried once or twice to explain to Victor in clipped phrases, long before he’d understood he’d need to know of them for his story to be spoken. For Victor, Ma’s history began when Father brought her to live with the Apsáalooke after losing his three wives in a horse raid. As it was told, Father’s next intended had been chosen—a big-boned widow from a neighboring clan. But before their introduction, Father set off for a yearlong expedition and, to the dismay of the clan’s women, returned home with a strange woman, more black-skinned than he, who claimed she was born in the middle of a sea, on a land she called “Trinidad.”

  It was true that Father and Ma both were and were not Apsáalooke. And Victor could not help but wonder if their origins—if his origins—had anything to do with what he felt was his lack of good fortune.

  The boys ran to the sheep that now thrashed against the brittle earth. One arrow in the flank, another in its right leg. As if confused, Lone-bull and Fire-Bear looked to Like-Wind who slapped Victor upon his back, congratulating him on their shared kill. Victor smiled, and the boys, who had been ready to praise Like-Wind alone, grinned cautiously, as though both worried about and angry with Victor for believing himself fortunate enough for such a tempting of fate.

  “We don’t speak of this,” Like-Wind warned.

  That night, as they ate charred sheep and smoked the pipe with long and heavy drags, the boys agreed they would separate the next morning to meet again on the fourth afternoon beside a cluster of wide-limbed junipers. The one who arrived with the most spoils would be declared the winner.

  When Victor woke at dawn, three of the boys were waiting for him to rouse, the creases of sleep still deep on their faces. They told Victor that the kill he’d had with Like-Wind had been a manifestation of Like-Wind’s good fortune, not his. That Victor, alone, could never be so lucky. Would never be so lucky again. Like-Wind, overhearing, told the boys that if good fortune could be lost, it could be made again. But the boys laughed and said Victor’s good fortune, if ever made, had long ago been unmade.

  They had traveled days from camp, down their mountain, and Victor now found himself alone in a region with trees so plentiful there seemed no sky to view. It was the third day and Victor had already taken two stout bucks that he’d hung like meaty nests in a tree. He believed he could win the competition with the buck he sighted now from a large divot where he lay in snow. As he contemplated the shot, he thought over what the boys had told him, thought of how much he’d always wanted the good fortune of which they spoke. He believed he was born unlucky, but he could not have told his friends this, could not have told them how he longed for Like-Wind’s physicality, his doting father, his mother’s line of chiefs, could not have told them that his Ma had warned him about coveting another’s fortune.

  As Victor counted the buck’s tines—twelve to match each of his years—he wondered whether good fortune could be all the things the boys had said: given, made, unmade.

  When Victor had journeyed to sweat the second time, it was against the advice of Father and the akbaalia, both of whom suggested he was not ready. After Victor returned to camp with no report of a vision, Father did not speak again until Victor assured him he’d fasted for more than a week’s time, assured him he’d done more than the expected.

  “And still no vision?” Father had asked.

  Victor had felt the embarrassment of his shortcoming like a brash wave of smoke burning his throat and eyes. He left Father and hurried to deliver the last of the day’s water to Ma, who had only just finished dressing his sisters inside the lodge. The little twin girls, happy to see him, clambered about him with their long, pliant limbs while Ma watched Victor from afar. When Ma sent the girls away, she oiled her fingertips with something from a pot kept always beneath the lodge smoke hole, and set Victor down on the mat, kneeling behind him.

  “Be still.” Ma reached for the bark comb she had fashioned for the bushy hair Victor and his sisters carried like jeweled crowns. She began the part at his hairline, then kneaded the oil onto his scalp, the warmth of it traveling to the base of his neck, her scent a fruit he could not then name, her long dark legs encasing him. “Your time is coming,” she had whispered.

  Now, as he rooted the bow between his sure hands, his sight firm upon the buck, Victor wondered if Ma might have been correct.

  “To properly hunt, one must be unnatural in his arrest, extraordinary in his belay.” Ma’s father, her Papá, had taught her to catch the prey of her homeland, had taught her to call to them, to bleat, to grunt, and it had been Ma, not Father, to teach Victor that to win at anything one must control all that is within one’s control. “Beginning with breath,” Ma had said. “Listen for it, capture it, fight to control it; direct Breath, and the heart and mind will follow.”

  Victor felt his thoughts narrow into the arrow’s tip. He saw the buck tumble in his mind’s eye long before the bow was emptied. The buck bellowed. Victor issued another arrow, then another, until the buck’s figure masked the snow like a great muddy print. It groaned and Victor pitied it, for somehow he already understood this feeling of losing control of one’s breath.

  All the boys save Like-Wind arrived at the cluster of junipers on the fourth day.

  Victor knew he’d have to wait until dusk before the count could begin. They kindled a fire, warmed their lithe bodies at the edges of it, and it was only when the great owl was heard that Victor began to tell the story of his triumphant hunt: seven bears, a talking coyote, four vengeful does, and fawns that bared their teeth. The story was to be funnier and more thrilling than truth, and the boys laughed as he told it, gripping their firm bellies, nodding at him with favor. But Victor had wanted Like-Wind there too, wanted Like-Wind present so that he might feel the heady effect of his victory.

  “We will sleep here and wait for him,” he told the others.

  In the grey light of morning, when Like-Wind still had not come, they returned to camp, expecting to find Like-Wind in the lodge where men went to smoke. They were met at the edge of camp by a troop of girls in quill robes who’d been sent by the women to collect the game. The girls flanked Victor with smiles and praise, their hands reaching out for him, and Victor loved the attention, for it had always been Like-Wind, ropy and powerful and capable of making them laugh, who garnered it.

  Father had approached from behind, causing the girls to disperse “Always you with the girls,” he said. He wore a fine coat of beaver with a tall, stiff collar framing his face in a way that made him appear more handsome than usual, for his dark skin looked to have its own light and his thick hair rippled like lake
waves.

  Father’s Apsáalooke nickname was Cut Nose, for he had lost the lower half of his left nostril in battle. Yet even with this imperfection, there were few whose figure drew such attention. Father had enough height to share and possessed a chest that burgeoned and arms like oak pillars. As he moved toward Victor’s spoils, Victor walked beside him with his own skeletal torso and his own skin, a milky gold like Ma had described her Mamá’s skin, and Victor saw nothing of himself in the man.

  Father bent down, peeled back the frozen hides, turned over the flanks to find the kill spots. “You lost your whole quiver for just three bucks?”

  The girls, still within hearing, covered their mouths and watched Victor’s jaw tighten with shame. He swallowed the shame and turned toward the elders who wished to congratulate him, and one elder, Bluegrass, who wished to question Victor on the whereabouts of his son.

  Victor, Father, and Bluegrass, along with a dozen others, went off the mountain in search of Like-Wind. They traveled nearly two weeks down to the plains, across Bighorn Lake and along the Shoshone River. When they returned to camp, Victor avoided the other boys, knowing they blamed him for the curse that’d befallen them. He felt the grief rush upon him mighty and terrible, for Victor hadn’t known days without Like-Wind. For as long as Victor could recall, the two had eaten beside each other, had left their mothers’ warmth to find each other’s giggles, and Victor felt the pain of Like-Wind’s absence like a grinding in his chest, making him think that control of Breath was an illusion for the heartless.

  It was a month after the hunt that the first melt began. Trees sparkled wet with relief, the sky became the color of maple in the early evenings, and the elders were forced to conclude that Like-Wind was lost to them, that he’d met his fate. Like-Wind’s mother and sisters mourned in prolonged wails and shaved their heads. When Victor told Ma of his unsparing heartache, of the way dreams of Like-Wind shook him awake at night, Ma told him that his dreams meant there was life there still.