For Joshua Read Online Free Page A

was to gather some white thread, tobacco, a blanket, and a large canteen. When I had these things I was to let him know. I trusted John, though it felt odd to follow directions without a full explanation. But I believed that a collection of things as seemingly harmless as what he was asking for couldn’t bring too fearful a result, so I went along.
    “Is there some place you know that’s special for you?” he asked when I had gathered all of the materials.
    “Yes,” I said, without a lot of thought.
    There was a hill where I had been going for a month or so to watch sunsets. The hill faced the Rocky Mountains, which were only about twenty miles away. I’d found it by accident one day while driving aimlessly about. Maybe the Ojibway in me, the part that remembered a home territory much like this, with high craggy cliffs and thick bush enveloped in a huge, tangible silence, was attracted to thatsetting. I don’t know. But I do know that it was one of those places that felt right, and I’d returned again and again.
    To get to the top I needed to park my car by the side of a gravel road and walk about half a mile around and up to a small copse of trees where there was an outcropping of rock with a ledge from which I could dangle my feet. The drop from that ledge to the road was more than two hundred feet and I had seen eagles and hawks soar between me and the road below. It’s an eerie feeling when you see great birds from above, and eerier still when they make their silent passes against a backdrop of coyote howls from the hoodoos and hills all around you. There were bears in that territory, too, though I hadn’t seen any during my visits to the hill.
    I’d sit there silently and watch the sun fade into the arms of the Rockies and then make my way back down in the gathering darkness, filled with a sense of mystery and a foreign calm that always lessened the closer I got to the city of Calgary again.
    “Sounds like it’s the right place, then,” John said.
    We drove out together late one morning. It was summer, and the brilliance of the sun seemed to fill everything we passed with a vibrant energy so that the world was virtually quivering with life. I was vibrating, too, but with a differentenergy. I was anxious and uncertain and the fact that John didn’t talk much on the drive unsettled me further. I sensed that what he was about to ask me to do was a big enough matter that small talk seemed insignificant in the face of it. I felt the knot of apprehension grow in my belly. When we got to the hill we walked to the top of it in the same dense silence.
    At the ledge he drew a large circle on the ground with his walking stick. To the west I could see the Rocky Mountains, and I could follow their ragged sweep to the south and north over foothills thick with trees. Eastward, forest, rock, and the huge bowl of the sky hovered over the great plains. The road looked like a pale grey ribbon from that height, and John’s car was a small dot of colour at the base of the hill. I felt distant from everything at that moment. When he’d finished inscribing the circle, John told me to sit in it with all my articles.
    “This will be your home for the next four days,” he said. “You can’t step out of this circle for any reason. That meal we ate in town is the last food you’ll have for that length of time, and the water you carried in has got to last you through.”
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I would have no fire. I would have nothing to read. My job for the next four days was to sit in that circle and look around at the world. I was to pay strict attention and think about my life.
    “Each time you think of something in this world and in your life that you are thankful for, you put tobacco in the cloth and tie it,” John instructed. “You look around you and you think. Go back to things, places, people. Try to remember how you felt at certain times in your life. It might be hard—you may cry, you may