Kiss of the Fur Queen Read Online Free Page A

husband’s home community of Ootasneema, Saskatchewan, so far away that Marie-Adele Weechawagas-née-Okimasis barely existed for Champion.
    Sure enough, before he could launch into his forty-third verse, a herd of caribou came charging out from behind that first small island on a lake so white that it was difficult to look at for any length of time. Umpteen-umpteen caribou, Champion estimated their number as he squinted and banged his accordion with even greater vigour, the song kicking into a tempo he would later come to know as allegro con brio. When he saw his father zoom out behind the stampeding animals, hunting rifle in the air, his huskies racing as though demons were nipping at their tails, he yelped his father’s famous “
Weeks’chiloowew!” Two
other rifle-waving hunters came dashing out behind Abraham.
    At this distance, Champion, his mother, and his three sisters couldn’t see the details, much less hear the sounds; but the thunder of caribou hooves was so familiar they would hear the rumble in their dreams of any ordinary night. They also knew that Abraham was expressing his joy by yodelling the only word in his yodelling repertoire, the word Champion loved with all his heart.
    Josephine and Chugweesees and their puppies Cha-La-La and Ginger went tumbling, screaming, yelling, and barkingdown to the lake and would have run clean across the ice to join their father if the wise-beyond-her-years Chichilia Okimasis hadn’t grabbed them and dragged them back to shore. “You wanna be stomped to death by wild caribou?” she screamed. “You wanna leave this Earth looking like two ugly little meat patties?”
    Champion knew that the most effective way to help his father was to keep singing, and this he did, the song now more a furious jig than the anthem of hope it had been. Champion was so surprised by the new effect that he slipped into the key of D, although C was the only key he knew.
    “Champion! Champion, call your father!” Alarmed by the sudden sharpness in Mariesis’s voice, Champion saw that her face was contorted, her arms wrapped around her belly, her body rocking back and forth. The little musician stopped in mid-vibrato. Accordion still strapped to his little torso, he scampered down to the shore.
    “Chichilia! Chichilia!” cried Champion, the accordion bouncing up and down on his little belly, squeaking and sputtering out random clusters of semitones. “There’s something wrong with Mama! There’s something —”
    Splat
He had tripped on the root of a dying tree and lay on his accordion with the breath knocked out of both of them.
    When he looked up, his face covered with dirt and dirty snow, all he could see was Chichilia’s feet striding up to his face. Her dog, the remarkably intelligent Suitcase Okimasis, sniffed around his neck for a trace of broken vertebrae.
    “Mama’s belly is hurting! Mama’s belly …”
    Chichilia wasted not a word; the young woman strode across the ice towards her father and the stampeding herd.
    Though he couldn’t hear it from such a distance — at least a mile was his estimation — Abraham knew that his son was singing for him. For wasn’t it his greatest pride to have finally sired a child with a gift for the making of music, one to whom he could pass on his father’s, his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s legacy? The assurance that this ancient treasure of the Okimasis clan could rest intact for at least another generation inspired him to glide across the ice with even greater skill, greater precision, greater speed.
    “Mush
, Tiger-Tiger,
mush!”
    The caribou now loomed a mere fifty yards in front of him; his soul began to sing.
    Then a yearling veered to the left. The hunter’s heart jumped three half beats. Separated from the herd, this yearling would give Abraham the perfect opportunity to display to the other hunters trailing him what was admired throughout northern Manitoba as caribou-hunting prowess without equal.
    “U
,