The Great Death Read Online Free

thigh and pressed down on the lever, which broke open easily. The whole top of the gun seemed to slide apart.
    â€œNow pull it back up,” said Father. “Good. Careful. It’s loaded now.”
    Father taught Millie and Maura how to safely lower the hammer when they weren’t ready to shoot. He showed them how to aim, warning them to hold the butt firmly against their small, bony shoulders, and how to look down the barrel to align the sights. He taught them never to aim the barrel at anything they didn’t want to kill. He was too weak to take them outside to practice. Besides, he had only half a box of ammunition. He had meant to trade some furs for more.
    After the short lesson, Father fell asleep, his breathing hard.
    Millie slung the rifle over her shoulder and lifted the sloshing honey bucket. She felt safer with the gun firmly pressing against her back. Maura grabbed the water pail, and together they stepped outside. No one was moving about. It was as if the entire village were asleep or, perhaps, abandoned. First they emptied the honey bucket in the outhouse, returning afterward to set the empty bucket outside the door. Then the girls walked toward the lake to fill the water pail. Now they could hear wailing and crying as they passed cabins. Death was everywhere.
    When they stopped by one house to check on a friend of Millie’s, they learned that another infant and two elders had died in the village during the night, too young or too old or too weak to fight off sickness for long. Millie’s friend had the red spots, and she was weak and coughing. She was looking after her mother, who was lying on the bed, covered with spots and shaking terribly.
    â€œShe’ll be all right,” she said, wiping her mother’s forehead with a wet rag. “I think she’s a little better than she was this morning.”
    Millie and Maura thought the woman looked worse than their mother.
    â€œWhere is your father?” Millie asked.
    â€œHe died yesterday,” she said. “My uncles took his body away.”
    Millie worried about her own father, and she wanted to hurry back to him.
    â€œWe have to go now,” she said, nervously. “We must take care of our parents.”
    Though neither said a word as they left the cabin, Millie and Maura felt guilty that they didn’t have any sign of the sickness. As far as they knew, they were the only ones in the entire village.
    The People had always buried their dead, but since the sickness arrived, no one was strong enough to drag away the corpses or to dig the many graves. Instead, they tried to burn the corpses, thinking it would kill the disease, but no one was strong enough to gather the great quantities of wood needed for funeral pyres. As the girls slowly passed nearby houses, they saw partially burned corpses lying scattered atop too-small fires, some still smoldering. They even saw the scorched body of Millie’s friend’s father. Millie and Maura turned their heads, frightened by the burned and disfigured faces of people they had known all their lives, many of them relatives.
    They were too shocked to speak. Maura vomited twice. Millie held it back, barely, though more than once she felt it rush up into her mouth.
    The dead lay everywhere—inside, outside—the dying sitting or lying beside them, the living brushing away flies from the bodies and holding cloths to their faces to lessen the stench of decay that rose from their dead and from the rotting salmon along the creek. The village that was all the girls knew of life and place and home had transformed into a smoky shadow of death.
    Millie and Maura walked close together, careful to step around the dead. Millie halted when she saw the body of an older boy whom she had liked. Then she pushed on. The girls made their way down to the lake, wary of bears, filled the pail with water, and collected dry driftwood from along the beach.
    No wind blew over the land. The