Thieving Forest Read Online Free Page B

man steps closer and the dog crouches as if to strike, but with a quick sweep the man hits the dog alongside his snout with the blunt end of his hatchet. Naomi can’t see where the dog lands, or if he’s all right.
    “What’s happening?” Aurelia asks. She is standing back now, not looking.
    “Koman’s dog...the man hit him,” Naomi says.
    “Why?”
    “I think the dog...I don’t know. He wouldn’t move out of the way. I think he was protecting us,” Naomi says. She wants that to be true. They need some protection.
    “You!” the scarred Potawatomi shouts. “ Yaknogeh !” He pulls away the log and then kick-rolls it over in the direction of the dog. The women are standing in front of him now, fully exposed, their dresses in tatters from their forced run among the trees, dirt in their hair.
    “Wait,” Penelope tells him. “Wait! Listen to me! Do you have my knitting bag? She can knit for you! A pair of stockings?” She pulls her skirt up a fraction to show him her stockings. Like her dress, they are torn and dirty.
    “She can make stockings for you!” Penelope says. “She is a very fast knitter!”
    He reaches in to grab Aurelia by the hair. Penelope holds on to Aurelia’s arm and keeps pleading with him. He waves his hatchet so close that Naomi is afraid for a moment he will cut off Aurelia’s arm and Penelope’s hand with it. Beatrice must think so too, for she says, “Penelope! Watch yourself!”
    “It’s all right,” Aurelia says in a tattered voice. The Potawatomi pulls her out with a hard jerk and Aurelia falls outside on her knees, the dirt shooting up in a cloud and then resettling around her. He drags her to her feet. Then he pushes her toward the trees with two hands, forcing her to take one step and then another. Penelope calls out, “Fight him!” But Aurelia only says, “I am so tired.” And she does look tired. Tired and ill. Yaknogeh .
    “What should we do?” Beatrice asks. “He’ll kill her!”
    Naomi makes a move to get out of the shelter but the two young men who supervised their work now step in front of them, making escape impossible. So she can only watch as the scarred Potawatomi pushes Aurelia into the trees. She thinks she sees the leaf in Aurelia’s hair loosen and fall in a slow arc behind her. It disappears in the sunlight before it hits the ground. She is squeezing Penelope’s hand hard on one side and Beatrice is squeezing her forearm on the other. If the two Potawatomi who are guarding the shelter suddenly sprouted wings and flew across the water she could not feel any more bewildered. Her old world with all its rules is surely gone.
    “He’ll take us one by one,” Beatrice says.
    The birds outside are momentarily quiet. Although Naomi still can’t hear her music and does not even try to, she can hear, in the cramped space, the even beat of her sisters’ breath, and this seems both beautiful and sad, a kind of music in the way that a whisper can be a kind of song. The sun is going down and the light seems to fall farther and farther away from them. She closes her eyes. The fresh green wood of the shelter smells strange. How much time passes she can’t tell.
    “He’s back,” Beatrice says finally. “He’s alone.”
    Naomi waits. Penelope’s hand tightens in hers.
    “He’s wiping blood off his hatchet,” Beatrice says. “He’s walking this way.”

Three
    Later Susanna cannot remember how she got herself to Spendlove’s cabin, she only remembers that her legs felt like lead and that her heart was beating so hard that it hurt. She knows she pounded on the ironworks door with its horseshoe nailed crookedly above the lintel with one nail missing and flecks of rust on the outside edge. She must have stared at it, she remembers it so well. Then she sat down on the bench outside. This is where Betsey T. and her son Mop find her—how much later?—when they come by with a bucket of milk for Spendlove, who does not own a cow.
    Even sitting Susanna