Free The Spirit Keeper by K. B. Laugheed Page A

mother’s kitchen from the day I could stand—stirring, peeling, chopping, kneading. And when it came to cleaning, well, in my life I had swept miles of floor, hauled oceans of water, and scraped up mountains of ash. No one in the world could have scrubbed more dishes in the preceding seventeen years than I.
    Unfortunately, I knew nothing about the preparation of wild game nor the management of a wilderness camp. Before moving to the frontier, we kept chickens and milk cows, of course, but the only butchering I was involved with was our birds. In truth, meat was ne’er more than a small part of our diet, and when we were lucky enough to have it, we eked it out in soups, stews, or pies. For the most part we sated our hunger with pancakes, porridge, pudding, or pottage, and, of course, we ne’er ate a single meal without bread and butter.
    My companions, on the other hand, ate meat, meat, and more meat, cooked in ways I ne’er imagined. They stuck it on a stick in the fire, wrapt it with leaves and buried it under hot coals, or boiled it in a pouch made from the animal’s stomach. All their ingredients and cooking methods were bizarre to me—how could I possibly help?
    But I had neither the words nor the time to explain all this to Syawa. He picked up the carcass Hector had thrown down and finished skinning it, all the while explaining what he was doing. The process was painfully slow because he had to keep using his hands to gesture when I did not understand his words. When he was done with that first animal, he bade me prepare the second carcass, patiently advising me how to use his stone tool. The animal he prepared was cleanly cut and ready to cook, but by the time I was done hacking away at my poor raccoon, all that was left was a pile of mangled meat scraps. Syawa laughed good-naturedly and assured me I would improve, saying the important thing was that I was willing to try.
    Once we set the meat a-cooking, I found, to my dismay, my lesson was far from over. Syawa explained that women were expected not only to turn the freshly killed game into a meal, but also to preserve all useful parts of the animal and then clean the camp of every single drop of blood. Unskilled as I was in campfire cooking, I was nigh hopeless when it came to preserving the hides, bones, and sinews, but I did my best to follow Syawa’s instructions as he showed me every grueling step of the painstaking process.
    By the time we finisht all my new tasks and put our tools away, the meat had cooked to the consistency of dried leather. With Hector still nowhere in sight, Syawa and I went ahead and ate our share, tho’ I was so exhausted by this time I could scarce chew. Syawa ate happily, however, offering endless additional tips on how to skin, preserve, and store animal parts.
    My mind was numb from all I’d learnt, leaving me incapable of following what he said anymore, so after a time he finally stopt talking to stare contentedly into the fire. I wondered about Hector’s absence, but Syawa seemed unconcerned. As my thoughts hearkened back to their argument, I remembered one particular set of sounds Hector used several times—it was a word I’d heard him use before in reference to me. I looked at Syawa and shattered the pleasant silence by asking what that word meant, struggling to pronounce the sounds exactly as I’d heard them.
    Syawa raised his eyes from the fire to look at me for a long moment before he said and gestured: “That word means ‘not know how to do things.’”
    Ah. It meant ignorant, stupid. Hector had called me stupid, and Syawa defended me. Now I understood why the argument had been so heated.
    I looked at the ground with a humorless laugh. “Your friend thinks I stink and stupid,” I said with words and gestures. I looked at Syawa, who was smiling sympathetically. “I told you I not good for you.”
    Syawa spake with both his words and hands. “You are stupid only because you do not know how we do things. I will