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

teach you. You will learn.”
    I nodded, but my thoughts were grim. Once again I felt completely undeserving of all this attention from someone of Syawa’s high status, and I worried that if the rest of his people were as intolerant of my many faults as Hector seemed to be, I was going to be in serious trouble. Syawa might be enamored of me now and therefore willing to put up with my incompetence, but once the newness wore off, he would surely despise me. How could he not? His friend clearly did.
    I could almost hear my mother crowing— I told ye so, I told ye so  . . .
     • • •
    When I awoke the next morning, Hector was back, but the men made no eye contact and did not speak that whole day. I was sickened by the strained silence—it was all my fault! Ne’er before had I seen a friendship like theirs, and the thought that I might be the cause of its demise crushed my soul. To make amends, I determined to do everything a woman was supposed to do e’en if I didn’t know how to do it, which meant, of course, that I made a terrific muddle of everything.
    The evening after the big argument, I immediately set about starting a fire, which I now knew was my job. I collected wood, set up kindling, and shredded dry bark as I had seen Syawa do. Smiling encouragement, he handed me the horn in which he carried a coal from the night before, but when I dumped the glowing ember into the shredded bark, it fizzled, then expired. I gasped, horrified, but Syawa only laughed and set about making a new spark, the result of which was our fire was scarce smoldering by the time Hector returned with a fish.
    With Syawa’s help, I did my best to scale, gut, and cook that poor fish, but my best was woefully bad and frustration quickly led to tears, which meant I had no hope of success. The fish was rendered almost entirely inedible, and Hector ended up saying the word “stupid” under his breath as he threw the charred remains into the stream, with an Apology to the Spirit of the Fish. Thanks to the mess I made, some sort of predator came snuffling ’round during the night, which necessitated Hector running into the bushes with his hand-ax whilst Syawa added wood to the fire.
    The result of my first full day of doing my expected duties was that the three of us had almost no food nor sleep, which made our short tempers e’en shorter all the next day.
    The next night I hurried to collect a bundle of firewood as soon as we stopt. With Hector off hunting and Syawa off filling the water skin, I looked for the hand-ax. I was confident about this chore, at least, for one of my duties at home had been to chop kindling and I fancied myself something of an expert with a hatchet. E’en my brothers acknowledged my skill, for they challenged me once to a hatchet-throwing contest and I hit the target closer to the center than any of them. Thus, when I picked up the hand-ax, I was certain I could chop a great pile of firewood in no time.
    But the stone tool was strange to me, top-heavy and unbalanced, and no matter how I swung it, it kept turning sideways as I slammed it down, so that I ended up crushing the wood more than chopping through it.
    Then the unthinkable happened. Increasingly frustrated by my own incompetence, I banged furiously against the wood and somehow managed to snap the stone blade in two. Terrified, I considered throwing down the ax and running off into the woods to start at last for Philadelphia, but ’twas already too late—Syawa was returning. I had no choice but to show him the ax, at which he sighed and gestured that this was most unfortunate. The ax, he said, had been a gift to Hector from his father.
    I sobbed and sobbed, repeating over and over the new word I had learnt— stupid, stupid, stupid . With infinite patience, Syawa took the ax from me and told me ’twas not my fault. The blade had broken, he said, not because I was stupid, but because I had not been properly taught to use it. The fault, he said, was