Free Born with a Tooth by Joseph Boyden

think of polite ways to ask him for it. Walking up Sherbourne, he thought of polite ways to ask for what was owed him. A hot dog would taste good about now, he hummed to himself.
    It had been many weeks since he’d seen Kyle. Kyle had given up looking for Painted Tongue to take him out for a meal or coffee or drink a long time ago. Kyle had walked far from working construction with Painted Tongue, the first job the two had found years before when they’d driven together in the old Dodge war pony from Cedar Point to Toronto. Work was easy to find back then. Painted Tongue was as good as any goddamn man with a hammer and a level. He was never afraid to do roofing or construction way up high on a building, either. Balance and bravery were in his blood.
    But Kyle had hated construction work from the beginning. It callused his fingers and left his hands too sore at night to hold a paintbrush. Most lunch breaks he’d go to whatever tavern was closest to drink beer and talk to Painted Tongue. Painted Tongue remembered those days with good feelings. Those afternoons when he first started drinking were warmer with a belly full of beer, his eyes focused only on the nails to be pounded or joists to be cut and fit or the shingles to be pulled and replaced. He and Kyle had been thrown off manyjobs for being drunk, but there had always been more jobs waiting.
    Then Kyle got a fancy job in a gallery selling others’ art and, after a while, his own. Now he was Big Chief in the city, and he’d given up the booze. Painted Tongue was left to find his own jobs, and the jobs got harder to find. Not many foremen wanted to hire a man who didn’t talk. Kyle moved in with a pretty gallery woman, and Painted Tongue, after some decision-making, left walls and a roof on the first warm spring day two years ago to live more simply. He enjoyed living like the grandfathers, his days spent searching out food and drink, protecting himself from enemies and sitting quietly, listening to his few friends talk to him on park benches, or lying in the grass still left between the concrete buildings. He waited in winter until the heating grates of apartment buildings couldn’t keep him warm anymore to search out a bed in the hostels or, if he was lucky, a reinforced cardboard box and blankets in a quiet thicket of pine in High Park. A warrior walked the earth on strong legs or else he perished. Kyle knew that too. Although he’d taken a different path, Painted Tongue was sure Kyle respected him highly for his abilities as a warrior on the streets. Kyle knew what others couldn’t see. Painted Tongue had found the circle to walk, and along the route of that circle he found everything he needed to live.
    When Painted Tongue arrived at the Native Centre, Agnes was busy with customers, so he wandered the gallery and admired the paintings and wood carvings and jewellery. He stopped suddenly at a large painting of a turtle, each section of its curved shell coloured green or red or black. Its nose was hooked. Small squiggled people and pine trees grew from its back. The artist had titled the painting “Earth Mother Turtle.”Painted Tongue recognized Kyle’s signature, curved and sharp like a knife on the bottom right-hand side. Agnes stayed busy with the customers for a long time, so Painted Tongue went outside to hunt for food.
    Four nights later, Painted Tongue sat by a small grove of trees and a pond in High Park. He stared up at the stars and threequarter, late-spring moon that shone through the city’s lights. Ducks by the pond honked out warnings whenever a raccoon or cat, or some bigger, shadowed animal that he guessed was a dog or fox, prowled close to the small flocks huddled by the water’s edge with their beaks buried in their wing feathers. As soon as the ducks settled down and grew quiet, the same or some other predator would make a leap from nearby bushes and send the flocks quacking and hissing, beating