Norseman Chief by Jason Born Page B

her nose, stepped back, wiped her hands across her face, then stepped away to take on her daily tasks which knew no end.
    Like so many times in my life, I was left standing alone, trying to understand what had just happened to me.
    . . .
     
    Kesegowaase lay flat on his back on the forest floor in a crudely constructed cage that looked like it was built recently.  The ends of the small logs that were used to make it were still the light color of fresh timber with no darkening from age.  They were lashed together with thin cord made from the inner bark of nearby trees.  When observed from one end, the cage itself was in the shape of the Roman letter “A,” just barely long enough for the boy to fit his lanky frame inside.
    He had been laying thus for fifteen consecutive days and nights, alone except for my watching eyes from the brush and his guard who came by twice per day to give him water and more of the paste they called wysoccan.  The paste clearly made the boy as if he were drunk, but with symptoms worse than I had ever seen.  Each day I approached his prison when I was sure the young warrior had moved on.  I had to lean close to see if he yet lived.  Kesegowaase’s skin was flushed to a red color from his head to his feet.  There was a dried white crust around his nostrils and mouth while his lips smacked as if they were parched.  The boy’s breathing was rapid.  I reached my hand through the wooden bars and felt that his heart beat rapidly like the feet of a skittering rabbit.  Through his buckskin shirt, and despite the chill in the air, I could feel tremendous heat pouring out from his body.  My hand moved to pry open one of his eyes.  Despite the full sun of the day, his pupil was large, taking up nearly the full extent of the deep brown colored portion.
    At first I wondered about the cage.  In the state in which he spent these last fifteen days, there was no risk to him escaping.  At his most lucid moments when he was only able to scream out about the frightening hallucinations he saw before him, Kesegowaase would have been lucky to claw his way one or two fadmrs across the ground.  But during the second night of his captivity while I watched half-asleep under a briar, a bear came to sniff at the bars.  The bear’s great, black nose breathed the stench of the boy in and out – Kesegowaase had soiled himself many times already in his drunken state.  The beast rose up on his hind legs, bringing his forepaws down with the force of a longboat’s keel in the waves on the frame nearly a dozen times.  My father’s saex was drawn, gripped tightly in my hand, but the walls held and after a time the bear ambled away for easier prey.
    On the morning of the sixteenth day, after a full night of a cold, driving rain, his guard came back.  This time however, the young man left a large skin filled with water next to a nearby tree after giving Hurit’s boy the paste.  The rest of this day passed like the rest, with me leaving for a short time to gather some roots or snare a rodent for a meal.  When the sun was descending to the west at the time the guard normally came back, the woods was noticeably silent.  I thought he had been delayed but when the night fell around us, it was clear that a new phase of the trials had begun.
    During the night Kesegowaase began to leave the drunken spirit world and emerged, in fits and starts, from the stupor.  His body writhed in awkward contortions as he shouted, mumbled, and drooled.  He rolled over onto his stomach and jammed his face into the dirt, wet from the rainstorm, took mouthfuls, gnawed on pebbles and even swallowed much of it.  It was an awful spectacle.
    He survived through the morning without the guard’s return.  Kesegowaase was quietly sleeping until the sun was quite high, then as if out of nothing, he was reborn.  From my hiding place I could tell his eyes were scanning his surroundings as he lay sinking into the shit-filled muck.  “Is