Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger

Author:William Kent Krueger [Krueger, William Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780743278416
Google: 3PdA5HvH7VwC
Amazon: 1439157820
Barnesnoble: 1439157820
Goodreads: 1153501
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2007-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

The days passed quickly. Henry and Maria often visited Maurice, who proved to be a wonderful and grateful host. Over time, they learned his story.

His father came from Haiti, where he’d been a carpenter, working on a sugar plantation. One night he got into a fight with the plantation owner’s son over a woman and he beat the white man badly. He was forced to run. He took the woman with him and she became his wife. They fled to Canada, to Quebec, where a small colony of black Haitians was already established. Maurice was their first child.

His mother was white, and Maurice grew up with the names half-breed, mule, and mongrel thrown at him like stones. All his life he dreamed of rising to a place where he could look down on those who’d taunted him. Money, he’d believed, would be the way. He’d grown up with stories of wealth waiting to be discovered in the great, unexplored wilderness to the northwest. As soon as he was able—when he was seventeen—he left home and set out to find that wealth.

For the next fifteen years, he spent summers exploring rivers and streams he suspected no man had ever followed. Winters, he worked as a hand in a mill in Fort William owned by a French-speaking Quebecois.

One summer day he came across a village of Odawa where a young woman named Hummingbird lived. Love, he told Henry and Maria, struck him with the force of a bullet in his heart. All his loneliness leaked out and what filled its place was happiness. Hummingbird left her village and they traveled far into the wilderness, to the place beside the stream, where they’d built the cabin and lived together for twenty years. There was an Odawa village three days to the south where they traded for things they could not hunt or trap or gather—coffee, molasses, flour—which the villagers got from the government.

“It has been lonely since Hummingbird died?”

“Yes,” Maurice admitted.

“Why did you stay?”

“I came here looking for gold. I found something better. These hills, this forest, the lakes and streams, the memories of Hummingbird, all these are worth more to me than gold.”

“It must be a hard life here,” Henry said.

“It is hard.” Maurice nodded. “But I decided long ago that life among white people would be harder.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.