The Oxboy Read online

  I lay on my back pondering these wonders and staring at the dark rafters while the moon poured through my dusty window.

  “There are those who say that the dog still lives in the deepest forest,” said my friend. “No hunter could ever find him. It was in this time that the blue hunters arose and began to hunt those with mixed blood.”

  “The teachers say that almost all the Impure are dead,” I said to the otter. “But we are alive, and I have seen others.”

  “Yes,” said the otter. “There are many others.”

  Discovery

  This is how we were discovered.

  It was a hot summer day, and I had taken the otter out for a swim. I didn’t take him out very often anymore—it was too hard to get him back into the house. My stepfather was more and more suspicious of me. He sometimes searched my knapsack when I had spent the day in the forest and made me empty my pockets.

  Once I had to leave the otter in a field until my stepfather was out of the way. I put the otter in a small pool of water surrounded by tall grasses. “Come back soon,” the otter said. His large, glittering eyes were full of fear.

  I too was afraid—my mind was filled with thoughts of blue hunters, predatory birds, and prowling forest cats. I waited until my stepfather was asleep, and then I crept out of the house in the dark. The nighttime landscape was unfamiliar and confusing, and it took me a long time to find the otter. When I finally reached him, he was shivering and mute. I bundled him in a sack and carried him home.

  “I have lost the knack of living alone in the wild,” he told me. “You must never leave me.”

  “I will not,” I promised.

  We did not have any outings for a long time after that.

  That hot day when we were discovered, my stepfather had announced at breakfast that he would be gone until late that night. I ran upstairs to tell the good news to the otter.

  When my stepfather had gone, I put the otter in a sack and we set off for the stream. There I freed the otter into the water, left my clothes in a pile on the bank, and jumped into the stream. The otter swam ahead and teased me, calling me a slowpoke.

  We played in the stream for a while, then drifted sleepily on our backs, looking up at the sky and its towering white clouds. The overhanging trees created patches of light and shadow that moved over our faces.

  “Did you know the animals once had names?” began the otter. His voice sounded like the rippling notes of the stream.

  “When my father sent my papers, I saw his name for the first time.”

  “Yes,” said the otter. “In earlier times, before the blue hunters, all the mixed-blood were stripped of their names. Some secretly kept their names, however, and passed them on to their children.”

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  The otter paused. “We only tell our names to our family, and sometimes to a very close friend. Since you are my very dear friend, I will tell you mine.”

  I heard the crackle of twigs and small plants being trampled underfoot but dismissed it as a wild cow searching for food.

  “My name is Theodore,” he said.

  “Theodore,” I echoed.

  The next moment we were surrounded by hunters, their faces painted blue, guns cradled in their arms. The otter dived under the water, but the hunters raised their guns and fired.

  I screamed.

  They pointed their rifles at me. The stream was red with Theodore’s blood. Now I am going to die, I thought.

  “Get out!” one of the men ordered me roughly. “Out!” he shouted. “Or we shoot!”

  I climbed out of the stream and stood shivering in front of the hunters. One of them threw me my shirt and pants. Without knowing what I did, I put them on. Theodore is dead, I thought. My friend is dead.

  Another of the blue-faced men came forward. “You stupid boy,” he said.

  I recognized my stepfather’s voice.

  He jerked me forward.

  “He has committed a very serious crime,” said one of the hunters. “Consorting with a mixed-blood animal.”

  “He is stupid,” my stepfather replied. “He doesn’t know what he is doing.”

  “Say you’re sorry,” he whispered.

  I did not speak.

  My stepfather dug his fingers into my arms.

  “My stepson is not very smart,” he said loudly to the other men. “Say you didn’t mean it!” he hissed at me. “Say that animal enchanted you and led you astray!”

  I stared silently at him.

  “Little fool!” he growled. “I’d just as soon let you die. It’s your mother I’m thinking of.”

  I still did not answer, but turned my head stubbornly away.

  One of the hunters stepped closer. “He must be punished for his crime. Give him to us.”

  “I’ll take care of him.” My stepfather slapped me again and again. Then he took me by the throat and began to choke me.

  Then my father’s nature—that slow, persistent, steady, and volcanic nature—reasserted itself. I loosened my stepfather’s fingers from my neck, picked him up, and hurled him into the bloody stream.

  Prison

  They put me in a cell with a pallet of straw and a trough of water. THE guards were supposed to come twice a day to bring me food and water. One was especially cruel. Instead of food he sometimes shoved heaps of rotting hay through my door. “Here, animal lover,” he would say.

  I often heard him with another man outside my cell. They laughed and talked in great detail of the animals they had killed and how they had died. The guard would always conclude with the words, “And that in there is no better than an animal. When he gets out, we’ll shoot him down and collect a bounty on his head.”

  One day he was changing the straw on the pallet when his shirt fell open and I saw his feathered chest.

  He caught my stare and hastily closed his shirt.

  “Do not worry. I will not reveal your secret,” I said.

  Gathering up the dirty straw, he ran from the cell.

  Soon after, that guard disappeared. He was afraid of me, I think. Perhaps he left town or found another job before I could betray him. Or had another person glimpsed his feathered chest and reported him? If that was so, perhaps he, like Theodore, was dead now.

  The guard who took his place did not have the animosity of the first. My water was changed regularly and I received my meals on time.

  After a month, they brought me to trial. The courtroom was like a school, with wooden benches and a map on the front wall. The judge, a big man with the dull look of one who eats too much meat, looked at me without interest and called the witnesses to testify.

  They stood their rifles against the benches in an orderly row and walked heavily to the front of the room. They had painted their faces blue for this day. While I sat to the left of the judge with a guard on either side of my chair, the blue hunters told of how they had heard the animal and the boy laughing and talking together in full violation of written and unwritten human law. Of how they had crept up to the stream and surprised us. Of how they had done their duty and instantly shot the animal.

  They told the court that they had waded into the stream and taken the body of the otter. They had cut off one leg for the bounty and then hung the otter on a pole and left it in the forest as a warning to any other animal that might think of corrupting a human boy.

  Then came my stepfather, who told the judge that he had not expected to find me in the stream with the otter. But it had not surprised him. I was a stubborn, difficult boy, who would not take direction from his elders and betters. But I was young and perhaps not completely hopeless. My mother was a gentle, sensible woman. With the proper training I might yet be salvaged …

  The judge dismissed the hunters and called me to him. He made me kneel by his desk. Then he spoke in a low voice. “You know the penalty for consorting with an animal.”

  I nodded.

  “You are lucky that the hunters did not shoot you along with the animal,” he
said sternly.

  I said nothing.

  “It would have been no more than you deserved,” he added. “It is your stepfather whom you must thank for saving your life.” Then he slapped me lightly on the face and told me to get to my feet. “You may still die. Think on it.”

  The two guards gripped my arms and led me back to the cell.

  Because of my youth, they did not execute me. Instead I was sentenced to hard labor and forbidden to speak to other humans.

  “You have harbored an animal and you will be treated like one,” said the judge when he sentenced me.

  They yoked me to a plow and had me till the fields. I carried stone to build walls, I dug wells and pulled carts of timber.

  There were five other prisoners who labored alongside me. They had committed crimes against men, such as thievery, fraud, or abuse, and their work was much lighter. To them fell the planting of seeds, the scything of long grasses, the burning of brushwood. They did not speak to me or even acknowledge that I was there.

  I did not mind the hard labor—I was strong and young and it was in my blood to work the fields. I did not mind the hostile stares of my fellow prisoners as long as I was working the earth under the sky.

  Then after many months I was again confined to a cell, a dark room that had only one small window that was set near the ceiling.

  “You enjoyed it too much outside,” said one of the guards who escorted me to my new cell. “Now you’ll see what prison is really like.”

  A feeble gleam of sun passed high across my walls in the early morning, and then the room was gray until the next morning. I would stretch out my hands to bathe them in the weak rays of sunlight. Sometimes, desperate to feel light and warmth on my face, I would jump again and again toward the window.

  My mother was not allowed to visit me. Indeed, I never received any letters from her. She would not abandon me, I thought. Perhaps my stepfather had forbidden her to write, or perhaps the guards destroyed her letters before they got to me.

  Once a note came through the window. It was a piece of rough paper with a laceflower pinned to it. There were no words, only a tiny s in one corner.

  The flower soon wilted, but I propped it against the wall so it caught my eye throughout the day.

  My only companions were the ants that scuttled along the floor. They were not intelligent like my friend Theodore, but I took pleasure in their movement and in their constant search for food. I often crumbled a bit of bread in one corner of the cell and watched them swarm over it.

  The otter had told me many stories about animals repaying the kindness of humans and about humans who were indebted to animals. I wondered if these ants wished to help me in any way. Perhaps they could bring me a key to unlock the door of my cell or lead me to a tunnel out of the prison. If they all worked together, the ants might wear down the stone of that high window, and light and air would flood my cell.

  But the ants did nothing to release me from the dark cell. And the weeks lengthened to months, and my labor in the fields now seemed like a distant paradise.

  To the Forest

  They released me from jail after a year. When my stepfather brought me home, a crowd of people had gathered around our house. I was dazzled by the light and the vast sky, and at first I thought that they had come to greet me.

  Then I heard the threatening murmurs. My stepfather gripped my arm and pushed me through the crowd. I saw two of Suseen’s baker cousins talking intently to a gaunt woman with large bulging eyes. I wondered if Suseen was somewhere nearby.

  When we got to the house, my stepfather banged his fist three times on the door. It opened abruptly, and we stumbled in. Then it slammed shut behind us.

  My mother and I embraced. “You have grown thin,” she said. “And much taller.”

  She looked tired and sadder, but I did not tell her this.

  The crowd outside stayed and began to chant, “Pure blood of the human race.” My mother drew the curtains.

  All day I stood near the window at the back of the room, where I could see the sky and the fields.

  Every evening people stood in front of our house shouting and chanting. But in time their numbers dwindled, and finally they came no more.

  One day I left the house and went to the stream. I found no trace of the otter. Even the stick where the blue hunters had hung him was gone.

  The days passed. I did a few odd jobs for Old Xerry. But he had little work and no one else would hire me.

  I went into town. It was the middle of the afternoon and the streets were deserted. I saw Suseen in her cousin’s bakery, where she now worked. She wore a white apron over a green dress, and her hair was pinned up with a comb. Her hands, dusted with flour, deftly sliced peaches into a pastry dish.

  When she saw me, she stopped her work. “You’re back,” she said.

  We stood there a moment. Then her cousin entered with a tray of pastries on his shoulder.

  Suseen pushed a bread across the counter at me.

  I fished in my pocket for some coins and left quickly.

  My stepfather told me he was ashamed to live in the same house as me. If it was up to him alone, he would have sent me out into the streets long ago. Only because of my mother had he let me stay. Now I must leave.

  He washed his hands of me.

  I saw myself going from town to town in search of work, and the bleak friendless days of my future stretched out in front of me.

  I did not know what to do, and when I went to my mother, she said only one word. “Wait.”

  A few days later, she was in the yard, a basket of freshly washed laundry at her feet. My stepfather’s work shirts hung stiffly on the line. She called me to her.

  “Look.” My mother pointed to a patch of bare earth almost concealed by tall grasses where I saw the fresh hoofprints of an ox.

  “He has come for you,” she said.

  The next day just before dawn my mother woke me. My stepfather was still asleep when we left the house. She gave me a knapsack of food, which I hoisted over my shoulder. The air was cool and soft as we walked along the dirt road that led to the forest.

  We crossed the field where Noah and I had played so long ago. And from the shadows of the forest a great brown ox emerged.

  “My son,” he said.

  I grasped his horns and climbed onto his back.

  “Are you comfortable, my son?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  My mother reached into her pocket, pulled out the blue velvet sack with the pearly stones, and hung it around my neck. Then for a moment she leaned her cheek against my father’s head.

  The sun came over the trees, and my father and I plunged into the forest.

  At times my father carries me on his back, and at times I walk alongside him. Each night I gather wood and make a fire to cook with and keep us warm. We travel over pathless roads searching for the lost animals, my half-brothers and half-sisters. When we meet them, we share our food and our fire. There is great rejoicing. To them I am neither a human boy nor an animal. I am the oxboy.

  About the Author

  Anne Mazer grew up in a family of writers in upstate New York. Intending to be an artist, she enrolled in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts before moving to Paris, where she would live for three years, studying French language and literature and beginning to write.

  Mazer is the author of forty-four books for children and adults. Her seven novels include The Salamander Room, a Reading Rainbow feature selection and a 1993 ABC Children’s Choice; Moose Street, a Booklist Editors’ Choice for best book of 1992; and The Oxboy, an ALA Notable Book and a 1993 Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies. Mazer’s short stories have been included in a number of collections, and she has published her own book of short stories, A Sliver of Glass. She is also the editor of several anthologies that are widely used in classrooms from the elementary through the college level.

  Mazer’s many books for young readers include t
he bestselling Amazing Days of Abby Hayes series, which has extended over eleven years and twenty-two books, and the Sister Magic series. Her latest work, coauthored with Ellen Potter, is Spilling Ink: A Young Writer’s Handbook, which was a CLA Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts in 2011 and a 2010 Cybils Award finalist.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993, 2000 by Anne Mazer

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-9402-4

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  ANNE MAZER

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