The Marrow Thieves (Marrow Thieves #1)

by Cherie Dimaline

“The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.” — William S. Burroughs

“Where you’ve nothing else,construct ceremonies out of the airand breathe upon them.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Too late, buddy; they know someone is up here, just not how many someones.”

😭😭😭

He yelled around the house, into the front yard, and into the van, covering all sounds of a small escape in the trees. Then the door slid shut. And an engine clicked on and whirred to life. And I was alone. I wanted to let go. I wanted to take my arms off the trunk and fold them to my chest like a mummy,

😭😭😭

“Okay, boys, that’s it, off to bed.” Mom shooed us off the bench, pushing us out the door before we could formulate an argument to stay. Dad stopped me to kiss the top of my head, and I felt safe, even just for a minute.

Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes.

This wasn’t going to be so bad. Maybe the end is just a dream. That made me feel sorry for a minute for the others, the dreamless ones. What happened when they died? I imagined them just shutting off like factory machines at the end of a shift: functioning, purposeful, and then just out.

“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.”

The moose watched all this play out on my face, a dirty boy tangled in the roots of an upended tree, hiding from the world, hiding from memories of a family and days without pursuit.

I was okay with my decision, but not okay with the consequences.

Ugh

“Do you think circumstances make people turn bad? Or that people make circumstances bad to begin with?”

“At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?

None of us were happy. We wanted to stay at the lodge. It was warm and had walls and made us feel less in danger, less chased. Maybe that’s why he wanted us gone so quickly, before we lost the will and instinct to keep moving altogether.

“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.”

‘Jean, running only works if you’re moving towards something, not away. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere.’”

“Yeah.” She looked up, turning her face up towards mine. “A hunch. And a lot of hope.”