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“Winter is here,” she continued. “Maybe it came a little earlier than we all expected. It’s the time when the trees go to sleep. The bears go to sleep. We all rest. And then we will be reborn in the spring. But it’s important to make sure we’re ready. Now is the time to help your relatives prepare their winter homes. Make sure they have enough food. Enough wood. Enough medicine to make it through the dark season.”
Some looked slightly panicked.
“Last Wednesday, our satellite service went out. That knocked out TV and internet. Most of you noticed. We got a lot of visitors down here at the band office that day. Here we just thought you were all coming to wish Walter a happy birthday,” he giggled and looked down at his cousin, and the crowd chuckled again. “These things happen, so we gave it a day. Sometime in there, the phone lines went down for some reason too. When all those things still weren’t working on Thursday, we tried to call our service provider down in Gibson with our off-grid sat phone. But that wasn’t working either. We
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“On Saturday, we turned on the generators so you could put the lights and heat back on,” Terry reminded them. “We wanted to give you a chance to keep working on whatever you still needed to do before winter. Stuff like arranging your food in your freezers and bringing wood inside. Looks like we did that just in time too. We’re keeping the generators on for the time being, but we still need you to conserve energy. Only turn on lights in the room you’re in. Don’t use your electric oven if you don’t have to. If you’re gonna watch DVDs, please do it sparingly. “It’s been a long time since the
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“At regular usage, we estimate that we’ll run out of diesel by February. We don’t think that’ll happen anyway. But to be on the safe side, don’t use too much power.”
In the meantime, keep your wood stoves and furnaces going. We want you to stay warm. We also don’t want your pipes to freeze.”
Milk had become slightly cheaper with the opening of the service road and now it wasn’t always condensed milk on their table.
Not only was this general store the only outlet for food, it also supplied all the hardware, household supplies, and other domestic necessities. While prices were better than they had been before the road was built, they were still outrageous compared to what people paid in the South. A two-litre carton of milk usually cost ten dollars. Sometimes it went up to fifteen.
“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.”
“Apocalpyse.” “Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”
“Onaabenii Giizis,” he proudly proclaimed out loud. “The moon of the crusted snow.”
Onaabenii Giizis usually referred to February but it could also apply to early March. He remembered hearing two teachers dispute about it when he was younger. One of them was convinced it meant the time at the peak of winter when the weather was so cold the snow simply froze over. The other said it was later in the season when the weather fluctuated between freezing and milder temperatures, causing the snow to melt and then freeze again, creating a crust.
There was no point anymore knowing if it was Tuesday the twenty-first of whatever. All that mattered was getting through each season and preparing for the next.
