Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)

by Waubgeshig Rice

Alcohol had been banished by the band council nearly two decades ago after a snarl of tragedies. Young people had been committing suicide at horrifying rates in the years leading up to the ban, most abetted by alcohol or drugs or gas or other solvents. And for decades, despairing men had gotten drunk and beaten their partners and children, feeding a cycle of abuse that continued when those kids grew up. It became so normal that everyone forgot about the root of this turmoil: their forced displacement from their homelands and the violent erasure of their culture, language, and ceremonies.

But here it came, coating roofs, stairs, driveways, and roads with a blanket of snow that seemed to thicken with each blink of the eyes. Evening seemed to creep in quickly. Men and women scurried outside to shovel driveways, salt stairs, and haul wood. Dogs huddled in their shelters and under porches. Snow squeezed the remaining birds out of the fall sky.

“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.”

The crust of the snow he broke was thicker than his snowshoes. He kicked up frozen shrapnel each time he raised a foot. A fine powder lay underneath. The conditions made him think of the specific time of year. There’s a word for this, he thought, trying to remember with each high step across the hard snow.

“Onaabenii Giizis,” he proudly proclaimed out loud. “The moon of the crusted snow.”