Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)

by Waubgeshig Rice

He still felt a little awkward, saying this prayer of thanks mostly in English, with only a few Ojibwe words peppered here and there. But it still made him feel good to believe that he was giving back in some way.

He made a quick inventory of the meat they’d have for the winter: three moose, ten geese, more than thirty fish (trout, pickerel, pike), and four rabbits, for now — more rabbits would be snared through the winter.

Evan ate southern meats when he had to, but he felt detached from that food.

Most importantly, hunting, fishing, and living on the land was Anishinaabe custom, and Evan was trying to live in harmony with the traditional ways.

Evan sometimes envied the trees and black bears that could shut down for the winter.

Even then it only happened because the construction contractors from the South wanted a good signal while they built the massive new hydro dam farther north on the bay.

Evan dug the fleshing device hard into the softening hide, scraping flesh and fat away from the skin.

The truth is, Evan thought, these things do work better than they used to. High speed internet access had been in the community for barely a year.

They stood quietly again. That comfortable, easy, important silence between a father and a son fell upon them.

Evan couldn’t remember the last time his father had spoken so much at once. He wasn’t known as a storyteller or a talented orator. He never talks about dreams, Evan thought.

“We have no communication with anyone from Hydro,” he continued. “The satellite phone’s not working, and we can’t pick up anything on the other end of the old shortwave radio.

It was supposed to be a dry community. Alcohol had been banished by the band council nearly two decades ago after a snarl of tragedies.

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.

Despite the hardship and tragedy that made up a significant part of this First Nation’s legacy, the Anishinaabe spirit of community generally prevailed.

Survival had always been an integral part of their culture. It was their history. The skills they needed to persevere in this northern terrain, far from their original homeland farther south, were proud knowledge held close through the decades of imposed adversity. They were handed down to those in the next generation willing to learn. Each winter marked another milestone.

This protocol had once been forbidden, outlawed by the government and shunned by the church. When the ancestors of these Anishinaabe people were forced to settle in this unfamiliar land, distant from their traditional home near the Great Lakes, their culture withered under the pressure of the incomers’ Christianity. The white authorities displaced them far to the north to make way for towns and cities.

As an elder, she had the full attention of everyone in the room. Any eyes that might have rolled during the smudge were nonetheless now fixed on her.

She’s lived through it all, he thought. If she’s not worried, then we shouldn’t be.

I don’t know what we were running from or running to, but we had to get somewhere. You weren’t around anywhere.

He remembered his father’s dream, and his eyes stayed open in the darkness as the competing omens forced the calm from his mind and body.

“The end of the world is gonna be big bombs or earthquakes or some shit like that. The dinosaurs were around for like a billion years, and the only thing that could do them in was a massive fuckin’ asteroid! This shit won’t be slow, believe me.”

“The food’s all gone. The power’s out. There’s no gas. There’s been no word from Toronto or anywhere else. People are looting and getting violent. We had to get the fuck out of there.”

“It feels like the end of the world.”

The only person each knew intimately was the other.

But the closer he came, he realized they were bodies, frozen stiff, wrapped in blankets, and piled three-to-four high against the Gyprock walls.

Maiingan meant “wolf” and Nangohns “little star.”

Somehow Evan had known that the cigarettes and free-flowing booze would lead back to Scott.

Scott hadn’t been in the community long, but rumour had it that he was the man to go to if you’d run out of smokes or alcohol. He had somehow concealed a decent supply of vices in those hard cases he towed from the South.

The two young women lay side by side in the ditch. Their brown faces were frozen blue and white.

Shit, Terry’s lost control, thought Evan. He just handed it over to Scott.

He’d learned to keep his thoughts behind a careful mask. He could not show weakness, especially now.

“Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway.”

“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.”

“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.

One suicide often led to another among the young people, and the compounding tragedies squeezed the stammering heart of the reserve.

And it’s weird — he seems to be getting bigger, though I know that’s not possible. Probably it’s just the rest of us are getting skinnier.”

Whatever stood in the snow just outside the garage door wheezed as it drew in a breath, and let out a harsh, threatening snarl at a pitch just higher than a bear’s. Evan stiffened, momentarily paralyzed, before he summoned the courage to turn and face it.

It was disfigured yet oddly familiar. Scott. His cheeks and lips were pulled tight against his skull. He breathed heavily through his mouth, with long incisors jutting upward and downward from rows of brown teeth. His eyes were blacked out.

“Scott took a body.” “Come on, man. That’s crazy. What for?” Evan paused. There was a heavy stillness in the big room. “To eat.”

And when it became clear to them that they were never supposed to last in this situation on this land in the first place, they decided to take control of their own destiny.