Moon of the Crusted Snow

by Waubgeshig Rice

  “Apocalypse?”

  “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.”

  Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention.

  “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.”

  She became more animated as she went on. Her small hands swayed as she emphasized the words she wanted to highlight. “But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this . . . what’s the word again?”

  “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.”

  Evan gazed back down to the table. He felt his shoulders ease and his chest open up. He was tired, but she gave him hope. “You’re right, Auntie,” he said. “I never thought of it that way.”

  He smiled, and she smiled back, crow’s feet creasing at the corners of her eyes.

  “Well, I should probably head back out there,” he said, as he tipped back the cup into his mouth.

  “Okay then. Busy day?”

  “Not really. Just gotta tie up some loose ends.” He didn’t want to tell her the morbid details of his next task. He got up and put on his jacket and zipped it up. He took the black toque out of his right pocket and pulled it over his shaggy black hair, which nearly hung into his eyes. He said miigwech and smiled before walking out the back door.

  His sturdy yellow snowshoes were propped up against the porch. Evan sat on the step and, his hands bare, threaded the leather straps through the metal buckles at the heels and toes of both feet. He lifted each foot and shook it to ensure the shoe was snug.

  He shoed around to the front of the house and through the deep snow on the driveway. The snow continued to fall, as it had for days, whiting out nearly everything, save for the homes and the trees that were tall enough to rise above the snowline. He looked back at Aileen’s house one more time and saw her in the large picture window, waving. He smiled and waved back. The smoke coming from the chimney put him at ease. She would be okay for another day.

  He walked onto the road, now devoid of trucks and cars. Once the diesel supply became critically low, the ploughs had stopped running. Most of the town’s trucks and cars had run out of gas anyway. Within a few days of steady snowfall, the roads had become impassable.

  Two weeks earlier, the diesel had finally run out. It came as little surprise to most. Still, it had resulted in a handful of frustrated people storming the shop to demand some sort of solution, still clinging to the idea that other people could fix their problems.

  In reality, there was a small amount of diesel left for one last burst — to boost the generators to reconnect to the hydro grid, if it came back online, or to fuel up vehicles once again for some sort of voyage somewhere to get supplies or connect with another community to consolidate resources. Either possibility seemed remote.

  So Evan was now doing his rounds on foot, checking in on the elderly, or those who needed help keeping their fires burning or making food. He didn’t really have an official job anymore. The band administration had essentially dissolved, save for organizing weekly food handouts from the cache. Some people still saw Terry and the rest of the council as the figureheads of the community, but their influence was greatly diminished. Walter was the one council member most people now turned to if they needed a problem solved. And Walter, in turn, relied on Evan, Isaiah, and Tyler. Otherwise, people had retreated to their family groups or had now fallen under the spell of Justin Scott’s promises of easier living under his authority. Alliances were forming and shifting, and Evan was uneasy.

  The hypnotic crunch of his steps was the only sound he heard on this still day. The afternoon chill was deep and people kept indoors if they could. Grey smoke pumped from each chimney.

  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. His knees raised as if to rev his mind into higher gear. He looked up to the lumpy clouds in the hope that the word would emerge like a ray of sunlight through overcast sky.

  “Onaabenii Giizis,” he proudly proclaimed out loud. “The moon of the crusted snow.” His words fell flat on the white ground in front of him and he wondered which month that actually was.

  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.

  Evan thought it must still be deep winter and that this crust he was walking through was what the first teacher from his memory was talking about. There had been no mild weather yet. The deep freeze was unrelenting. The wind howled. Blizzards continued to blow in. There were calm, sunny days of bearable temperatures, but otherwise there was no real respite from the harshest of seasons here in the North. The crusted snow moon sounded severe to him. He agreed with the first teacher. This must be the peak of Onaabenii Giizis, he thought.

  He had stopped counting the days and weeks long ago. 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.

  Now the milestones he used to mark time were the deaths in the community. The toll was rising steadily as people perished through sickness, mishap, violence, or by their own hands. Even in a place as familiar with tragedy as a northern reserve, it had reached levels he had never experienced.

  Evan’s trips to the band office, the elders’ homes he served, and back home had become routine. He had trained himself to think deliberately, to ponder things that settled his mind. He thought about spots where they could gather more wood. He reviewed rabbit snare knots. He visualized pulling back an arrow and letting it fly at a target. He had discovered that reviewing routines in his head helped him keep desperation at bay. As long as the wind didn’t blow too harshly and the snowfall abated, he even enjoyed these walks.

  He trudged up to the side of the garage at the band office. He opened the heavy green door that was never locked anymore and propped it open with a grey cinder block to let in some meagre light. He stepped inside and went right to the chains that opened the garage door manually. He pulled down, and it slowly lifted, letting in a sliver of white daylight underneath. A few more solid yanks of the chain and the door was up, illuminating the garage behind him. He ignored the rows of bodies wrapped in blankets and bags and stepped back outside to await the others.

  Two figures appeared on the hill in the distance, pulling a sled. Evan recognized his friends by their walk, even in snowshoes. They were immersed in conversation, making animated hand gestures. The two young men had become accustomed to their grim task as makeshift undertakers.

  The plastic sled scraped loudly against the hard snow, drowning out their voices as they neared. Its heavy cargo dug into the crusty chunks and powder, sink
ing in slightly. The two seemed to ignore it as they greeted Evan.

  “Hey, Ev, get a load of this fuckin’ guy,” said Isaiah. “He figures Toronto woulda been in a playoff spot by now.”

  “Fuckin’ right they woulda been,” said Tyler. “They had the hottest start ever! And if they kept it up, playoffs would be starting pretty soon.”

  “Well, one of you is full of shit, that’s for sure,” Evan smiled, shaking his head. “But I guess we’ll never know who.”

  “Just watch, all this shit’s gonna come back on, and they’ll be in the playoffs. They probably been playing this whole time, and we just been in the dark,” said Tyler. He had been one of the best young players on the reserve and had been scouted for a junior team in Gibson when he was fifteen. But there was a blizzard the day he was supposed to fly down, stranding him on the reserve, and the opportunity never arose again.

  Despite Tyler’s optimism, Evan doubted the lights would ever come back on. Hockey as we know it is done, he thought. He shook off that notion and focused on the job they had to do: today it was Johnny Meegis they would lay to rest in the garage.

  “So how was it, getting old Johnny here?” Evan asked, jutting his chin towards the black body bag on the sled. It was difficult for him to square the long black lump before him with his mental image of the elder.

  Isaiah twisted to look back at the sled. “He was pretty stiff by the time we got there,” he said. “We had trouble getting him into the bag.”

  “All his kids and grandkids were there,” said Tyler. “They were all pretty upset. It was a rough scene.”

  “Do they know what happened to him?” asked Evan.

  “They think it was his heart, or his diabetes.”

  “Probably a combination of things,” added Isaiah, matter-of-factly. He was never one to reveal much emotion.

  “Yeah, I guess we won’t really know,” stated Tyler. “Too bad, anyways.”

  They left it at that and pulled the sled into the garage. It was a tragic routine the three had been assigned earlier in the winter, and it had become one of their primary jobs now that there wasn’t any more ploughing to do. When word got around that there was a death, it was up to them to collect the body and bring it here to the garage, where it would wait out the winter. The community would bury their loved ones after the spring thaw.

  Evan squatted at the head of the body and slid his hands underneath the shoulders. Tyler positioned himself to pick up the legs. They gave each other a quick nod and heaved upwards. Evan took a few steps backward and to his left, and they carefully placed Johnny beside Mark Whitesky, Evan’s older cousin who had frozen to death not far from his house a few days earlier. Evan hadn’t decided if he thought his cousin had had an accident or if he had killed himself by walking out into the cold.

  After they had settled Johnny, they surveyed the room to ensure everything was as they left it last time. The makeshift morgue housed twenty-one bodies lined neatly in three rows. Johnny Meegis closed out the third. The garage had room for at least three more, and they could squeeze in more with some rearranging. But with each body, the three friends hoped it would be the last.

  In the back left corner lay young Jenna and Tara Jones, the first to go. Their bodies were moved here after the leaders had come to the grim realization that there would be more deaths over the winter and that they would need somewhere cold to keep them until spring.

  Soon after, Jacob McCloud was found hanging from a tree in the bush behind his parents’ house. Friends said that he’d been overwhelmed by the guilt of letting the young women walk home drunk on a frigid night. They’d been his close friends. His body lay beside theirs. But dispute lingered over what exactly had happened to the girls. Word trickled through the rez that Scott somehow got hostile that night, but when asked about it, Cam and Sydney either wouldn’t talk about it or they’d say they didn’t remember. Scott had allies on the rez now and it was hard to get answers. He and his cronies lived in the duplexes that had been abandoned when families began consolidating as the blackout wore on.

  Next to Jacob’s body, wrapped in old, tattered blue sheets, was his cousin, Dion McCloud. He had shot himself a few days later, near the tree where Jacob had died. One suicide often led to another among the young people, and the compounding tragedies squeezed the stammering heart of the reserve.

  In the next row were mostly people who had died of natural causes. Many were elderly. Johnny Meegis was neatly lined up with the rest of them.

  “Journey well, Johnny,” said Tyler.

  “He’s definitely on his way to a better place than this,” muttered Isaiah. “We don’t gotta do anything else, do we?”

  “You said they had a ceremony at his house?” asked Evan.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah, I don’t think we gotta do anything. Just pay your respects on your own, I guess.”

  Isaiah and Tyler nodded silently.

  “Might as well go home.”

  Evan pulled at the chains to shut the large garage door, shrouding the bodies once again in darkness. He knew they’d be back, likely sooner than later.

  Twenty-Three

  Nicole looked out the front window at the still trees and the settled snow. It looked calm. She opened the door and took a step halfway out to gauge the temperature. It felt relatively mild, given the frigid weather they’d endured so far this winter. It seemed like a good afternoon to take the kids for a walk.

  She bundled up Maiingan and Nangohns and sat them on the front porch while she put on her snowshoes to walk around the house to get the wooden sleigh from under the back steps. The thin wooden straps of the basket were blistered and worn, but its long skis slid smoothly across the thick snow. It still seemed to work well, but Nicole wondered how much her son and daughter would weigh it down.

  “Aambe maajaadaa, binoojiinyag,” she said. “Let’s go, kiddies.”

  The boy bounded down the stairs, while Nangohns hesitated. She whined as she saw her brother take a seat at the front of the sleigh. Her pleas verged on tears before her mother decided to step in.

  “Give your sister the front,” she commanded. “You’re taller. You can see over her head.”

  He shimmied back in his thick blue snow pants to let his sister onto the sleigh. She nestled in for the ride as Nicole called out, “Okay, you guys ready?”

  With the leather strap wrapped around her thick deer-hide mitts, Nicole tugged at the sleigh. It moved easily across the snow; the load of children felt a lot lighter than she expected. Maybe we’ll go a little farther then, she thought.

  The thick cloud cover insulated them from the stinging air of a clear, windy day. It reminded Nicole that there would be an end to this season, as there always was. At times, though, she wasn’t so certain. Everything was different. Things they had come to rely on had fallen apart and their community had been turned upside down. There were days when she wasn’t sure if she was awake or dreaming.

  But this was real, and she was sure of it. She was sure of her children’s warm skin and beating hearts. She had felt their breath close to her as she dressed them for this trip outdoors. She was determined that they would survive and thrive on this land, despite the building sickness and despair around them. She turned to look behind her. “You guys doing okay?”

  “Yeah, Mommy.”

  “Okay, good. We’ll just go a little bit down the road. Maybe we’ll go see Grandma and Grandpa.”

  That meant her parents. Evan’s parents were known by the Ojibwe words for grandfather and grandmother — mishomis and nookomis (or kookom, which was interchangeable) — while Gary and Theresa McCloud went by the English words. It was really just to differentiate the sets of grandparents, although there was some logic to it, given that Dan and Patricia spoke more of the language in their home.

  Up the road, Nicole noticed someone crouched over in the ditch, digging at some
thing. She could only make out a blue figure, but as they approached she recognized Meghan Connor, the sole woman from the group of refugees who had come after Scott.

  Meghan heard the sleigh on the snow and stood up to see them coming. “Hey there.”

  “Hi,” replied Nicole. “Staying warm?”

  “Yeah, I’m just checking on some rabbit snares. No luck so far.”

  Nicole scanned the snow-covered ditch in both directions. “I don’t think the rabbits make burrows this close to the road. It might be a while before they come back this way.”

  “Oh, right. This used to be the road. I forgot.” Meghan readjusted her wool toque while she looked down at the snow to hide her embarrassment.

  “Where’s the rest of your crew?”

  “The other guys went to check more traps. They’re all spread around.”

  “You guys got enough to eat over there?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Haven’t been too hungry yet anyway.”

  The days after the second wave of newcomers arrived had been tense and awkward. After Scott had killed one of the refugees, Terry and Walter had felt obliged to take them in — though they hadn’t been planning to turn them away. They moved quickly to house the three surviving members of the group in Walter’s basement while they made arrangements for more long-term housing.

  Brad, his wife Meghan, and the third man, Alex Richer, mourned their friend while they settled in to their new reality. Walter and his wife did what they could to make them feel at home, cooking moose and deer and sharing stories about the community and the people who lived there. All three helped with chopping and piling wood and cooking. Eventually Brad and Alex joined Walter when he set and checked rabbit snares.

  After a month, the newcomers had moved into the row of duplex bungalows. While many of the original inhabitants had moved in with other family, some remained there, including Cam. Nicole pictured the row of brown duplex homes and wondered whether the bush on that end of the community yielded enough wildlife to feed these white people. She also wondered how well they knew how to trap.