The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

  The girls turned their backs to him, not so much to ignore his veiled remark as to show him they had no fear of him. But you don’t turn your back on a dangerous animal. Only squirrels should be able to see your spine. We didn’t know that he was an animal we had yet to imagine could exist.

  THE WAY IT ALL CHANGED

  We set up our tents in a semicircle, backing onto the woods, midway between their fire and the cliff. Miig didn’t want to stay close, nor did he want to be backed up onto an impossible exit.

  We built our own fire and unfurled blankets. Light rain fell for about an hour as the sun was setting so we roped up our tarps and sat together for a moment, to regroup and plan watch.

  “We’ll do hour shifts and leave at first light. Starting with Tree and ending with French. Got it?”

  No one was sure later who was to blame that we were caught unaware, but then, the idea of blaming someone was too horrible to imagine. It would have killed us even more, and we were already so diminished.

  I heard her at the same time I felt a body crash into the side of the tent, full weight hard on my back while I lay, still clothed, in my sleeping bag. The body gave a sound like a kitten squeezed too tight, a kind of windless yelp. The sound pushed adrenaline into my thighs and knocked sleep out of my head. I struggled under the weight and whoever it was rolled off, cursing.

  I heard another yelp and then a screech, a long wail that made my teeth chatter. It was Wab.

  “What the hell?” I pushed to my knees and unzipped the tent flap. I turned once to see Slopper, eyes wide, blankets tucked around his face like a giant baby. I saw in his eyes the reflection of the Morse code my heart was pushing out: terror.

  About twenty feet off, Tree and Zheegwon were back to back, arms intertwined, at the end of a gun held by Travis. Miigwans was a few steps to their right, his own gun on the ground by his feet, chest heaving. I couldn’t see Minerva or Rose, but Chi-Boy lay on the ground, his own knife pushed through his arm. Wab was still screaming, standing in front of her tent in her long underwear, mouth open in a round O of panic. At first I thought she must be screaming over Chi-Boy’s wound, but then I followed her stare. Lincoln, having picked himself up from where he’d fallen into my tent, had lumbered over behind Travis. His hair was messy on top and his face looked dozy, like a sleepy child. He was swaying a bit.

  I thought it was maybe drink, or whatever he’d been swallowing back at the campfire, that was making him move that way. But then he turned and I saw RiRi, her throat grasped under his thick arm, legs kicking the air. She was grabbing at his forearm with her little hands, her face bright red.

  “Just put her down.” Miig tried to keep his voice steady. “Please, just put the girl on the ground so she can breathe.”

  Travis licked his lips, shifting his weight between the balls of his feet. He tried keeping his eyes pinned on the twins, Miig, and Wab while he backed up.

  “Linc,” he called to his partner over his shoulder. “Linc, the girl is no good dead. For Chrissakes, man, make sure she’s breathin’.”

  “Put her down!” Miig yelled now, pointing, an edge of panic in his voice.

  “Easy, Chief. Easy.” Travis trained his handgun on Miig and moved forward quickly to kick the hunting rifle away from reach and just into the shadows at the edge of the woods.

  Then he turned, “Lincoln, for fucksakes, put her down!”

  The bigger man obliged, bending his arm so that RiRi dropped suddenly to the ground. She would have fallen flat on her face if her arm weren’t being held at a cruel angle. Instead she kind of hung there. At least her feet were on the ground and she was coughing now.

  I hadn’t been seen yet, still half in the farthest tent and with Lincoln’s unobservant current state. I slowly pulled back through the flap, turning to show Slopper a finger pressed to lips. He hadn’t moved. I reached beside my bag and retrieved the rifle. All the saliva dried up in my mouth.

  “Linc, we got the ’cruiters coming any minute now. Every head is worth a fortune. Don’t damage any of ’em.”

  They were traitors. Indians turning in Indians for reward. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been lulled to complacency by the color of skin and an accent that made home feel real.

  “She’s hurt! Let her go!” It was Rose. She’d emerged from her tent and was holding Minerva back at the door. Minerva, who had seen RiRi dangling from the man’s meaty grasp while her arm twisted at a sick angle, was frantic to claw past and into the clearing. The sight of the old woman in her kerchief and long skirts over track pants made Lincoln laugh. He dropped RiRi to clutch his belly, and that’s when Travis turned his head and Chi-Boy made his move.

  He jumped from his crouch on the ground, the knife out of his arm and back in his hand. He lunged at Travis, driving the blade into the man’s leg, just above the knee. The older man screamed and dropped the gun in pain and shock. Miig jumped at it, smashing a fist into the howling man’s chin on the way back up.

  Lincoln, watching the group start to rally, picked RiRi up and threw her over his wide shoulder. I didn’t see a weapon on him, but just the sheer size of him matched with his unnatural state made him a danger to us all, especially for RiRi. He turned and started to run.

  “Stop!” Miig yelled. “I’ll shoot!”

  But he wouldn’t. The clearing was dark and RiRi was at risk. Instead Miig gave chase, Wab at his heels, quickly catching up and passing him, her old runner instincts returned. Rose followed. Behind her, Minerva jogged, her arms pumping at her sides, not going much faster than a walk, her lips pushed out like a Nish gps system. While half the group took off after RiRi and the hulk, the twins had gathered up Chi-Boy, pulling him away from Travis, who was crumpled on the ground with a bloody mouth. Tree ran to my tent where I sat half in, half out.

  “You okay, French?” He peered in behind me at Slopper. “Slopper?” He gave the boy the thumbs-up sign. Slopper just stared in return.

  “We gotta tie this guy up quick, Tree.” Zheegwon came up behind his brother.

  I watched them tie Travis’s hands to his ankles with a piece of rope before slinging my rifle on my back. Then I ran off into the dark after my family.

  I ran hard, with abandon, into the narrow swatch of the clearing, darker here with the closer trees. I ran full out, almost tripping over the huddled shape of Minerva where she sat, crouched on the ground, rocking back and forth and muttering words I couldn’t pick up. I managed to avoid her, but slammed my shoulder hard into a protruding birch branch. I heard a dry snap, and I wasn’t sure if it had come from the branch or the explosion of heat in my arm or from further up the path. It didn’t matter. I just kept going.

  Up ahead I could see shadows and then figures as the trees opened and the moon poured into the clearing before the cliff. I slowed down to assess, like Miig had taught me to do. One of the figures was on the ground, another was bent over, hands on knees. The third was holding on to a tree, leaning over the edge.

  And that was it.

  There were only three.

  I doubled my speed and burst into the moonlight. Wab was on the ground. She looked like she was sleeping, but her eyes were wide open. Rose was bent over, throwing up between her feet, hysterical in between retches. It was Miig who leaned over the edge. I grabbed him first, taking his forearm into my grip. It’s a good thing, too, because his hand let go seconds later, too shaky to hold on. I pulled him back hard, and he fell on top of my legs on the grass.

  “Where’d they go? Did we lose them?”

  I refused to put the pieces together.

  “Miig, move, get up.” I struggled under his dead weight. “Miig, c’mon, we’re giving him too much of a head start. I’ll go into the bush on the west. You take the east side.”

  He wasn’t moving. I got angry, pushed at him, kicking him in the back to dislodge my other foot from under him. Still, he was motionless.

  �
�Come on, you guys!” I was yelling now, pacing a small half circle around the catatonic group. “Let’s go! Do I need to do this alone?” I waited two seconds for an answer. “Fine, I’m going.”

  I walked between Miig and the cliff, on my way to into the trees where I’d mimicked Chi-Boy’s stealth earlier on, like that meant anything. And then I saw it. A single pink boot, all shiny like candy, one of the fastest boots in the world, real nishin. And it was empty, on its side, at the edge of the cliff.

  There is a feeling that has no name because, really, it is such an absence that it exists only in a vacuum of feeling and so, really, can have no name. It sucks you inside out and places you in a space where touch and taste and sound and sight all turn to ash. I was there now, alone. There was no mooring, no ground, no sky. There was just me and the boot, and then, suddenly, the warm weight of the rifle on my back.

  My vision narrowed, and I turned on a heel, throwing myself back the way I came. From a thousand miles away I heard Miigwans call, “French! Come back.” But it could have just been the wind.

  I passed Minerva and the broken birch and I bounded over the ground, legs aching, the gun bouncing softly against my spine. Later, I couldn’t recall this journey back to the camp. There was no planning, no ideas or theories or even any real rage locked inside my skull. There was just nothing. Nothing but a pink boot without a girl to wear it and a rifle that I knew as well as my own hand.

  I crashed into the campsite, startling the twins, who had finished tying up Travis and were guarding him with the handgun. Slopper sat at the edge of the tent, the blankets still pulled tight around his cheeks.

  “French! Jesus, you scared us.” Tree trained the gun back at our prisoner from where he had pointed it at me and wiped his forehead with the back of a dirty hand, leaving a streak like paint. “Where’re the others?”

  “Did you get RiRi?” Zheegwon moved closer to his brother. I must have had it written all over my face, because he grabbed the baseball cap off Tree’s head and pushed it over his own, eyes still on me.

  “Frigging Linc. He killed her, didn’t he? Dammit, I told him to lay off those pills.” Travis spat blood into the grass and sighed. He struggled to his knees, hands pulled tight behind him, and looked up.

  “Uh, listen, boy. There’s no use in us fighting now.”

  I reached behind me and yanked on the strap, bringing the rifle to my side. I cocked the barrel and trained it on the prostrate man in front of me. Panic flashed across his face and then it settled into a look of soft, practiced pleading. That’s the only time I felt anger through it all, seeing that rehearsed mask slip over his dark face.

  “Hey now, come on. Let me go now and I can show the rest of you the way out of here, before the white boys show up.” Blood and spit flew with his words, betraying his anxiety under the mask.

  “French? French, it’s okay, we got him under control.” Tree was trying to reason with me. Or maybe it was just the wind.

  I kept my eyes on Travis. He nodded at Tree’s wisdom and then tried a weak smile at me. “Yeah, c’mon, Brother.”

  Time is slow in that vacuum space. In this new space, I had time to aim squarely between the man’s eyes, watching his muscles contort and his skin wrinkle. Then I decided against it, lowering the barrel to his chest: always go for the sure target. Miig had taught us that on one of my first hunts, and I listen to my Elders. I dug a shoe in to accommodate for the kick back and bent at the knee, just like Miig had showed me.

  “Come on now! Don’t be stupid, kid! We can get out of here. Let’s go! Come on, kid! I didn’t mean it! It’s nothing personal!”

  I heard him whine a little at the end of his plea. But then, maybe it was just the wind.

  I pulled the trigger and the wind stopped blowing.

  THE LONG STUMBLE

  We ran. I can’t really recall what the packing-up was like or if I even contributed, but we were gone from the clearing and into the darkest part of the woods before the sun was fully up.

  I know I held on to the gun, still warm in my palm, for most of the run, up until we heard the whistles far away, echoing off that cliff, and I swung it back behind me and snapped out of it a bit, just enough to take whatever Rose had in her arms in addition to her pack and to run behind her to keep pace.

  We ran for hours, Chi-Boy and Miig taking turns carrying Minerva like a child on their backs while she wailed and sang and mewled in cycles. We zigged and we zagged, and when he wasn’t packing our distraught Elder, Chi-Boy was off leaving false trail leads for any potential followers, his arm held closed with duct tape since there was no time to properly stitch it up.

  By evening we were exhausted. We’d run and mourned for hours, each one of us crying out when the image of RiRi came to mind. RiRi, in one shiny pink boot dropping off the edge of the rock, held to the body of her would-be kidnapper by the iron bar of his arm. Instead of a captor, he became her anchor, dragging her all the way to the bottom. Camp that night was two tents thrown up hastily in the middle of dense bush with the spring bugs newly awake buzzing at the tears we hadn’t had time to repair. We slept with our shoes on, piled together like sticks, falling unconscious more than to sleep. Rose curled around me, but I could barely feel her. Something had changed since I’d fired the gun, since I’d killed Travis. It was like a color had ceased to exist and now the world seemed dull.

  RiRi was dead. I had killed a man. And there was no taking either of those things back. For the first time in several years I missed my parents as physical pain at the bottom of my stomach and under each kneecap. That’s where the loss lived, in those strangely normal spots on my body. I didn’t think I deserved to rub them, so I fell into dreamless sleep with a throb and a pull in my body.

  The next morning Wab made sure we each ate a bowl of lukewarm mush in the cold hour before the sky started shedding layers into a lighter blue. She spoon-fed Minerva, who was now unresponsive, and rag-washed her face and hands before taking her into the bush to pee and then bundling her back up. Her cart had been left back at the clearing, so she made a kind of sling to balance the woman’s weight on Chi-Boy’s back.

  “A bit warmer now.” Tree spoke to Zheegwon in whispers. They needed to hear each other’s voices. It was part of their coping.

  “It’ll be full spring soon. Saw some green on the brown trees.”

  “That’s good.”

  We didn’t have much to pack up and soon we were on our winding path again, heading everywhere and nowhere, frantic to get away.

  The next two days and nights were much the same. Tree and Zheegwon commented on the weather getting warmer and the bugs coming back. Minerva rode catatonic on our strongest carriers, and I was numb.

  It was the fourth day when Miig called to me from the front of the line.

  “French? Get up here, boy.”

  I made my way up while he waited. Before I would have rushed, but now I wasn’t sure I even wanted to join him. I wasn’t really sure of anything. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to run anymore. Maybe I could just sit and wait for the Recruiters to pick me up. Maybe I could use the last bullet I had in my gun to just go away.

  I fell in stride beside him. At first he said nothing.

  “I didn’t want to live after Isaac didn’t make it out of the school,” he said. “I’d escaped, sure, but why? I had no life without him. The only thing that kept me going was the promise I’d made to myself to go back, to get Isaac the first chance I got.

  “At first I had to run, of course. The second they realized the laundry boy was no longer in the laundry room they would comb the area. So I ran. For two days and two nights, in my bare feet and a uniform that looked like men’s pajamas. It’s not as bad as it sounds. At night I found nooks and holes to crawl into. And anything is better than living in a maze of hallways and sterile rooms, not knowing if the person you care most for in the world is alive or dead or hurting. Knowing o
nly that he’s close by, but impossibly out of reach. Knowing only that your people could be strapped into some kind of machine that chews them up and spits out bone mush and sticky sap. It’s much better to freeze and bleed a free man.

  “After that, I found a Cree family that was on the run too. They let me camp with them a bit, gave me food and clothes and information. Told me about small pockets of Anishnaabe still huddled around here and there. Back then there were smaller communities, like the one you lived in. And that’s when I met your dad, walking into a settlement by Huron with the Crees.”

  I felt a sharp jab in my guts at the mention of my father, like a poisonous bubble bursting, one that I’d been trying to protect in the soft wet of my insides.

  “I ate real food and slept for a week. Then I began bartering, trading game and knowledge for clothes and camp gear. All I needed was a gun. For that, I had to promise to show your dad and his Council to the capital. They had this crazy notion that there was goodness left, that someone, somewhere, would see just how insane this whole school thing was. That they could dialogue. That they could explain the system had to die and a new one be built in its place. Like that wasn’t scarier to those still in the system than all the dreamlessness and desert wastelands in the world.

  “I brought them to the borderlands and drew the final roads in. I couldn’t walk all the way in with them. I was a fugitive from the school, and I needed to get back. I still had to find Isaac. So your dad, he shook my hand, gave me the rifle, and walked away.”

  I remembered the way my mother had changed when Dad didn’t return. Her skin turned to paper, and on it was written all the worries that’d ever crossed her mind and heart. I saw his back walking away from Miigwans, out of the safety of the woods and into the unknown of the city. And I knew he wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t been driven by his love for us, me and Mitch. I was listening with every cell, desperate to pick up a new piece of information or add a new color to the picture that was my father’s last days. Of course, Miig had told me this story before, more than once when I bugged him. But it had always ended right here. This time, he continued.