Moon of the Crusted Snow

The days have been getting shorter, but so far, the sunny autumn has kept winter at bay. Evan sighs as he looks at the blank television and his blank cell phone screen. He thinks that the weather might be responsible for the outage, but Isaiah thinks it’s probably just the reserve’s bad receivers. Evan grabs two large bags of moose meat for his parents and throws them into his truck. He tunes the car radio to 98.1 FM (the reserve’s community station) while joking about going back in time with just a radio for entertainment.

Evan drives by the reserve’s hockey rink and wonders if he would have made it as a hockey player, had the rink had been there when he was younger. However, he thinks, the “comfort and familiarity” of the community and land made him never want to leave—he didn’t even leave for college. Evan started working for the roads department with his father (Dan) in between hunting and fishing.

Evan parks and walks around to the back of his childhood home, where Dan is tanning a moose hide. Evan picks up a scraper, and they work on the hide silently together, both enjoying the quiet intimacy of the moment. They stop for a smoke break, pulling cigarettes from their left pockets in unison, and they chat about their meat stores for the winter. Dan already heard about Evan’s kill through other people in the community, so he knew Evan was coming by with moose meat. They smoke in happy silence, and Evan takes the meat inside to his mother, Patricia.

Inside, Patricia is sitting at the computer, exasperated because the internet is out. Evan navigates easily through the well-worn house, chuckling because he knows Patricia likes to gamble online. The internet and television have both been out since yesterday. Evan jokes that, on the bright side, they can eat supper on time; Patricia elbows him playfully as she gets up. In truth, Evan is a little uneasy that the television satellite, phone lines, and internet are all down. He heads back outside and has another comfortable, silent smoke with Dan as they scan the horizon.

Evan is surprised when Dan says he had a dream last night, because Dan never talks about his dreams. In the dream, it was a spring night, and Dan was walking toward a hill with a shotgun over his shoulder. The other side of the hill was on fire. In the dream, Evan and his friends were staring at the fire, wearing hunting gear but looking skinny and weak. Evan looked up with a scared look on his face, and then Dan woke up. Hearing this, Evan suddenly feels anxious, and he jokes nervously that it’s a good thing he caught that moose he hunted. Eventually, Dan’s face breaks into a smile, and he bats Evan playfully on the shoulder before heading inside. Evan is relieved.