It was more than enough for his own family of four, but he planned to give a lot of the meat away. It was the community way. He would share with his parents, his siblings and their families, and his in-laws, and would save some for others who might run out before winter’s end and not be able to afford the expensive ground beef and chicken thighs that were trucked or flown in from the South.
“Bad moose meat is always better than a good pork chop[.]”
“You're a good man[.]”
But the little girl’s questions often lingered in Evan’s mind long after she asked them, and he believed she held the wisdom of countless generations, despite her youth. She was an old soul. He wanted her to question everything. He wanted her to grow up to be strong and intelligent. He wanted her to be a leader.
There had been lots of infrastructure improvements on the reserve over the last few years, including their connection to the hydro grid. The old diesel generators that had run their lightbulbs and appliances for decades were still around, but they didn’t need them anymore.
“I thought all these new dishes and towers and stuff were supposed to be better!”
When Evan had been out on the land learning real survival skills with his father and uncles as a teenager, Cam had chosen to stay behind, learning simulated ones in video games.
“Yeah, all moccasin telegraph all the time these days.”
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. But people like Aileen […] had kept the old ways alive in secret. They whispered the stories and the language in each other’s ears, even when they were stolen from their families to endure forced and often violent assimilation at church-run residential schools far away from their homes. They had held out hope that one day their beautiful ways would be able to reemerge and flourish once again.
“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.”
“Some kids started getting angry, yelling that they wanted a shower or hot food […] We thought it was all pretty dumb, so we just went back to our rooms.”
“We’re in a crisis and everyone’s survival depends on cooperation.”
His rough, meaty palm dwarfed Evan’s. The handshake was half goodwill, half intimidation.
“We gotta make a stand […] I was protecting us.”
“Well, you make sure you spend some time with her. Go for a walk in the bush. When the spring comes, ask her to show you some of the medicines. She'll know a lot now, if she remembers all the stuff from when I used to take her and all the young girls out there. It will be important if we don't get any new supplies in from the hospital down south.”
“You know, when young people come over, some of them […] say that this is the end of the world. The power’s out and we’ve run out of gas and no one’s come up from down south. […] There’s a word they say too […] Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. […] Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash [white person] came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. […] But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That's when our world ended again. […] 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.”
“Scott’s a fucking asshole. […] he orders us around. He threatens us. And the worst part is, Brad has totally fallen in line […] And sometimes I catch Scott staring at me. It really creeps me out.”
“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.”
“Do you kids know the one about Nanabush and the geese?”
“Don’t be greedy!”
She had been his surrogate grandmother, his go-to elder whenever he had questions about the old ways, and he had loved her. […] The smell of sage smudge lingered in his nose, and the travelling song her family had sung for her rang in his ears.
“No, they won’t listen to us. They’ll just call another damn meeting and do nothing. This is up to us.”
As Scott turned to fire on Tyler and Isaiah, his head burst open above his left eye in a spray of blood, bone, and brain. He fell forward. Meghan Connor stood on the back porch with the rifle sight up to her eye. […] Scott lay face down, motionless, as blood leaked from his head into the snow, spreading crimson across the white. […] Isiah […] looked to Meghan on the porch, still holding her rifle. She nodded, and trained her gun on her husband and his
friend, who froze in place.
Their ancestors were displaced from their original homeland in the South and the white people who forced them here had never intended for them to survive. […] But they refused to wither completely, and a core of dedicated people had worked tirelessly to create their own settlement away from this town.
No one wanted to deal with any more of them. Not now.
