The Marrow Thieves E-Book

Cherie Dimaline

• Herausgeber: Jacaranda Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: The Marrow Thieves Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 332

Beschreibung

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden-but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves. "Miigwans is a true hero; in him Dimaline creates a character of tremendous emotional depth and tenderness, connecting readers with the complexity and compassion of Indigenous people. A dystopian world that is all too real and that has much to say about our own." Kirkus Reviews

Leseprobe

Praise for The Marrow Thieves

WINNER, GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARDFOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2017)WINNER, KIRKUS PRIZE FOR YOUNG READERS’ LITERATURE (2017)

SHORTLIST SELECTION, SUNBURST AWARD (2018)SHORTLIST SELECTION, CBC CANADA READS (2018)FINALIST, TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD (2018)FINALIST, ONTARIO LIBRARY ASSOCIATION WHITE PINE AWARD (2018)

LONGLIST SELECTION, SUNBURST AWARD (2018)A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK (2017)

A SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (2017)

“Miigwans is a true hero; in him Dimaline creates a character of tremendous emotional depth and tenderness, connecting readers with the complexity and compassion of Indigenous people. A dystopian world that is all too real and that has much to say about our own.”

—starred review, Kirkus Reviews

“A timely and necessary read... powerful and endlessly smart, it’s a crucial work of fiction for people of all ages.”

—starred review, Quill & Quire

“Dimaline writes elegant prose that grabs the reader and carries them into this dark and passionate world. The author has created a rich work of postapocalyptic fiction without the dense exposition often found in the genre.”

—starred review, School Library Journal

“The brilliance here is that Dimaline takes one of the most well-known tropes in YA—the dystopia—and uses it to draw explicit parallels between the imagined horrors of a fictional future with the true historical horrors of colonialism and residential schools. It’s as beautifully written as it is shocking and painful—a legitimate must-read.”

—The Globe and Mail

“There’s a quality in Dimaline’s writing that reached from the page, into my being... That’s a specific reference to the residential schools of the past, where so much was taken from Native children. It is one of many points in The Marrow Thieves where—painfully or with exquisite beauty—Dimaline’s story resonates with me. It will resonate with other Native readers, too, especially those who are Anishinabe. Several tribal nations are mentioned in here, too... There’s so much more to say... about Miggs and Isaac, about Ri, about Minerva, about French. But I’ll stop and let you be with these achingly dear characters. I highly recommend The Marrow Thieves.”

—Debbie Reese, author of American Indians in Children’sLiterature

First published in Great Britain 2019 byJacaranda Books Art Music Ltd27 Old Gloucester Street,London WC1N 3AXwww.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk

A previous version of “Frenchie’s Coming-to Story” was originallypublished by Theytus Editions, copyright © 2016.

Originally published in 2017 by Cormorant Books Inc.

Copyright © Cherie Dimaline [2017]

The right of Cherie Dimaline to be identified as the author of thiswork has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described inthis book are the product of the author’s imagination.Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form orby any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronicor mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of thecopyright owner and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from theBritish Library

ISBN: 9781913090012eISBN: 9781913090029

Cover Art by Chief Lady BirdTypeset by Kamillah BrandesPrinted and bound in the United Kingdom

For the Grandmothers who gave me strength.To the children who give me hope.

“The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”—William S. Burroughs

“Where you’ve nothing else, construct ceremonies out ofthe air and breathe upon them.”—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

FRENCHIE’SCOMING-TO STORY

MITCH WAS SMILING so big his back teeth shone in the soft light of the solar-powered lamp we’d scavenged from someone’s shed. “Check it out.” He held a bag of Doritos between us—a big bag, too.

“Holy, Mitch! Where’d you get that?” I touched the air-pressurised bag to confirm it was real. My dirty fingers skittered across the shiny surface like skates. It was real. My mouth filled with spit, and a rotten hole in one of my molars yelled its displeasure.

“In the last house back there, hidden on top of the cupboard like Ma used to do when she didn’t want us getting into stuff.”

Mom had only been gone a few months, so talking about her still stung. My brother popped the bag to cover our hurt. And like cheese-scented fireworks, that loud release of air and processed dust cheered us up.

We were in a tree house somewhere on the outer rim of a small city that had long been closed down like a forgotten convenience store. We were a few hours out from Southern Metropolitan City, which used to be Toronto back when there were still so many cities they each had a unique name instead of a direction. West City, Northeast Metropolis, Southern Township...

It was a great tree house; some lucky kid must have had a contractor for a father. It was easily two storeys up from the unmown lawn and had a gabled roof with real shingles. We’d been there for three days now, skipping school, hiding out. Before he’d left with the Council and we never saw him again, Dad had taught us that the best way to hide is to keep moving, but this spring had been damp; it had rained off and on for over a week, and we couldn’t resist the dry comfort of the one-room tree house with built-in benches. Besides, we reasoned, it was up high like a sniper hole so we could see if anyone was coming for us.

It probably started with that first pop of air against metallic plastic, no louder than a champagne cork. I imagined the school truancy officers—Recruiters, we called them—coming for us, noses to the wind, sunglasses reflecting the row of houses behind which we were nestled in our wooden dream home. And sure enough, by the time we’d crunched through the first sweet, salty handfuls, they were rounding the house into the backyard.

“Shit.”

“What?”

Mitch put the bag down and turned to the window cut into the north wall.

“Francis, you’re going to have to listen to me really carefully.”

“What?” I knew it was bad. He never called me Francis, no one but Mom ever did, and then only when I was in trouble. I’d been Frenchie since I could remember.

“Listen, now.” He turned away from the window to lock eyes with me. “You are going to climb out the back window and onto the roof, as low down as you can get.”

“But, Mitch! I can’t climb out a window.”

“Yes, yes you can, and you will. You’re the best damn climber there is. Then when you’re on the roof, you’re going to grab the pine tree behind us and climb up into it. Stay as close to the trunk as you can. You have to shimmy into the back part, where the shadows are thickest.”

“You go first.”

“Too late, buddy; they know someone is up here, just not how many someones.”

I felt my throat tighten to a pinhole. This is how voices are squeezed to hysterical screeching.

“Mitch, no!”

He turned again, eyes burning with purpose, bordering on anger. “Now. Move it, Francis!”

I couldn’t have him mad at me; he was all I had left. I clambered out the window and folded upward to grasp the slats on the roof. I shimmied up, belly to the wood, butt pulled down tight. I lifted my head once, just high enough to look over the small peak in the centre, just enough to see the first Recruiter lift a whistle to his mouth, insert it under his sandy moustache, and blow that high-pitched terror tone from our nightmares. Under the roof I heard Mitch start banging the plywood walls, screaming, “Tabernacle! Come get me, devils!”

Fear launched me into the pine. The hairy knots on the sticky trunk scraped my thighs, sweat and skin holding me there. The needles poked into my arms and shoved into my armpits, making me tear up. I pulled my sweaty body towards the other side of the pine, scrapes popping up red and puffy on my thighs and torso. All the while the whistles, two now, blew into the yard.

“Come get me, morons!”

I saw both of the Recruiters now: high-waisted navy shorts, gym socks with red stripes pulled up to their knees above low, mesh-sided sneakers, the kind that make you look fast and professional. Their polo shirts were partially covered with zip-front windbreakers one shade lighter than their shorts. The logo on the left side was unreadable from this distance, but I knew what it said: Government of Canada: Department of Oneirology. Around their necks, on white cords, hung those silver whistles.

Mitch was carrying on like a madman in the tree house. Yelling while they dragged him down the ladder and onto the grass. I heard a bone snap like a young branch. He yelled when they each grabbed an arm and began pulling. He yelled around the house, into the front yard, and into the van, covering all sounds of a small escape in the trees.

Then the door slid shut.

And an engine clicked on and whirred to life.

And I was alone.

I wanted to let go. I wanted to take my arms off the trunk and fold them to my chest like a mummy, loosen my thighs from their grip, and fall in a backwards swan dive to the bottom. I pulled one hand back and clutched the opposite shoulder. Deep breath. You can do this. The other hand shook as it began to release. The skin of my thighs burned with the extra strain. Soon they too would be unclenched. Deep breath...

If I survived the fall, which was possible, I’d be taken to the school with Mitch. This thought was appealing at first, and for a brief moment I had some kind of TV reunion in my head: me, Mitch, Mom, Dad... but I knew that’s not how it would go. A few had escaped from the schools, and the stories they told were anything but heartwarming.

“THERE’S A MAN named Miigwans who came by Council last night,” my father had said one night when we were still together. “He escaped from one of the satellite schools, the one up by Lake Superior.” Dad had bags under his eyes. He’d gathered us around the kitchen table to talk, but spoke haltingly, like he’d rather not. “He told us about what’s happening to our people. It wasn’t easy to hear, and was he frantic, tried to leave right away, looking for this Isaac fellow.”

“Jean, maybe the boys should go in the other room for this...”

“Miigwans says the Governors’ Committee didn’t set up the schools brand new; he says they were based on the old residential school system they used to try to break our people to begin with, way back.” He paused and drank half the liquid in his greasy glass, a kind of moonshine he kept in an old pop bottle on the back stoop. He placed it hard on the picnic table we’d hauled into the main room of the cabin. The glass echoed the wood in its hollow curve. It was punctuation. It made me jump. He was in the gloomy place he went to when he spoke about how the world had changed. He said we were lucky we didn’t remember how it had been, so we had less to mourn. I believed him.

“Okay, boys, that’s it, off to bed.” Mom shooed us off the bench, pushing us out the door before we could formulate an argument to stay. Dad stopped me to kiss the top of my head, and I felt safe, even just for a minute.

We heard Mom crying as we lay in bed that night. And the next day, we packed up that small cottage we’d been staying in since our apartment in the city had lost power and things had gotten dangerous. We hadn’t even spent a full year there, and none of us were keen on leaving, especially me and Mitch. We had family here, blood and otherwise. There were other families, people like us, who had settled here. The old people called it the New Road Allowance. And now we were jamming clothes and jars of preserves wrapped in blankets into our duffel bags to move again. I thought about our walk into this settlement from the city.

“We walk north,” Dad had said then. “North is where the others will head. We’ll spend a season up by the Bay Zone. We’ll hole up in one of those cabins up there and I’ll try to find others. We’ll find a way, Frenchie. And up north is where we’ll find home.”

“For sure?”

“Hells yes, for sure. I know so because we’re going to make a home there. If you make something happen you can count on it being for sure.”

“What will we find up there, Dad?” I’d been nervous it would be all empty and wet, the constant rain making pools in our footprints before we could completely empty them of our feet.

I was tired and hungry, and my shoes were as thin as cardboard, but I tried not to let any of that colour my voice when I spoke. I knew we were all tired and hungry and trudging along on leather-skin shoes. I knew to be positive in that way that a little kid comes home from school and can tell there’s been an argument that day by the way the air smells in the front hall and decides this is the day he’ll start his math homework without being asked. Survival, I guess.

We were out by old Highway 11, having slipped the noose of the last suburb of East City. Unlike the smaller city outskirts where I’d later lose my brother, these suburbs were open and vast, a maze of darkened windows and burnt cars in kaleidoscopic boroughs that branched out like a geometric blossom of asphalt and curb and erupting driveways.

I’d felt kind of special then, before I knew how dangerous special could be. I guess I was proud of my family, with our ragged shoes and stringy hair; we were still kings among men. I held my twiggy walking stick like a scepter, chin tilted towards the ashy sky.

And now here we were again, getting ready for another journey into another unknown, driven by fear. But we never made that move, not together, anyway. At what was supposed to be my father’s last Council meeting before he took his family north, it was decided they’d make one last-ditch effort to talk to the Governors in the capital. They never came back.

I KNEW I’D never see my family if I were captured; we wouldn’t be reunited at the school. I had to get down from this tree safely and keep moving. Mitch had sacrificed himself so I could live, so I had to live. It was the only thing left I could do for him.

I pulled myself back against the tree, hugging the craggy trunk so hard I had tectonic imprints on my cheek and thighs for three days after. I stayed there until the van drove off, until I couldn’t hear the engine anymore, until the day filled up with grey, until the grey turned indigo. Then I shook each sleepy limb, each screaming muscle back into service and half slid, half climbed back down the tree to the ground. The landing vibrated into my shins and set my kneecaps loose like baby teeth. I sat there a moment before the memory of the shrill siren of the Recruiter’s whistle shoved under my feet like slivers. I was almost to the house next door before I remembered to turn back for my backpack and the half-eaten bag of chips.

The first night I kept going, running when I could, crawling against every surface that offered a shadow. I even pissed on the run, dribbling on my duct-taped boot. The morning after, when I was truly alone in the bright of day, I was all panic and adrenaline. I found a rain barrel behind a small detached bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere by the outlet mall and drank as much water as I could, then right away threw most of it back up. At least my boot was clean again.

Here the sidewalks were shot through with arterial cracks and studded with menacing weeds that had evolved to survive torrential rain and the lack of pollinators. Wildlife was limited to buzzards, raccoons the size of huskies, domestic pets left to run feral, and hordes of cockroaches that had regained the ability to fly like their southern cousins. I had been scared of them all when I was still running with my brother. Now, in the wake of his removal, they were nothing. I crunched over lines of roaches like sloppy gravel, threw rocks at the pack of guinea pigs grunting at me with prehistoric teeth from under their protective awning at a corner grocery.

“No one cares, you little shit!” I screamed at the largest male, who stood his ground on the outer perimeter of the awning, stomping his boundary on surprisingly muscular front legs like some kind of caricature of an old bulldog. Behind him huddled his nuclear family, a circle of two smaller females and about eighteen bucktoothed guinea pig children.

“We’re all dead anyway. I should make a shish kebab of your kids.”

I didn’t mean it. I looked at their round eyes, wet and watching but not nervous enough for the threat of a human. Their dad was there, after all, and they knew they were safe. I felt tears collecting behind my own eyes like sand in a windstorm. I opened my mouth... to say what? To apologise to a group of wild guinea pigs? To explain that I hadn’t meant what I’d said? To let them know I just missed my family? A small sob escaped instead. I cupped a dirty hand over my mouth to catch it, but not before the male smelled my fear and turned his back to me. I was no danger to them. I was no danger to anything. At best, I was prey.

It was early evening when I hit the edge of the trees. According to the small plastic compass clipped onto the zipper of my backpack I was now heading northeast. Dad had said we should head north to the old lands. We’d told mom we were heading east when we lost her at the seniors’ home. I figured northeast was the safest bet.

Now I was alone, leaving the smaller cities that had winked out long ago like Christmas lights on a faulty wire. The trees here were still tall, so I wasn’t very far north, but they were dense, so I wasn’t too south anymore, either.

My legs screamed from a night and day of ache and stretch marinated in old adrenaline and scabbed with tree bark cuts. I collapsed under a pine. It was still spring, and I knew the night would be too cold for a single boy with no real shelter other than a thermal wrap and a couple layers of hoodies. The early moisture would set in, and I couldn’t afford to get sick. So I built a modest fire just big enough to cut the chill and lay on my back, backpack under my head.

Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes. And surrounded by these silent trees, beside a calming fire, I watched the bones dance. This was our medicine, these bones, and I opened up and took it all in. And dreamed of north.

Cold is an effective alarm clock, and I was up before the sun. The fire had gone out, but not long ago, since there was still smoke. The cough I’d been cultivating over the past few days was more insistent now. I coughed, and each push of air brought a fresh ache out of my back and legs. The jump and the run had really done a number. Still, I stood and started my jumping jacks, following Mitch’s morning warm-up routine even though he wasn’t there to motivate me.

“C’mon, French. I’ve seen higher from a boulder!”

I rolled up my sweaters and the wrap and jammed them in my backpack before a quick breakfast of the second to last tin of meal replacement drink and a granola bar with a bite already missing. My stomach grumbled when I finished, but there was maybe a day and a half of food supplies left in my pack and I was heading into the woods. There’d be no grocery stores or abandoned duplexes to raid for leftovers and non-perishables. I wasn’t quite sure how I would do it. Mom had said her uncles and grandpa were great hunters, that it was a family trait. Maybe it would just come to me, like a blood memory or something. What would I even kill an animal with, a stick?

I started back north, keeping my eyes to the ground for animal tracks with no idea of what I would do if I actually saw some, or if I would even recognise what animal made them.

By the time the sun reached centre stage, a punctuation mark in the cloud-lined sky, I was miles into the woods. The trees were denser, the ground less manageable, and the wildlife—judging by the sounds and smells around me—had changed. I stopped in a small clearing filled with tall grasses and low bushes. It was the thud of my heart against the hollow bowl of my stomach that made me eat a cluster of dandelion weeds grown to waist height. They weren’t bad. I added them to my “available and edible” list and clomped on, the plastic compass pressed into my palm now like a toy talisman. I kept trudging north.

“YOU HAVE TO try to keep the goal in your head. You can’t let what’s not here, what’s missing, you can’t let that slow you down.” Mom was trying hard to give us a pep talk on top of the seniors’ home in a small city on our last night as a trio. But with a monotone voice and that far-off look she’d taken on since Dad had left with the lost Council, it was hard to take in the message. Her words fell in between the sheets of rain like downed planes: defeated, useless.

“Mom, here.” Mitch held an on open can of artichoke hearts he’d just grilled with a lighter. “You need to eat.”

She ignored him. “There were generations in our family where all we did was move. First by choice, then every time the black cars came from town and burned out our homes along the roadside. Now the cars are here again. Only now, they’re white vans. And I can’t run that fast. Not fast enough. Never fast enough.”

“Mom,” Mitch spoke louder but still gently. I was huddled against the side of the gazebo, peering through the wooden lattice, on the lookout for Recruiters. “You haven’t eaten all day. You need to eat.”

Her eyes stayed fixed, away from her eldest. The smell from the lake here was nauseating. Once this was a popular city, being right on the water. Now this lake, like all the industry-plundered Great Lakes, was poison, and a tall fence blocked it off from the overgrown streets. We hadn’t been here more than a day, so the smell was pungent for us. We breathed into bandanas and built shelter from the stench with plywood and a tarp.

Mitch tried a different tactic with Mom. “If you don’t eat you won’t have the strength to take second shift tonight.”

Something flickered on her face and she reached out, removed one pale heart from the cluster, and inserted it into her mouth like a chore. It was a few minutes before she spoke again.

“We have to move, my boys. Tomorrow we move, after I do one last forage in the old Friendship Centre.”

“Mom, no! That place is a hot spot for Recruiters. It’s a pretty obvious Nish-magnet.”

She squinted her eyes. “Oh now, the officers are long done with that place. There’s no Indians left in this part of the city anyway. I’m just going to look for a few things we’ll need once we get past the city and into the bush. It’ll only take me a minute.” She reached for our hands and squeezed them, breathing deep and full like a prayer, chewing her bottom lip like penance.

The next day she left before we reheated artichoke for breakfast. And then Mitch and I were on our own.

I WAS STUMBLING. Another night asleep in the open. This time I didn’t have enough strength to rebuild the fire that had been rained out while I fitfully slept. My muscles ached, my belly rumbled, my heart hurt. I’d tripped over an aboveground root bent like an arthritic finger and picked up a limp. The rain started again just after noon, and I sat under a dense pine nursing my last tin of meal replacement, the last-resort tin with the expiry dated for the previous year. There was a sour current through the frothy top notes, but it was all that was left; I hadn’t even seen any more damn dandelions. My molar screamed every time a swallow of liquid passed over it. Just this morning I had started contemplating dentistry with a rock. Or maybe I could just fall out of a tree, cheek first. I fell asleep biting a piece of shoelace, leaning against the pine trunk, wishing Mom would find me.

A shiver woke me up. It was almost full dark, and my tooth hurt and my ankle throbbed and I’d spilled what was left of the tin on the ground beside my legs.

“Oh no.” I righted the tin and shook it. Not even a mouthful left. “Damn it!”

I tried to throw it into the woods, to make that damn tin pay for my own carelessness. It arched up and hit the ceiling of pine branches above me, slamming back to the ground not a foot in front of me. I kicked it instead.

“Jesus!” My ankle sang a terrible song like my toothache had sunk to my foot. Rot and damp and hopelessness and hunger and fear and anger twisted up in a clamp around my ribcage.

I sat back down, picked up the can, and rubbed it across my greasy forehead, back and forth, back and forth. No one to take care of me now. No one to make me move. Where the hell was I going anyway? Where the hell was my mom? Why did she have to go to the Friendship Centre? Her eyes that night: hollow like an old stump. Like the hole in my molar, a true ache.

“I’m going to die.”

Saying it out loud was like hearing it from another person’s mouth. It made my head well up with tears. I held onto them; precious water. I decided then that if I was going to die, I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for the truancy dicks to come get me. I’d die fighting wild animals, or swan diving from one of these pines, or of starvation half buried in the drying earth like a partially cremated corpse floating down the old Ganges, before the Ganges became a footpath for heartbroken pilgrims.

I stood back up, dropped the can, and shouldered my pack. Onward.

I fell a couple of times, tripping over roots sticking out from ground that was ashy and loose in the thinning earth, washed out from the endless rain. I split my lip on the last tumble and tasted wet pennies and heavy perfume. Shoulda turned my head to hit my tooth, I thought. I laughed out loud, a desperate sound that made me laugh harder so that I had to stop, hands on my shaking knees, and wait out the wave of giggles that made it impossible to trudge on.

The cough was near constant, stiff and phlegmy like a sack of bricks slamming against my insides. It made me double over and drool. I broke a blood vessel in my right eye with the hack. The walk was slow with sickness and the limp. I didn’t even notice my stomach had pulled itself into a fist until I was being punched by it, nauseous and cold. And now, night was falling.

“Nooooo.” I couldn’t do anything to protect myself from it, so I whined. “Shit, no.”

I leaned against a knobbly pine sticky with sap that matted the back of my head to the bark and watched the sky betray me into navy. I slid then, slow and painful, ripping out my hair so that a clump of me stayed pinned to the tree—nesting material for low-flying buzzards. The stars began to rip through the hard skin of dark like the sharp points of silver needles through velvet. I watched them appear and wink and fade, and I smiled. This wasn’t going to be so bad. Maybe the end is just a dream. That made me feel sorry for a minute for the others, the dreamless ones. What happened when they died? I imagined them just shutting off like factory machines at the end of a shift: functioning, purposeful, and then just out.

I closed my eyes. Just for a minute. The dream came for me right away. Later, I couldn’t recall what it had been or for how long I’d been asleep. But when I woke, it was reluctantly.

“PUT HIM DOWN over there, right close to the fire.”

“He’s breathing all funny.”

“Never mind now, just prop up his head. Wab, go grab that quilt from my bedroll. Zheegwon, heat up some water. We’ll need to get some liquid into him.”

Voices. Voices with the pulled vowels and cut lilt of my father. Voices with the low music of my mother. I couldn’t open my eyes. Not yet. This was too beautiful a dream, even just in audio.

“All right now, pull off his shoes and get his feet close to the pit.”

I felt tugging and then the relief of a good swell allowed to spread out, then heat.

“Hey, boy, can you hear me? You’ll need to drink some of this water.” A metal edge split my broken lips and clear, warm water poured into my mouth. I sputtered at first, a reaction to the intrusion, then the fist in my guts demanded it and my throat opened up in compliance. The need was so great, the satisfaction so complete, I grasped for the vessel, lest it be pulled away.

“Easy now, easy now.”

I managed to open one eye.

There was a man holding the tin, not my father, but a man with the same crease around his eyes. His hair was long down the middle and shaved close on the sides. He looked to be about my father’s age. Over his right shoulder a girl stared at me with one round, dark eye, her long hair draped around her face, flickering in tandem with the flames of the large fire. She handed a blanket to the man, who tucked it in around me.

“Zheegwon, get some soup over here. This boy is starved.”

The man spoon-fed me broth with sweet corn mush until the fist unclenched just enough for me to rest, then he put it beside me on a flat rock.

“When you can hold it yourself, that’s when you know it’s okay for you to eat more without getting sick.”

I opened both eyes and looked around. There were more people now. There was the man, and the older girl who’d brought the blanket, who I saw was wearing an eye patch and had an angry red slash down her cheek. There was a child, not much older than a baby, sleeping in a nest of blankets like a puppy beside an old lady dozing in her kerchief. Then there was a small, round boy, two taller boys who looked like they must be twins, and another tall boy whose face was hidden by the shadow of a hood. They all sat around a roaring fire on blankets and sleeping bags and they seemed to all be Native, like me. Behind them were two canvas tents shut tight against the cold air and the new bugs that had found the blood around my mouth interesting.

“Who are you?” It wasn’t more than a whisper.

It was the man who answered, standing to poke at the branches in the fire. “I’m Miigwans, and this is my family. But not now. There’ll be time for that tomorrow. You need to eat some more of that soup and then sleep. Tomorrow we move. Probably got some Recruiters nearby with the racket you were kicking up by yourself out there.”

Miigwans. I’d heard that name before. I could see my father’s mouth pronouncing it with reverence, like he did for everything that had a touch of the old about it, the words from our language; like a prayer.

“North.”

He turned his face to me, flames animating the shadows that fell there under his eyes, along his cheekbones. “Yeah, that’s right, north. We seem to be heading in the same direction. Might as well trudge on together then, eh?”

I didn’t answer. The tears cleared away the dirt from my eyes, stinging as they crossed my split lips. Sobs rocked me, open and closed, until I was fetal. I was embarrassed to be so broken in front of all these new Indians. If they were embarrassed for me, no one made a motion or mouthed a reproach. They just let me be broken, because soon I wouldn’t be anymore. Eventually, I wouldn’t be alone, either. And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up and find myself closer to home.

THE FIRE

MIIG EXPLAINED IT one night at the fire.

“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.” He poked at the crackling wood with a pointy stick till the shadows were frenetic against his tan face, till they slid into the longer shoots of hair near the front of his mohawk, the tendrils he swept up and patted into place atop the shorter brush with the care of a pageant queen. He didn’t make eye contact with us, the motley group seated in a loose semi-circle around the fire, beneath the trees where he commanded place.

I imagined spiderwebs in my bones and turned my palm towards the moon, watching the ballet of bones between my elbow and wrist twist to make it so. I saw webs clotted with dreams like fat flies. I wondered if the horses I’d ridden into this dawn were still caught in there like bugs, whinnying at the shift.

Miig nudged the rounded stones placed around the perimeter of the fire with his boot. You could see where the holes in his sole had been patched up with sap and scavenged leather.

“How do they get in there?” RiRi, now seven, was always curious and not shy with her questions.

“You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into the marrow like spinners,” Miig answered. The flames tried to settle, and he prodded them to dance again. He added, “That’s where they pluck them from.”

I pulled each one of my fingers into my palm and made a fist silhouetted against the fire, flames licking around the tight ball of brown and bone. I imagined my brother tied to a chair at the school, a flock of grey-hooded villains tightening his beaded chains while they recited Hail Mary like synchronised swimmers.

Miig sat, satisfied that we were all at attention, that we were listening with every cell. He leaned against a felled tree beside Minerva, who woke up with his rustling. He rolled a smoke out of his precious tobacco stores and plucked a twig out of the fire with a burning ember at the tip to light it with. Old Minerva, near-sighted to squinting, lifted her nose at the smell. Her lips fell slack and she sighed. Those first few exhales were big and wasteful as Miig tried to get the damp paper to light, and smoke billowed across the clearing like messages. Everything was always damp, so we were trained to sniff out mould to keep that sickness at bay. Minerva made her hands into shallow cups and pulled the air over her head and face, making prayers out of ashes and smoke. Real old-timey, that Minerva.

Miig and Minerva were the only grown-ups in our group. Miig wore his hair shaved to the skull except down the middle and had a moustache that only grew on the left side of his top lip. He was tall but bent like a walking question mark, and he was short with words and patience. Miig wore army pants, alternating between two identical pairs, and layers of brown and green sweaters. He kept a small pouch hung on a shoelace around his neck and tucked into those sweaters. Once, when I’d asked him, he’d told me that was where he kept his heart, because it was too dangerous to keep it in his chest, what with the sharp edges of bones so easily broken. I never asked again. Too many metaphors and stories wrapped in stories. It could be exhausting, talking to Miig.

Minerva was dark, round, and tiny like a tree stump. She kept her long grey hair in two braids like a little girl with a flowered kerchief tied over her head and under her round chin. She had old-timey ways, but you couldn’t get much from her, either. She didn’t talk, and when she did it was in bursts accompanied by laughter and maybe a scream or two. Mostly she watched... everything: us kids playing in the river, the way the trees tilted to the north towards what was left of the natural landscape beyond the clear-cuts stripped of topsoil. She watched the birds on their perpetual migration to anywhere, the fire at end of day, and the way we clapped each other’s backs when trading off on the traplines.