Waubgeshig Rice - Moon of the Crusted Snow

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, sinking 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.