“You boys need to work on your hunting.”
“But there’s, like, no animals around here, Miig.”
Miig put his hands on his skinny hips and sighed, shaking his head down as he exhaled. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll be back, and you need to be ready. ’Sides, maybe if you were better at hunting you’d catch one of the dozen or so animals that are around here.” He was addressing Slopper, who kicked rocks with the toe of his beat-up Converse.
We stood in the trees in a circle around Miig, who was loading his gun while he gave us the charge for the day. We did this every second or third day, depending on the weather; sometimes it was hunting, others it was shelter-building. Miig said it was Apocalyptic Boy Scouts. We didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about, but we liked fashioning bows and arrows and whooping to each other through the bush and feeling all Chiefy. We took turns, splitting into groups, Hunting and Homestead, switching off every three months. The Homesteaders were back at the campsite packing up for the next slide northward and watching Minerva, who had been braiding RiRi’s hair and tapping out a tune on the top of her head in pauses when we left them.
We were lucky; we had Miig to learn from instead of Minerva to babysit. We clamored out of the camp, all elbows and bravado, feeling our superiority, owning our luck. Rose, her massive curls tangled on her head in a sloppy bun, shot me a look from the tent she was dismantling, having been stuck with Homesteaders. I watched my feet navigate the tripwires we’d set up yesterday and avoided her disdain.
“You got to know how to tell animals are nearby. How would you do that? Anyone?”
Slopper’s hand shot up, exposing his round belly hanging out the bottom of his shrinking T-shirt. All of our clothes got worn to dust. It was rare to come across anything out here, and even if we did, you had to wear the new boots or holed sweater a few weeks before you forgot a dead man had worn it. I had lucked into a pair of fleece-lined army pants two winters past. They had been frozen to a low branch where someone must have left them to dry. I rolled them three times on each leg and kept them up with a rope for forever. Just this season I’d finally been able to let them hang to their full weight. Because I had pants and a coat and even gloves with only two fingers worn to skin, all clothes we found were passed on to the others. Soon enough I would be looking for new pants and the goods would go my way first.
Miig tried not to sigh, but he did, a little. “Yes, Slopper?”
“You see them?”
“Okay, Slopper, if they’re close enough for you to see them, there better already be a bullet or an arrow on the way to take them down. Anyone else have any ideas on how we can track them to get close enough to shoot?”
Chi-Boy answered. “Ground marks.”
“Okay, like what?”
“Shit.” My face got hot when the others laughed.
“That’s right, Frenchie. If you see shit on the ground, you know the asshole who dropped it must be close by.”
Miig’s response brought fresh peals of laughter, including my own.
“You can also tell by its, err, freshness, how long ago the animal was at that spot. Anything else?”
We spent the morning talking and looking at examples of trees gored by shedding antlers and branches snapped by lumbering bodies. Wab led us through the brush, trying to demonstrate the movements required to take prey by surprise. It was after midday when we began the walk back to the camp with a couple of rabbits and one patchy-furred squirrel for lunch before an afternoon march to the next bunking.
I was walking with Slopper and Chi-Boy. We were singing a song we’d made up to an old-timey round dance double beat. Chi-Boy had a beautiful high voice, and when he sang he squinted his already small eyes to slits. It made him look like the friendliest giant in the forest. I loved watching him sing. Slopper hammed it up a bit, trying to mimic and trying to pretend that wasn’t the case.
Way ya, hey ya, hey ya, way ha
I don’t know where we’re going
Don’t know where we’ve been
Way hey ya
All I know is I’ll keep walking
Can’t get taken in
Way hey ya
We sang it around and around in our warbling voices somewhere between youth and where they would settle, like bees around a single flower. We were delirious with it, tossing the chorus back and forth between us like a ball, making up new lyrics as we grew bored with the old ones.
Miig was oddly quiet. Usually at about the sixth time through he’d snap at us to shut it. But today he just kept two paces ahead. He didn’t even yell at the twins for lagging behind to pick up interesting-looking rocks for their growing collection. “Maybe you should collect feathers instead of rocks. It’s not the smartest collection when you’re on the run,” he’d told them more than once.
I jogged up to meet his pace. “Hey, Miig, what’s up?”
He kept cadence and didn’t answer for a full minute. “Birds are too quiet.”
“Maybe they went ahead.”
“But why?”
We came into the camp from the east, stepping over the wires and ducking under the hanging bells. The Homesteaders had almost everything ready for the move, stacked and tied in one pile. There was just a dinner fire glowing and the people themselves, sitting on the fallen logs we’d dragged around the pit like they’d been waiting all day for our lazy arses to get back. I searched the faces for Rose. When I found her, I looked away and then just happened to stumble over to her log to sit.
Miig handed the catch to Wab. As the only woman in the bunch, other than crazy old Minerva, the management of the cooking fell in her domain. Not that she had to cook everything herself, just that she got to say who did it and how. As the woman of the group, she was in charge of the important things. Even though she’d hunted that day, she decided to take care of things herself. Wab gathered her long bleached hair into a ponytail, looked us over once with her small, dark eyes, and then set about skinning the animals on a flat rock with her beloved blade. She liked this solitary work, her fingers catching and releasing, pulling and knotting in old rhythms, especially after having to mentor the Hunters.
I felt Rose on the log beside me. It’s like the shape of her body heat fit right into me and I couldn’t ignore her for long. “I feel bad for you guys.”
“What? Why?” Rose was all aggression out of the gate. She turned to look at me, her curly hair wild around her round face, half tucked into her too-small parka.
“Well, because we get to go learn from Miig and you guys are stuck with that.” I pointed with my lips across the fire to Minerva, who was absorbed in chewing through a bag of porcupine quills she’d harvested last week when we ran across its carcass. “I hate when it’s my turn for Homesteaders. It’s so useless.”
“Stuck with Minerva? Huh, you have no idea.” She leaned forward, her elbows on her thighs. Our knees were almost touching.
“As bad as that, eh?” I commiserated, glad to have something to talk about, glad that she leaned into me to do so.
“No, not bad at all. As a matter of fact, being with Minerva is pretty nishin.” She narrowed her eyes.
Uh-oh. “Nishin? What in the hell is that?”
“Oh nothing, just a little of the language.”
I jumped up. “Bullshit!”
She jumped too, throwing her shoulder into mine. “Not bullshit. Real shit.”
“How do you have language?” My voice broke on the last syllable. My chest tightened. How could she have the language? She was the same age as me, and I deserved it more. I don’t know why, but I felt certain that I did. I yanked my braid out of the back of my shirt and let it fall over my shoulder. Some kind of proof, I suppose.
She pushed her face into mine, and for the first time I didn’t think about kissing her. I didn’t notice then, but would recall later, that she had cut bangs into her hair t
hat day, that they fell a little lower on the left side and she had to brush them out of her eye.
“Minerva. Minerva has the language and us poor guys are stuck with her so we learn.” She used her fingers to put air quotes around poor guys. Then she used those same fingers to push me in my chest.
I had to turn away. I had to walk out towards the perimeter of the clearing, into the darkness of branches and shadow. Because I wasn’t sure if I was going to cry or scream, and I didn’t want her to witness either.
“Hey, Frenchie, don’t go far there. We need to get some rest now. We’re heading out at first light.” Miig called me back to the fire. I hunkered down into my sleeping spot as soon as we finished our meal, before even the first stars ripped through the black.
Nishin. Nishin. Nishin.
I turned the word over in my throat like a stone; a prayer I couldn’t add breath to, a world I wasn’t willing to release. It made my lungs feel heavy, my heart grow light, until the juxtaposition of the two phased into sleep.
I couldn’t yell, had no voice to make noise with. All I could do was watch and shake my head from the tree while down below on the overgrown lawn Mitch waved up at me all happy and carefree. Behind him six Recruiters crept forward in a semicircle, trapping my brother between them and the dense trees in which I was hiding. I pleaded with him with my eyes. I had to hold on to the trunk with everything I had; I knew that if I didn’t I’d fall and Mitch would be angry. I tried to lift one hand, just one hand so I could point to the Recruiters, now barely six feet away, but as soon as I loosened a finger I started to slide and Mitch’s face grew dark. I had to. I just had to. I couldn’t let them take him again.
I pulled my left hand free and started pointing like crazy. Mitch was upset, and he called to me. “No, Frenchie! Hold on, for God’s sake. Hold on, Frenchie! You hear me?”
“French. Frenchie.” Someone shook me awake with the toe of their boot. “Get up, we gotta go now.”
I woke up sweating, Zheegwon standing over me, his brother, Tree, slightly behind him. They’d hit a growth spurt this past summer. It made their almost consistent silence a little more intimidating. My sleeping bag was wedged between my legs in a sweaty twist of polyester and anxiety.
“Yeah, okay.” I wiped the sweat from my eyes and sat up. Kids were already shouldering their packs. Miig was pouring water on the pit. I took a piss in the bushes and rolled up my gear fast.
“Let’s go. We need to make ground today.” Miig’s eyes were squinty, and we moved faster than our usual pace. Minerva and little RiRi were relieved of their baggage to give them a bit of an advantage so they could keep up. A seven-year-old and a thousand-year-old need as much of an advantage as they can get, I suppose.
We had walked for almost an hour before I felt the last fingers of the dream loosen from my lower back. The sun was warm this morning even as we edged further north and further into the season.
“It means good.”
It was Rose. She’d caught up to me, even with the added weight of RiRi’s roll attached to her own with a fraying bungee cord.
I looked at her, a question in my eyes.
“Nishin. It means good.”
I kept my eyes on the trail ahead. I didn’t mean to, but I said it anyway. “So?”
“Sooooo,” she said. “If you want to know what Minerva tells us, I’ll share.”
I took three strides before I could answer. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
She punched my arm. I couldn’t help but smile. I wanted to say her name, to feel it rumble past my teeth.
“Yeah, Rose. That sounds nishin.”
HAUNTED IN THE BUSH
For a week I’d had trouble sleeping. I wanted to see Mitch and my parents when I closed my eyes, but not in the way they had been coming to me as of late: Mom showing up in my tent with her mouth sewn shut and her left arm missing; Dad sitting by the fire drinking out of a Mason jar, then jumping into the flames when I got close enough to smell the moose hide of his mitts. I spent a lot of time with RiRi, and she took full advantage of my resistance to sleep.
“Where did you walk from?”
“The outer city.”
“Did the Recruiters chase you?”
“They would have. My brother stopped them.”
“Did your brother get taken?”
“Yeah, Ri. He got taken.”
“What did he look like?”
“He seemed really big, but I don’t think he was. I think maybe he was just always bigger than me. He had eyes that were blue sometimes but sometimes looked grey. And his hair was almost black. His teeth were crooked so that the front ones looked like they were holding hands.”
It was painful, but I didn’t really mind. The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered, like the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi’s tent as she drifted off.
I woke up with stiff muscles and frozen toes on her tarp one morning, her small form huddled under layers, cheeks pink with warmth and rest. I must have fallen asleep in the middle of talking the night before. I could see my breath and hear the near constant rain pattering on the vinyl walls. A slow, steady drizzle. That’s the best we could hope for these days. Miig couldn’t explain the science of it, but ever since the North started melting there were more rains.
I shook the damp out of my legs and laced my boots back on, wrapping the tops in strips of fabric that tore as I knotted them. Almost time to replace them. Thank God I was done with the last growth spurt. I’d ended up having to wear flip-flops for weeks; they were the only thing that fit until we scavenged a forgotten fishing lodge and found the boots I wore now.
Outside, Wab and Chi-Boy were already packing up her tent. She moved away from him when I came out, and he shuffled off to fold up his own tent, leaving her to wind the rope and store her pegs. Something about their movements, choppy and stilted, made me feel awkward. I tried to fill the space with words.
“Good morning. Uh, hey, Wab, start breakfast yet?”
“Twins are on meal duty. They’re Homesteaders.”
“Oh right. I forgot it was hunting day. Yippee, more squirrel and mushroom stew.”
She didn’t answer. Instead she gave me a wry look, then started braiding up her hair as she watched Chi-Boy work.
“Not that I don’t like your stew, it’s just …”
Thankfully, I was interrupted when Slopper farted loud and long from his tent. We couldn’t help but laugh.
“Christ! Sounds like that one ripped a hole in the ground,” one of the twins shouted from the main latrine behind a dense thicket. Chuckles could be heard from Miig’s and Minerva’s tents.
“Gross.” Ri was up.
With that introduction to the new day, the camp came to life, one by one: brushing their teeth with brushes worn to stiff nubs, beating the wet out of clothes by slapping them against trunks, and running tight circles around the perimeter to warm up.
We sat in a quiet circle, packing our gear and waiting for food. The Hunters strapped on the wristwatches we shared. Miig didn’t need one; he kept a pocket watch in his jeans. It was important for Hunters to keep time, so we could keep track of each other and the day.
“We never used to need these things,” Miig commented as we wound the mechanisms and checked they were synchronized. “But no one has the skill of telling time by the sky here. Maybe one day we’ll run into someone who does. Then we won’t have to rely on these things no more.”
The twins opened a few tins of condensed milk, handing the empty cans to Minerva, who rinsed them out in a puddle. She smiled while she cleaned the lids and pulled them off, stashing them in the leather cross-body bag she wore every day. Who
knew what she was up to. Minerva collected odd things. We didn’t even question it anymore. Miig crushed the tins as small as they could go so we could bury them along with our other minimal garbage by the latrine.
After a hasty breakfast of mush, the Hunters were off, eager to take advantage of the halt in the rain and the appearance of sliced sunlight through the striated clouds.
“It is often necessary to break up a larger group to achieve a goal, especially since a lone shadow can get into more spots without notice than a larger group.” We were a fifty-minute hike from the camp.
“I want you all to get used to the idea of operating alone.” Miig was crouched down in the middle of our huddle, checking the ground for fresh prints. “There’re signs of deer in this area, maybe something bigger. If we work separately but together we should bring back a nice buck.”
“Woohoo!” Slopper pumped his fist in the air, being a huge fan of fresh deer meat.
“But only,” continued Miig, looking at the excited boy, “if we can stay quiet and focused.”
Slopper lowered his fist and shuffled his feet.
Miig stood, put his hands on his lower back, and stretched. “We are going to each go our separate ways. So make sure you keep track of which direction you walk. Cross twigs on the paths when you change directions to find your way back without tipping off potential predators. And have your weapons ready.”
Chi-Boy and Wab were carrying bows. Slopper, not having graduated to full Hunter status, carried a sharpened stick. Miig had his .45, and I had the rifle slung over my shoulder. Chi-Boy used to carry the rifle, but he and Wab had been spending time relearning bow hunting, so it fell to me now.
“Bows are sustainable. Eventually we won’t be able to get more bullets, and at least I can make arrows,” he’d explained. I think they just liked having this thing they shared in common, never mind all the hours it provided them alone to practice.
“Everyone goes a different way. Keep a steady but mindful pace, the same speed we keep on the trail when we move camp. An hour’s walk, no more, then you find a lookout and wait.” Miig reloaded his handgun and tucked it back in his waistband. With his long raincoat with the popped-up collar and the .45 in his wide leather belt, he looked like an old-timey gunslinger. “We wait for two hours, then make your way back here. If there’s a problem, you all know the alarm. Chi-Boy?”
The Marrow Thieves Page 4