Chi-Boy threw his head back and let out a screech that curved up into a tail before fading. An eagle.
“Okay?”
We all nodded then turned and pushed off into the bush like swimmers from the block.
I walked southeast, careful to pace my steps so that I was moving neither too fast nor too slow to keep the group synchronicity that would make it easier to track anyone who didn’t return on time. Just in case. Our lives were a series of actions twinned with “just in case” reactions.
The ground was cold and soggy. I could feel it through my boots. The earth barely had a chance to absorb the rainwater before the next deluge. It hadn’t been this bad even when I was on the move with my parents and brother. Every year the world was making us more aware of change. After the cities crumbled off the coastlines, after the hurricanes and earthquakes made us fear for a solid ground to stand on, even now we were waiting for the planet to settle so we could figure out the ways in which we would be safe. But for now there was just movement, especially for us: the hunted trying to hunt.
I concentrated on my gait, marking the changes in direction, following nothing but the way my feet seemed to divine. I made up goals as I walked to pass the time: if I avoided snapping even one twig in the next five minutes, it meant I would stop ten minutes early; if I could remember the names of Mom’s three favorite books, I would rest for three minutes … Even if I did manage to stay quiet, and even if I did remember the books, I still walked on.
At fifty-nine minutes, thirty-two seconds, I stopped, pulled my lighter hunt bag and the rifle off my back, and settled into the nook made by a felled tree. I pushed up into the guts of its roots where they had been yanked out of the ground. The hole it left had filled with filthy water, but the roots were dry and tangled enough to make a comfortable seat.
I climbed up into the middle of the roots and leaned back. It was kind of soothing like that, with a dozen wooden knuckles massaging my back. I leaned my head into the mess, limbs dangling with no effort, just another set of roots protruding out of the fallen tree. I exhaled and paid attention to the way my lungs sank in, with just a little bit of rattle at the end left over from my annual bronchitis.
My mind wandered. I tried to keep it focused on my surroundings, but I was tired and so I let it run a bit off leash for lack of the energy to remain disciplined. From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we’d had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?
I thought about the sickness and the insanity that crept like bedbugs through families while they slept. What would I have done to save my parents or Mitch, given the chance? Would I have been able to trap a child, to do what, cut them into pieces? To boil them alive? I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what they did. And I didn’t really want to know if I’d be capable of doing it.
Time passed. I may have fallen asleep once or twice. The world out here was quiet, like the land was holding its breath. But if you listened, really put conscious action into listening, things began to sing. Insects with wings pirouetted somewhere above my prone head. From the hole where the tree had once held on to the earth came the sound of deep movement, maybe just the mud shifting. And a group of small birds chatted with some clipped formality in the pines on the other side of the clearing. And then there were footsteps.
I lifted my head, flexing my arm to raise the rifle into position.
Soft shuffling over by the pines. I aimed the gun, watching the trees, praying for nothing more than a deer, nothing human, really.
It was huge, like a tree had yanked itself up and was slowly moving into the clearing, a tree with bone white branches. It walked further into the grass. A moose. I’d never seen one this close before. Adrenaline made my teeth chatter.
Time is slow in that vacuum space. In this new space, I had time to aim squarely between the moose’s eyes, watching his muscles contort and his skin wrinkle as he bent to take another mouthful of grass. Then I decided against it, lowering the barrel to his chest: always go for the sure target. Miig had taught us that on one of my first hunts, and I listen to my Elders.
Just then he raised his head, so massive I wondered at the blood it must take to animate, and he saw me. He blinked a long, slow blink and faltered for only a second or two before he began chewing again. He turned a bit so that I knew he knew I was there. I swallowed hard, aiming, fingers exact and stiff. He was so frigging big. It was like he was a hundred years old, like he had watched all of this happen. Imagine being here through it all — the wars, the sickness, the earthquakes, the schools — only to come to this?
He exhaled, long and loud like the wind. This was food for a week. Hide and sinew to stitch together for tarps, blankets, ponchos. This was bone for pegs and chisels. This was me, the conquering hero, marching into camp with more meat than all of us could carry, taking the others back to field dress this gift. This was Rose looking at me with those big eyes so dark they shone burgundy in the firelight. This was my chance.
But could we travel with this meat before it rotted? No. And could we smoke and dry it? No, Miig wouldn’t set up camp for that long, especially not with a steady thread of smoke reaching above the trees, blasting a signal to anyone who might be out there. So we’d be leaving half, at least half, behind to rot.
The moose watched all this play out on my face, a dirty boy tangled in the roots of an upended tree, hiding from the world, hiding from memories of a family and days without pursuit. And he stayed perfectly still. His eyes were huge, dark globes that reflected back their surroundings. I was sure I could see myself in there, in the trees, a long-haired warrior taking aim.
I lowered the rifle. He blinked once more, then crossed his legs, one over the other as if at the start of a curtsey, then turned back into the trees.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let it come to this, not for him and not for me.
Walking back to the meeting point, I swung between peace with my decision and wrenching regret. I was empty-handed, but something in my chest was burning a little brighter. I was okay with my decision, but not okay with the consequences. I secretly hoped no one else had gotten anything so I wouldn’t be the only loser, even if it meant we went hungry for a day. I pictured RiRi’s face, sad because of an empty belly. That made me ashamed.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about RiRi. When I made it to the meeting spot, Chi-Boy and Miig were already there, each with a wild turkey strung up in the lower branches of a maple.
“Grabbed mine in the first twenty minutes. The rest must have been scared off by the shot and headed towards Chi-Boy there. He grabbed one too.” Miig was laughing, enjoying a hand-rolled smoke.
Slopper was napping, leaning against a log.
“No luck, French?”
Watching them pat each other on the back and proudly spin their turkeys, examining the carcasses for size and weight, I was back to wrenching regret.
“Nope. Nothing.”
Chi-Boy glanced at his watch. “Ten past.”
“She’ll be here.” Miig scanned the area. “She’s good.”
Miig told the story of his turkey and rolled a new smoke to replace the one he’d finished. Slopper was awake now, yanking out a few of the nicer feathers from Chi-Boy’s bird. Chi-Boy didn’t protest; he was pacing the perimeter, looking at his watch.
“Twenty-five after.”
“Boy, give her another ten and then we’ll start off in her direction.” Miig was sympathetic but short. “She’s fine. Better out here than most of us.”
We’d almost hit the ten-minute deadline when Wab silently slipped in beside us. Chi-Boy sighed, and even smiled.
But he made no movement towards her. She was empty-handed, which was weird for her, not that it bothered me. Misery loves company, I suppose.
“Everything okay?” Miig’s forehead wrinkled at her expression.
She nodded. “Let’s head back.”
Without another word, she led the way back to camp. She didn’t tell us what she’d seen out there until it slipped out a week later.
A PLAGUE OF MADNESS
In a way, I got that moose. He visited me in my dreams. I was walking along the sandy shore of Huron, the surface brown and healthy, and there on the other side, beside a weeping willow that dipped the tips of its branches into the water, stood the moose. He wasn’t watching me, but I knew he knew I was there. Another time, I was walking through the bush, my right hand outstretched against the cool brick of a building buried deep in the trees. I followed the wall straight for a mile until it turned the corner. I walked around the corner, and way down this side, which seemed to go on for another mile, was the moose, block-ing the path between the brick and a dense thicket of bush. I started walking towards him. I woke up before I reached him, fingers already anticipating the soft warmth of his flank.
It was a calmer time for us. There hadn’t been a Recruiter sighting for weeks, and we settled into a more leisurely pace. We enjoyed this new cadence, taking the time to help Chi-Boy gather sticks for arrows, playing in the clearings dotted with strangely robust flowers new to the territory. Only Wab seemed stressed.
She rushed ahead when we took our time. She was the last to fall asleep, walking the perimeter of the camp and double-checking the wire alarms. She ate little and said even less. There was no real way to figure out what was wrong; Wab was prickly on the best of days. So we stopped asking her to join our games and stopped offering her the best cuts of meat. She wouldn’t take them anyway. Her mood stayed the same for days, until one night at the fire, after Minerva and the younger kids and the twins had wondered off the bed, she asked a question: “Do you think circumstances make people turn bad? Or that people make circumstances bad to begin with?”
Miig exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Well, that’s not an easy question.”
Rose walked over from her tent, having grabbed a sweater and returned to the circle, sitting between me and Wab. Chi-Boy and I stared into the flames of the dying fire, waiting for the old man to continue. I was surprised to hear her talk after such a long silence and wanted to engage, but if anyone could address her question, it would be him.
“I read this book once, written by this Algerian fellow. Camus was his name.” He examined the heater on his smoke, packing it in and trimming the ashes by dragging it on a rock by his feet. “Anyway, in this story was all these people trapped inside their own town because the plague attacks them and they are put into quarantine.”
I’d never heard this story before. But I knew what a plague was. That’s what they were calling the dreamlessness when it started, a plague of madness.
“So these people, they start to change. Some of them, like the doctor, stay close to the same because he gives everything he’s got — his time, his expertise, his clinic — to working for the people. But I guess that’s change too, just closer to his real nature.”
“So, we change because of circumstances. But if you’re a good person, you change in a good way?” Wab sought to cut to the message right away.
“Well now, not necessarily.” He stubbed out the butt and popped the remainder in his pocket to roll into the next one. “I think it’s more like you do what you need to in order to keep yourself intact. It’s about motivation.”
“Like how we are motivated to run because of the Recruiters?” Rose jumped in. “And the Recruiters are motivated to run after us because of the schools?”
“Almost,” he answered. “We are actually both motivated by the same thing: survival.”
“But isn’t is just us that’s trying to survive? No one’s trying to kill those jerk-offs.”
“But, nevertheless, they are dying. Mostly killing themselves, mind you. And so they are motivated by the need to be able to survive. And they see that solution in us.”
Wab was on her knees now, listening so hard she was leaning towards each speaker. “So, we’re the same?”
“In a way.”
“So then I’m right. If we’re both motivated by the same thing, and they are the ones hurting people, then that’s their nature, they’re bad to begin with.”
Miig steepled his hands and paused before he asked, “What would you do to save us?”
We looked at each other, faces bright in the singular light of the fire. We were family. We were all we had. The rest was dark and unknown.
It was Chi-Boy who answered. “Anything.”
Wab spoke after him. “Everything.”
Rose reached across the space and put her hand on mine. I grabbed it and laced our fingers together.
“Exactly. We all do what we can to survive. Right now, they can chase us. And us? We can run. It may not always be this way, and who is to say what we will be capable of.”
We were quiet for so long, Miig began to stand up, pushing his hands on his thighs when Wab spoke again.
“I saw men in the woods.”
Miig sat back down. We waited.
“When we were on the hunt last week. Two of them.” She looked up at us. “And I knew one of them.”
Chi-Boy slid closer to her. “Who was it?”
She shook her hair. “Someone who wasn’t very honest. Someone from my old life.”
Chi-Boy got uncharacteristically gruff. “The one who did this?” There was anger in his voice, and he touched her chin where the scar ended.
“No.” She pulled back and stood up. “I didn’t know him very well. He was with one other.”
“Indian?” Miig asked.
She nodded, and Rose squeezed my hand a little. We were always excited at the possibility of more of us. Miig must have seen the looks on our faces, the sudden excitement, because he said, “Not every Indian is an Indian.”
We stayed there in silence until the fire died out, then made our way to the tents.
THE FOUR WINDS
We headed northwest, up towards the shallows of James Bay where the whales used to migrate before they packed up and headed down to Australia for good.
After the Indians left, the industries and businesses in and around their territories closed up too: small-time fisheries, hunting camps, tourist traps. After that, the big ones started to fall: large-scale resorts, fly-in luxury cottages, and wilderness getaways for stressed businessmen and their foreign investors. In light of the wars and the rush to adapt and survive, no one really gave a shit about tourism, gross domestic profit, or low-level jobs for rurally located folks. Though they cared enough to kick everyone out when the former employees tried to bunk down in the once-plush rooms and make use of the supplies and heat. They fenced them off, boarded them up, and some even hired security firms to walk around the perimeter and make sure no one was looking to survive on corporate-sponsored vacancy.
This is where we were now, up against the high fences sur-rounding Four Winds Resort, according to the faux-marble sign at the end of the weed-cracked driveway on the other side.
“Ten, maybe twelve feet.” Chi-Boy was eyeing the top of the fence. “Razor wire edging. Electric charge mechanism.”
“I doubt they’re still electrified. That would mean the generators still worked.” Miig sounded more hopeful than he looked. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.”
Miig put his packsack on the ground, pulled the sash off his forehead, and let his bedroll drop behind his feet. He spit into his palms and rubbed them together.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.
I saw what he meant to do when he nudged his bedroll out of the way and took a few steps back, shaking out his arms and rolling
his head on the stem of his neck.
“Shiiiiit …” Rose hissed like a recoiling snake, her hand reaching to cover RiRi’s eyes in anticipation of Miig dancing an electric jig, sizzling like a piece of frying meat.
I saw it in Chi-Boy’s face, the way he suddenly looked young; I saw it in Minerva’s eyes before they snapped shut behind wrinkles clenched like fat fists; I felt it in my own pulse — Miig was too important to lose. We couldn’t manage without him, and yet here he was, about to take a run at a potentially electrified fence so that we could be sheltered and fed for another night.
I locked my eyes on Rose, on that bowed cord of vein and muscles that curved from her earlobe down her neck to her collarbone, and took a quick step to the right and forward. Before Miig could start his run, before I could lose my nerve, I reached out and took two chain links in my fingers.
I felt the electricity enter my hand, shoot up my arm, and land like a ball of hornets in my aorta. I swear I did. But it was just adrenaline, because there were no sparks, no smell of barbecue pork, no blindness. There was just that stream of breath and blood and tension rolling from Rose’s ear down under the collar of her faded parka.
“We’re good.” I wanted it to sound more confident, bigger, with more nonchalant swagger. Instead it sounded like the squeak of a sixteen-year-old boy who had to check with the back of his left hand that he hadn’t just wet himself.
I released the links and pushed my shaking hand through my hair to give it somewhere to hide. Chi-Boy slapped me on the shoulder before he leapt onto the fence with a Pendleton blanket thrown across the back of his neck like a towel. He clambered to the top. Minerva clapped and smiled, watching him go like a tall Cree monkey, the stress smoothed away from her opened eyes.
The Marrow Thieves Page 5