Moon of the Turning Leaves
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Synopsis
In this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by Evan Whitesky ventures into unknown and dangerous territory to find a new home for their close-knit Northern Ontario Indigenous community more than a decade after a world-ending blackout.
For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.
Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the “land where the birch trees grow by the big water” in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature.
But it isn’t just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence.
Release date: February 27, 2024
Publisher: HarperCollins
Print pages: 224
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Moon of the Turning Leaves
Waubgeshig Rice
PROLOGUE
a guttural howl tore through the lodge and breached the birchbark walls. The younger women caught their breath. The air inside the small domed structure grew thicker with each measured exhalation flowing from the young woman sitting upright against a pile of blankets draped with soft rabbit fur, her protruding belly commanding the attention of the midwives, her cousins, and her aunts. The fire burning in the middle of the birthing lodge painted her young, crumpled face a flickering orange. Her partner, the only man inside, nervously swayed on the soles of his feet while his mother and grandmother watched under concerned brows.
A large pot of water and cedar boughs boiled on the blackened grill in the centre of the lodge, steam and embers and the medicinal aroma of the tincture floating up and through the hole in the bark ceiling above. The birthing woman’s long, thick black braids hung down the front of the tattered light-blue button-up shirt covering everything but her belly, rising and falling with her breath as she recovered from the push. The young man knelt low beside her, rubbing her back and holding her hand while whispering assurances into her ear.
Two midwives—an elder and a younger apprentice—knelt before her, watching for the black hair of the child’s crown to emerge. The older woman squinted to peer through scratched glasses, while the other one softly commanded the delivering woman—her younger cousin—to prepare to push. She drew a long, energizing breath through her nostrils, and her cheeks ballooned as she exhaled through pursed lips. Her breathing quickened, tightening the space around the ten people huddling closer to fulfill this birthing rite.
The young man’s mother stepped forward from her perch beside the fire to deliver him a hand drum. She only nodded at him, to avoid betraying the anxiety that was peaking deep within her long into this night of labour. She’d delivered her son nearly two decades earlier in a loud, bright, white room in a city hospital hundreds of kilometres to the south. The moment replayed in her mind as they entered this birthing lodge to receive her grandchild, and she wondered if that hospital still stood.
The expectant father stood, taller than all the women gathered, and struck the drum four times. His voice cracked as he attempted the opening notes of the welcoming song, and he cleared his throat loudly to sync his melody with the beat. The shadow of his head bobbed against the tied boughs and birchbark that made up the interior wall of the birthing lodge, built high enough for the young man to stand comfortably. The skeletal saplings that ran up each wall were buried deep into the ground and woven together tightly to stand year-round. The beating rhythm of the drum invoked a count of the babies born in this ceremonial space in the decade since they tied it together: eight in total, but only five who survived beyond birth and infancy.
The younger midwife spoke softly to the expectant mother, low enough for only them and the elder midwife to hear. The young woman tightened her lips, her nostrils flaring with each heavy breath. Two of her cousins brought two plastic tubs of water closer. The elder midwife grabbed a pinch of cedar from a wooden bowl near the firepit and threw it onto the flames. The tiny green leaves popped and crackled, pumping a sharp evergreen aroma into the air.
The young woman
pressed her chin to her chest to push again. Sweat rolled from her creased brow and down her ruddy cheeks. She cried out in another burst of pain and her partner sped up his drumming, outpacing the tempo of his own voice. His mother and grandmother bounced to the beat in front of the fire, while the shadows on the wooden walls around them danced.
The midwife asked her cousin for another big push. Her shriek stilled the shadows and caused her partner’s song to falter for a moment. The baby’s head emerged, its black hair glistening in the orange light of the fire. Face down, the child made no noise. The mother shouted and pushed again, but the baby remained in place, silent. The pause, although infinitesimal, was enough to panic them all. The elder midwife stepped forward swiftly to kneel beside the other.
“Wiikbinaa-daa,” urged the elder, repeating again, “Let’s pull!” She wrapped her thin fingers around the infant’s slippery head, cradling the chin and the back of its skull. The apprentice placed her hands atop the midwife’s. The drumbeat stopped in the sudden severity of the moment.
They remained silent while they pulled. The young mother threw her head back in one last immense inhalation, followed by a searing wail. In that instant, the baby’s shoulder came free, and in the midwives’ careful grip, the arms, torso, and legs slid out behind it. The elder midwife fluently pulled the glistening blood-streaked body into her elbow and scooped mucus from the baby girl’s mouth as she cradled her. A small but piercing first cry echoed through the lodge.
The new parents, exhausted, cried together in a relieved half embrace. By the fire, the new grandmother and great-grandmother beamed through tear-streaked cheeks. The younger midwife wiped down her cousin’s baby with a soft, white rabbit pelt, which turned pink with each pass across her blotchy skin. Still in the elder’s arms, the baby cried louder as her young lungs quickly expanded.
The girl was washed first in the tub of lukewarm sterilized water. Cedar water was poured in from the pot that simmered on the grill into the second tub, creating a translucent medicinal blend. The elder midwife dipped her hand into the warm essence and scooped it onto the newborn’s skin. The faint-green liquid streaked across her torso and beaded in the chubby creases of her arms and legs, the baby’s skin gaining colour with each beat of her young heart. The baby’s mother watched the ceremonial cleansing while sipping from a copper cup of water.
After the baby’s skin and scalp were dried with a faded and tattered blue towel, the young midwife carried her over to the eager and anxious new parents. She lowered the child onto her mother’s bare chest. As the baby nestled, the lodge roused in whoops of joy and celebration. The parents thanked their daughter for coming
to them, and giggled together as they gazed in awe upon the new life they’d created, delicate yet full of wonder.
The young father looked from his daughter up to his mother by the fire. Her long dark hair hung loosely, framing her slender face. She smiled and nodded to let him know it was time. The new mother kissed the top of the baby’s head one more time, cupped her little frame into both hands, and raised the child in the direction of her grandmother. She took her granddaughter into her bare arms and carefully caressed the girl’s torso with her callused fingertips before resting her weathered palm upon it, trying to feel the first beats of her heart outside of her mother. She looked to her daughter-in-law and smiled again before clearing her throat to commence the naming ceremony.
“Boozhoo,” her voice punctuated the convivial ambience hanging in the lodge. “Niimkiikwe ndizhnikaaz, mkwa ndodem. Bjiinak ngii-ooshenh’,” she said, introducing herself as a new grandmother in Anishinaabemowin, the traditional language of their people. The rest acknowledged her with a celebratory holler, and she switched to English to tell the story of the girl’s name so everyone could understand.
She told a story of a dream of a beam of light coming down from the sky—but it was only a glimpse. She told how the same dream came twice more in the following weeks, longer each time. In the vision, it appeared to be early fall, when the leaves have just begun to change. But the land she was seeing didn’t look like their current home.
As she walked through the bush, the trees were tall around her, she told them. Large pines were on her right. Maples and oaks stood scattered throughout. But mostly she remembered the white birch trees, leaves just starting to turn. She felt a warm breeze coming from behind her, and she heard waves but couldn’t see any water.
Then the light came again, the beam from above, descending slowly and touching down in the bush ahead. She couldn’t tell how far away she was from where the light met the ground, but she felt like it wanted her to follow it. She didn’t hear voices in her dream, she told the onlookers, but the light in the bush seemed to be calling to her.
Then, she told them, she stepped over a small hill into the middle of a clearing, where the gleam shone down, and she saw a tiny flower alone in the grass. “It had wrinkled purple petals with yellow and white in the middle,” she described. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flower like it. Not around here, anyway. I tried to look up again to where the light was coming from, but that’s when I woke up."
The new mother’s face swelled with emotion as she stifled a quick sob and smiled, teary eyes sparkling in the glow of the fire.
“I didn’t have to think about that dream anymore,” the grandmother said, concluding her story. “That flower I saw is this baby’s name. Like that flower, this child is special. She’s beautiful. She is a light that will help lead the way out of this darkness. Her name is Waawaaskone. A flower, in the language of our people.”
“Waawaaskone,” repeated the new parents. Sharp pops rang out as more cedar and tobacco were tossed on the fire.
In the sacred safety of the birth space, all stood but the new mother. The grandmother extended the baby’s small, plump body outwards. She turned to face the opening to the lodge, which pointed east. The baby slept soundly now, still wrapped in the faded blue towel. Her grandmother’s strong bare arms elevated her to eye level, presenting her proudly to the direction where the day begins.
“Waawaaskone,” she proclaimed again.
“Waawaaskone,” the rest repeated.
The grandmother pivoted to the remaining three directions, declaring the girl’s name. The crowd followed her movements and voice, repeating the name for all of creation to hear. The chorus faded into the bark walls and the ground below, and she lifted the baby skyward to speak her name one last time, followed by the echo of the helpers. The ceremony was complete.
ONE
water lapped against the low hull of the boat, its rhythm synchronized with the pulls on the float line as the small white plastic pods that kept the net afloat knocked against the shiny metal of the vessel. Hand over hand, fifteen-year-old Nangohns yanked the white nylon net over the gunwale trim, pulling in the green and grey fish that flopped onto the curved deck. The rippling water around the small boat bounced jewels of light back up towards the sky. Nangohns hunched her long torso over to survey the morning’s haul. Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel. She looked from her deeply tanned hands to the bin on the floor of the boat and estimated she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped for a few more fish.
Two days had passed since Waawaaskone was born, and Nangohns had proudly taken on the responsibility of harvesting the food for the feast to celebrate her niece’s arrival. On short notice, she had decided that netting fish in the lake was the best option for a quick return. But it had only been a couple of weeks since the last netting, and she worried the lake’s stock was running low. A lot of the fish caught so far this season had seemed undergrown, and she’d heard similar complaints from other fishers.
The tin thirteen-footer she’d rowed out in rocked as she hauled in the net, but she kept her hips loose to prevent it from tipping. Since the age of five, Nangohns had practically lived on this lake, splashing along the shore with her brother, Maiingan, and other kids, rowing out to other inlets to explore, and walking along the ice and cutting holes to fish in the winter. The lake lay just steps from their settlement, which they called Shki-dnakiiwin, or new village. It was wide and deep, and teeming with fish when they first arrived, and her people called it simply Zaag’igan, the word for “lake” in their language. From the middle, rocky and sandy shores were visible in every direction, illuminated by the sun, which had cleared the treeline in the east.
Nangohns looked north, back at the settlement. When she and her family had made this land their new home, a half day’s walk from the crumbling homes and buildings of the old reserve, they had laid out their new community in a loose circle. The open space in the middle was kept clear for ceremonies, celebrations, and the play of children. Over the water, Nangohns could hear the chatter of little ones in the distance as the community awoke just beyond the shore. The lodges lining that central space were inhabited by the five extended families who first came to Shki-dnakiiwin, led by Nangohns’s father, Evan Whitesky. She could see her own family’s pair of domed dwellings, made of a frame of tied saplings and covered in canvas and plastic tarps, lying closest to the shore, on the outskirts of a permanent camp of ten more wooden lodges ranged around the central gathering hub.
The ceremonial lodge was the largest structure, standing about a metre taller than the other buildings, and easily within Nangohns’s line of sight from her vantage out on the lake. Like most other buildings in this community, it was shaped into a dome, stretched out on the ground like an elongated oval. Walter, the eldest survivor, had instructed Evan and the other younger adults to build it this way, in the manner of the old medicine lodges of the Anishinaabek.
To Nangohns, Shki-dnakiiwin was physical evidence that separated the time before—what they called Jibwaa—from the world she knew now and that made up most of her memories. When her parents and their people were building this village, they erected an
extra two dwellings on the periphery, in case any holdouts hoping for the lights to come back on at the old reserve—named Gaawaandagoong for the abundant white spruce trees there—would eventually turn up, needing shelter. Like her uncle Chuck, her mother’s cousin, who at first refused to live in the bush. And Dave, the elder Walter’s nephew, who remained in the community garage at the old site for as long as he could, half believing the machinery there, the power transformers and trucks, would one day work again. Nangohns remembered those two, among a handful of others, trudging through the snow, cheeks gaunt, eyes bloodshot, to join them after most of the holdouts had died off.
The final few floats that buoyed the net thudded against the gunwale as Nangohns brought in the last of it. Five more fish, all notably smaller than usual at this point in the season. There were thirteen altogether in the heavy green bin. A few twitched in their final nervous throes of life, but most had died shortly after being caught in the white weaves of the net, unable to move and push water through their gills.
Nangohns sighed and looked back to the shore. Adults were beginning to bustle in the central glade and along the shore, some collecting firewood, others hauling water in buckets. Most of the plastic tarps and canvas coverings of the dwellings were being readjusted or removed, in preparation for the coming summer heat. Seeing people out now for daily tasks turned her attention back to the head count for tonight’s feast. After everyone ate, the rest of the morning’s catch would likely last her family a week at most.
A loon flapped its wings low to the water as it passed through her line of sight. She grabbed the handles of the long, light aluminum oars, the oarlocks creaking and rattling as she settled into place to row homeward. As she pumped her right hand to slice the oar’s blade through the water and point the bow to the shore, the outlines of the muscles in her arms stretched and constricted in a steady tempo as she paddled herself smoothly to land.
The bow came to a stop on the muddy shore, scraping loudly as the hull dug into the rocks below. With the boat firmly planted among the lush green reeds of the shoreline, Nangohns stood, turned, and climbed up onto the seat in front of her and made her way to the front. The metal benches had captured the heat of the morning sun and warmed the bare soles of her feet. She leapt over the side and splashed into the shallow cold water, which came up to her calves. The summer solstice was approaching, but the lake would remain fairly chilly until the peak of the summer heat. Nangohns walked around to the bow and began to tug the boat out of the water and up around
to the bow and began to tug the boat out of the water and up onto the shore.
“Need help?” a familiar voice murmured from behind. She turned to see her father walking down the grassy slope to the shore. Evan Whitesky’s hair was freshly tied into a braid, and the sun reflected off the sheen of his black crown. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare coming off the water.
“Kaawiin,” replied Nangohns. “It’s not that heavy this morning, sorry to say.”
She pulled the boat up onto the grass and let it sit. Evan came to her side and they peered down into the bin of fish, shoulder to shoulder.
“If I caught those with a hook I woulda thrown ’em back,” said Nangohns. “But they got caught in the net, so most were already dead.”
“We’ll make use of ’em,” Evan said, reassuringly.
“Might be time to find better fishing spots,” she suggested after a short pause.
“Let’s just clean these for now,” her father replied, pulling the bin of fish out of the tin boat and turning to walk back up the slope. Nangohns followed, carrying the other, empty bin and the tattered nylon net.
They ambled up from the shore and onto a plateau where their family’s two domed lodges stood, each entrance facing a large central firepit. The larger structure to the west was draped in green canvas tarps, faded by sunlight but mostly intact. A slightly smaller lodge was covered in a shiny, crinkled blue plastic tarp that rustled with any movement. The green house stood tall enough for full-grown adults to walk around upright inside with sufficient headspace. The blue dwelling stood lower, primarily a sleeping space, and a separate home for Nangohns’s brother, Maiingan, and his partner, Pichi, and now their newborn, Waawaaskone.
Evan carefully placed the haul of fish on the grass in front of the firepit. Nangohns tossed the big plastic bin and white net aside as they each took a seat on one of the stools arranged around the pit. The morning sun climbed higher and the soft humidity from the lake began to bead on their sun-darkened foreheads and bare shoulders.
“Aapiish Ngashi?” Nangohns asked, not seeing her mother around.
“She went out to the garden earlier to get some stuff to cook with these giigoonyik. Then I think she was gonna go see your aunties for a little visit,” Evan said. “I think a bunch of them are gonna come by. They all wanna see your little shimis.”
“Where’s the rest of them, then?” asked Nangohns.
“Inside sleeping
still. Still pretty tired from it all.”
She wanted to see the baby girl again, but didn’t want to disturb the new parents.
They sat in the comfortable late-spring stillness. The sun climbed higher, accentuating their arid surroundings after several days without rain. The flies would descend upon them soon, to feast on bare arms and legs, and they could only cover them up with long sleeves and pants or swat them away until the woodsmoke from the evening fires provided a shield.
Evan set to cleaning the fish, and Nangohns to mending the net, which they both agreed could use some work. She grabbed a handful of the fine mesh from the bin and pulled it up to eye level. The nylon threads keeping the net together were still strong enough to trap with, but, scanning it up and down, she noticed some dire holes. It was their last net of this kind.
“Hide ties won’t work for a net,” Evan reminded her. “They’ll just soak and get loose and fall off. Maybe some spruce roots would work.”
Within her short lifetime, they would have been able to buy new nets hewn from thin but sturdy nylon strands from the people in the towns and cities to the south. Food and tools would come to them by air. In the winter, provisions came up on trucks that rolled along the ice.
But her father rarely indulged her questions about things like airplanes, trucks, and satellites, and Nangohns had mostly given up asking. The words and markings on their older tools and clothing—the things they hadn’t made themselves—had become increasingly intangible to her. Now it seemed that almost everything that had come from Zhaawnong—from the south, that other world, down there—was fading away and falling apart.
She had been three when the power went out, and only five when her father had led their people off the old rez and into the bush. But Nangohns held on to fading memories of bright lights and soft furniture and rumbling cars and trucks that once took them from place to place.
“Maybe I can take down some of the net on the side and use that to patch some of these holes,” she suggested.
Evan grunted in the affirmative, arranging buckets and preparing to clean the fish. He picked up one of the wooden logs that served as a stool next to the firepit and placed it beside another smaller one. On top of that log sat his long, curved fixed-blade cleaning knife in its original leather holster. Like the net, it was a manufactured tool that could no longer be traded for, and thus was wielded with great care, meticulously cleaned and sharpened, and never overused.
Nangohns waited for something from her father beyond the gruff acknowledgement. ...
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