Wandering Through the Canadian Wilderness

Last week: false spring in Leelanau in November

Cinnamon! She opened the little glass jar of powder, held it to her nose, and breathed in the deep, almost ecclesiastical perfume. She was suddenly in her father’s house, in the kitchen, following the old cook around while she worked, sitting on the counter by the sink licking a spatula thinly covered in gingerbread batter. She remembered flour sifted into a wide ceramic bowl in perfect peaks, salt and sugar denting the summit, and finally a tiny spoonful of cinnamon dropped in, a small thrill among the whiteness. 

- Gil Adamson, The Outlander

A reader is many chapters into The Outlander before learning Mary’s name, long after learning — though all this not immediately revealed, either — that she has killed her husband, lost an infant, and is being tracked through forests and over mountains by her husband’s twin brothers. Functionally illiterate but raised in a genteel household with servants, Mary could not have found life easy in her husband’s dark, windowless, isolated log cabin, far off in the Canadian wilderness, away from everything she had ever known. But her grandmother’s object was achieved by the marriage of the young, motherless girl to an older man: the girl was spared the horrors of "spinsterhood."

With a well-worn, familiar Bible but no money and no change of clothes, Mary is running away, seeking to cross a river by ferry, pursued by a pair of red-headed identical twins when first we meet her. She is wearing an oddly put-together costume of black supposed to serve as mourning. Only now that I am halfway through the book, after chapters of the protagonist's stumbling through snowy woods and almost dying of starvation, has she find refuge with a widowed minister in a mining camp. She has a real bed to sleep in again at last.

It looked like March last week, after an early, January-type storm

Along the way, however, she had already been rescued three times, first by an old lady famous for taking in needy strays. When "the widow," as Mary is simply called in the early chapters, flees the old lady’s house, she makes off with a horse, an elaborate pipe, and enough good tobacco to last a while.

New snow a week later, a new storm and new snow

Her second rescuer in the mountains is called by authorities the Ridgerunner. The Ridgerunner is a man who lives by his wits and by stealing food and whatever else he needed from Forest Service cabins. Captured, tried, and acquitted once in a court of law, he returned to his old life and tells Mary with a laugh, “They probably think I’m dead by now.” With William, she discovers laughter and passion, but the Ridgerunner has been alone too long to take her on as a permanent companion, and one day he simply vanishes, taking all his gear with him. The widow is once more on her own.

The third person (second man) who comes to her assistance is Henry, a Crow Indian, and it is Henry who delivers her to the Reverend. Henry’s wife warns Mary that the Reverend Bonnycastle is the only man in the mining camp she should trust, and Mary finds the minister's character to be everything promised. But the red-haired twins have hired a tracker and are close on her heels. 

-- What will happen next? I was happy to reach the pleasant, cozy cinnamon-in-kitchen interlude on Sunday morning at home while enjoying my first cup of coffee with delicious cinnamon bread baked by a friend. Outside a new blizzard raged. We would not be taking to the road as planned....

The calm after earlier wild gusting and blowing

Early chapters of The Outlander, as I’ve indicated, were all set outdoors, and the author’s attention to sensual detail is beautiful and vivid on every page.

She left her belongings and wandered aimlessly. Spider webs brushed her face and she did not wipe them away but let spiders climb to her and ride a while and drop away. The sun came down in beams and shafts, and once, when she looked up, she saw the moon hung high and pale in the blue morning. Tricky thing, pretending to be gone when it wasn’t. She was reduced to an idiot child lost in the woods. It was with an idiot’s glee, then, that she came across the tracks of her horse, and bent to see the deep, scored prints where the animal had run and dodged and dodged again. Other horses had run with it and diverged through the trees, hounded by dogs. Not dogs, she reminded herself. Many wolves, harrying the horses.  

The widow followed the tracks and came across a carcass. It was a big mule deer. The body lay with its hooves toward her. From ten yards away she could see blood pooling in paw prints in the mud, the throat and belly torn away, intestines dragged over the ground. One leg askew.

Hungry wolves want that deer meat, but so does the hungry young woman alone on the mountain!

When a friend and I discussed Moon of the Crusted Snow the other day, she expressed disappointment that the story was so short on detail and left so much to the imagination. I had rather appreciated the author’s spare, light touch, but I understood what my friend was saying, especially when she told me she wanted to know, “What were the women doing?” Ah, yes, good question! The first scene in the Rice novel shows us an Anishnaabe hunter who tracks, kills, and butchers his moose, and he has learned from his father how to tan hides, but we do not see how women transform hides into clothing or harvest rice together or do any of the work that would have been so crucial to survival after the power grid goes dark. Their contributions are referred to only in passing. 

In The Outlander (I’m not sure yet that the title refers to the protagonist; that remains to be seen), we see everything that the woman does. She is the character in focus, and as the year is 1903 and she is fleeing alone on foot through mountain wilderness, survival is of paramount importance in this novel, as well. But “the widow” has no survival skills and would have been dead several times over were it not for the rescuers she meets along her way, so while there is much detail given of her travails and much of the beautiful country she passes through, Mary is hardly a model for ancient knowledge, and this lone white woman is also very much without community.

I enjoyed Moon of the Crusted Snow — devoured it! — and am also fascinated by the Gil Adamson’s Canadian story, The Outlander. I think of how Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River was compared by many reviewers to Huckleberry Finn, Campbell offering a female version of running away downriver. 

Frozen wild grapes

What my friend wants, though, is something different from all of these books, if I have her criticisms right (and maybe she will tell me if I don’t): She wants a story of Anishnaabe post-apocalyptic survival that stresses community aspects and particularly the contributions made by women in the group. What kinds of traditional knowledge of nature would be crucial if the lights went out and there were no more grocery stores? How would clothing be replaced, food prepared, sicknesses treated? Knowing how these aspects of life were carried on in the traditional past would be part of survival into a future if one truly had to live off the land. 

If a novel telling such a story were to come out of Peshawbestown, I would read it eagerly! For today, I'm content to be snowed in again, preparing for eventual departure in leisurely fashion. The Artist and I needed a day of rest before beginning our travels.

Book Review: MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW

Snow was falling in Northport on Thursday afternoon, sometimes blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street, with the temperature hovering right around the freezing mark when one of my customers arrived to pick up her special order. The book she had ordered sounded so intriguing that I’d ordered a second copy, and later that afternoon I began reading. 

The central character, Evan Whitesky, up in northern Ontario, is on the trail of a moose.

He had been out since early morning and had been tracking this particular bull since around noon. The fall hunt was drawing to a close, and he still wanted to put more food away. Food from the South was expensive and never so good, or as satisfying, as the meat he could bring in himself.  

- Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

Evan takes pride in providing for his partner and their two young children. An accomplished hunter and fisherman, he has put away enough protein for the winter to have plenty to share with his parents, and when Evan joins his father in cleaning a hide, the two men envision future moccasins. The Whitesky family is better prepared than some others on the reserve for life without hydro power.

A missing satellite signal brings the first hardship: no morning television for the children and no Internet signal for their elders. Electric power lasts a little longer before it too goes out, but people on the remote, isolated reserve have experienced power outages before and know how to cope until the electricity comes back on. They remind each other that the old ones in times past lived without electric lights and television. When there is no signal for their cell phones, some still have landlines — until these, too, fall dead.

It is the beginning of winter, so the Council needs to plan for the future as well as for the immediate situation. Without regular deliveries of fuel and food from the South, they have enough diesel to run a generator until late February, if everyone cooperates in conserving energy, and with foresight they have stockpiled a cache of canned foods for just this sort of emergency, but surviving the immediate emergency is only the first step, and the future is unclear.

Three more cold nights passed. The generator power would only last so long. The chief called another emergency meeting at the band office…. There was still no communication with anyone in the outside world.

The world of the novel is circumscribed from the outset. Its remote backstory is one of displacement — from the Great Lakes region to the south, the people had been forced to the harsher north — the nearer backstory one of dependence on regular deliveries of groceries and fuel. But that was then, and this is now, and the demands of now throw the people back on traditional ways of life and traditional values that some have been practicing all along and others need to learn.

Peshawbestown dancers in Northport

Evan has been going to school, informally, with his elders: learning the people’s language, he and Nicole are teaching it to their children, and, somewhat awkwardly, using the native words he knows interspersed with English, he speaks traditional prayers on the appropriate occasions. His parents’ knowledge of old ways is augmented by stories and lessons given him by the band’s oldest member, a woman in her late eighties. He hunts and shares with those in need, and he is learning to pray.

Aileen brought the flickering orange light under the carefully piled sage in the shell, and the medicine caught fire. She let it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Thick grey smoke billowed from the shell….

One-way “contact” with the outside world comes only three times in the novel, in quietly escalating pitch. First, a homecoming: Two young members of the band arrive on snowmobiles, having fled the chaos of the town below, which is also without power or grid infrastructure and where people are panicking and growing violent. Next, an intruder: A large, dangerous-looking white man, Justin Scott, has followed the trail of the returning young men and requests asylum, promising to pull his weight on the hunt. Finally, a while later, four more white refugees turn up and are taken in, nominally by the band, more immediately by Scott. What will the presence of these outsiders, especially the frightening and mysterious Scott, mean in this tight-knit community?

Words and phrases of Anishinaabemowin are a natural fit in Rice’s characters’ speech and are generally translated immediately, so a reader unfamiliar with the language can understand and perhaps learn a little along the way. Dreams are handled naturally, as well, either told by one dreamer to another character or presented without transition but also without confusion. When the legendary windigo enters the story, it does so naturally and quietly at first, without undue drama and literary special effects, so that we are gradually prepared for its full-blown presence.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, like Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, imagines a world suddenly bereft of electricity, electronic and digital devices, and energy systems we take for granted in our daily lives, but the imagined worlds of the two novels are very different. In the Mandel novel, we roam cities and countryside with groups of wandering Shakespearean players, a “family” brought together by interest and necessity rather than inheritance, and in the end the world as we know it is restored. The people in Rice’s world, many of them related to each other by blood, remain in place. We follow their lives in that place through the first hard winter and leave them in the spring following their second winter, the latter — and the longer-term future — left to our imaginations. 

Both novels, you might say, are stories of post-apocalyptic survival, but Rice’s character Aileen dismisses the apocalyptic notion. She has heard of the notion from young people but puts no credence in it.

“Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders, anyway. 

Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. 

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.” 

We’ve always survived, and we always will, Aileen tells Evan. 

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States presents the past of the North American continent from a perspective not taught in schools with curricula set in place by whites, and Moon of the Crusted Snow presents a possible future from a non-white point of view — one possible non-white point of view, of course. That Rice’s compelling story is told in beautiful language with sympathetic characters in a setting not difficult to imagine as the first real snow blows into northern Michigan seared it into my brain, and I recommend it for your winter reading, wherever you live and whatever your ethnic background or connection to the virtual world.

Our reading world is enriched as more voices come to be heard in fiction from different cultural, ethnic, and historical perspectives.