Nova Scotian writer Amanda Peters has already made a name for herself with her debut novel The Berry Pickers, which won the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books' best fiction books of the year.

Now she's back with a short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which draws from her own background of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry.

Waiting for the Long Night Moon widely describes the Indigenous experience by melding traditional storytelling and spare prose. The stories highlight both trauma and resilience, from what happens when a young man returns from residential school and realizes that he cannot communicate with his parents to the nervous excitement of a young girl dancing in her very first Mawi'omi.

"The stories from Waiting for the Long Night Moon were written before, and a few during, the writing of The Berry Pickers, " Peters told CBC Books in an email. "I sometimes call them my writing training wheels."

"While they are works of fiction, there have been so many people who have planted the seeds of stories in my imagination and I am grateful for their gifts. As we know, a story never belongs to one person, it the accumulation of knowledge granted to someone like myself who perhaps feels like these stories might have a place in the world," said Peters.

"My hope is that these stories, while being works of fiction, may reflect the history of this land now called Canada's. And as I always hope, I want people to feel like they have read a good story when they close the book."

Waiting for the Long Night Moon will be out on Aug. 13, 2024. You can read an excerpt below.

I slip it under my sleeping place, carefully lifting the upper right-hand corner, the spot furthest away from where my mother sleeps. My fingers are dirty from digging roots, my nails crusted with dark earth. When the hole is big enough, I place it inside and cover it with a jagged flat stone, too brittle for arrows, but perfect for hiding things.

The basket I use for collecting sits empty just outside the door, the ash weave has thinned from age. Small bits of stringy wood separate from pieces of tree woven ages ago by my grandmother's hands before she joined her husband in the spirit world. Sometimes I think I can't wait to go to the spirit world and see her lined face and smell her hair, fragrant with the smell of fire and pine. Other times, I know I would miss my father. I think I would miss my mother, but I can't be sure. She is so different from the mother she used to be. She keeps her love close to her, too close for me to feel it. She grieves for her lost son, the boy who now sits around the fire with my grandparents after a sickness that shook his feverish body and turned his skin the colour of ash. Mother wailed and cried until the moon became uncomfortable and slipped behind the trees to escape. We all grieve for him, he was a sweet boy, but she seems to have forgotten about the two children still on this side of the spirit divide. My older brother uses work to keep his mind busy, to keep his distance from the woman who used to cuddle us, used to kiss our heads before bed. He told me once that distance keeps his heart from breaking all the way.

Many of the things my mother used to do have fallen to me. I cook the food and mend the clothes, gather berries, and dry the fish in the summer. In the winter, I keep the fire and mend the walls made of birch. I hunt smaller animals when I can, but I leave the big animals to my father. He says it's dangerous for a girl as young as I am. I remind him that my brother had been ten seasons when he went on his first big hunt, and I am twelve seasons now. But he insists that the help I provide my mostly absent mother is too important to be left to her. Sometimes, I like to watch her sleep. The faint light from the fire hides one side of her face that gradually disappears into the dark, but the other side looks calm and peaceful. The lines that she carries during the day rest at night, and I can see the mother I used to know.

Dirt from yesterday's work remains at the bottom of my basket. The wild leeks are in season and they're my father's favourite. I've made it my job to find them and dig them out of the earth and make soup. My mother and her friend leave me alone and I get to wander in the woods on my own. Sometimes my father comes with me but most of the time I'm alone, with only the wind to keep me company. I'm still not allowed to go far. I need to be able to hear my mother when she calls my name. Today, she and her friend are busy, on their knees, their heads hung, eyes focused on the ground muttering low and quick in the new language he is teaching her. My father and my older brother have gone to find rabbit for our evening meal.

It was just after my brother died that she found Brother Anthony, or he found her. I can't remember how he came to visit here so often. I do know that he wanders through the trees and along the river almost a days' walk from his own home, made of felled trees stripped naked of their bark. He comes all this way to sit with her for hours at a time. He brings with one of his books, a large one that he uses to teach her his ways and his words. He makes her use a stick to draw letters in the sand. On days when she is sad, she walks to him. My father says to let it be. The grief will pass and she will come back to us.

Unlike my mother, I find my comfort in the silence of the forest floor as my footsteps land softly on fallen pine needles. I like the way the sun sneaks through the high branches, shaping a golden path on the ground. I see a patch of sunlight and the green of leeks rising out of the earth. The pine needles offer a soft resting place for my knees, and I use a small stone to dig around the base of the leek, taking the stalk and gently pulling it from its place. My grandmother's basket isn't half full when I hear my name travelling through the trees. Even from here, protected by the forest, my mother's voice tells me that she knows that I have taken it. I pick up the basket and slowly make my way out of the forest. I am in no hurry to face her, no hurry to feel her misplaced anger. I look into my basket to ensure that I have enough leeks to flavour the rabbit stew, and step gently onto the path and toward the sound of my name.

I walk out from behind the trees to see her standing, her back hunched over, the beads Brother Anthony gave her clenched in her hands. Her braid has come undone. I will fix it for her around the fire this evening. She sees me and walks in my direction. She takes my shoulders in her hands. When she shakes me, the beads clink together. It's a pretty sound, even if it doesn't belong out here.

"Where is it? What have you done with it?" She looks down at me, the anger is turning her brown eyes to the colour of fire. She clutches her neck, but I don't answer.

"Where is it?" She lowers her voice; her hand reaches out to grab my arm and I drop the basket, the leeks I'd so carefully pulled from the earth fall to the ground.

"Where is what?" I try my hardest not to betray myself. My grandmother always told me that I had a face that couldn't tell a lie.

"You know what." She reached up to her neck, the thin chain Brother Anthony gave her is missing its charm. "Where is it?"

"It was the Wiklatmu'j. I saw them."

The flame in her eyes burns into the skin on my face.

"There are no little people. Never let Brother Anthony hear you say such ridiculous things." She looks around her.

"It must have been the Wiklatmu'j. Grandmother told me that they love things that shine." The sting of her hand on my cheek is sudden and feels like a hundred wasps. She walks away and I watch as her shoulders slump, her head falls to her chest. She doesn't want to hit me, but Brother Anthony says it is necessary to make me good.

That evening, before my father has learned of my misbehaviour, my cheek still red and sore, I sneak back to my sleeping place. I look around to make sure that Mother isn't close by. I roll back the corner of my grass sleeping mat. The small piece of flint is where I left it, undisturbed. The earth around it is smooth, patted down by my own hands just hours before. Everything looks the same as when I buried it but when I move the stone, the hole, dug with my
smallest finger, is empty.

The Golden Cross by Amanda Peters from the collection Waiting for the Long Night Moon © 2024. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.