Hunting by Stars

Praise for
HUNTING
BY
STARS

“A harrowing glimpse into a future all the more chilling because it’s rooted in history. Our marrow holds many stories. The best ones are of love, hope, and resistance. Miigwech to Cherie Dimaline for this story! Hunting by Stars is a revelatory must-read.”

–ANGELINE BOULLEY, New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper’s Daughter

“Spellbinding. Straight from the heart of resilience–Dimaline shows how Indigenous people hold on to dreams even when trapped in nightmares.”

—WAB KINEW, author of the bestselling The Reason You Walk

“What a brilliant and utterly gripping book this is. Beautiful on a sentence level, kinetic, and possessed of a deep humanity. Cherie Dimaline is one of the finest worldbuilders working in fiction today, and here she has crafted something truly profound on the nature of survival, community, and the resurrective power of a story carried and told. To live up to the legacy of one of the best dystopian novels in recent memory is no small talk–Hunting by Stars does that and more.”

—OMAR EL AKKAD, author of the bestselling American War

PENGUIN TEEN

an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers,
a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited

First published 2021

Published in the United States of America by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS LLC

Text copyright © 2021 by Cherie Dimaline

Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

Cover illustrations © 2021 Stephen Gladue

Cover design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

Cover © 2021 Amulet Books

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Hunting by stars / Cherie Dimaline.

Names: Dimaline, Cherie, 1975-author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021009138X | Canadiana (ebook) 2021009141X | ISBN 9780735269651 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735269668 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS8607.I53 H86 2021 | DDC jC813/.6–dc23

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

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For Lydea, Miles, Tarquin, and every kid in, or running toward, community. And for the grown-ups working to make sure it’s there for them to find.

The last thing I remember is standing on the edge of the clearing looking up. The tops of the pines looked like black lace over the full yellow moon, the constellations stitched into velvet. The whole sky was dressed for a feast. Around me, the calls of crows reported on the darkness, a mocking song of reunion with pauses full of loss. I should have listened harder to the crows. Anything that when gathered is called a murder is bound to speak prophecy.