Three Day Road (7 page)

From what we were to find out later, they travelled the day through deep snow, Micah stopping along the way and wandering off to find animal tracks. When dusk threatened they’d only made it a few miles and had set up camp by a creek where he hoped to find tracks in the morning. He didn’t. They pushed on.

Micah and his wife and their child made their way west. They moved inland and away from the Great Salt Bay only a few miles at a time, Micah searching for tracks. On the fourth day he made a difficult shot at a snowshoe hare bounding toward a tree line, and later watched proudly as his wife cooked it. A good enough sign for him. As they ate the hare he declared that this place marked where they would build their winter shelter.

For a while, anyway, we thought Micah’s decision to head out on his own must have been right. That or he was dead. We did not see them for many weeks. From what his wife was later able to explain between her fits and in words that we understood, many tracks crisscrossed the area, fox, marten, wolf, lynx, hare. It was as if Micah had discovered that place in the forest where all the animals had come to winter. But for all the tracks he followed, Micah did not see a single animal.

At night, the
Wawahtew,
the North Lights, flickered so brightly they awoke the baby from her sleep. Strange sounds echoed from the forest, groaning and shrieking. Micah said the trees were popping in the cold, or wolves were snatching rabbits. His wife claimed to us that they’d found tracks near their lodge early in the morning after those long nights, tracks that resembled a man’s but much larger, holes in the snow gouged where claws instead of toes had dug in. Tracks of the
windigo
. By the time she told these stories, though, Micah’s wife had become unreliable, had become something else. At that point she was only trying to save herself.

Out in the bush, their situation became more desperate. Micah blamed himself for his inability to find an animal despite so many tracks. The baby’s hunger cries suddenly stopped. Instead now she stared reserved from her
tikonoggan,
her eyes like the eyes of an old person. Micah grew desperate enough to dig through the snow, chop through the ice and try to catch fish. He spent long hours with a line of sinew and a bone hook, constantly stirring the water of the small hole with a stick so that it would not freeze up. The cold was the brutal kind, bullying. His wife begged Micah to give up his fishing but he refused. “I will not return to our lodge until I can feed you” is all he would say. He caught nothing. He began to stay by the hole through the night, too, a small fire to warm him.

At first light one morning, the wife bundled up her child and herself and went to check on Micah. She found him sitting in the snow, his fire long burned out, a grimace carved on his face. The wife sat and mourned her dead husband, her tears freezing on her cheeks. The baby stared listlessly.

The two of them somehow survived the cold of that day. As dusk settled she made the promise, whispered just loud enough for the forest to hear, that if she and her baby survived the dark, she would feed the child well the next morning. Later, when we tried to get this from her, all she could do was growl and whimper at us. But that
morning the sun did rise, and with the last of her strength she collected wood and started her cook fire. She drew her knife from her shawl and leaned toward her husband. He was keeping his promise to feed her and the child.

None of us knew any of this at the time. We continued on best we could. Even the smallest and sickliest game was a welcome change from the roots and bits of dried fish we still had left. The hunters came to my father and asked him to divine. He prepared his fire. When all was ready, he had the hunters bring him the shoulder blade of the last moose that had been killed, a young bull. I watched as the men huddled around the fire and my father prompted them to discuss in detail the day they’d taken the animal.

“What was the weather like?” he asked, holding the shoulder blade in his scarred hands. “Was the moose feeding on red willow? Tell me exactly where you found the tracks. Tell me everything. Leave nothing out.” The men described the day, the tracks, the location. My father placed the shoulder blade in the fire and urged them to talk on, to say everything.

After a time, he took a small cup of water and dipped his fingers into it. He leaned over the fire and dripped water onto the shoulder blade. He studied it carefully, then dripped more. “Keep speaking,” he urged the hunters. “Describe the river, the animal’s movements, everything.”

The men continued to talk and my father continued to drip water onto the heated sheath of bone, the water sizzling, then disappearing. Soon cracks began to appear in the bone. The men talked on, reminiscing about the day, the place, how they felt as they tracked the wounded moose silently so as not to panic it, deep into the bush. They did this until the fire died down.

My father removed it from the fire, still hot so that I didn’t know how it was that his hands weren’t burned badly. The others gathered around him as he explained the map of cracks and splits. “This is the
Albany River,” he said, pointing to a long, thick split. “This is where the Wakina Creek pours into it.” They nodded and listened carefully. “You will find a moose here, close to that creek. Leave early tomorrow morning.” They smiled and rose to leave.

In the days that the hunters were gone Micah’s wife and her baby returned. She appeared with the sunlight behind her, walking steadily, powerfully on her snowshoes so at first we mistook her for a man. Her face was flushed and healthy-looking. Her eyes sparkled.

All of us children gathered around to talk to her, asking questions. Had Micah found game, was he still on his lines, had she any food in the large pack slung across her back? At first she didn’t answer, just stared at us quizzically, as if she didn’t know who we were or what we were saying. When we began to wonder what was wrong, she finally spoke. “Micah is back in the bush,” she said, smiling. “He has supplied me with more meat than I can eat.”

We children jumped around at word of this, energized for the first time in weeks. “Give us some! Give us some!” we shouted.

“I will cook some for you,” she said. As she walked away I swore she’d grown taller.

My mother and father knew something was wrong. My mother’s father was Ojibwe, and my mother had seen this once before. So had my father. He told some of the young men to keep an eye on Micah’s wife and to take away her pack. Later, I heard her screams from where I lay hiding under my father’s moose robe, dreaming of roasted meat. The men entered her
askihkan,
and it took four to hold her down.

Even then they barely managed. My father ordered her bound and guarded day and night. He then sent out a search party to see what had become of Micah. My parents already knew, though. They’d seen the contents of her pack. My father strung it high in a tree for the
manitous
to watch over.

The next days we listened to her fall into madness. She begged and pleaded in a child’s voice, first for Micah to help her, then for her child to be brought to her. At nighttime her voice went hoarse so that she sounded like some monster growling in a language we did not understand. None of us slept. We became tense and restless. Some days she turned back into her old self and talked normally. This is when she confessed everything, explained to us what had happened. She said that on the night before she cut into Micah’s flesh, a strange man-beast came out of the bush. He threatened to take and eat her child if the wife did not feed it the next day.

“It was not my fault. Don’t you see?” she pleaded. “I was only trying to protect my baby.” And then she’d cry again, her sobs turning into angry growls as she began to quake and squirm so fiercely that we thought she’d break her ropes and attack us.

The baby cried constantly. One of the other women who was breast-feeding agreed to nurse it. We couldn’t trust Micah’s wife any more. The child sucked hungrily on the other woman, who became worried the child would drain her of all her milk. When the woman tried to remove it, the baby bit hard and the woman screamed in shock. My father had to pry the child’s mouth from her bloody tit.

Micah’s wife and the baby were turning
windigo
. The children in camp stopped sleeping, cried in fear, no longer felt their hunger. We’d grown up on stories of the
windigo
that our parents fed us over winter fires, of people who eat other people’s flesh and grow into wild beasts twenty feet tall whose hunger can be satisfied only by more human flesh and then the hunger turns worse. I listened to the adults of the camp talk nervously among themselves, their voices interrupted by the wife’s growls and mad language. They talked of my father’s reputation as a
windigo
killer, of how as a young man he became our
hookimaw
after killing a family of them who roamed near where we trapped, a family who had once been part of the caribou clan but had turned one hard winter and begun preying on the camps
of unsuspecting Cree. “He must kill
windigos
once again,” the adults whispered to one another. “We are too weak already and Micah’s woman’s madness can surely spread in these bad times.” My father knew this too, and made preparations to act as his own father had taught him.

Micah’s wife must have sensed what was coming. She pleaded and begged, screamed and howled, whispered to the children to untie her ropes. On the day that my parents called for her, it took five men to carry her to them. Once again I hid under my father’s moose robe. My stomach ached with what I thought was hunger but the ache turned to a dull throb when my father sprinkled crushed cedar into the fire and muttered prayers. Micah’s wife watched him with eyes sparkling, her body shaking, her mouth gagged now. The baby lay sleeping beside her.

He didn’t take long to do it. His eyes looked sad. He leaned down and whispered something I could not hear into her ear. She immediately went slack and her eyes reflected fear and then expectation as he straddled her chest. My father covered her face with a blanket and placed his hands on her neck. He looked up above him and the muscles of his body tensed. Her feet quivered, then went still. At the moment when the quiet came like a shadow into the room, I felt warmth between my legs. My father turned to the baby. Again he wasted no time. He covered the sleeping child’s head with a corner of the blanket, placed a hand about its small neck and, looking up once again, squeezed until the life left it.

He sat silent for a long time after, staring into the fire, his back to me. “I allowed you to watch, Little One,” he said when he finally spoke, “because one day I will be gone and you might have to do the same.” The ache in my stomach was gone. When he went outside I placed my hand between my legs and then brought it to my face, stared at the little smear of blood on my fingers, hoping to see some sign of what awaited me.

Within days, our hunters returned with as much moosemeat as each of them could carry. They’d found a large bull where my father had told them to look. Something unwanted had left us. A thaw settled in the very morning we prepared the feast. Winter’s back had been broken. Colour came into the children’s faces. The adults once again walked with purpose.

More than ever I kept to myself now, too old to play with the children, too young to be accepted by the adults. From that time on, I realized long after, the rumours about me began, talk fuelled by full stomachs, whispers of half-truths that grow wings as they leave the speaker’s mouth and flit around like sparrows, landing where they please. I had been witness to brutal deeds that no child should see, I’d been struck mute by shock, my womanhood had come to me like a tainted thing, a sick animal, at the moment it should not have. I heard all of this and it pushed me deeper into my shy silence. My fourteenth year had come, that time when the wisdom of the world begins to show itself but cannot be expressed in childish words. So I chose not to speak, always watching. What the gossips did not realize was that I wasn’t afraid of my father’s actions, his gifts. I desperately wanted to possess them for myself.

W
HEN THE SNOWS RECEDED
, the clans came together at the mouth of the Albany River not far from where the
wemistikoshiw,
the pale ones of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had built a post. It had been a poor winter for furs, the bad side of the seven-year cycle, which did not make the company men very happy. Those Cree who did have furs were treated well, given flour and sugar for their bellies, rum that loosened their tongues. Some began to talk.

All the clans that had gathered already seemed to know the others’ winter hardships and triumphs. Unspoken law said Cree business remained Cree business and was not to be discussed with the
wemistikoshiw
. But rum is a sly and powerful weapon. I’ve
watched it drown our people all of my life. In the month of the frog moon when the fishing is at its best, the rum drinker George Netmaker, father of Joseph, brought an important message to my father. What my father had done over the winter seemed to have angered the Hudson’s Bay Company men, and they demanded he come to them to discuss his actions so that they might decide whether or not he should be considered a murderer. We laughed at this. Wasn’t it the
wemistikoshiw
who were on our land? Was it not they who relied on us? My father ignored the news.

For the most part, our lives continued as they always had. Hunting, fishing, trapping, socializing late into nights that stayed bright, storing up on food and laughter, preparing as best we could through the brief summer for winter’s return. This was my summer of bitter happiness, moods sweeping over me like summer thunderstorms. I hated the changes, the monthly blood, the sprouting of breasts. I was appalled and mesmerized by what I was becoming.

As we prepared that autumn for the path of the geese to cross ours, the
wemistikoshiw
came with many rifles. They were North-West Mounted Police, and their uniform buttons shone brightly in the sun. Their leather boots squeaked with each step, and their strange words broke harshly from thin, tight lips. George Netmaker translated. They had come for my father. He was to sit in their circle to discuss if what he’d done last winter violated their laws. He was to go with them now and wait in one of their jails because we were a people who would not sit still, and who knew if we might run away and never return?