Early winter, the time of the blowing moon, sat upon us. Our hunters came back wide-eyed and frozen, reporting to my father the absence of animals, even of tracks. They worried by my family’s fire. I know all this because I watched them from the corner of our askihkan, hidden under my father’s moose robe, quiet and observant like a hungry lynx.
By the end of that month, all of us scrounged for food. The women peeled tamarack bark for tea, dug through the deep snow in hopes of finding a few dried fiddleheads. The men continued to go out on the traplines and to hunt, returning silent, their blank stares scaring us children.
I was nearing the time of my strawberry ceremony, when the women closest to me would keep me in our askihkan all day, talking to me, praying, telling me stories, preparing me for my first blood of womanhood. Until the spring came, I was allowed to wander. But I wanted nothing of that. I wanted to stay close to my father, to watch over him.
When talk began that soon we would be forced to boil our moccasins, a group of hunters returned with a small black bear slung on a pole between them. Some of the old ones among us were bear clan and muttered bitterly. Who would dare disturb a brother’s winter sleep? They brought the bear directly to my father. I hid in my usual place and watched as he spoke with them about where they’d come across the den, how they had recognized it in the deep snow.
Marius, the oldest hunter, spoke first. “We followed its tracks.” My father looked puzzled, but he remained silent. Marius continued. “At first I thought I was mistaken, but there they were for all of us to see. We followed them.” My father and the four hunters sat silent for a long time, staring at the crackling fire. “The tracks ended near a cliff by the river,” Marius said after a while.
My father waited.
“They just stopped,” one of the younger hunters blurted. “We walked with them, and in the middle of an open field they just stopped.”The others stared at him.
“We’d been led to a den,” Marius went on, as if the young one hadn’t spoken at all. “We could see its indent on the side of the cliff. But the tracks stopped short of it at least the length of a tall man. Clearly the den had not been disturbed since autumn. We dug and we roused the bear and took it quickly. We wouldn’t have disturbed it, but we were hungry.” My father nodded and again they all stared at the fire.
I looked over at the bear hanging from the pole, tied by its hind paws so that its nose pointed to the ground and its tongue lolled out. Normally they would have skinned and quartered the animal where they took it, but this time was different. The bear was thawing now near the fire. I smelled the musky smell of piss. I could see from where I lay that it was only a little taller than me.
The young hunter spoke again. “All of this is not good!” His name was Micah. He had a pretty wife who’d had her first child the summer before. I thought he was handsome, and I blushed whenever he was around.
“Do we continue to starve or do we eat the animal that has been delivered to us?” my father asked. “If no other game is found in the next day, the choice will be apparent.”
I listened to this as the wind threw itself against our askihkan. An early storm wind, young and strong. Even I knew that. There would be no hunting for the next day at least.
The following afternoon my mother and father prepared the bear for us. Normally we did our butchering outside, but the bear was our brother, and so he was invited in. Nothing was rushed. Nothing was to be wasted for fear of angering him. The knife used couldn’t touch anything else. Any of the hair that the bear shed was carefully collected from the floor and clothing, and burned in the fire, whispered prayers drifting up with the stinking smoke. My parents carefully laid the animal on his back on freshly cut spruce boughs, talking to him, whispering prayers for what seemed like hours. They rocked back and forth on their haunches, my father sprinkling bits of powder into the flames that brought into the room a sweet smell I recognized as cedar. I was alarmed when at one point my father began to cry. I’d never seen this before and was frightened, but I remained beneath his heavy moose robe.
When the prayers were finally done, the bear was pulled up on the pole by his hind paws once again and a large cooking pot placed below him. My father took his knife and ran it along the bear’s stomach. With a ripping sound the askihkan filled with the powerful smell of insides. The guts filled the pot. Then he and my mother cut along the inside of the bear’s legs and gently peeled the fur from his body, cutting carefully where they had to separate flesh from fur, until the animal hung there naked. He looked like a small, thin man dangling from his feet, blood dripping from his head. For the first time I realized why we were told the bear was our brother.
For many nights after, I was jolted from sleep by dreams of this bear-man waking from his death slumber, bending up to untie his feet and then jumping onto the floor, eyes bulging from his fleshy skull, pacing on two legs between the bodies of my sleeping family, sinew of white muscle glistening in the moonlight as he searched for his fur.
With the skinning and cleaning done, the hunters who’d killed him were invited in to prepare the meat for roasting. He was a winter bear, grown thin in his sleep, and although young, was tough already. But we were hungry, and all thirty of us crowded in and ate until every part of the animal was gone—his meat, brain, heart, kidneys, liver; his bones cracked open for their marrow and carefully collected to be boiled down later. We ate until our stomachs grew taut as drums, until beads of sweat dotted our foreheads and our cheeks flushed red. My father warned all of us that not a scrap should be wasted. Even the smallest piece of gristle that no one wanted was collected in a bowl and added to the bones or burned in the fire over prayers. We were always careful not to waste for fear of insulting an animal, but this time stood out to me. I did not understand my father’s concern, his eyes following everything, anxious. Later I would come to understand.
The young hunter Micah took his new baby girl from his wife’s lap, then chose a bit of flesh and put it in the baby’s mouth. “Your first taste of meat,” he said to the child, who hesitantly, then hungrily began to chew. We all smiled at the expression on her face, but then she turned red and began to gasp. Micah shook her upside down to try and dislodge the meat. Like lightning my mother grabbed the child, sticking a finger in her throat so that she gagged and threw the meat up. I saw the meat drop to the floor. I glanced at Rabbit, but she did not pick it up and place it in her bowl. No one else seemed to have noticed.
We didn’t taste fresh game again for a very long time. It got so that I would remember the tough bits of gristle that I had not wanted at the feast and my stomach would grumble moodily.
The real cold settled in with the moon of the exploding trees. This was the time of the year that we depended on the hare to help us live. Its hides were sewn together and worn fur-side-in from our feet to our heads. Its meat was tender. We ate the stomachs that were filled with bitter greens to stave off the coughing disease and the yellow disease. But like everything else this particular winter, even the hares began to abandon us. The hunters continued to return with very little or nothing at all. Marten partially eaten by wolves, the odd grouse, a skinny and starved beaver. Some of the men began to complain about what we already knew, that there were too many of us for this part of the bush to sustain. They were going to head off with their families in hopes of surviving. In the end only the head-strong young Micah and his wife and baby walked into the bush alone.
The next day broke bright and cold as any I’d ever felt. The children who had energy played a game where they let spit drool from their mouths and measured how fast it froze once it hit the air. Micah pulled a toboggan with their few possessions, his wife with her child slung in her tikonoggan walking behind in the track that he cut. Although his wife did not speak a goodbye or look back to us, we all knew that she did not want to go, that it was Micah alone who had made the decision.
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 w
inter 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.
Three Day Road Page 5