Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

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 thatmorning 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