Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Page A

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 theAlbany 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,