Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Page B

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 campsof 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