Clemence said it was fine, so I shut myself in the room. I shed my clothes and crawled into my grown-up cousin’s bed, which was plush and saggy and smelled of dust. Mooshum’s snore was a very old man’s hypnotizing purr. I fell immediately asleep. Sometime right after moonrise, for there was light in the room, I woke. Mooshum was talking all right, so I rolled over and stuck a pillow over my head. I dozed off, but something he said hooked me in, and little by little, like a fish reeled up out of the dark, I began to surface. Mooshum was not just talking in the random disconnected way people do, blurting out scraps of dream language. He was telling a story.
Akii
At first she was just an ordinary woman, said Mooshum, good at a number of things—weaving nets, snaring rabbits, skinning out and tanning hides. She liked the liver of the deer. Her name was Akiikwe, Earth Woman, and like her namesake she was solid. She had heavy bones and a short, thick neck. Her husband, Mirage, appeared and disappeared. He looked at other woman. She had caught him many times but stayed with him. He was a resolute hunter in spite of his ways and the two of them were good at surviving. They could always get food for their children, and even extra meat would come their way, for she especially, Akii, could make out in dreams where to find the animals. She had a shrewd heart and an endless stare, with which she kept her children in line. Akii and her husband were never stingy, and as I say they were always very good at finding food even in the dead of winter—that is, until the year they forced us into our boundary. The reservation year.
A few had broken soil like the white man, and put some seeds in the ground, but a real farm takes many years to build until it keeps you alive in winter. We hunted all the animals before the Moon of Little Spirit and there wasn’t even a rabbit left. The government agent had promised supplies to tide us over for the loss of our territory, but these never came through. We left our boundaries and ranged back up into Canada, but the caribou were long gone, there were no beaver left, no muskrats even. The children cried and an old man boiled strips of his moosehide pants for them to chew on.
During this time, every day, Akii went out and she always came back with some small tidbit. She chopped an ice hole and with great effort she and her husband kept it open day and night, so they fished there until she hooked a fish that said to her, My people are going to sleep now and you shall starve. Sure enough, she could not get another fish after that. She saw Mirage looking at her strangely, and she looked strangely back at him. He kept the children behind him as they slept and the axe with him in his blanket. He was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. Some people in these hungry times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat. That’s what was happening, her husband decided. He imagined that her eyes were starting to glow in the dark. The thing to do was you had to kill that person right away. But not before you had agreement in the matter. You couldn’t do it alone. There was a certain way the killing of a wiindigoo must be done.
Mirage got some men together, and persuaded them that Akii was becoming very powerful and would soon go out of control. She had cut her arm for her baby to drink the blood, so that baby might go wiindigoo too. She stared as if she might pounce on her children and followed their every movement. And then, when they tried to tie her up, she struggled. It took six men to do it, and they came out the worse for their work—bitten and gouged. Another woman took the children away so they would not see what was to happen. But one, the oldest boy, was left. The only person who could kill a wiindigoo was someone in the blood family. If her husband killed her, Akiikwe’s people might take revenge. It could have been a