Three Day Road: Noohtaawiy: My Father Summary & Analysis

Niska stares at the river water and thinks about her father. Niska’s father “was the last great talker in [their] clan,” and he told many stories. As a child, Niska imagined that the stories her father “weaved” in the summer would keep them warm through the winter. On cold nights, they would gather in their collective warmth and listened to his stories. Often, Niska’s father’s stories “were all that [they] had to keep [them] alive.” Xavier cries out, and it makes Niska think of a story from her childhood. “Now I tell it to you, Xavier,” Niska says, “to keep you alive.”

Niska tells Xavier of a cold and dark winter, long before he was born, when thirty Anishnabe lived in the same camp. They usually wintered in much smaller numbers, but the previous autumn three hunters had been “taken away” (one by rum and two by the North-West Mounted Police), and their families had to be cared for by the tribe. It was early in the winter, but they were yet to take a moose. Without moose meat, they would surely starve.  

Just as the tribe began to worry that they would have to “boil [their] moccasins,” the hunters returned with a small bear. They found its den, roused it, and quickly shot it. The hunters claimed they wouldn’t have killed the bear, but they found no other tracks. Some of the camp’s members were from a “bear clan,” and they looked disgusted. “Who would dare disturb a brother’s winter sleep?” they asked. Niska’s father said they would look for more game until the next day. Only then, in the absence of other options, would they eat the bear.

Game was not found, and the next day Niska’s father and mother prepared the bear. Since the bear “was [their] brother,” he was “invited in,” and they slowly processed the meat. Niska’s mother and father prayed before the animal before slitting its stomach and emptying its guts into a pot. Then they skinned the bear and hung it over the fire. “He looked like a small, thin man dangling from his feet,” Niska tells Xavier. The bear was roasted, and all thirty members of the camp ate until every bit was gone. Niska’s father warned them that nothing should be wasted.

The deep cold of winter soon set in, and the rabbits the camp relied on were scarce. Families began to consider leaving camp, and a young hunter, Micah, was the first to lead his family into the bush. Micah travelled west through deep snow with his wife and baby daughter and set up a small camp. He saw many tracks but no animals, and he feared they would soon starve. During the cold nights, the Wawahtew would wake the baby and she would scream with hunger.

Micah’s wife heard “strange sounds” at night, like “groaning and shrieking,” and in the morning she found the “tracks of the windigo” outside their lodge. Soon, the baby’s cries of hunger stopped, and Micah became “desperate.” He cut a hole in the ice and tried to fish. “I will not return to our lodge until I can feed you,” he told his wife.

The next morning, after Micah failed to return to the lodge, his wife found him frozen dead by the river.  Micah’s wife promised herself that if she and her baby survived the cold of the night, the next day she would find a way to feed them. The next morning, Micah’s wife woke and built a cooking fire, and with her knife in hand, she looked toward Micah’s frozen body.

Back at the camp, food remained scarce, and the hunters asked Niska’s father to “divine” for them. He built his fire and they brought him the shoulder blade of their latest moose kill. Niska’s father asked the men to describe the day they shot the moose and dripped water onto the bone heated by the fire. Each drop would “sizzle” and “disappear,” and he continued this until the fire burned down. Afterward, he told the hunters they would find moose by the Albany River and that they should leave at dawn.

The next day, after the hunters had already left, Micah’s wife came in from the bush. She was “flushed and healthy-looking,” and she claimed Micah was still in the bush but had provided her with lots of meat. Niska’s mother and father immediately knew something was wrong, and their suspicions were confirmed when they looked in her pack. Niska’s father ordered Micah’s wife to be “bound and guarded,” and it took four men to secure her.

Micah’s flesh was removed from the pack and placed “high in a tree for the manitous to watch over.” In the passing days, Niska listened as Micah’s wife “fell into madness.” In a moment of lucidity, she confessed what she had done. She claimed “a strange man-beast” threatened to “eat her child” if she did not feed the baby. “It was not my fault,” Micah’s wife cried. “Don’t you see?” Micah’s wife and baby were both “turning windigo,” Niska says.

Niska’s mother and father had told her of the windigo—people who turn into “wild beasts twenty feet tall” and eat the flesh of humans—and Niska’s father was a widely known “windigo killer.” As a young man he had become the clan’s hookimaw after killing an entire family of windigos. “He must kill windigos once again,” people in camp began to whisper.

“He didn’t take long to do it,” Niska tells Xavier. Niska hid under an animal pelt as her father approached Micah’s wife. He whispered something in her ear, and she became calm. He put a blanker over her face and began to strangle her. She quickly fell still. As Niska watched, he turned to the baby and did the same. “I allowed you to watch, Little One,” he said to Niska when he was done, “because one day I will be gone and you might have to do the same.”

The hunters came back from their hunt with plenty of moose meat, and the rest of the winter went on without occurrence. In the spring, a local Indian told Niska’s father that the Hudson’s Bay Company men were looking for him to question him about Micah’s wife and baby. They said that he had “murdered” them. Niska’s father laughed and ignored the request, but by autumn the wemistikoshiw came for him. They took Niska’s father off in handcuffs to their jail and he never returned.

By the following spring, word reached the camp that Niska’s father was dead, but Niska already knew. Her “convulsions” had returned that winter, and she had seen her father in the tiny room. Niska’s mother continued to teach her children the ways of their people, but there was one thing she didn’t need to teach Niska—something Niska innately knew. “I am the second to last in a long line of windigo killers,” Niska says. “There is still one more.”