Maybe you know the Ojibwa name this bitter heart of winter the Moon of the Windigo, after their most ancient fear, the crazed cannibal giant who swoops down from the north bringing madness and destruction. Each breath of pale frozen air catches in the throat and nostrils. The hard packed snow creaks loudly underfoot. At night you hear the tamarack trees crack like gunfire in the iron cold. Constellations glitter wildly and the northern lights shimmer across the sky.

You could say it began like this, with the windigo moon bright on the snow and Grand’mère, snowbound in her cabin on the edge of the muskeg, staring into the flames of her round black stove. She drank from a bottle of moonshine whiskey and the past became the present . . .

*
Rachelle has taken to hanging around the store with the older girls after school. They sip cherry soda and giggle through their hair at the loggers who also stop by at this time. They want movie magazines, strawberry bubblegum, grape-flavoured lipstick, and the lumber men, enchanted by the schoolgirl laughter, pay.

Rachelle does not come home as usual. For three long days and nights she is missing. Even Grand’mère, who knows all the places, can find no trace. Zack discovers her on the fourth day, abandoned in a sugar shack, a bruised, distraught, unspeaking girl, gripping tightly the coat he wraps her in. Little by little Grand’mère pieces together all that has been done to Rachelle. She tells no one. Even­tually the ones she concludes are responsible wander into the muskeg and long before Bobby is born they are all lost in the cold, shifting, bottomless mire. Constable Martello questions the Oswekens about the disappearances. He looks long and hard through narrow eyes at Grand’mère. But there is no evidence. Others have vanished this way. No one ever knows for certain, not Zack Guillem, not Father Souris, not even Rachelle.

Bobby is born in the Moon of the Windigo; he is a bright and difficult child. Grand’mère cares for him as she has cared for all her large family. But Rachelle will have nothing to do with the boy. She quits school and finds live-in work at a holiday lodge on Medicine Chant Lake. She paints her face and chain-smokes. Zack sometimes calls by but she pretends not to know him. Soon the resort manager tells him to stop coming round. Later he learns she has gone to the city, where the money is better. It is Grand’mère who tells him this. She speaks without emotion, but hopelessness gathers like a freezing mist. “There is Bobby,” she says flatly, “with a child it is always springtime.”

Bobby plays on her soft, shining moosehide rugs. He bangs her cooking pots and beats her drum. Sometimes she holds him up to sit astride her dogs. Bobby watches her prepare the herbs she uses in her medicine. He holds her hand when they go out to pick the tawny leaves, the mosses and lichens, the cherry bark and cedar for making steaming broths to drink or splash on red-hot stones, the forked and hairy one she calls root of a thousand roots. On winter days he takes her collection of mineral samples out of the grey canvas bags and arranges them in rows. He smells spices, the cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, and sneaks the raisins when she bakes. She makes deerskin mittens, decorates them with coloured beads. He echoes her chants and sees inside her medicine pouch, the necklaces of animal claws and teeth, bones and strips of fur. Sometimes, not often, they go to Mass. In the evenings he sits close to her. He holds her long grey braid in his hand and they eat popcorn.

Bobby watches the men, Louis and Ovide, prepare the traps and fishing lines. Later he goes into the bush with them, far beyond the maple groves, and learns to take the skins from animals and cut up the meat for food. Once he helps to build a shelter in a sudden snowstorm. He listens to the fireside talk and story telling on long winter nights, about ancestors and spirits in the magic Ojibwa world. He hears there can be persons in all things, even animals and trees, who sometimes visit in a dream. He learns some people may not be as they appear and wonders if Father Souris is one of these. Miss Grochowska also comes, this time in nightmares. He wakes up screaming. They are very powerful, these dream visitors. He must not make them angry, for if they are offended they will surely pay him back. He must not tell anyone these things lest telling it should make them stronger still.

Grand’mère and Bobby hunt for crayfish in the river. They bend in the shallows and turn over stones where they know the crayfish like to hide. It is Indian summer, warm and still, and mosquitoes swarm in the sunlight. Bobby stands up abruptly. “Are all the stones alive, Grand’mère?” he asks.

She hesitates. “No, Bobby, but some are.”

“Which ones?”

Grand’mère thinks for a moment. “Only those stones that look alive. You’ll know when you see one.”

“I saw a stone that moved,” Bobby says excitedly, “all by itself.”

“Maybe,” says Grand’mère. “Things aren’t always what they seem. Maybe it isn’t a stone at all.”

“It looked like one. I think it was one.”

“You’ll have to ask it next time what it really is.”

Bobby tells Miss Grochowska what he saw in the river. “Stones are never alive, Bobby. That’s impossible. They are inanimate objects,” she says. “You’d know that if you came to school every day like you’re supposed to.”

“But I saw one move.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It was alive. I asked it, just like Grand’mère said.”

On his way home, Bobby sees Zack Guillem. “I saw a stone that moved, Zack. All by itself.”

“That’s great, Bobby. Better keep it to yourself. You don’t want those powerful stones to get mad ’cause you told about them too soon.”

Miss Grochowska talks to Father Souris. “Heaven knows what else she’s telling him, Matt. She tells Bobby things aren’t what they seem, that stones are alive. I confronted her. ‘Yes, Mamselle,’ she says, ‘some maybe.’ I told her I won’t allow the boy to be confused by all that native nonsense. ‘Try telling that to the stones,’ she says. Matt, something must be done.”

Bobby is taken from her. It is the fault of that schoolteacher woman, the possessed one, who has so turned Zack Guillem’s head he no longer thinks straight. She blames Bobby for the symbols on her house and on her lawn. He is placed with Catholic foster-parents in far away Penetanguishene. It is either this or he’ll end up in reform school after what he’s done, Father Souris insists. They, he assures her, will provide the stable and structured family environment he needs. They will make sure he goes to school every day. Bobby attacks them with a skinning knife. He sets fire to their car and runs away. A police patrol picks up the little boy hitching unerringly back to Sugarmilk Falls. And now Bobby is in jail.

*
Grand’mère gazed deep into the embers flickering like seams of gold in hard black ore. The hiss and flare tormented her. Slowly, unsteadily she rose to her feet. The time for patience, for wisdom, was over. She loaded bullets into her .22 calibre rifle. Drifting snow dust tinkled against the window. The windigo moaned.

From the Hardcover edition.