Bad Cree

After dinner, everyone steps outside. Verna observes that a storm is coming. Mackenzie reflects that on the prairie, the weather is “honest.” The heat has been oppressive, and storm clouds are indeed beginning to gather. The women head to the Stardust bar for karaoke, and Mackenzie notices their easy rapport. Family, she thinks, can be so soothing. At the bar, the woman who runs karaoke night passes out slips of paper so that patrons can request songs. Mackenzie’s grandmother loved the Stardust, and Doreen worked here for a few months when Kassidy was young. Mackenzie is bone-tired from her interrupted sleep schedule, and the fatigue and her beer begin to go to her head. As she is talking with Tracey, she begins to feel faint. Before she can get outside for some air, she passes out.

While she is unconscious, she again dreams of the gravel pit. Sabrina and Tracey return from the woods silent, scratched up, and with torn clothing. Sabrina again admonishes Mackenzie for not going into the woods after her. Mackenzie tries to explain that they’d looked for the girls and shouted, but Sabrina’s eyes are angry and piercing. Mackenzie notices that her shirt is torn and bloody. There is a wound near her collarbone that is bleeding. This is the same injury she’d seen in a photograph, but her mother and Tracey claimed not to be able to see (they were sure it was an imperfection in the photo) or identify it. When Mackenzie wakes, she is outside of the Stardust. Her family is gathered around. In her hands, she is clutching a bloody piece of flannel, Sabrina’s shirt. It does not disappear when she blinks herself awake. She is terrified, and surer than ever that Sabrina’s “message” to her isn’t about her funeral at all but about this night at the gravel pit.

Mackenzie and her family walk back home together in the still, dark night. Back at the house, Mackenzie reveals that her dreams have not stopped. She has continued to be tormented by nightmares since returning home. Later, Mackenzie talks with Kassidy and Tracey. She learns that Tracey, too, has visions and strange dreams. She and Sabrina used to dream the same dreams, and after Sabrina died, Sabrina visited Tracey’s dreams nightly. Tracey began drinking to dull her mind and sleep without dreaming, but she remained unsettled by her sister’s visitations.

They talk about the night at the gravel pit. Tracey reiterates that although Sabrina’s clothes were indeed ripped, she hadn’t been injured. She certainly didn’t have a large, jagged cut that bled and caused a scar. The girls postulate that there is more than one way to be injured or scarred and recall the mythical figure of the wheetigo. Known to various Indigenous nations, the creature is an undead monster. Associated with winter (like the unseasonable snow in Mackenzie’s dreams) it is cannibalistic. In some traditions, it preys on animals. In others, it preys on people. The wheetigo is a cautionary figure, used both to discourage greed and keep children from wandering off. They wonder if Sabrina had encountered a wheetigo that night in the woods. Tracey does recall her silence when they returned and that she’d seemed “off” thereafter. She’d never really returned to her old self.

Mackenzie, Tracey, and Kassidy try to look up more information about wheetigos, but they find little beyond what they already know. Their mothers gather with them in the kitchen, and the girls share their idea that Sabrina might have been attacked by a wheetigo in the woods the night that she and Tracey temporarily disappeared. This theory particularly alarms Mackenzie’s mother, and she appears worried. Because all the women in the family experience visitations and visions in their dreams, they understand that Sabrina’s appearances in Mackenzie’s dreams are serious. Mackenzie wonders aloud if Sabrina herself might be a wheetigo. Wheetigos are shapeshifters, and it is possible that a wheetigo took on Sabrina’s form to visit Mackenzie.

Mackenzie’s mother and her sisters decide to ask around about the wheetigo, and they begin a series of visits to friends, family, and neighbors that take days. The girls grow restless and watch over one another at night in case they experience visions or visitations. One night, Mackenzie overhears her mothers and aunties talking. They theorize that oil companies lured the wheetigo to the area. Wheetigos are motivated by greed, and who better embodies greed than oil companies? They think it’s possible that many wheetigos were lured to the area by the oil companies and once the companies left, they roamed the woods, attacking whomever they could find. Sabrina might have been a casualty.

Mackenzie is angry that her mother and aunties have not shared their information with the girls, and she heads back to the bedroom. She tells Kassidy and Tracey what she’s overheard. The girls see the wisdom in the idea that oil companies drew the wheetigo to their area, and they wonder if Sabrina was indeed a casualty of the situation. They talk further about the oil companies, noting the way they used Indigenous communities, promised jobs, and then packed up and left when the oil dried up. Their town is beginning to decline in the absence of oil money, and many businesses have closed. As they are talking, Mackenzie gets a series of texts from the ghostly number claiming to be Sabrina. They ask why she hasn’t “followed” Sabrina to the lake. The girls vow to find out more about what happened to Sabrina that night in the woods.