The Wendigo
Dr. Cathcart then likewise turned in, weariness and sleep still fighting
in his mind with an obscure curiosity to know what it was that had
scared Défago about the country up Fifty Island Water way,--wondering,
too, why Punk's presence had prevented the completion of what Hank had
to say. Then sleep overtook him. He would know tomorrow. Hank would tell
him the story while they trudged after the elusive moose.
Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in
the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass
beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that
poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages
from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay
already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. White men, with their
dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood
fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of
moss and bark and hardening swamp a hundred miles away. Even Hank and
Défago, subtly in league with the soul of the woods as they were, would
probably have spread their delicate nostrils in vain....
But an hour later, when all slept like the dead, old Punk crept from his
blankets and went down to the shore of the lake like a shadow--silently,
as only Indian blood can move. He raised his head and looked about him.
The thick darkness rendered sight of small avail, but, like the animals,
he possessed other senses that darkness could not mute. He
listened--then sniffed the air. Motionless as a hemlock stem he stood
there. After five minutes again he lifted his head and sniffed, and yet
once again. A tingling of the wonderful nerves that betrayed itself by
no outer sign, ran through him as he tasted the keen air. Then, merging
his figure into the surrounding blackness in a way that only wild men
and animals understand, he turned, still moving like a shadow, and went
stealthily back to his lean-to and his bed.
And soon after he slept, the change of wind he had divined stirred
gently the reflection of the stars within the lake. Rising among the far
ridges of the country beyond Fifty Island Water, it came from the
direction in which he had stared, and it passed over the sleeping camp
with a faint and sighing murmur through the tops of the big trees that
was almost too delicate to be audible. With it, down the desert paths of
night, though too faint, too high even for the Indian's hair-like
nerves, there passed a curious, thin odor, strangely disquieting, an
odor of something that seemed unfamiliar--utterly unknown.
The French Canadian and the man of Indian blood each stirred uneasily in
his sleep just about this time, though neither of them woke. Then the
ghost of that unforgettably strange odor passed away and was lost among
the leagues of tenantless forest beyond.
II
In the morning the camp was astir before the sun. There had been a
light fall of snow during the night and the air was sharp. Punk had done
his duty betimes, for the odors of coffee and fried bacon reached every
tent. All were in good spirits.
"Wind's shifted!" cried Hank vigorously, watching Simpson and his guide
already loading the small canoe. "It's across the lake--dead right for
you fellers. And the snow'll make bully trails! If there's any moose
mussing around up thar, they'll not get so much as a tail-end scent of
you with the wind as it is. Good luck, Monsieur Défago!" he added,
facetiously giving the name its French pronunciation for once, "_bonne
chance!_"
Défago returned the good wishes, apparently in the best of spirits, the
silent mood gone. Before eight o'clock old Punk had the camp to
himself, Cathcart and Hank were far along the trail that led westwards,
while the canoe that carried Défago and Simpson, with silk tent and grub
for two days, was already a dark speck bobbing on the bosom of the lake,
going due east.
The wintry sharpness of the air was tempered now by a sun that topped
the wooded ridges and blazed with a luxurious warmth upon the world of
lake and forest below; loons flew skimming through the sparkling spray
that the wind lifted; divers shook their dripping heads to the sun and
popped smartly out of sight again; and as far as eye could reach rose
the leagues of endless, crowding Bush, desolate in its lonely sweep and
grandeur, untrodden by foot of man, and stretching its mighty and
unbroken carpet right up to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.
Simpson, who saw it all for the first time as he paddled hard in the
bows of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty. His
heart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs
drank in the cool and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat,
singing fragments of his native chanties, Défago steered the craft of
birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his
companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such
occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become
human beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer,
and Défago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply--two
men, the "guider" and the "guided." Superior knowledge, of course,
assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into
the quasi-subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting when
Défago dropped the "Mr.," and addressed him as "Say, Simpson," or
"Simpson, boss," which was invariably the case before they reached the
farther shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles against a head wind.
He only laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it at all.
For this "divinity student" was a young man of parts and character,
though as yet, of course, untraveled; and on this trip--the first time
he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland--the huge
scale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realized,
to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to
dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an
initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain
shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.
Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held the
new. 303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless,
gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lake
and portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that he
was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they were
camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as Europe
itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effect
of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of
appreciating. It was himself and Défago against a multitude--at least,
against a Titan!
The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather
overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality
of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and
terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon,
and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his
own utter helplessness. Only Défago, as a symbol of a distant
civilization where man was master, stood between him and a pitiless
death by exhaustion and starvation.
It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch Défago turn over the canoe
upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed
to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an
almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say,
Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by
these marks;--then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home camp
agin, see?"
It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it
without any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to
express the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was
symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it.
He was alone with Défago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe,
another symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those
small yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only
indications of its hiding place.
Meanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying his own
rifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen trunks and
across half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that fairly gemmed
the forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards five o'clock
found themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods, looking out across a
large sheet of water in front of them, dotted with pine-clad islands of
all describable shapes and sizes.
"Fifty Island Water," announced Défago wearily, "and the sun jest goin'
to dip his bald old head into it!" he added, with unconscious poetry;
and immediately they set about pitching camp for the night.
In a very few minutes, under those skilful hands that never made a
movement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut and
cozy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk cooking fire
burned with the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman cleaned the
fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, Défago "guessed" he
would "jest as soon" take a turn through the Bush for indications of
moose. "_May_ come across a trunk where they bin and rubbed horns," he
said, as he moved off, "or feedin' on the last of the maple leaves"--and
he was gone.
His small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while Simpson
noted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed him into
herself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.
Yet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood somewhat
apart, well spaced; and in the clearings grew silver birch and maple,
spearlike and slender, against the immense stems of spruce and hemlock.
But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of grey rock
that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground, it might
well have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one might have
seen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however, began the
great burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its real
character--_brulé_, as it is called, where the fires of the previous
year had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt and
ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match heads stuck into the
ground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal and
rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.
The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the
fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the
only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that
vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the
woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might
stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front,
through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of
Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip
to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of
rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever
known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where
the islands--a hundred, surely, rather than fifty--floated like the
fairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests
fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as
the light faded--about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the
heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.