The Wendigo
sparks went up into the air, "you don't--smell nothing, do you--nothing
pertickler, I mean?" The commonplace question, Simpson realized, veiled
a dreadfully serious thought in his mind. A shiver ran down his back.
"Nothing but burning wood," he replied firmly, kicking again at the
embers. The sound of his own foot made him start.
"And all the evenin' you ain't smelt--nothing?" persisted the guide,
peering at him through the gloom; "nothing extrordiny, and different to
anything else you ever smelt before?"
"No, no, man; nothing at all!" he replied aggressively, half angrily.
Défago's face cleared. "That's good!" he exclaimed with evident relief.
"That's good to hear."
"Have _you?_" asked Simpson sharply, and the same instant regretted the
question.
The Canadian came closer in the darkness. He shook his head. "I guess
not," he said, though without overwhelming conviction. "It must've been
just that song of mine that did it. It's the song they sing in lumber
camps and godforsaken places like that, when they're skeered the
Wendigo's somewhere around, doin' a bit of swift traveling.--"
"And what's the Wendigo, pray?" Simpson asked quickly, irritated because
again he could not prevent that sudden shiver of the nerves. He knew
that he was close upon the man's terror and the cause of it. Yet a
rushing passionate curiosity overcame his better judgment, and his fear.
Défago turned swiftly and looked at him as though he were suddenly about
to shriek. His eyes shone, but his mouth was wide open. Yet all he said,
or whispered rather, for his voice sank very low, was: "It's
nuthin'--nuthin' but what those lousy fellers believe when they've bin
hittin' the bottle too long--a sort of great animal that lives up
yonder," he jerked his head northwards, "quick as lightning in its
tracks, an' bigger'n anything else in the Bush, an' ain't supposed to be
very good to look at--that's all!"
"A backwoods superstition--" began Simpson, moving hastily toward the
tent in order to shake off the hand of the guide that clutched his arm.
"Come, come, hurry up for God's sake, and get the lantern going! It's
time we were in bed and asleep if we're going to be up with the sun
tomorrow...."
The guide was close on his heels. "I'm coming," he answered out of the
darkness, "I'm coming." And after a slight delay he appeared with the
lantern and hung it from a nail in the front pole of the tent. The
shadows of a hundred trees shifted their places quickly as he did so,
and when he stumbled over the rope, diving swiftly inside, the whole
tent trembled as though a gust of wind struck it.
The two men lay down, without undressing, upon their beds of soft balsam
boughs, cunningly arranged. Inside, all was warm and cozy, but outside
the world of crowding trees pressed close about them, marshalling their
million shadows, and smothering the little tent that stood there like a
wee white shell facing the ocean of tremendous forest.
Between the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed another
shadow that was _not_ a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast by
the strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly upon
Défago in the middle of his singing. And Simpson, as he lay there,
watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plunge
into the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profound
stillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs ... and when the night
has weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil about
it.... Then sleep took him....
III
Thus, it seemed to him, at least. Yet it was true that the lap of the
water, just beyond the tent door, still beat time with his lessening
pulses when he realized that he was lying with his eyes open and that
another sound had recently introduced itself with cunning softness
between the splash and murmur of the little waves.
And, long before he understood what this sound was, it had stirred in
him the centers of pity and alarm. He listened intently, though at first
in vain, for the running blood beat all its drums too noisily in his
ears. Did it come, he wondered, from the lake, or from the woods?...
Then, suddenly, with a rush and a flutter of the heart, he knew that it
was close beside him in the tent; and, when he turned over for a better
hearing, it focused itself unmistakably not two feet away. It was a
sound of weeping; Défago upon his bed of branches was sobbing in the
darkness as though his heart would break, the blankets evidently stuffed
against his mouth to stifle it.
And his first feeling, before he could think or reflect, was the rush of
a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard
amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so
pitifully incongruous--and so vain! Tears--in this vast and cruel
wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in
mid-Atlantic.... Then, of course, with fuller realization, and the
memory of what had gone before, came the descent of the terror upon him,
and his blood ran cold.
"Défago," he whispered quickly, "what's the matter?" He tried to make
his voice very gentle. "Are you in pain--unhappy--?" There was no reply,
but the sounds ceased abruptly. He stretched his hand out and touched
him. The body did not stir.
"Are you awake?" for it occurred to him that the man was crying in his
sleep. "Are you cold?" He noticed that his feet, which were uncovered,
projected beyond the mouth of the tent. He spread an extra fold of his
own blankets over them. The guide had slipped down in his bed, and the
branches seemed to have been dragged with him. He was afraid to pull the
body back again, for fear of waking him.
One or two tentative questions he ventured softly, but though he waited
for several minutes there came no reply, nor any sign of movement.
Presently he heard his regular and quiet breathing, and putting his hand
again gently on the breast, felt the steady rise and fall beneath.
"Let me know if anything's wrong," he whispered, "or if I can do
anything. Wake me at once if you feel--queer."
He hardly knew what to say. He lay down again, thinking and wondering
what it all meant. Défago, of course, had been crying in his sleep. Some
dream or other had afflicted him. Yet never in his life would he forget
that pitiful sound of sobbing, and the feeling that the whole awful
wilderness of woods listened....
His own mind busied itself for a long time with the recent events, of
which _this_ took its mysterious place as one, and though his reason
successfully argued away all unwelcome suggestions, a sensation of
uneasiness remained, resisting ejection, very deep-seated--peculiar
beyond ordinary.
IV
But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. His
thoughts soon wandered again; he lay there, warm as toast, exceedingly
weary; the night soothed and comforted, blunting the edges of memory and
alarm. Half an hour later he was oblivious of everything in the outer
world about him.
Yet sleep, in this case, was his great enemy, concealing all approaches,
smothering the warning of his nerves.
As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with
a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail
accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events
that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind
somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in
the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest
delusion. At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake,
ready to let slip the judgment. "All this is not _quite_ real; when you
wake up you'll understand."
And thus, in a way, it was with Simpson. The events, not wholly
inexplicable or incredible in themselves, yet remain for the man who saw
and heard them a sequence of separate facts of cold horror, because the
little piece that might have made the puzzle clear lay concealed or
overlooked.
So far as he can recall, it was a violent movement, running downwards
through the tent towards the door, that first woke him and made him
aware that his companion was sitting bolt upright beside him--quivering.
Hours must have passed, for it was the pale gleam of the dawn that
revealed his outline against the canvas. This time the man was not
crying; he was quaking like a leaf; the trembling he felt plainly
through the blankets down the entire length of his own body. Défago had
huddled down against him for protection, shrinking away from something
that apparently concealed itself near the door flaps of the little tent.
Simpson thereupon called out in a loud voice some question or other--in
the first bewilderment of waking he does not remember exactly what--and
the man made no reply. The atmosphere and feeling of true nightmare lay
horribly about him, making movement and speech both difficult. At first,
indeed, he was not sure where he was--whether in one of the earlier
camps, or at home in his bed at Aberdeen. The sense of confusion was
very troubling.
And next--almost simultaneous with his waking, it seemed--the profound
stillness of the dawn outside was shattered by a most uncommon sound. It
came without warning, or audible approach; and it was unspeakably
dreadful. It was a voice, Simpson declares, possibly a human voice;
hoarse yet plaintive--a soft, roaring voice close outside the tent,
overhead rather than upon the ground, of immense volume, while in some
strange way most penetratingly and seductively sweet. It rang out, too,
in three separate and distinct notes, or cries, that bore in some odd
fashion a resemblance, farfetched yet recognizable, to the name of the
guide: "_Dé-fa-go!_"
The student admits he is unable to describe it quite intelligently, for
it was unlike any sound he had ever heard in his life, and combined a
blending of such contrary qualities. "A sort of windy, crying voice," he
calls it, "as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable
power...."
And, even before it ceased, dropping back into the great gulfs of
silence, the guide beside him had sprung to his feet with an answering
though unintelligible cry. He blundered against the tent pole with
violence, shaking the whole structure, spreading his arms out
frantically for more room, and kicking his legs impetuously free of the
clinging blankets. For a second, perhaps two, he stood upright by the
door, his outline dark against the pallor of the dawn; then, with a
furious, rushing speed, before his companion could move a hand to stop
him, he shot with a plunge through the flaps of canvas--and was gone.
And as he went--so astonishingly fast that the voice could actually be
heard dying in the distance--he called aloud in tones of anguished
terror that at the same time held something strangely like the frenzied
exultation of delight--
"Oh! oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire! Oh! oh! This height
and fiery speed!"
And then the distance quickly buried it, and the deep silence of very
early morning descended upon the forest as before.
It had all come about with such rapidity that, but for the evidence of
the empty bed beside him, Simpson could almost have believed it to have
been the memory of a nightmare carried over from sleep. He still felt
the warm pressure of that vanished body against his side; there lay the
twisted blankets in a heap; the very tent yet trembled with the
vehemence of the impetuous departure. The strange words rang in his
ears, as though he still heard them in the distance--wild language of a
suddenly stricken mind. Moreover, it was not only the senses of sight
and hearing that reported uncommon things to his brain, for even while