The Wendigo
undecipherable manner--appalling.
It was in the bigger tracks he first noticed this, and for a long time
he could not quite believe his eyes. Was it the blown leaves that
produced odd effects of light and shade, or that the dry snow, drifting
like finely ground rice about the edges, cast shadows and high lights?
Or was it actually the fact that the great marks had become faintly
colored? For round about the deep, plunging holes of the animal there
now appeared a mysterious, reddish tinge that was more like an effect of
light than of anything that dyed the substance of the snow itself. Every
mark had it, and had it increasingly--this indistinct fiery tinge that
painted a new touch of ghastliness into the picture.
But when, wholly unable to explain or to credit it, he turned his
attention to the other tracks to discover if they, too, bore similar
witness, he noticed that these had meanwhile undergone a change that was
infinitely worse, and charged with far more horrible suggestion. For, in
the last hundred yards or so, he saw that they had grown gradually into
the semblance of the parent tread. Imperceptibly the change had come
about, yet unmistakably. It was hard to see where the change first
began. The result, however, was beyond question. Smaller, neater, more
cleanly modeled, they formed now an exact and careful duplicate of the
larger tracks beside them. The feet that produced them had, therefore,
also changed. And something in his mind reared up with loathing and with
terror as he saw it.
Simpson, for the first time, hesitated; then, ashamed of his alarm and
indecision, took a few hurried steps ahead; the next instant stopped
dead in his tracks. Immediately in front of him all signs of the trail
ceased; both tracks came to an abrupt end. On all sides, for a hundred
yards and more, he searched in vain for the least indication of their
continuance. There was--nothing.
The trees were very thick just there, big trees all of them, spruce,
cedar, hemlock; there was no underbrush. He stood, looking about him,
all distraught; bereft of any power of judgment. Then he set to work to
search again, and again, and yet again, but always with the same result:
_nothing_. The feet that printed the surface of the snow thus far had
now, apparently, left the ground!
And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of
terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped
with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving
him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come--and
come it did.
Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and
wailing, he heard the crying voice of Défago, the guide.
The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect
of dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood
motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then
staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized
hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the
most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that
his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden
draught.
"Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire ...!" ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this
voice of anguish down the sky. Once it called--then silence through all
the listening wilderness of trees.
And Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself
running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and
boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after
the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which
experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged,
picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and
heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in
that far voice--the Power of untamed Distance--the Enticement of the
Desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of
someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering the lust and
travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of Défago, eternally
hunted, driven and pursued across the skiey vastness of those ancient
forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts ...
It seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his
disorganized sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a
moment, and think ...
The cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response;
the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond
recall--and held him fast.
* * * * *
Yet he searched and called, it seems, for hours afterwards, for it was
late in the afternoon when at length he decided to abandon a useless
pursuit and return to his camp on the shores of Fifty Island Water. Even
then he went with reluctance, that crying voice still echoing in his
ears. With difficulty he found his rifle and the homeward trail. The
concentration necessary to follow the badly blazed trees, and a biting
hunger that gnawed, helped to keep his mind steady. Otherwise, he
admits, the temporary aberration he had suffered might have been
prolonged to the point of positive disaster. Gradually the ballast
shifted back again, and he regained something that approached his normal
equilibrium.
But for all that the journey through the gathering dusk was miserably
haunted. He heard innumerable following footsteps; voices that laughed
and whispered; and saw figures crouching behind trees and boulders,
making signs to one another for a concerted attack the moment he had
passed. The creeping murmur of the wind made him start and listen. He
went stealthily, trying to hide where possible, and making as little
sound as he could. The shadows of the woods, hitherto protective or
covering merely, had now become menacing, challenging; and the pageantry
in his frightened mind masked a host of possibilities that were all the
more ominous for being obscure. The presentiment of a nameless doom
lurked ill-concealed behind every detail of what had happened.
It was really admirable how he emerged victor in the end; men of riper
powers and experience might have come through the ordeal with less
success. He had himself tolerably well in hand, all things considered,
and his plan of action proves it. Sleep being absolutely out of the
question and traveling an unknown trail in the darkness equally
impracticable, he sat up the whole of that night, rifle in hand, before
a fire he never for a single moment allowed to die down. The severity of
the haunted vigil marked his soul for life; but it was successfully
accomplished; and with the very first signs of dawn he set forth upon
the long return journey to the home camp to get help. As before, he left
a written note to explain his absence, and to indicate where he had left
a plentiful _cache_ of food and matches--though he had no expectation
that any human hands would find them!
How Simpson found his way alone by the lake and forest might well make a
story in itself, for to hear him tell it is to _know_ the passionate
loneliness of soul that a man can feel when the Wilderness holds him in
the hollow of its illimitable hand--and laughs. It is also to admire his
indomitable pluck.
He claims no skill, declaring that he followed the almost invisible
trail mechanically, and without thinking. And this, doubtless, is the
truth. He relied upon the guiding of the unconscious mind, which is
instinct. Perhaps, too, some sense of orientation, known to animals and
primitive men, may have helped as well, for through all that tangled
region he succeeded in reaching the exact spot where Défago had hidden
the canoe nearly three days before with the remark, "Strike doo west
across the lake into the sun to find the camp."
There was not much sun left to guide him, but he used his compass to the
best of his ability, embarking in the frail craft for the last twelve
miles of his journey with a sensation of immense relief that the forest
was at last behind him. And, fortunately, the water was calm; he took
his line across the center of the lake instead of coasting round the
shores for another twenty miles. Fortunately, too, the other hunters
were back. The light of their fires furnished a steering point without
which he might have searched all night long for the actual position of
the camp.
It was close upon midnight all the same when his canoe grated on the
sandy cove, and Hank, Punk and his uncle, disturbed in their sleep by
his cries, ran quickly down and helped a very exhausted and broken
specimen of Scotch humanity over the rocks toward a dying fire.
VI
The sudden entrance of his prosaic uncle into this world of wizardry
and horror that had haunted him without interruption now for two days
and two nights, had the immediate effect of giving to the affair an
entirely new aspect. The sound of that crisp "Hulloa, my boy! And what's
up _now_?" and the grasp of that dry and vigorous hand introduced
another standard of judgment. A revulsion of feeling washed through him.
He realized that he had let himself "go" rather badly. He even felt
vaguely ashamed of himself. The native hard-headedness of his race
reclaimed him.
And this doubtless explains why he found it so hard to tell that group
round the fire--everything. He told enough, however, for the immediate
decision to be arrived at that a relief party must start at the earliest
possible moment, and that Simpson, in order to guide it capably, must
first have food and, above all, sleep. Dr. Cathcart observing the lad's
condition more shrewdly than his patient knew, gave him a very slight
injection of morphine. For six hours he slept like the dead.
From the description carefully written out afterwards by this student of
divinity, it appears that the account he gave to the astonished group
omitted sundry vital and important details. He declares that, with his
uncle's wholesome, matter-of-fact countenance staring him in the face,
he simply had not the courage to mention them. Thus, all the search
party gathered, it would seem, was that Défago had suffered in the night
an acute and inexplicable attack of mania, had imagined himself "called"
by someone or something, and had plunged into the bush after it without
food or rifle, where he must die a horrible and lingering death by cold
and starvation unless he could be found and rescued in time. "In time,"
moreover, meant _at once_.
In the course of the following day, however--they were off by seven,
leaving Punk in charge with instructions to have food and fire always
ready--Simpson found it possible to tell his uncle a good deal more of
the story's true inwardness, without divining that it was drawn out of
him as a matter of fact by a very subtle form of cross examination. By
the time they reached the beginning of the trail, where the canoe was
laid up against the return journey, he had mentioned how Défago spoke
vaguely of "something he called a 'Wendigo'"; how he cried in his sleep;
how he imagined an unusual scent about the camp; and had betrayed other
symptoms of mental excitement. He also admitted the bewildering effect
of "that extraordinary odor" upon himself, "pungent and acrid like the
odor of lions." And by the time they were within an easy hour of Fifty
Island Water he had let slip the further fact--a foolish avowal of his
own hysterical condition, as he felt afterwards--that he had heard the
vanished guide call "for help." He omitted the singular phrases used,
for he simply could not bring himself to repeat the preposterous
language. Also, while describing how the man's footsteps in the snow had