The Wendigo
the Bush--wind, falling water, cries of the animals, and so forth. And,
once the victim hears _that_--he's off for good, of course! His most
vulnerable points, moreover, are said to be the feet and the eyes; the
feet, you see, for the lust of wandering, and the eyes for the lust of
beauty. The poor beggar goes at such a dreadful speed that he bleeds
beneath the eyes, and his feet burn."
Dr. Cathcart, as he spoke, continued to peer uneasily into the
surrounding gloom. His voice sank to a hushed tone.
"The Wendigo," he added, "is said to burn his feet--owing to the
friction, apparently caused by its tremendous velocity--till they drop
off, and new ones form exactly like its own."
Simpson listened in horrified amazement; but it was the pallor on Hank's
face that fascinated him most. He would willingly have stopped his ears
and closed his eyes, had he dared.
"It don't always keep to the ground neither," came in Hank's slow, heavy
drawl, "for it goes so high that he thinks the stars have set him all
a-fire. An' it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the
tops of the trees, carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him
jest as a fish hawk'll drop a pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its
food, of all the muck in the whole Bush is--moss!" And he laughed a
short, unnatural laugh. "It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added,
looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions. "Moss-eater," he
repeated, with a string of the most outlandish oaths he could invent.
But Simpson now understood the true purpose of all this talk. What
these two men, each strong and "experienced" in his own way, dreaded
more than anything else was--silence. They were talking against time.
They were also talking against darkness, against the invasion of panic,
against the admission reflection might bring that they were in an
enemy's country--against anything, in fact, rather than allow their
inmost thoughts to assume control. He himself, already initiated by the
awful vigil with terror, was beyond both of them in this respect. He had
reached the stage where he was immune. But these two, the scoffing,
analytical doctor, and the honest, dogged backwoodsman, each sat
trembling in the depths of his being.
Thus the hours passed; and thus, with lowered voices and a kind of taut
inner resistance of spirit, this little group of humanity sat in the
jaws of the wilderness and talked foolishly of the terrible and haunting
legend. It was an unequal contest, all things considered, for the
wilderness had already the advantage of first attack--and of a hostage.
The fate of their comrade hung over them with a steadily increasing
weight of oppression that finally became insupportable.
It was Hank, after a pause longer than the preceding ones that no one
seemed able to break, who first let loose all this pent-up emotion in
very unexpected fashion, by springing suddenly to his feet and letting
out the most ear-shattering yell imaginable into the night. He could not
contain himself any longer, it seemed. To make it carry even beyond an
ordinary cry he interrupted its rhythm by shaking the palm of his hand
before his mouth.
"That's for Défago," he said, looking down at the other two with a
queer, defiant laugh, "for it's my belief"--the sandwiched oaths may be
omitted--"that my ole partner's not far from us at this very minute."
There was a vehemence and recklessness about his performance that made
Simpson, too, start to his feet in amazement, and betrayed even the
doctor into letting the pipe slip from between his lips. Hank's face was
ghastly, but Cathcart's showed a sudden weakness--a loosening of all his
faculties, as it were. Then a momentary anger blazed into his eyes, and
he too, though with deliberation born of habitual self-control, got upon
his feet and faced the excited guide. For this was unpermissible,
foolish, dangerous, and he meant to stop it in the bud.
What might have happened in the next minute or two one may speculate
about, yet never definitely know, for in the instant of profound silence
that followed Hank's roaring voice, and as though in answer to it,
something went past through the darkness of the sky overhead at terrific
speed--something of necessity very large, for it displaced much air,
while down between the trees there fell a faint and windy cry of a human
voice, calling in tones of indescribable anguish and appeal--
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire!"
White to the very edge of his shirt, Hank looked stupidly about him like
a child. Dr. Cathcart uttered some kind of unintelligible cry, turning
as he did so with an instinctive movement of blind terror towards the
protection of the tent, then halting in the act as though frozen.
Simpson, alone of the three, retained his presence of mind a little. His
own horror was too deep to allow of any immediate reaction. He had heard
that cry before.
Turning to his stricken companions, he said almost calmly--
"That's exactly the cry I heard--the very words he used!"
Then, lifting his face to the sky, he cried aloud, "Défago, Défago! Come
down here to us! Come down--!"
And before there was time for anybody to take definite action one way or
another, there came the sound of something dropping heavily between the
trees, striking the branches on the way down, and landing with a
dreadful thud upon the frozen earth below. The crash and thunder of it
was really terrific.
"That's him, s'help me the good Gawd!" came from Hank in a whispering
cry half choked, his hand going automatically toward the hunting knife
in his belt. "And he's coming! He's coming!" he added, with an
irrational laugh of horror, as the sounds of heavy footsteps crunching
over the snow became distinctly audible, approaching through the
blackness towards the circle of light.
And while the steps, with their stumbling motion, moved nearer and
nearer upon them, the three men stood round that fire, motionless and
dumb. Dr. Cathcart had the appearance of a man suddenly withered; even
his eyes did not move. Hank, suffering shockingly, seemed on the verge
again of violent action; yet did nothing. He, too, was hewn of stone.
Like stricken children they seemed. The picture was hideous. And,
meanwhile, their owner still invisible, the footsteps came closer,
crunching the frozen snow. It was endless--too prolonged to be quite
real--this measured and pitiless approach. It was accursed.
VIII
Then at length the darkness, having thus laboriously conceived, brought
forth--a figure. It drew forward into the zone of uncertain light where
fire and shadows mingled, not ten feet away; then halted, staring at
them fixedly. The same instant it started forward again with the
spasmodic motion as of a thing moved by wires, and coming up closer to
them, full into the glare of the fire, they perceived then that--it was
a man; and apparently that this man was--Défago.
Something like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in that
moment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it as
though they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.
Défago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his way
straight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peered
close into the face of Simpson. The sound of a voice issued from his
lips--
"Here I am, Boss Simpson. I heered someone calling me." It was a faint,
dried up voice, made wheezy and breathless as by immense exertion. "I'm
havin' a reg'lar hellfire kind of a trip, I am." And he laughed,
thrusting his head forward into the other's face.
But that laugh started the machinery of the group of waxwork figures
with the wax-white skins. Hank immediately sprang forward with a stream
of oaths so farfetched that Simpson did not recognize them as English at
all, but thought he had lapsed into Indian or some other lingo. He only
realized that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, was
welcome--uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly and
leisurely, advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.
Simpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those next
few seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peering
at such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses at
first. He merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained
will of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of all
emotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that half
destroyed their reality; it was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through the
torrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's
tone of authority--hard and forced--saying several things about food and
warmth, blankets, whisky and the rest ... and, further, that whiffs of
that penetrating, unaccustomed odor, vile yet sweetly bewildering,
assailed his nostrils during all that followed.
It was no less a person than himself, however--less experienced and
adroit than the others though he was--who gave instinctive utterance to
the sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situation
by expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.
"It _is_--YOU, isn't it, Défago?" he asked under his breath, horror
breaking his speech.
And at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other had
time to move his lips. "Of course it is! Of course it is! Only--can't
you see--he's nearly dead with exhaustion, cold and terror! Isn't _that_
enough to change a man beyond all recognition?" It was said in order to
convince himself as much as to convince the others. The overemphasis
alone proved that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held a
handkerchief to his nose. That odor pervaded the whole camp.
For the "Défago" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets,
drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like
the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is
like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another
generation. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that
parody, masquerading there in the firelight as Défago. From the ruins of
the dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the
face was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong
proportions, the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjected
to extraordinary pressures and tensions. It made him think vaguely of
those bladder faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that change
their expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint and
wailing imitation of a voice. Both face and voice suggested some such
abominable resemblance. But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking to
describe the indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a face
and body that had been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmosphere
being removed, the entire structure threatened to fly asunder and
become--_incoherent_....
It was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume of
emotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to a
head without much ado. He went off to a little distance from the fire,
apparently so that the light should not dazzle him too much, and shading
his eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that held
anger and affection dreadfully mingled:
"You ain't Défaygo! You ain't Défaygo at all! I don't give a--damn, but
that ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!" He glared upon the huddled
figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. "An' if it is I'll
swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s'help
me the good Gawd!" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.