The Wendigo
It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one
possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear--_because it was the
truth_. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more
outlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time it
looked as if he meant to fling himself upon "the intruder," for his hand
continually jerked towards the long hunting knife in his belt.
But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself
very shortly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on
the ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go
into the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was
witnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face
peeping through the crack of the tent door flap.
Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept
his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and
stood opposite to the figure of Défago huddled over the fire. He looked
him squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.
"Défago, tell us what's happened--just a little, so that we can know
how best to help you?" he asked in a tone of authority, almost of
command. And at that point, it _was_ command. At once afterwards,
however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a face
so piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctor
shrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson,
watching close behind him, says he got the impression of a mask that was
on the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discover
something black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. "Out with
it, man, out with it!" Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck with
entreaty. "None of us can stand this much longer ...!" It was the cry of
instinct over reason.
And then "Défago," smiling _whitely_, answered in that thin and fading
voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another
character--
"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air about
him exactly like an animal. "I been with it too--"
Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart
would have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known,
for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his
voice from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes.
Such a howling was never heard.
"His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed--feet!"
Défago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the
first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet
Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And
Hank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like
that of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of
blanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caught
little more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massed
where moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but with
uncertain vision.
Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even
think a question, much less ask it, Défago was standing upright in front
of them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and
twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in
the true sense, monstrous.
"Now _you_ seen it too," he wheezed, "you seen my fiery, burning feet!
And now--that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent--it's 'bout time
for--"
His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was
like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook
their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a
blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the
little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of
time. Défago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards
the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought
him--was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him,
gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The
darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later,
above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind,
all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry
that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and
distance--
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.
Dr. Cathcart--suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the
others--was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to
dash headlong into the Bush.
"But I want ter know,--you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! That
ain't him at all, but some--devil that's shunted into his place ...!"
Somehow or other--he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished
it--he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,
apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed
his own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably.
It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave
him most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a
condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him
upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was
possible under the circumstances.
And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the
lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into
the folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height
and fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "People
with broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace
towards the camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit up
and stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terrible
in the wilderness are--are the feet of them that--" until his uncle came
across to change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.
The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just
as it cured Hank.
Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr.
Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there were
strange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul
battled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some of
the outer signs ...
At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others,
and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp--three
perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his
inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.
IX
They talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common
things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that
clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank,
being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself,
for he was also less complex. In Dr. Cathcart "civilization" championed
his forces against an attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he
is not _quite_ sure of certain things. Anyhow, he took longer to "find
himself."
Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions
probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order.
Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely
witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that
had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically,
betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it
rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic
and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature
were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe
not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later
in a sermon "savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of
men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity
as it exists."
With his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier
between the two types of mind made it difficult. Only once, years later,
something led them to the frontier of the subject--of a single detail of
the subject, rather--
"Can't you even tell me what--_they_ were like?" he asked; and the reply,
though conceived in wisdom, was not encouraging, "It is far better you
should not try to know, or to find out."
"Well--that odour...?" persisted the nephew. "What do you make of that?"
Dr. Cathcart looked at him and raised his eyebrows.
"Odours," he replied, "are not so easy as sounds and sights of telepathic
communication. I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do
yourself."
He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations. That was all.
* * * * *
At the fall of day, cold, exhausted, famished, the party came to the
end of the long portage and dragged themselves into a camp that at
first glimpse seemed empty. Fire there was none, and no Punk came
forward to welcome them. The emotional capacity of all three was too
over-spent to recognize either surprise or annoyance; but the cry of
spontaneous affection that burst from the lips of Hank, as he rushed
ahead of them towards the fire-place, came probably as a warning that
the end of the amazing affair was not quite yet. And both Cathcart and
his nephew confessed afterwards that when they saw him kneel down in
his excitement and embrace something that reclined, gently moving,
beside the extinguished ashes, they felt in their very bones that this
"something" would prove to be Défago--the true Défago, returned.
And so, indeed, it was.
It is soon told. Exhausted to the point of emaciation, the French
Canadian--what was left of him, that is--fumbled among the ashes, trying
to make a fire. His body crouched there, the weak fingers obeying feebly
the instinctive habit of a lifetime with twigs and matches. But there
was no longer any mind to direct the simple operation. The mind had
fled beyond recall. And with it, too, had fled memory. Not only recent
events, but all previous life was a blank.
This time it was the real man, though incredibly and horribly shrunken.
On his face was no expression of any kind whatever--fear, welcome, or
recognition. He did not seem to know who it was that embraced him, or
who it was that fed, warmed and spoke to him the words of comfort and
relief. Forlorn and broken beyond all reach of human aid, the little man
did meekly as he was bidden. The "something" that had constituted him
"individual" had vanished for ever.
In some ways it was more terribly moving than anything they had yet
seen--that idiot smile as he drew wads of coarse moss from his swollen
cheeks and told them that he was "a damned moss-eater"; the continued
vomiting of even the simplest food; and, worst of all, the piteous
and childish voice of complaint in which he told them that his feet
pained him--"burn like fire"--which was natural enough when Dr. Cathcart
examined them and found that both were dreadfully frozen. Beneath the
eyes there were faint indications of recent bleeding.
The details of how he survived the prolonged exposure, of where he had
been, or of how he covered the great distance from one camp to the
other, including an immense detour of the lake on foot since he had
no canoe--all this remains unknown. His memory had vanished completely.
And before the end of the winter whose beginning witnessed this strange