I A considerable number of hunting parties were
out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the
moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms
of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations
could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without
a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which
he declares was worth all the bull moose that had ever been shot. But then
Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was i
nterested in other things besides moose--amongst
them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however,
found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple
reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself
played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the
affair as a whole.... Besides himself and his guide, Hank Davis,
there was young Simpson, his nephew, a divinity student destined for the
"Wee Kirk" (then on his first visit
to Canadian backwoods), and the
latter's guide, Defago. Joseph Defago was a French "Canuck," who had
strayed from his native Province of Quebec years before, and had got
caught in Rat Portage when the Canadian Pacific Railway was a-building;
a man who, in addition to his unparalleled knowledge of wood-craft and
bush-lore, could also sing the old _voyageur_ songs and tell a capital
hunting yarn into the bargain. He was deeply susceptible, moreover,
to that singular spell which the wilderness lays
upon certain lonely
natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion
that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated
him--whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing
with their mysteries. On this particular expedition he was Hank's
choice. Hank knew him and swore by him. He also swore at him, "jest
as a pal might," and since he had a vocabulary of picturesque, if utterly
meaningless, oaths, the conversation between the two stalwart
and
hardy woodsmen was often of a rather lively description. This river of expletives,
however, Hank agreed to dam a little out of respect for
his old "hunting boss," Dr. Cathcart, whom of course he addressed after
the fashion of the country as "Doc," and also because he understood that
young Simpson was already a "bit of a parson." He had, however, one
objection to Defago, and one only--which was, that the French Canadian
sometimes exhibited what Hank described as "the output of a cursed and di
smal
mind," meaning apparently that he sometimes was true to type,
Latin type, and suffered fits of a kind of silent moroseness when nothing
could induce him to utter speech. Defago, that is to say, was
imaginative and melancholy. And, as a rule, it was too long a spell of
"civilization" that induced the attacks, for a few days of the wilderness
invariably cured them. This, then, was the party of four that found
themselves in camp the last week in October of that "shy moose year" 'way
up in the
wilderness north of Rat Portage--a forsaken and desolate country.
There was also Punk, an Indian, who had accompanied Dr. Cathcart and
Hank on their hunting trips in previous years, and who acted as cook.
His duty was merely to stay in camp, catch fish, and prepare venison steaks
and coffee at a few minutes' notice. He dressed in the worn-out
clothes bequeathed to him by former patrons, and, except for his coarse
black hair and dark skin, he looked in these city garments no more like
a real reds
kin than a stage Negro looks like a real African. For all that,
however, Punk had in him still the instincts of his dying race; his
taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his superstition. The party round the blazing fire that night
were despondent, for a week had passed without a single sign of recent
moose discovering itself. Defago had sung his song and plunged into
a story, but Hank, in bad humor, reminded him so often that "he kep'
mussing-up the fac's so, that it was 'most all n
othin' but a petered-out
lie," that the Frenchman had finally subsided into a sulky silence which
nothing seemed likely to break. Dr. Cathcart and his nephew were fairly
done after an exhausting day. Punk was washing up the dishes, grunting
to himself under the lean-to of branches, where he later also slept.
No one troubled to stir the slowly dying fire. Overhead the stars
were brilliant in a sky quite wintry, and there was so little wind that
ice was already forming stealthily along the shores
of the still lake
behind them. The silence of the vast listening forest stole forward
and enveloped them. Hank broke in suddenly with his nasal voice. "I'm in favor of breaking new ground tomorrow,
Doc," he observed with energy, looking across at his employer. "We
don't stand a dead Dago's chance around here." "Agreed," said Cathcart, always a man of few
words. "Think the idea's good." "Sure pop, it's good," Hank resumed with confidence.
"S'pose, now, you and I strike west, up Garden Lake way fo
r
a change! None of us ain't touched that quiet bit o' land yet--" "I'm with you." "And you, Defago, take Mr. Simpson along in
the small canoe, skip across the lake, portage over into Fifty Island Water,
and take a good squint down that thar southern shore. The moose 'yarded'
there like hell last year, and for all we know they may be doin'
it agin this year jest to spite us." Defago, keeping his eyes on the fire, said
nothing by way of reply. He was still offended, possibly, about his interrupte
d
story. "No one's been up that way this year, an'
I'll lay my bottom dollar on _that!_" Hank added with emphasis, as though
he had a reason for knowing. He looked over at his partner sharply.
"Better take the little silk tent and stay away a couple o' nights,"
he concluded, as though the matter were definitely settled. For Hank was
recognized as general organizer of the hunt, and in charge of the
party. It was obvious to anyone that Defago did not
jump at the plan, but his silence seemed to con
vey something more than
ordinary disapproval, and across his sensitive dark face there passed
a curious expression like a flash of firelight--not so quickly, however,
that the three men had not time to catch it. "He funked for some reason, _I_ thought,"
Simpson said afterwards in the tent he shared with his uncle. Dr. Cathcart
made no immediate reply, although the look had interested him enough
at the time for him to make a mental note of it. The expression had caused
him a passing uneasiness he
could not quite account for at the moment. But Hank, of course, had been the first to
notice it, and the odd thing was that instead of becoming explosive or
angry over the other's reluctance, he at once began to humor him
a bit. "But there ain't no _speshul_ reason why no
one's been up there this year," he said with a perceptible hush in
his tone; "not the reason you mean, anyway! Las' year it was the fires that
kep' folks out, and this year I guess--I guess it jest happened so,
that's all!" Hi
s manner was clearly meant to be encouraging. Joseph Defago raised his eyes a moment, then
dropped them again. A breath of wind stole out of the forest and
stirred the embers into a passing blaze. Dr. Cathcart again noticed
the expression in the guide's face, and again he did not like it. But this
time the nature of the look betrayed itself. In those eyes, for an instant,
he caught the gleam of a man scared in his very soul. It disquieted
him more than he cared to admit. "Bad Indians up that way
?" he asked, with
a laugh to ease matters a little, while Simpson, too sleepy to notice
this subtle by-play, moved off to bed with a prodigious yawn; "or--or
anything wrong with the country?" he added, when his nephew was out
of hearing. Hank met his eye with something less than
his usual frankness. "He's jest skeered," he replied good-humouredly.
"Skeered stiff about some ole feery tale! That's all, ain't it,
ole pard?" And he gave Defago a friendly kick on the moccasined foot that
lay nearest
the fire. Defago looked up quickly, as from an interrupted
reverie, a reverie, however, that had not prevented his seeing
all that went on about him. "Skeered--_nuthin'!_" he answered, with a
flush of defiance. "There's nuthin' in the Bush that can skeer Joseph
Defago, and don't you forget it!" And the natural energy with which he
spoke made it impossible to know whether he told the whole truth or only
a part of it. Hank turned towards the doctor. He was just
going to add something when he stopp
ed abruptly and looked round. A sound
close behind them in the darkness made all three start. It was old
Punk, who had moved up from his lean-to while they talked and now stood
there just beyond the circle of firelight--listening. "'Nother time, Doc!" Hank whispered, with
a wink, "when the gallery ain't stepped down into the stalls!" And,
springing to his feet, he slapped the Indian on the back and cried noisily,
"Come up t' the fire an' warm yer dirty red skin a bit." He dragged
him towards the
blaze and threw more wood on. "That was a mighty good
feed you give us an hour or two back," he continued heartily, as though
to set the man's thoughts on another scent, "and it ain't Christian to
let you stand out there freezin' yer ole soul to hell while we're
gettin' all good an' toasted!" Punk moved in and warmed his feet, smiling
darkly at the other's volubility which he only half understood,
but saying nothing. And presently Dr. Cathcart, seeing that further
conversation was impossible, f
ollowed his nephew's example and moved off
to the tent, leaving the three men smoking over the now blazing fire. It is not easy to undress in a small tent
without waking one's companion, and Cathcart, hardened and warm-blooded
as he was in spite of his fifty odd years, did what Hank would have
described as "considerable of his twilight" in the open. He noticed,
during the process, that Punk had meanwhile gone back to his lean-to, and
that Hank and Defago were at it hammer and tongs, or, rather,
hammer
and anvil, the little French Canadian being the anvil. It was all very
like the conventional stage picture of Western melodrama: the fire lighting
up their faces with patches of alternate red and black; Defago,
in slouch hat and moccasins in the part of the "badlands" villain; Hank,
open-faced and hatless, with that reckless fling of his shoulders,
the honest and deceived hero; and old Punk, eavesdropping in the background,
supplying the atmosphere of mystery. The doctor smiled as he noti
ced
the details; but at the same time something deep within him--he hardly
knew what--shrank a little, as though an almost imperceptible breath of warning
had touched the surface of his soul and was gone again before he could
seize it. Probably it was traceable to that "scared expression" he had
seen in the eyes of Defago; "probably"--for this hint of fugitive emotion
otherwise escaped his usually so keen analysis. Defago, he was vaguely
aware, might cause trouble somehow ...He was not as steady
a
guide as Hank, for instance ... Further than that he could not
get ... He watched the men a moment longer before
diving into the stuffy tent where Simpson already slept soundly. Hank,
he saw, was swearing like a mad African in a New York nigger saloon; but
it was the swearing of "affection." The ridiculous oaths flew freely
now that the cause of their obstruction was asleep. Presently he
put his arm almost tenderly upon his comrade's shoulder, and they moved
off together into the shadows wher
e their tent stood faintly glimmering.
Punk, too, a moment later followed their example and disappeared
between his odorous blankets in the opposite direction. 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 Defago 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. H
ank 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 thei
r 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 Defago, 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 surrou
nding 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 tre
es 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 league
s 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 ar
ound up thar, they'll not get so
much as a tail-end scent of you with the wind as it is. Good luck, Monsieur
Defago!" he added, facetiously giving the name its French pronunciation
for once, "_bonne chance!_" Defago 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 Defago and Simpson,
with silk tent and grub for two da
ys, 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,
Defago 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 Defago 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 dream
ed
of objecting when Defago 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 hug
e 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, gleami
ng 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 Defago 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 Defago, 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
Defago 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 Defago 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 Defago wearily,
"and the sun jest goin' to di
p 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,
Defago "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--_brule_, as it is called, wher
e
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 w
orld 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 droppe
d 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. And strips of colored cloud, like flaunting
pennons, signaled their departure to the stars.... The
beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting.
Simpson smoked the fish and burnt his fingers into the bargain in
his efforts to enjoy it and at the same time tend the frying pan and the
fire. Yet, ever at the back of his thoughts, lay that other aspect of the
wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation
which took no note of man. The sense of his utter loneliness, now
that even Defago had gone, came close as he looked about him and listened
for the sound of his c
ompanion's returning footsteps. There was pleasure in the sensation, yet with
it a perfectly comprehensible alarm. And instinctively the
thought stirred in him: "What should I--_could_ I, do--if anything
happened and he did not come back--?" They enjoyed their well-earned supper, eating
untold quantities of fish, and drinking unmilked tea strong enough to
kill men who had not covered thirty miles of hard "going," eating little
on the way. And when it was over, they smoked and told stories round
the
blazing fire, laughing, stretching weary limbs, and discussing plans
for the morrow. Defago was in excellent spirits, though disappointed
at having no signs of moose to report. But it was dark and he had not gone
far. The _brule_, too, was bad. His clothes and hands were smeared with
charcoal. Simpson, watching him, realized with renewed vividness their
position--alone together in the wilderness. "Defago," he said presently, "these woods,
you know, are a bit too big to feel quite at home in-
-to feel comfortable
in, I mean!... Eh?" He merely gave expression to the mood of the
moment; he was hardly prepared for the earnestness, the solemnity even, with
which the guide took him up. "You've hit it right, Simpson, boss," he replied,
fixing his searching brown eyes on his face, "and that's the truth,
sure. There's no end to 'em--no end at all." Then he added in a lowered
tone as if to himself, "There's lots found out _that_, and gone plumb
to pieces!" But the man's gravity of manner was
not quite
to the other's liking; it was a little too suggestive for this scenery
and setting; he was sorry he had broached the subject. He remembered
suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken
with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited
wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated,
half deluded, to their death. And he had a shrewd idea that his companion
held something in sympathy with that queer type. He led the
conversation on to other topics, on to Hank and the doctor, for instance,
and the natural rivalry as to who should get the first sight of moose. "If they went doo west," observed Defago carelessly,
"there's sixty miles between us now--with ole Punk at halfway
house eatin' himself full to bustin' with fish and coffee." They laughed
together over the picture. But the casual mention of those sixty
miles again made Simpson realize the prodigious scale of this land
where they hunted; sixty miles was
a mere step; two hundred little more than
a step. Stories of lost hunters rose persistently before his memory.
The passion and mystery of homeless and wandering men, seduced by the
beauty of great forests, swept his soul in a way too vivid to be quite
pleasant. He wondered vaguely whether it was the mood of his companion
that invited the unwelcome suggestion with such persistence. "Sing us a song, Defago, if you're not too
tired," he asked; "one of those old _voyageur_ songs you sang the other
night." He handed his tobacco pouch to the guide and then filled
his own pipe, while the Canadian, nothing loth, sent his light voice
across the lake in one of those plaintive, almost melancholy chanties
with which lumbermen and trappers lessen the burden of their labor.
There was an appealing and romantic flavor about it, something that recalled
the atmosphere of the old pioneer days when Indians and wilderness
were leagued together, battles frequent, and the Old Country farther
off than it is
today. The sound traveled pleasantly over the water,
but the forest at their backs seemed to swallow it down with a single gulp
that permitted neither echo nor resonance. It was in the middle of the third verse that
Simpson noticed something unusual--something that brought his thoughts
back with a rush from faraway scenes. A curious change had come
into the man's voice. Even before he knew what it was, uneasiness caught
him, and looking up quickly, he saw that Defago, though still
singing, was p
eering about him into the Bush, as though he heard or saw something.
His voice grew fainter--dropped to a hush--then ceased altogether.
The same instant, with a movement amazingly alert, he started
to his feet and stood upright--_sniffing the air_. Like a dog scenting
game, he drew the air into his nostrils in short, sharp breaths,
turning quickly as he did so in all directions, and finally "pointing"
down the lake shore, eastwards. It was a performance unpleasantly
suggestive and at the same ti
me singularly dramatic. Simpson's heart
fluttered disagreeably as he watched it. "Lord, man! How you made me jump!" he exclaimed,
on his feet beside him the same instant, and peering over his shoulder
into the sea of darkness. "What's up? Are you frightened--?" Even before the question was out of his mouth
he knew it was foolish, for any man with a pair of eyes in his head
could see that the Canadian had turned white down to his very gills. Not
even sunburn and the glare of the fire could hide t
hat. The student felt himself trembling a little,
weakish in the knees. "What's up?" he repeated quickly. "D'you smell
moose? Or anything queer, anything--wrong?" He lowered his voice instinctively. The forest pressed round them with its encircling
wall; the nearer tree stems gleamed like bronze in the firelight;
beyond that--blackness, and, so far as he could tell, a silence of death.
Just behind them a passing puff of wind lifted a single leaf, looked
at it, then laid it softly down again with
out disturbing the rest of
the covey. It seemed as if a million invisible causes had combined just
to produce that single visible effect. _Other_ life pulsed about
them--and was gone. Defago turned abruptly; the livid hue of his
face had turned to a dirty grey. "I never said I heered--or smelt--nuthin',"
he said slowly and emphatically, in an oddly altered voice that
conveyed somehow a touch of defiance. "I was only--takin' a look round--so
to speak. It's always a mistake to be too previous with
yer questions."
Then he added suddenly with obvious effort, in his more natural voice,
"Have you got the matches, Boss Simpson?" and proceeded to light
the pipe he had half filled just before he began to sing. Without speaking another word they sat down
again by the fire. Defago changing his side so that he could face the
direction the wind came from. For even a tenderfoot could tell that.
Defago changed his position in order to hear and smell--all there was
to be heard and smelt. And, since he
now faced the lake with his back
to the trees it was evidently nothing in the forest that had sent so strange
and sudden a warning to his marvelously trained nerves. "Guess now I don't feel like singing any,"
he explained presently of his own accord. "That song kinder brings back
memories that's troublesome to me; I never oughter've begun it. It sets me
on t' imagining things, see?" Clearly the man was still fighting with some
profoundly moving emotion. He wished to excuse himself in the eyes o
f
the other. But the explanation, in that it was only a part of
the truth, was a lie, and he knew perfectly well that Simpson was not deceived
by it. For nothing could explain away the livid terror that had
dropped over his face while he stood there sniffing the air. And nothing--no
amount of blazing fire, or chatting on ordinary subjects--could make
that camp exactly as it had been before. The shadow of an unknown horror,
naked if unguessed, that had flashed for an instant in the face and
gestu
res of the guide, had also communicated itself, vaguely and therefore
more potently, to his companion. The guide's visible efforts to
dissemble the truth only made things worse. Moreover, to add to the younger
man's uneasiness, was the difficulty, nay, the impossibility he felt
of asking questions, and also his complete ignorance as to the cause ...Indians,
wild animals, forest fires--all these, he knew, were wholly out
of the question. His imagination searched vigorously, but in vain.... * * *
* * Yet, somehow or other, after another long
spell of smoking, talking and roasting themselves before the great fire,
the shadow that had so suddenly invaded their peaceful camp began
to shirt. Perhaps Defago's efforts, or the return of his quiet and normal
attitude accomplished this; perhaps Simpson himself had exaggerated
the affair out of all proportion to the truth; or possibly the vigorous
air of the wilderness brought its own powers of healing. Whatever
the cause, the feeling of immediate
horror seemed to have passed away
as mysteriously as it had come, for nothing occurred to feed it. Simpson
began to feel that he had permitted himself the unreasoning terror of
a child. He put it down partly to a certain subconscious excitement
that this wild and immense scenery generated in his blood, partly to
the spell of solitude, and partly to overfatigue. That pallor in the
guide's face was, of course, uncommonly hard to explain, yet it _might_
have been due in some way to an effect of fi
relight, or his own imagination
...He gave it the benefit of the doubt; he was Scotch. When a somewhat unordinary emotion has disappeared,
the mind always finds a dozen ways of explaining away its
causes ...Simpson lit a last pipe and tried to laugh to himself. On getting
home to Scotland it would make quite a good story. He did not realize
that this laughter was a sign that terror still lurked in the recesses
of his soul--that, in fact, it was merely one of the conventional
signs by which a man
, seriously alarmed, tries to persuade himself
that he is _not_ so. Defago, however, heard that low laughter and
looked up with surprise on his face. The two men stood, side by side,
kicking the embers about before going to bed. It was ten o'clock--a
late hour for hunters to be still awake. "What's ticklin' yer?" he asked in his ordinary
tone, yet gravely. "I--I was thinking of our little toy woods
at home, just at that moment," stammered Simpson, coming back to
what really dominated his mind, a
nd startled by the question, "and comparing
them to--to all this," and he swept his arm round to indicate
the Bush. A pause followed in which neither of them
said anything. "All the same I wouldn't laugh about it, if
I was you," Defago added, looking over Simpson's shoulder into the shadows.
"There's places in there nobody won't never see into--nobody
knows what lives in there either." "Too big--too far off?" The suggestion in
the guide's manner was immense and horrible. Defago nodded. The expre
ssion on his face
was dark. He, too, felt uneasy. The younger man understood that in
a _hinterland_ of this size there might well be depths of wood that would
never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was
not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he
suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with
the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that
did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wan
ted to
say, yet found it difficult to "get at." "Say, you, Boss Simpson," he began suddenly,
as the last shower of 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?"
persi
sted 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. Defago'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. "I
t 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. Defag
o 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 o
f 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 whi
te 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 Defago 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 for
est 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; Defago up
on 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-Atla
ntic.... 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. "Defago," 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 notice
d 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 hi
s 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. Defago, 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 memor
y 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 t
he 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 throug
h the blankets down the entire length
of his own body. Defago 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, i
ndeed, 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, ov
erhead 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: "_De-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 the man cried and ran, he had become aware
that a strange perfume, faint yet pungent, pervaded the interior of the
tent. And it was at this point, it seems, brought to himself by the
consciousness that his nost
rils were taking this distressing odor
down into his throat, that he found his courage, sprang quickly to his feet--and
went out. The grey light of dawn that dropped, cold
and glimmering, between the trees revealed the scene tolerably well. There
stood the tent behind him, soaked with dew; the dark ashes of the
fire, still warm; the lake, white beneath a coating of mist, the islands
rising darkly out of it like objects packed in wool; and patches of
snow beyond among the clearer spaces of the Bu
sh--everything cold,
still, waiting for the sun. But nowhere a sign of the vanished guide--still,
doubtless, flying at frantic speed through the frozen woods. There
was not even the sound of disappearing footsteps, nor the echoes of
the dying voice. He had gone--utterly. There was nothing; nothing but the sense of
his recent presence, so strongly left behind about the camp; _and_--this
penetrating, all-pervading odor. And even this was now rapidly disappearing
in its turn. In spite of his exceed
ing mental perturbation, Simpson struggled
hard to detect its nature, and define it, but the ascertaining
of an elusive scent, not recognized subconsciously and at once, is
a very subtle operation of the mind. And he failed. It was gone before
he could properly seize or name it. Approximate description, even, seems
to have been difficult, for it was unlike any smell he knew. Acrid
rather, not unlike the odor of a lion, he thinks, yet softer and not wholly
unpleasing, with something almost sweet
in it that reminded
him of the scent of decaying garden leaves, earth, and the myriad, nameless
perfumes that make up the odor of a big forest. Yet the "odor of lions"
is the phrase with which he usually sums it all up. Then--it was wholly gone, and he found himself
standing by the ashes of the fire in a state of amazement and stupid
terror that left him the helpless prey of anything that chose to happen.
Had a muskrat poked its pointed muzzle over a rock, or a squirrel
scuttled in that instant
down the bark of a tree, he would most likely have
collapsed without more ado and fainted. For he felt about the whole affair
the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror ... and his scattered powers
had not as yet had time to collect themselves into a definite attitude
of fighting self-control. Nothing did happen, however. A great kiss
of wind ran softly through the awakening forest, and a few maple leaves here
and there rustled tremblingly to earth. The sky seemed to grow
suddenly much lighter.
Simpson felt the cool air upon his cheek and
uncovered head; realized that he was shivering with the cold; and,
making a great effort, realized next that he was alone in the Bush--_and_
that he was called upon to take immediate steps to find and succor
his vanished companion. Make an effort, accordingly, he did, though
an ill-calculated and futile one. With that wilderness of trees about him,
the sheet of water cutting him off behind, and the horror of that wild
cry in his blood, he did what an
y other inexperienced man would have
done in similar bewilderment: he ran about, without any sense
of direction, like a frantic child, and called loudly without ceasing
the name of the guide: "Defago! Defago! Defago!" he yelled, and the
trees gave him back the name as often as he shouted, only a little
softened--"Defago! Defago! Defago!" He followed the trail that lay a short distance
across the patches of snow, and then lost it again where the trees
grew too thickly for snow to lie. He shouted
till he was hoarse, and
till the sound of his own voice in all that unanswering and listening
world began to frighten him. His confusion increased in direct ratio to
the violence of his efforts. His distress became formidably acute, till
at length his exertions defeated their own object, and from sheer
exhaustion he headed back to the camp again. It remains a wonder that he
ever found his way. It was with great difficulty, and only after numberless
false clues, that he at last saw the white tent
between the trees,
and so reached safety. Exhaustion then applied its own remedy, and
he grew calmer. He made the fire and breakfasted. Hot coffee and bacon
put a little sense and judgment into him again, and he realized that
he had been behaving like a boy. He now made another, and more successful
attempt to face the situation collectedly, and, a nature naturally
plucky coming to his assistance, he decided that he must first
make as thorough a search as possible, failing success in which, he m
ust
find his way into the home camp as best he could and bring help. And this was what he did. Taking food, matches
and rifle with him, and a small axe to blaze the trees against his return
journey, he set forth. It was eight o'clock when he started, the
sun shining over the tops of the trees in a sky without clouds. Pinned
to a stake by the fire he left a note in case Defago returned while he was
away. This time, according to a careful plan, he
took a new direction, intending to make a wide swe
ep that must sooner
or later cut into indications of the guide's trail; and, before
he had gone a quarter of a mile he came across the tracks of a large
animal in the snow, and beside it the light and smaller tracks of what were
beyond question human feet--the feet of Defago. The relief he at
once experienced was natural, though brief; for at first sight he saw in
these tracks a simple explanation of the whole matter: these big
marks had surely been left by a bull moose that, wind against it, ha
d blundered
upon the camp, and uttered its singular cry of warning and alarm
the moment its mistake was apparent. Defago, in whom the hunting instinct
was developed to the point of uncanny perfection, had scented the
brute coming down the wind hours before. His excitement and disappearance
were due, of course, to--to his-- Then the impossible explanation at which he
grasped faded, as common sense showed him mercilessly that none of
this was true. No guide, much less a guide like Defago, could ha
ve acted
in so irrational a way, going off even without his rifle ...! The whole
affair demanded a far more complicated elucidation, when he remembered
the details of it all--the cry of terror, the amazing language, the grey
face of horror when his nostrils first caught the new odor; that muffled
sobbing in the darkness, and--for this, too, now came back
to him dimly--the man's original aversion for this particular bit
of country.... Besides, now that he examined them closer,
these were not the
tracks of a bull moose at all! Hank had explained to
him the outline of a bull's hoofs, of a cow's or calf s, too, for that
matter; he had drawn them clearly on a strip of birch bark. And these
were wholly different. They were big, round, ample, and with no pointed
outline as of sharp hoofs. He wondered for a moment whether bear tracks
were like that. There was no other animal he could think of, for caribou
did not come so far south at this season, and, even if they did,
would leave hoof marks.
They were ominous signs--these mysterious
writings left in the snow by the unknown creature that had lured a human
being away from safety--and when he coupled them in his imagination with
that haunting sound that broke the stillness of the dawn, a momentary
dizziness shook his mind, distressing him again beyond belief. He felt
the _threatening_ aspect of it all. And, stooping down to examine the
marks more closely, he caught a faint whiff of that sweet yet pungent odor
that made him instantly st
raighten up again, fighting a sensation
almost of nausea. Then his memory played him another evil trick.
He suddenly recalled those uncovered feet projecting beyond the
edge of the tent, and the body's appearance of having been dragged towards
the opening; the man's shrinking from something by the door when
he woke later. The details now beat against his trembling mind with concerted
attack. They seemed to gather in those deep spaces of the silent
forest about him, where the host of trees stood
waiting, listening, watching
to see what he would do. The woods were closing round him. With the persistence of true pluck, however,
Simpson went forward, following the tracks as best he could, smothering
these ugly emotions that sought to weaken his will. He blazed
innumerable trees as he went, ever fearful of being unable to find the way
back, and calling aloud at intervals of a few seconds the name of the
guide. The dull tapping of the axe upon the massive trunks, and the unnatural
accents of
his own voice became at length sounds that he even
dreaded to make, dreaded to hear. For they drew attention without ceasing
to his presence and exact whereabouts, and if it were really the case
that something was hunting himself down in the same way that he was hunting
down another-- With a strong effort, he crushed the thought
out the instant it rose. It was the beginning, he realized, of a bewilderment
utterly diabolical in kind that would speedily destroy him. * * * * * Although the snow wa
s not continuous, lying
merely in shallow flurries over the more open spaces, he found no difficulty
in following the tracks for the first few miles. They went
straight as a ruled line wherever the trees permitted. The stride soon
began to increase in length, till it finally assumed proportions
that seemed absolutely impossible for any ordinary animal to have
made. Like huge flying leaps they became. One of these he measured, and
though he knew that "stretch" of eighteen feet must be somehow wro
ng, he
was at a complete loss to understand why he found no signs on the snow
between the extreme points. But what perplexed him even more, making him
feel his vision had gone utterly awry, was that Defago's stride increased
in the same manner, and finally covered the same incredible distances.
It looked as if the great beast had lifted him with it and carried him
across these astonishing intervals. Simpson, who was much longer in
the limb, found that he could not compass even half the stretch b
y taking
a running jump. And the sight of these huge tracks, running
side by side, silent evidence of a dreadful journey in which terror
or madness had urged to impossible results, was profoundly moving.
It shocked him in the secret depths of his soul. It was the most horrible
thing his eyes had ever looked upon. He began to follow them mechanically,
absentmindedly almost, ever peering over his shoulder to
see if he, too, were being followed by something with a gigantic tread....
And soon it cam
e about that he no longer quite realized what it was
they signified--these impressions left upon the snow by something
nameless and untamed, always accompanied by the footmarks of the little
French Canadian, his guide, his comrade, the man who had shared his tent
a few hours before, chatting, laughing, even singing by his side.... V For a man of his years and inexperience, only
a canny Scot, perhaps, grounded in common sense and established in
logic, could have preserved even that measure of bal
ance that this youth
somehow or other did manage to preserve through the whole adventure. Otherwise,
two things he presently noticed, while forging pluckily
ahead, must have sent him headlong back to the comparative safety of
his tent, instead of only making his hands close more tightly upon the
rifle stock, while his heart, trained for the Wee Kirk, sent a wordless
prayer winging its way to heaven. Both tracks, he saw, had undergone
a change, and this change, so far as it concerned the footstep
s of the
man, was in some 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 mysteri
ous, 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, ce
dar, 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 Defago,
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
su
pport, 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, scarcel
y 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 Defago, 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 difficult
y 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 innumera
ble 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 o
f 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 eq
ually 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 expecta
tion 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 rel
ied 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 Defago 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 w
hen
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 h
is 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 Defago
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 tim
e," 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
ment
ioned how Defago 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 gradually assumed an exact miniature likeness
of the animal's plunging tracks, he left out the fact that they measured
a _wholly_ incredible distance. It seemed a question, nicely balanced
between individual pride and honesty, what he should reveal and what
suppress. H
e mentioned the fiery tinge in the snow, for instance, yet
shrank from telling that body and bed had been partly dragged out of the
tent.... With the net result that Dr. Cathcart, adroit
psychologist that he fancied himself to be, had assured him clearly
enough exactly where his mind, influenced by loneliness, bewilderment
and terror, had yielded to the strain and invited delusion. While praising
his conduct, he managed at the same time to point out where, when,
and how his mind had gone astray.
He made his nephew think himself finer
than he was by judicious praise, yet more foolish than he was by minimizing
the value of the evidence. Like many another materialist, that
is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, _because_
the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence
inadmissible. "The spell of these terrible solitudes," he
said, "cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of
the higher imaginative qualities. It has worked upon yo
urs exactly
as it worked upon my own when I was your age. The animal that haunted
your little camp was undoubtedly a moose, for the 'belling' of
a moose may have, sometimes, a very peculiar quality of sound. The colored
appearance of the big tracks was obviously a defect of vision in your own
eyes produced by excitement. The size and stretch of the tracks
we shall prove when we come to them. But the hallucination of an
audible voice, of course, is one of the commonest forms of delusion due
to me
ntal excitement--an excitement, my dear boy, perfectly excusable,
and, let me add, wonderfully controlled by you under the circumstances.
For the rest, I am bound to say, you have acted with a splendid
courage, for the terror of feeling oneself lost in this wilderness
is nothing short of awful, and, had I been in your place, I don't for
a moment believe I could have behaved with one quarter of your wisdom and
decision. The only thing I find it uncommonly difficult to explain is--that--damned
odo
r." "It made me feel sick, I assure you," declared
his nephew, "positively dizzy!" His uncle's attitude of calm omniscience,
merely because he knew more psychological formulae, made him slightly
defiant. It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience
one has not personally witnessed. "A kind of desolate and terrible
odor is the only way I can describe it," he concluded, glancing at the
features of the quiet, unemotional man beside him. "I can only marvel," was the reply, "that
und
er the circumstances it did not seem to you even worse." The dry words,
Simpson knew, hovered between the truth, and his uncle's interpretation
of "the truth." * * * * * And so at last they came to the little camp
and found the tent still standing, the remains of the fire, and the
piece of paper pinned to a stake beside it--untouched. The cache, poorly
contrived by inexperienced hands, however, had been discovered and opened--by
musk rats, mink and squirrel. The matches lay scattered about
the o
pening, but the food had been taken to the last crumb. "Well, fellers, he ain't here," exclaimed
Hank loudly after his fashion. "And that's as sartain as the coal supply
down below! But whar he's got to by this time is 'bout as unsartain as the
trade in crowns in t'other place." The presence of a divinity student
was no barrier to his language at such a time, though for the reader's
sake it may be severely edited. "I propose," he added, "that we start
out at once an' hunt for'm like hell!" The g
loom of Defago's probable fate oppressed
the whole party with a sense of dreadful gravity the moment they
saw the familiar signs of recent occupancy. Especially the tent, with
the bed of balsam branches still smoothed and flattened by the pressure
of his body, seemed to bring his presence near to them. Simpson,
feeling vaguely as if his world were somehow at stake, went about explaining
particulars in a hushed tone. He was much calmer now, though
overwearied with the strain of his many journeys.
His uncle's method of
explaining--"explaining away," rather--the details still fresh in
his haunted memory helped, too, to put ice upon his emotions. "And that's the direction he ran off in,"
he said to his two companions, pointing in the direction where the guide
had vanished that morning in the grey dawn. "Straight down there he ran
like a deer, in between the birch and the hemlock...." Hank and Dr. Cathcart exchanged glances. "And it was about two miles down there, in
a straight line," conti
nued the other, speaking with something of the
former terror in his voice, "that I followed his trail to the place where--it
stopped--dead!" "And where you heered him callin' an' caught
the stench, an' all the rest of the wicked entertainment," cried Hank,
with a volubility that betrayed his keen distress. "And where your excitement overcame you to
the point of producing illusions," added Dr. Cathcart under his breath,
yet not so low that his nephew did not hear it. * * * * * It was early in the
afternoon, for they had
traveled quickly, and there were still a good two hours of daylight left.
Dr. Cathcart and Hank lost no time in beginning the search, but Simpson
was too exhausted to accompany them. They would follow the blazed
marks on the trees, and where possible, his footsteps. Meanwhile the
best thing he could do was to keep a good fire going, and rest. But after something like three hours' search,
the darkness already down, the two men returned to camp with nothing
to report. Fres
h snow had covered all signs, and though they had followed
the blazed trees to the spot where Simpson had turned back, they had
not discovered the smallest indication of a human being--or for that matter,
of an animal. There were no fresh tracks of any kind; the snow
lay undisturbed. It was difficult to know what was best to
do, though in reality there was nothing more they _could_ do. They might
stay and search for weeks without much chance of success. The fresh
snow destroyed their only hope,
and they gathered round the fire for
supper, a gloomy and despondent party. The facts, indeed, were
sad enough, for Defago had a wife at Rat Portage, and his earnings were
the family's sole means of support. Now that the whole truth in all its ugliness
was out, it seemed useless to deal in further disguise or pretense. They
talked openly of the facts and probabilities. It was not the first time,
even in the experience of Dr. Cathcart, that a man had yielded to the
singular seduction of the Solit
udes and gone out of his mind; Defago,
moreover, was predisposed to something of the sort, for he already had
a touch of melancholia in his blood, and his fiber was weakened by bouts
of drinking that often lasted for weeks at a time. Something on this trip--one
might never know precisely what--had sufficed to push him over
the line, that was all. And he had gone, gone off into the great wilderness
of trees and lakes to die by starvation and exhaustion. The chances
against his finding camp again
were overwhelming; the delirium
that was upon him would also doubtless have increased, and it was quite
likely he might do violence to himself and so hasten his cruel fate. Even
while they talked, indeed, the end had probably come. On the suggestion
of Hank, his old pal, however, they proposed to wait a little longer
and devote the whole of the following day, from dawn to darkness,
to the most systematic search they could devise. They would divide the territory
between them. They discussed their
plan in great detail. All
that men could do they would do. And, meanwhile, they talked about the
particular form in which the singular Panic of the Wilderness had made
its attack upon the mind of the unfortunate guide. Hank, though familiar
with the legend in its general outline, obviously did not welcome
the turn the conversation had taken. He contributed little, though that
little was illuminating. For he admitted that a story ran over all this
section of country to the effect that several In
dians had "seen the
Wendigo" along the shores of Fifty Island Water in the "fall" of last year,
and that this was the true reason of Defago's disinclination to
hunt there. Hank doubtless felt that he had in a sense helped his old
pal to death by overpersuading him. "When an Indian goes crazy,"
he explained, talking to himself more than to the others, it seemed,
"it's always put that he's 'seen the Wendigo.' An' pore old Defaygo
was superstitious down to he very heels ...!" And then Simpson, feel
ing the atmosphere more
sympathetic, told over again the full story of his astonishing tale;
he left out no details this time; he mentioned his own sensations
and gripping fears. He only omitted the strange language used. "But Defago surely had already told you all
these details of the Wendigo legend, my dear fellow," insisted the doctor.
"I mean, he had talked about it, and thus put into your mind the
ideas which your own excitement afterwards developed?" Whereupon Simpson again repeated the fa
cts.
Defago, he declared, had barely mentioned the beast. He, Simpson, knew
nothing of the story, and, so far as he remembered, had never even read
about it. Even the word was unfamiliar. Of course he was telling the truth, and Dr.
Cathcart was reluctantly compelled to admit the singular character
of the whole affair. He did not do this in words so much as in manner,
however. He kept his back against a good, stout tree; he poked the fire
into a blaze the moment it showed signs of dying down; he
was quicker
than any of them to notice the least sound in the night about them--a
fish jumping in the lake, a twig snapping in the bush, the dropping of
occasional fragments of frozen snow from the branches overhead where
the heat loosened them. His voice, too, changed a little in quality, becoming
a shade less confident, lower also in tone. Fear, to put
it plainly, hovered close about that little camp, and though all three
would have been glad to speak of other matters, the only thing they
seem
ed able to discuss was this--the source of their fear. They tried
other subjects in vain; there was nothing to say about them. Hank was the
most honest of the group; he said next to nothing. He never once, however,
turned his back to the darkness. His face was always to the forest,
and when wood was needed he didn't go farther than was necessary to get
it. VII A wall of silence wrapped them in, for the
snow, though not thick, was sufficient to deaden any noise, and the frost
held things pretty t
ight besides. No sound but their voices and the
soft roar of the flames made itself heard. Only, from time to time, something
soft as the flutter of a pine moth's wings went past them through
the air. No one seemed anxious to go to bed. The hours slipped towards
midnight. "The legend is picturesque enough," observed
the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather
than because he had anything to say, "for the Wendigo is simply the Call
of the Wild personified, which some na
tures hear to their own destruction." "That's about it," Hank said presently. "An'
there's no misunderstandin' when you hear it. It calls you by name right
'nough." Another pause followed. Then Dr. Cathcart
came back to the forbidden subject with a rush that made the others jump. "The allegory _is_ significant," he remarked,
looking about him into the darkness, "for the Voice, they say, resembles
all the minor sounds of 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 fricti
on, 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 alo
ng 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 t
hese 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 Defago," 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 Han
k'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, "Defago, Defago! 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 s
hockingly,
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--Defago. 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 th
e frontiers of normal
vision into the Unknown. Defago 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 haz
y 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 meaning
less 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, Defago?" 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
oth
ers. 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 "Defago" 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 Defago. 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 fain
t 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 Defaygo! You ain't Defaygo 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 th
e 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. 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 towar
ds 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 h
ad kept his courage better than all of them, went
up with a determined air and stood opposite to the figure of Defago huddled
over the fire. He looked him squarely in the face and spoke. At first
his voice was firm. "Defago, 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 "Defago," 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 voic
e 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!" Defago, 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, bundli
ng 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, Defago
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. Defago 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 a
ll, 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 lachry
mose 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 the 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 o
f 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 on
ly 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 w
as 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 the
m 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 th
e
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 Defago--the
true Defago, 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 h
ad 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 occurrence, Defago, bereft of mind, memory
and soul, had gone with it. He lingered only a few weeks. And what Punk was able to contribute to the
story throws no further light upon it. He was cleaning fish by the
lake s
hore about five o'clock in the evening--an hour, that is, before the
search party returned--when he saw this shadow of the guide picking its
way weakly into camp. In advance of him, he declares, came the faint
whiff of a certain singular odour. That same instant old Punk started for home.
He covered the entire journey of three days as only Indian blood
could have covered it. The terror of a whole race drove him. He knew
what it all meant. Defago had "seen the Wendigo."
Comments
Thank you for this. Blackwood was a genius. The atmosphere he creates is always so effective. Wendigo is my favorite of his work.
This is a superb reading by Amy Gramour. I'd read Blackwood's The Willows, of course, but aside from that one I'd never really rated him that highly. Gramour's reading is seemingly effortless; I listened on my phone while I spent the morning working around the house, and remained constantly hooked by this story. It's a curious blend of folklore and fairy tale, and the setting more suitable for a Jack London tale than the very British Blackwood; but somehow it works. Please note that the link you posted to Amy Gramour's other readings doesn't seem to be working.
From a guy that lives in ontario and spends many nights in the deep wilderness, this is awesome. I love the story telling! Thanks for the upload!
I've listened to this story so many times. I wrote a brief book report on it in high school, years ago. I just realized the whole "Odor of Lions" thing is meant to describe the smell of rotting flesh, not just the smell of a predator.
Her voice is very good! Not to shrill and very soothing. The story itself is great.
I love love this story. Have read it and I am definitely reading it again very soon. Algernon Blackwood is one of the best horror authors period. Along with HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy De Mapausant,(really hope I spelled his name right), Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle (at times when he did write horror stories),.... Just so many..... Henry S. Whitehead, Arthur Machen, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Chambers, Robert Howard,..... I can probably just go on and on. I love love classic horror stories.
This was one of the best tales I have ever had the privilege to hear. Expertly narrated and outstandingly written, it was as if I could see the story unfolding before my eyes. I was lying back with my eyes closed and just let the story take me in. I was disappointed that it had to end. 😊
Great story!! I listened to it on the way to work. I could visualize every detail thanks to the story telling . Creepy as hell!😮
I remember the abridged version in "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." Nice to finally hear the full story, although I liked the ending of the other one better.
Amy, I love your narration. Your voice is as clear as a bell with perfect pacing.
This classical and very good tale I knew from many (many!) years, but in this audiobook shape I listened some three years ago while (believe it) in a cabin in the deep of the forest, in Finland. The combined effect is still lasting on me.
I love this. So slow, detailed, and building. Reminds me of good campfire stories we used to tell. Wonderful job.
Way to many ppl with no imagination and no patience.This story is a classic,I love it and only ppl who have never read the original on a miserable winters night would complain of its length,
Did anyone else have this as required reading in high school? I remember dying of boredom while reading it, I’m so glad I gave it another try! Fantastic narration, thank you.
What a wonderfully written story!
An excellent story. Riveting and expertly narrated.
This is my favorite narration of this story. Plus it's a completely undeterred story too! Thanks for posting
This story has a different affect every time. I hear something new or connect with something old. Well told. And Blackwood's writing has it's own majic. It gets me into the kinds of stories I wouldn't usually be interested in. 🗿🍷
One of my favorite short stories!
I don't get why there's so much hate in the comments... Beautiful reading of a true master's artpiece (which is not for anybody and that's ok) & the visual is also great. If you don't like it, CLICK AWAY. No one forces you to watch & leaving anger in the comments also doesn't make your life any more beautiful. More calmness, love and light to all!