The Curse of the Wendigo

FOUR

“He Was My Best Friend, and How I Hated Him!”

We embarked upon our impromptu rescue mission the following morning—to a place that has now vanished from the earth.

Seventeen years after our expedition to that rough-and-tumble outpost on Canada’s western frontier, the town of Rat Portage merged with two sister settlements named Keewatin and Norman, each lending the first two letters of its name to the new incorporation: Ke-No-Ra. The change was brought about by the refusal of the Maple Leaf Flour Company to build in Rat Portage, fearing that the word “rat” on its bags might depress sales.

Situated on the north shore of Lake of the Woods near the border of Ontario and Manitoba, the area around modern-day Kenora was known in the native tongue as Wauzhushk Onigum—literally the “portage to the country of the muskrat,” from which Rat Portage derived its name. Today the town is a mecca for sportsmen; in 1888, the hunting was of a different sort entirely. Gold had been discovered ten years before, transforming the sleepy little village into a bustling boomtown of swindlers and speculators, starry-eyed fortune seekers, and desperadoes of every stripe, with the occasional bandit, cutthroat, and scallywag thrown into the mix. Even the ladies of the town, it was said, dared not venture onto the boardwalk unarmed.

Thank goodness for the gold, though! If it had not been discovered, our journey to the edge of the vast Canadian wilderness would have taken weeks. As it was, by the time of our expedition, the gold had transformed Rat Portage into a major distribution and supply hub of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Our journey took only three days, and those were spent in luxury aboard a well-appointed Pullman sleeper.

The doctor, expecting no end of hardship at the journey’s end, spared no comfort during the journey itself. Three copious meals each day, a pot of tea and a platter of scones in the afternoons, and between times candies and mints and all the salted peanuts he could eat, and Warthrop could eat quite a lot of them. He slept more soundly than I had ever witnessed at Harrington Lane. In fact, the teeth-jarring resonance of his snoring kept me up most nights well into the indecent hours.

But I hardly minded. For the first time in my life, I had left behind the quaint confines of the Massachusetts countryside on an adventure of wondrous promise. What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet? It called to me with thrice the urgency of a thousand “snap to!”s in a language unspoken by any human tongue but apprehended by every human heart. It made all things bearable, even the monstrumologist’s insistence that we dress each night for dinner, and the globs upon globs of philocome he applied to my hair in a vain attempt to plaster my multitudinous cowlicks.

It was the first time I had witnessed him take the slightest care in his appearance. Even to this day, when he has been forty years in the grave, when I picture the monstrumologist, I see him in that tattered old smock smeared with the blood and dried viscera of his latest “curiosity,” his hair swirled into tempestuous confusion, his cheeks dotted with three-day-old stubble, his nails cracked and encrusted with gore. It was startling and oddly disconcerting to see him wearing a high collar and a fashionable cravat, freshly shaven and washed, his nails neatly trimmed, his black hair glistening, its waves tamed and swept back from his strong brow.

I was not the only one who took note of this remarkable transformation. At dinner service I saw women glance at him or offer a smile as we made our way to the table. This was every bit as vexing as his transformation. Women were fascinated by—nay, one might even say attracted to—Pellinore Warthrop! Some would even blush or—more horrifying still—smile and attempt to flirt with him. Flirt—with the monstrumologist!

Of course Warthrop, being Warthrop, ignored these coquettish advances, or rather, he seemed oblivious to them, which, naturally, made him all the more intriguing. I’d always thought him more cold stone than flesh and blood, and these shy smiles, these glancing looks, these blushing cheeks—I simply did not know what to make of them.

“The conclusion is unavoidable. After three months, he must be dead,” the doctor opined abruptly while we enjoyed the final evening service, his face turned toward the large window beside our table. Night had fallen, and the landscape was obscured by our reflections; I could not tell if he was looking beyond his own face in the glass. “More a recovery than a rescue, and there’s small hope of even that, since the failure of professionals practically ensures our own.”

“Then, why are we going?” I asked.

He turned from the window and stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“Because he was my friend.”

Later that evening, as we lay in our bunks and the train’s lulling motion and the lullaby of her wheels eased us toward slumber, he spoke up suddenly, as if no time had passed since the onset of the conversation.

“I was an only child like you, Will Henry, but in John Chanler I found the closest thing I would ever have to a brother. We lived together for six years under the tutelage of von Helrung, sharing the same room, eating the same meals, reading the same books—but in nearly every other aspect we were complete opposites. Where I was retiring and somewhat sickly, John was outgoing and quite the athlete—an accomplished boxer with whom I made the mistake of picking a fight; he broke my nose and fractured my left cheek before Meister Abram pulled us apart.

“We came to monstrumology by different routes. He loved the sport of it, the thrill of the chase, whereas I was drawn to it for more complicated reasons, many of which you already know. John’s father was no scientist and was appalled when he applied to apprentice under von Helrung. The Chanlers are one of the wealthiest families on the East Coast, his father a friend to presidents and men such as Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Astor. John was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, and, to my knowledge, he has never been forgiven for his recalcitrance. I don’t know for certain, but I believe his father may have disowned him. Not that John cared. He seemed to delight in defying the expectations of others.”

He fell silent. After a time I thought he must have fallen asleep, and then suddenly he spoke again.

“He loved practical jokes, particularly at my expense. You may be surprised to hear this, but the Warthrops have always been known for their lack of humor; it’s a sort of congenital defect. In his lifetime I heard my father laugh only once, and that politely. It delighted John to short-sheet my bed or dip my hand in warm water as I slept. Once he drained the blood from the carcass of a Tanzanian Ngoloko we were to dissect the next day and placed the pail on top of the door going into our room. Well, you can guess what happened. He put sealing wax in the earpieces of my stethoscope; he mixed dried feces in my tooth powder; and, in one memorably unfortunate incident, right before I was to take my final exams before the entire governing board of the Society, he laced my tea with an extract of dried beans heavy in oligosaccharides, a sugar that most human beings—including me—cannot digest, causing excessive bloating and, at least in my case, explosive gas. I literally farted my way through the entire dissertation, and the tears that flowed from every eye had little to do with the profundity of my presentation. The hall seemed larger than the Metropolitan Opera house when I entered. By the time I left, it seemed as cramped as a water closet, and was just as odiferous. . . . What is that sound, Will Henry? Are you laughing?”

“No, sir,” I managed to gasp.

“I hated John Chanler,” he said. “He was my best friend, and how I hated him!”

We arrived in Rat Portage the next morning under a cloudless sapphire sky, with a biting north wind at our backs that ruffled the surface of Lake of the Woods like the invisible hand of a giant baby splashing its bathwater. Fishing boats bobbed upon the chop, loons dove and splashed in their wake, and I spied a steamboat chugging along the far southern shore, a bald eagle soaring high above its billowing stacks.

A wiry lad of native descent wearing a buckskin jacket and beaver hat popped out from the milling crowd and offered in broken English to tote our bags to the hotel for twenty-five cents. His offer inaugurated a prolonged negotiation. Like many of substantial means, Warthrop was tighter than a clam. I had witnessed him dicker for an hour to save a penny on a two-day-old loaf of bread. Add to this his native distrust of his fellow man’s honesty—he never could shake the suspicion that he was being cheated—and a simple transaction that should have lasted no more than a minute could stretch out to seventy times that. By the end of their prolonged dickering—offer and counteroffer and counter-counteroffer—both the doctor and our porter seemed dissatisfied with the outcome; each felt a little had by the other.

My master’s mood did not improve upon our arrival at the Russell House. Our room was small, containing a washstand, a dresser that looked as though it had been cobbled together by a blind man, and a single equally rickety bed. Warthrop was forced to rent a cot from the proprietor for an extra ten cents a night, a fee he likened to highway robbery.

We tarried only long enough to drop our bags and find something to eat at a smoke-clogged restaurant across the street, where men spat mouthfuls of oily tobacco juice into battered brass spittoons and eyed our eastern clothing with frank suspicion. We then set about to find Muriel’s correspondent, a task that proved more frustrating than the doctor had anticipated.

From the hotel clerk who checked us in: “Larose? Yes, I know him. He’s a popular guide; few know the backwoods better than Larose. Haven’t seen him in over a month, I’d say. Don’t know where he’s gone to, but let me know if you find him, Dr. Warthrop. He owes me money.”

From the Rat Portage postmaster: “Yes, I know Larose. Nice enough fellow when he isn’t three sheets to the wind. Can’t remember the last time I saw him. . . .”

“He posted a letter from here sometime in late July,” the monstrumologist said.

“Yes, that would be about right. I remember that. Falling down drunk. He’d just come in from the bush, he said. Seemed out of sorts, not his usual self. He wouldn’t say any more about it. If you can’t find him, I’d say he’s back in the woods, maybe up Sandy Lake way, but he’ll be back. He always comes back.”

“He has a family?”

“Not that I know of. He comes back for the liquor and the gambling. Which reminds me, if you see him, tell him I haven’t forgotten about the money he owes me.”

From the storekeepers along Main Street, to the dockworkers on the wharf, from the gambling halls and crowded halfpenny beer dives, from the offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to the deafening interior of sawmills choked in swirling wood chips, it seemed the entire town knew Pierre Larose, or at least knew of him, but no one knew where he might be. All agreed he had not been seen for some time, and he owed all, it seemed, for one debt or another. The consensus was that he either had picked up stakes and returned to his native Quebec or had fled into the wilderness to escape his burgeoning debt. The few who claimed to have seen him around the time he’d posted the letter to Muriel Chanler whispered of a man who had lost his mind, who had stumbled about the streets lost in a besotted fog, “spitting and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog,” slapping at his ears until they bled, whimpering and moaning and muttering on and on about a voice only he seemed able to hear.

Before that, Chanler had been seen with Larose at the chief outfitting shop on Main Street. (The clerk recognized Warthrop’s description of his colleague.) Chanler had paid for their supplies—ammunition, a tent, bedding, and the like—and when asked what was their game, Larose had winked and cagily replied, “We be goin’ after the Old One of the Woods.”

The clerk chuckled now, and added, “I knew what he was about with that, and sure enough, next he asks if we’ve got any silver bullets! ‘For what do you need silver bullets?’ I ask, but I know why he’s askin’. . . . Say, that Chanler—is he the one they was looking for couple weeks back? Whole troop of the NWMP were through here looking for some big shot that got lost in the bush, I recall.”

On the boardwalk outside, Warthrop shook his head ruefully.

“I am a fool, Will Henry. The NWMP is the first place we should have asked.”

He obtained directions from a man loitering outside the blacksmith shop, and we dashed across the dusty thoroughfare, dodging dray and carriage, to the other side, where the long shadows of late afternoon lay. We hopped over the steaming mounds of horse manure and slid through a small knot of miners standing in front of the tavern, fresh in town from their subterranean digs, their faces as black as players in a minstrel show, the whites of their eyes startlingly bright, each wearing a gun strapped to his waist. From the open door tinny music floated onto the street, faint and ethereal, unnervingly cheery, interrupted suddenly by what sounded to my anxious ears like a gunshot, only to resume again to the accompaniment of raucous laughter.

We ducked into the offices of the North-West Mounted Police, the precursor to the Royal Canadian Mounties. A strapping young sergeant dressed in a crisp red uniform rose from his desk.

“May I help you gentlemen?”

“I sincerely hope so,” replied the doctor. “I am looking for an American by the name of Dr. John Chanler. I understand you’ve been advised of his disappearance.”

The sergeant nodded, and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Are you a friend of Dr. Chanler?”

“I am. His wife asked that I look into the matter.”

“Well,” the man said with a careless shrug of his broad shoulders, “you are free to look, Mr.—”

“Doctor Warthrop.”

The Mountie’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Not the same Warthrop who’s the monster hunter?”

“I am a scientist in the natural philosophy of aberrant biology,” the doctor corrected him stiffly.

“Right—you hunt monsters! I’ve heard of you.”

“I’d no idea my reputation had preceded me so far north,” replied Warthrop dryly.

“Oh, my mother used to tell us children tales of your exploits—and I always thought it was to get us to mind!”

“Your mother? Then they were not my exploits. She must have been speaking of my father.”

“Well, whoever’s they were, they frightened the pants off us! But this Chanler—was he a monster hunter too?”

“His wife did not tell you?”

The man shook his head. “She said he’d come for the moose. He and his guide went in, and only the guide came out.”

“Pierre Larose.”

“Yes, that’s his name. Only he’s gone missing too, is my understanding.”

“So you were not able to question him?”

“Be the one I’d most like to lay my hands on, Dr. Warthrop, if I only knew where to put them. He’s the key to this whole riddle—last to see the man alive and then gone into thin air without even reporting it to us. We spent nearly a month in the bush trying to pick up their trail, all the way up to Sandy Lake and the Suckers encampment—”

“The Suckers?”

“Right. Jack Fiddler’s people.”

“Fiddler. I’ve heard that name before.”

“I’ll wager you have! He’s no doctor of monster philosophy, but he hunts them just the same. He’s a shaman, too—a medicine man—and fairly civilized for a savage. Speaks passing English. Used to work down here on the boats. Makes fiddles, that’s how he got his name.”

“And you questioned him about Chanler and Larose?”

“And got nothing from him—nothing of any use anyway. Told us the same thing Larose told Chanler’s poor wife—”

“Lepto lurconis,” murmured the doctor.

“Lepto what?”

He sighed. “The Wendigo.”

The sergeant nodded slowly, and then the connection dawned on him. His voice shook with wonder as he said, “You don’t mean to say—I never put any stock in those stories. Is that why you’ve come? It’s real?”

“Of course it isn’t real,” the doctor said irritably. “It’s a convenience, like the stories your mother told to frighten you into submission.”

“You mean those weren’t real either?”

“No, those probably were. It’s an entirely different species.”

“The Wendigo?”

“The stories. My good man, I understand Chanler is missing, but I’d hoped I might be able to dredge up information on Larose’s whereabouts . . .”

“You and half the town of Rat Portage. The man’s melted away like a puff of smoke.”

“It has been my experience that men do not simply ‘melt away,’ Sergeant. But it seems to me the best place to start is the last person to see both men alive.”

“You mean Jack Fiddler, but I told you I’ve already talked to him and he claims to know nothing about it.”

“Perhaps he will be more convivial with someone of the same spiritual inclinations.”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

“A fellow monster hunter.”