The Curse of the Wendigo

SIX

“A Different Species Altogether”

We made camp that first night on the northern shore of a vast lake, after a hike of nearly twenty miles along a fairly well-trod path. Canoes had been left on each side of the lake, a courtesy for local hunters and the native peoples who used the trail as a trade route to Rat Portage. The lake crossing took the better part of two hours, so vast was the water’s expanse and so deliberate was our passage, for with the three of us and all our gear on board, the little canoe rode alarmingly low in the water. While Warthrop helped Hawk pitch the tent—he had packed only one, not expecting a party of three—I was dispatched into the surrounding woods to gather kindling for our fire. In the twilight shadows I thought I heard the rustle of some large creature slinking, and I cannot say if that was truly the case, only that the fruitfulness of my imagination seemed to grow exponentially as the daylight faded.

Night had not fully come on, however, before Sergeant Hawk had a merry fire going and a pan of fresh venison sausages frying, and he was happily chattering on like an excited schoolboy on the eve of the summer holiday.

“Now you must tell me something about this monstrumology business, Doctor,” he said. “I’ve seen some pretty strange things in the bush, but they can’t be nothing to what you’ve seen in your travels! Why, if half the things my mother said are true . . .”

“Not knowing what she told you, I cannot speak to your mother’s truthfulness,” replied the doctor.

“What about vampires—have you ever hunted one of those?”

“I have not. It would be extraordinarily difficult to do.”

“Why? Because they’re hard to catch?”

“They are impossible to catch.”

“Not if you find one in his coffin, I hear.”

“Sergeant, I do not hunt them because, like the Wendigo, they do not exist.”

“What about the werewolf? Ever hunt one of them?”

“Never.”

“Don’t exist either?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What about—”

“I hope you aren’t about to say ‘zombie.’”

The man’s mouth closed. He stared into the fire for a few moments, stirring the flickering embers with the end of a stick. He seemed somewhat crestfallen.

“Well, if you don’t hunt any of them, what kind of things do you hunt?”

“In the main, I do not. I have devoted myself to the study of them. Capturing or killing them is something I try to avoid.”

“Doesn’t sound as fun.”

“I suppose that depends upon your definition of ‘fun.’”

“Well, if monstrumology ain’t about those things, why’d your friend Chanler come up here looking for the Wendigo?”

“I can’t be entirely sure. I would say, though, it was not to prove their nonexistence, since failing to find one would demonstrate only that one was not found. My suspicion is that he hoped to find one, or at least irrefutable evidence of one. You see, there is a movement afoot to expand the scope of our inquiries to include these very creatures of which you spoke—vampires, werewolves, and the like—a movement to which I am very much opposed.”

“And why’s that?”

Warthrop tried very hard to remain calm. “Because, my good Sergeant Hawk, as I’ve said, they do not exist.”

“But you also said not finding one don’t prove they don’t exist.”

“I may say with near absolute certainty that they do not, and I need venture no further than my own thought to prove it. Let’s take the Wendigo as an example. What are its characteristics?”

“Characteristics?”

“Yes. What makes it different from, say, a wolf or a bear? How would you define it?”

Hawk closed his eyes, as if to better picture the subject in his mind’s eye.

“Well, they’re big. Over fifteen feet tall, they say, and thin, so thin that when they turn sideways, they disappear.”

The doctor was smiling. “Yes. Go on.”

“He’s a shape-changer. Sometimes he’s just like a wolf or bear, and he’s always hungry and he don’t eat anything but people, and the more he eats, the hungrier he gets and the thinner he gets, so he has to keep hunting; he can’t stop. He travels through the forest jumping from treetop to treetop, or some say he spreads out his long arms and glides on the wind. He always comes after you at night, and once he finds you, you’re a goner; there’s nothing you can do. He’ll track you for days, calling your name, and something in his voice makes you want to go.

“A bullet can’t take him down, unless it’s made of silver. Anything silver can kill him, but it’s the only thing that can, but even then you have to cut out his heart and chop off his head, and then burn the body.”

He took a deep breath and glanced at my master with a chagrined expression.

“So we have covered most of the physical attributes,” the doctor said in the manner of a headmaster leading a class. “Humanoid in appearance, very tall, more than twice the size of a grown man, extremely thin, so thin, you say, as to defy physics and become invisible upon turning sideways. One thing you failed to mention is that the heart of Lepto lurconis is made of ice. The Wendigo’s diet consists of human beings—and, interestingly, certain species of moss, if I may append—and it has the ability to fly. Another attribute you failed to mention is its method of propagation.”

“Its what?”

“Every species on the planet must have some way of producing the next generation, Sergeant. Every schoolboy knows that. So tell me, how does the Wendigo make little Wendigos? Being a hominid, it is a higher order of mammal—putting aside the issue of how a heart made of ice can pump blood—so it is not asexual. What can you tell me about its courtship rituals? Do Wendigos date? Do they fall in love? Are they monogamous, or do they take multiple mates?”

Our guide laughed in spite of himself. The absurdity of the thing had become too much for him.

“Maybe they do fall in love, Doctor. It’s nice to think we’re not the only ones who can.”

“One must be careful not to anthropomorphize nature, Sergeant. Though, we must leave room for love in the lower orders—I am not inside Mr. Beaver’s head; perhaps he loves Mrs. Beaver with all his heart. But to return to my question about the Wendigo: Are they immortal—unlike every other organism on earth—and therefore have no need to reproduce?”

“They take us and turn us into them.”

“But I thought you said they ate us.”

“Well, I can’t say exactly how it happens. Stories come out of the bush, a hunter or trapper or, more often, an Indian ‘goes Wendigo.’”

“Ah, so it’s like the vampire or werewolf. We are its food as well as its progeny.” The doctor was nodding with mock gravity. “The case is nearly unassailable, isn’t it? Much more likely than the alternative, that the Wendigo is a metaphor for famine and the taboo of cannibalism in times of starvation, or a boogeyman to frighten children into obeying their parents.”

Neither spoke for a few minutes. The fire crackled and popped; shadows danced and whirled about our little camp; the lake shimmered in the moonlight, its waves sensually licking the shore; and the woods reverberated with the song of crickets and the occasional snap of a twig underfoot of some woodland creature.

“Well, Dr. Warthrop, I’m almost sorry I asked about monstrumology,” said Hawk wistfully. “You’ve darn near taken all the fun out of it.”

The men flipped a coin to see who would take the first watch. Though we were but a day’s hike from civilization, we were already well within wolf and bear country, and someone would need to keep the fire going throughout the night. Warthrop lost—he would have to be the last to sleep—but seemed pleased with the outcome. It would give him, he said, time to think, a statement that struck me as rich with irony. It was my impression he did little else with his time.

The burly Sergeant Hawk crawled into the tent and threw himself onto the ground next to me; so small were our quarters that his shoulder rubbed against mine.

“Sort of a queer fellow your boss is, Will,” he said quietly, lest Warthrop hear him. I could see the doctor’s silhouette through the open flap, hunched before the orange glow of the fire, the Winchester propped against his thigh. “Polite but not very friendly. Kind of coldlike. But he must have a good heart to come all this way after his friend.”

“I’m not sure if all of it’s about his friend,” I said.

“No?”

“He thinks Dr. Chanler is dead.”

“Well, that’s my thought too, and why we called off the search. But it’s like this Wendigo. Odds are your boss ain’t going to find him—and that won’t prove he is or isn’t dead.”

“I’m not sure it’s even about finding him,” I confessed.

“Then, what the devil is it about?”

“I think it’s mostly about her.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Chanler.”

“Mrs. Chanler!” Sergeant Hawk whispered. “What do you—Oh. Oh! Is that what—Well, you don’t say!” He chuckled sleepily. “Not so coldlike after all, eh?”

He rolled onto his side, and within a few seconds the sides of the tent began to vibrate from the potency of his snores. I lay sleepless for a long time, not kept awake by his snoring so much as by the disorienting lightness of being, the sense of being very small in a vast, empty space, far from all that was familiar, adrift in a strange and indifferent sea. I watched through half-closed eyes the shape of my master outside; it comforted me somehow. I fell asleep holding close that unexpected balm, drawing it into me or allowing it to draw me into it—the conceit of the monstrumologist watching over me.

The unease I suffered that first night in the bush—made all the more distressing after the keen anticipation I had felt on the outset of the journey—persisted in the days that followed, an odd mixture of boredom and anxiety, for as hour followed monotonous hour, the woods took on a dreadful sameness, each turn of the path bringing more of the same, mere distinctions with no difference. At times the trees suddenly parted, like a curtain being whipped aside, and we’d stumble from the forest’s perpetual gloom into the sudden sunlight of a clearing. Huge boulders thrust their heads from the earth, stony leviathans breaking the surface of the glen, their craggy faces sporting shaggy beards of lichen.

We crossed innumerable streams and creeks, some too wide to jump across; we’d no choice but to ford their icy waters on foot. We scrambled over washouts and through deep ravines where the shadows pooled thickly even at midday. Ruined landscapes that Hawk called brûlé rose up to meet us, where the charred bones of silver birch and maple, spruce and hemlock, marched to the horizon, victims of the spring fires that had raged for weeks, creating an apocalyptic vista stretching as far as the eye could see, where the restless wind whipped the inch-deep ash underfoot into a choking fog. In the midst of this desolation, I looked up and saw high above a black shape against the featureless gray, an eagle or some other great bird of prey, and for a shuddering moment I saw us through its eyes—pitifully small, wholly insignificant nomads, interlopers in this lifeless land.

Sergeant Hawk tried to halt each day’s march at some open spot in the bush, but sunset often caught us deep in the forest’s belly, forcing us to make camp in a blackness as profound as the grave’s, where, if not for the campfire, you could not see your hand an inch from your face.

Our guide’s good nature helped too in relieving the insistent dark. He told stories and jokes—some, if not most, on the bawdy side—and, possessing a fairly decent voice, sang the old songs of the French voyageurs, tilting his chin slightly as if to offer his song to some nameless forest god:

J’ai fait une mâtresse y a pas longtemps.

J’irai la voir dimanche, ah oui, j’irai!

“Do you know that one, Doctor?” he teased my master. “‘Le Coeur de Ma Bien-aimée’—‘The Heart of My Well-Beloved’? ‘A gentle lady charmed me, not long ago . . .’ Reminds me of a girl I knew in Keewatin. Can’t recall her name now, but by God I was damn near to marrying that one! Are you married, Doctor?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“I have not,” replied the monstrumologist.

“Been damn near ready, though?”

“Never.”

“What, don’t you like women?” he ribbed, giving me a wink.

The doctor pursed his lips sourly. “As a man of science, I have often thought that, for the sake of accuracy, they should be classified as a different species altogether—Homo enigma, perhaps, or Homo mortalis.”

“Well, I don’t know much about your science, Dr. Warthrop. I reckon a monster hunter looks at things a little differently than most, always with the eye turned to the dark and ugly, but all the more appreciative of the bright and fair when it comes along, or so I’d guess. I’ll take your word for it, though.”

He sang softly, “La demande à m’amie je lui ferai . . .”

Warthrop pushed himself to his feet with a snarl. “Please, would you cease with that infernal singing!”

He stomped away into the thick underbrush, stopping where the light of the campfire met the dark of the forest. His lean frame seemed to writhe as though he were in the superheated air above the fire.

Hawk was unperturbed. He poked me in the side and pointed at the doctor. “Seems to me he’s the kind who hates what he loves, Will,” he opined. “And the other way around!”

“I heard that, Sergeant!” snapped Warthrop over his shoulder.

“I was speaking to your indispensable servant, Doctor!” Hawk called back jovially.

The doctor lowered his head slightly. He held up his hand. His fingertips twitched; otherwise, he was motionless, as inflexible as a post driven into the ground. He seemed to be listening to something. Hawk turned to me, grinning foolishly, and started to speak, but his words died on his tongue when I scrambled to my feet. I knew my master; my instinct reacted to his.

A gust of wind stirred the monstrumologist’s hair and excited the flames of our fire; sparks jigged and spun; the sides of the tent fluttered. Hawk called softly the doctor’s name, but the monstrumologist gave no reply. He was peering into the dark woods, as if he had cat’s eyes that could penetrate the murk.

Hawk looked at me quizzically. “What is it, Will?”

The doctor plunged into the brush, disappearing into the trees in a wink, swallowed whole by the leviathan dark. So quickly did it happen that it looked as if something had reached out of the woods and snatched him. I rushed forward; Hawk grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back.

“Hold now, Will!” he cried. “Quick, there’s a couple of lamps in my rucksack.”

Within the woods we could hear the doctor crashing and stomping about, the sound fading as he drew farther and farther away. I lit the lamps with a brand from the fire and handed one to Hawk, and we charged into the bush after my wayward mentor. Though our lights barely dinted the dark, Warthrop’s trail was not hard for Hawk to follow. His expert eye picked out every broken twig, every bit of disturbed earth. Sight was all he could rely upon, for the night had gone deathly quiet. There was no sound but that of our own passage through the dense foliage. Vine and branch tugged upon us as if the forest itself were trying to slow us down, as if some primal spirit were saying, Stay. Stay, you do not wish to see.

The ground rose. The trees thinned. We stumbled into a clearing radiant in starlight, in the center of which stood the shattered trunk of a young hemlock, snapped off eight feet from the ground, and around its base were scattered the broken bones of its branches. It looked as if some giant had reached down from the star-encrusted heavens and snapped it in two like a toothpick.

Standing a few feet from the tree was the monstrumologist, head cocked slightly to one side, arms folded over his chest, like a connoisseur at a gallery regarding a particularly interesting piece of art.

A human being was impaled upon the splintered hemlock, the pole protruding from a spot just below its sternum, the body at the level of Warthrop’s eye—arms and legs outstretched, head thrown back, mouth agape, depthless shadows pooling there and in its eyeless sockets.

The body had been stripped bare. There were no clothes and, except for on the face, there was no skin; the body had been flayed of both. The underlying sinew and muscle glimmered wetly in the silver light.

The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony.

They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.