The Curse of the Wendigo

TEN

“It Can Break a Man’s Mind in Half”

Our flight to Rat Portage was painfully slow. Warthrop called for many halts to check Chanler’s vital signs and to attempt getting more water into him. Slowing the pace too was Sergeant Hawk—or rather Sergeant Hawk’s finding his bearings in the fog. It thickened as the day wore on, a colorless miasma that obscured the trail and peopled the forest with looming shadows and flitting apparitions upon which the imagination seized and ascribed portents of doom. In this gray land of muffled sound and borrowed light, our very breath was snatched from our mouths and trammeled underfoot.

By four o’clock the light had all but vanished. We made camp for the night no more than seven miles from the shores of Sandy Lake and still several miles from the grave of Pierre Larose. The doctor eased his load onto the ground and collapsed against a tree. His respite lasted only a minute or two; soon he was up again fussing over Chanler, wiping his brow, raising his head to force a bit more water down his throat, calling to him in a loud voice—but Chanler would not be roused. I gathered wood for our fire before the last of the light was snuffed out. Hawk inventoried our meager supplies, reckoning we had enough to last another five days. After that, we would have to live off the land.

“I’d planned on resupplying at Sandy Lake,” he said defensively when the doctor raised an eyebrow at this bit of bad news. “You didn’t tell me there’d be a kidnapping.”

The sergeant did not seem himself. His eyes would not stay still; they shifted right and left and back again restlessly, and he could not seem to stop wetting his lips.

“How did you manage to find him?” he asked.

“Fiddler. I thought if John was alive, Fiddler might check on him, and the odds were he would not risk it while we were awake. And my guess was right. At a little after two he came out of his wigwam, and I followed him. They had put John in a wigwam on the northern edge of the village, far removed from the others, as one might expect. It is common practice among indigenous peoples to construct a ‘sick house’ to isolate infectious members from the rest of the tribe.

“After that, it was only a matter of time and preparation. No guard was posted. I merely had to wait for Fiddler to go to bed.”

“What happened, do you think?” Hawk was staring at the opening of the tent wherein Chanler lay, the white of the blanket barely visible in the firelight.

“I can only guess,” answered the doctor wearily. “Either he stumbled into their camp or someone found him and brought him there. He was probably lost, separated from Larose—the man admitted as much in his letter to Muriel—and it nearly got the better of him.”

“It will, if you don’t know what you’re about,” agreed Hawk. His eyes cut toward the doctor. “Muriel . . . is that the missus?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

The sergeant glanced my way. “Nothing,” he said.

“Clearly it was not.”

“Just clearing my throat.”

“You did not clear your throat. You said, ‘hmm,’ like that. I would like to know what you meant.”

“I didn’t mean anything. Hmm. That’s all it was, Doctor. Just hmm.”

Warthrop snorted. He threw the dregs of his tea into the shadows and ducked into the tent to be with his patient. Hawk looked at me again, a crooked smile playing on his lips.

“J’ai fait une mâtresse y a pas longtemps,” he sang softly.

“And cease that infernal singing!” the doctor shouted.

The sergeant complied with Warthrop’s brusque request, and would not sing again for the remainder of our flight back to civilization. I call it ‘flight,’ for that is what it was, torturously slow though it proved to be. We were fleeing something—and we were bringing what we fled with us.

We woke on the next morning beneath an ominous gray sky. By noon a light snow had begun to fall, carpeting the trail with dusty powder that quickly grew slick; more than once the doctor nearly went down with his precious cargo. The sergeant would offer to spell him, each time rebuffed by Warthrop. The doctor seemed jealous of his burden.

It was cold and still; not a breath of wind stirred; and the snow, like the fog, deadened sound. We marched through vaulted chambers of brown and white, down desolate halls devoid of color, bereft of life. The nights fell with crushing suddenness. The daylight seemed not so much to fade as to vanish. Darkness was the true face of the desolation, its elemental substance.

More than the monotonous scenery or the miles of rough trail that crawled underfoot, that dark weighed upon us. It numbed our souls to senselessness as the cold numbed our fingertips and toes, a pitch-black tactile dark that mocked our feeble attempts to drive it away, a darkness that pressed down with suffocating force. I began to envy John Chanler and the feverish oblivion in which he dwelled.

And I worried about the doctor. Even on his worst days back at Harrington Lane, when he retreated to his bed and remained there for hours, refusing all sleep and sustenance, lost in a melancholy so profound all he could do was breathe, even those days seemed as bright as springtime compared to what he endured now. And he endured it for someone other than himself, a stunning revelation for me, who up to that point had thought him the most self-absorbed man on the continent. His face grew gaunt, his eyes receded into their sockets, his duster hung upon him like an empty garment upon a hanger. He was coming to resemble the man he was carrying.

I urged him to eat and rest, scolding him like a parent and reminding him he was no good to his friend if he succumbed to the same fate. He endured my chiding and rarely lost his temper, except on one memorable occasion when he dressed me down for more than a quarter of an hour. It might have gone on longer, but Hawk informed him that if he didn’t shut up, the sergeant was going to put a bullet through the back of his head.

After the last morsel of hardtack and cured bacon had been consumed, the sergeant shouldered his rifle and tramped into the woods, disappearing for the rest of the afternoon. We made no progress that day. Near dusk Hawk returned, empty-handed. He dropped the weapon to the ground and collapsed before the fire, muttering under his breath, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand incessantly and wetting his lips.

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing for miles.”

He lifted his eyes to the sky. “Not even a bird. Nothing. Nothing.”

“Well, we still have each other,” said the doctor consolingly, trying to lift his spirits. “You know, the Donner Party option.”

Hawk stared at him without expression, his mouth hanging open, and I thought the doctor, who knew so well his own limitations, must have been really out of sorts to even attempt humor. It was ludicrous, like a man trying to fly by flapping his arms.

Hunger became the newest member of our company, far stronger and far more resilient than the rest of us, and we were the dried bones upon which it chewed. There was no real resting when we stopped. Hawk and I would push our way into the bush, plucking berries, digging up edible roots such as Indian potatoes and toothwort, pinching the heads from puffball mushrooms, stripping bark from hickory trees, which we boiled, to soften it. (This “bark stew” was also beneficial for the digestion, the sergeant informed me, and was a native treatment for diarrhea and venereal disease.) We also gathered wolf’s claw, an evergreen moss that grew in abundance on the forest floor, with dense needlelike leaves that Hawk boiled to make a kind of herbal tea. The taste was pungent and bitter—the doctor spat out his first sip—yet Hawk kept harvesting it. The spores were highly flammable, and he delighted in tossing them into the fire and watching the subsequent flash of hot white light.

We rose each day a little weaker than the day before, and halted each night a little hungrier. Our eyes took on the haunted, vacant look of slow starvation, and our voices were lean in the breathless air. We stumbled clumsily down trail and through dead meadow, and crossed the desolate miles of brûlé, the trackless snowbound desert, with the gray dome of the sky upheld by the blackened pillars of branchless trees. It was here that we spied the first sign of life since our escape from Sandy Lake. I tugged on Hawk’s coat and pointed to them, lazily circling overhead on immobile wings, riding the high wind directly above us. He nodded and quickly looked away.

“Buteos,” he said. “Buzzards.”

The doctor’s toe caught on a fallen branch. He pitched forward, twisting around just before he landed, to avoid crushing his precious cargo beneath him.

“I’m all right; I’m fine,” he snarled at Hawk, who had reached down to help him up. He slapped away the offered hand.

“Let me carry him awhile, Doc,” said the sergeant reasonably. “You look all done for.”

“Do not touch him. Do you understand? I’ll shoot you if you touch him. No one touches him but me!”

“I meant no offense,” replied Hawk. “Just trying to help.”

“This is mine,” the doctor gasped. “Mine!” He slipped his arms beneath Chanler’s body and struggled to his feet, where he stood swaying for an awful moment before falling again, landing this time with a muffled thump upon his backside. His friend’s head lolled against his chest.

“God damn you to hell,” the doctor whimpered to Chanler, the words smashed to nothing by the emptiness that engulfed him. “Why did you come here? What did you think you would find? You idiot . . . you imbecilic fool . . . What did you think you would find?”

He stroked the soft feathery hair. He pressed his cheek against the top of John Chanler’s head.

“Ah, come on now, Doc,” Hawk urged him. “It’s not as bad as all that.” He stepped toward him, and the doctor leveled his revolver at Hawk’s forehead.

“You could have prevented this!” he cried. “You were here a month ago. He was a stone’s throw from you and you left him. You left him!”

“Now, Doc, I told you what Fiddler said. . . .”

“The same thing he said to me, and did I listen? Did I take him at his word? Did I allow him to take me for a fool?”

“Well,” answered Hawk tensely, “maybe you’re just smarter than I am.”

“That is no compliment.”

With those words all passion drained from the doctor; his eyes glazed over; the hand holding the gun dropped to his side. His listlessness returned, the same curious apathy that had infected Hawk and me as well. Desolation’s progeny—the lifeless living, every word pointless, every gesture useless, every hope vain.

I cannot say what day it was—it may have been the tenth or eleventh since our escape from the Sucker camp—when Hawk pulled my master aside, telling me, “Stay with Chanler, Will. I need a word with your boss.” They walked several yards up the path, and I followed—which is completely understandable, I’m sure. I eased up behind them to eavesdrop on their hurried and anxious conversation.

“Are you certain?” the doctor was saying. He sounded worried but dubious.

Hawk nodded, wetting his lips. “At first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It happens in the bush. So I didn’t say anything, but there’s no mistaking it, Doctor. I’m sure of it.”

“Since . . . ?”

“First heard it yesterday morning. Nothing on the watch last night, then off and on today.”

“The Iyiniwok?”

Hawk shrugged. He wet his lips. “Something. I suppose it could be a wolf, though not a bear, nothing that big. It’s . . . strange.”

“If Fiddler’s men were responsible for Larose . . . ,” Warthrop began.

“Then it could be whoever filleted him,” Hawk finished, nodding. Again, his tongue swiped across his chapped lips. “Thought you should know.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” the doctor said. “Perhaps we should force a confrontation?”

Hawk shook his head. “Just two of us—and God knows how many of them. Plus, there’s Chanler and Will to think about.”

I returned to Chanler, my mind racing. Beneath the blackened lids Chanler’s eyes roamed the darkness. Encompassing us, the mute forest brooded, shrouded in winter white.

The gray land was deceptively still. It kept its secrets.

Something was following us.

That night I saw the yellow eyes for the first time. I attributed it to my fevered imagination, overheated by the conversation earlier in the day—a trick of the firelight, I thought. Perhaps the reflection off a moth’s wing or some shiny bit of fungus. The trees were festooned with all types of it. No sooner had I noticed them than they were gone. A moment later they returned, deep in the woods and this time farther to my left, hovering several feet above the ground, almond-shaped, glowing like twin beacons.

I grabbed Sergeant Hawk’s forearm—the doctor had already crawled into the tent to lie with Chanler—and pointed. By the time he turned to look, the eyes had vanished again.

“What is it, Will?” he whispered.

“Eyes,” I whispered back. “Over there.”

For an eternity we waited, barely drawing breath, scanning the dark, but they did not reappear.

The eyes returned the following night. Warthrop saw them first, and rose silently to his feet, staring into the bush with a look of almost comical astonishment.

“Did you see that?” he asked us. “My eyes are probably playing tricks on me, but—”

“If it was eyes you saw, Will here saw them too—last night,” Hawk said. He slung his rifle around; he kept it on his person at all times, even when he slept.

“Look!” I said, raising my voice in excitement. “There they are again—over there!”

And gone again in the time it took Sergeant Hawk to whip the barrel round. He kept the stock against his shoulder and swung the weapon slowly back and forth.

“A bear?” wondered the doctor.

“A bear, could be,” breathed Hawk. “If he’s strolling about on his hind legs. Those eyes were near ten feet off the ground, Doctor.”

The seconds spun out, turned to minutes. A strange gurgling sound commenced behind us, and the sergeant whirled around to face the tent. Warthrop pushed down the barrel of the rifle and snapped, “It’s Chanler,” and rushed through the opening. “Will Henry!” he called. “Bring me some light!”

Within, the doctor was leaning over his patient, while the man’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically, like a landed fish’s, with burbling deep in his throat. Warthrop rolled him onto his side and lightly patted him in the small of the back. The body convulsed, and greenish-yellow bile erupted from his open mouth, soaking the doctor’s shirt and trousers and filling the tent with an unearthly noxious odor. I pinched shut my nose and fought the urge to vomit. Warthrop wiped Chanler’s mouth with his filthy handkerchief, and then looked up at me.

“Some water, Will Henry.”

Chanler moaned, and Warthrop reacted as if he had sat up and said his name. The doctor’s face fairly glowed with elation.

“Is he waking up?” I asked.

“John!” Warthrop shouted. “John Chanler! Can you hear me?”

If he could, he gave no reply. He went limp. We waited, but he had left again. Wherever he had been, he had gone back.

We did not see the yellow eyes for several nights thereafter, but their absence did little to relieve our unease. Hawk in particular seemed affected. He often lagged behind even the doctor, who was not walking so much as sliding, shuffling mechanically along the trail slick with the damp, dead leaves of autumn. Hawk would stop and turn around, rifle at the ready, and stare down the boreal tunnel in which we marched, every muscle tense, every sinew and nerve stretched, his head cocked to one side, listening. Listening to what, I cannot say, for neither the doctor nor I heard anything but our own ragged breath and the scratch-scratch of our boots along the ground. When we rested, the sergeant roamed the woods in all directions, and his angry muttering carried in the thin air like shards of conversations from splintered memory, bereft of meaning.

He grew sullen and taciturn, obsessively wiping his raw lips, sleeping for only a few minutes at a time and then starting awake with a growl, throwing more wood onto the fire or cursing when there was none left to throw. The fire could never be big enough for him. I think he would have burnt the entire forest if he could have. This man who had spent his entire life in these woods now seemed wholly at odds with them, distrusting and hating them with all the fury of a lover betrayed. What he loved did not love him. Indeed, it seemed bent on killing him.

Distracted though the doctor was by the condition of his patient, our guide’s condition did not go unnoticed. The monstrumologist drew me aside and said, “I’m concerned about the sergeant, Will Henry. God help us if my concern is well founded! Here, take this; put it in your pocket.” He pressed the revolver into my hand.

He must have noticed the question contained in my stunned expression.

“It can break a man’s mind in half,” he said. He did not define “it.” I do not think he felt it was necessary. “I have seen it.”

The sergeant broke the next day. We had stopped to rest, and no sooner had we eased our aching bodies down than he was up again and traipsing through the brush; I could see his hat, shimmering with dew, darting between the glistening ebony bodies of the trees.

“All right, damn you, all right!” he bellowed. “I hear you over there! You might as well come out where I can see you!”

I started to get up, and the doctor waved me back down. He picked up his rifle.

“I’ll shoot you. Do you want that?” yelled Hawk toward the vacant trees. “I’ll drop you like the miserable dog you are. Do you hear me?”

I jerked reflexively as the gunshot reverberated throughout the forest. Again I began to get up and the doctor pushed me gently down.

At that moment Hawk let loose with a banshee scream and raced away, crashing pell-mell through the undergrowth, firing wildly as he ran, his screams more like the high-pitched yelps of a wounded animal than those of a man.

“Stay with Chanler, Will Henry!”

With that the monstrumologist raced into the bush after him. I scooted closer to John Chanler, clutching the revolver in both hands, unsure what I should be more afraid of—the thing that might be following us or our deranged guide. Presently the snap and pop of the pursuit, the explosions of gunfire, and the hysterical screams faded. The quiet of the primeval forest returned, a preternatural stillness that was, if possible, even more unnerving than the noise.

I felt something stir beside me. I heard something moan. I smelled the breath of something foul. Then I looked down and saw that something looking back at me.