The Wendigo

by Algernon Blackwood

  II

  In the morning the camp was astir before the sun. There had been alight fall of snow during the night and the air was sharp. Punk had donehis duty betimes, for the odors of coffee and fried bacon reached everytent. All were in good spirits.

  "Wind's shifted!" cried Hank vigorously, watching Simpson and his guidealready loading the small canoe. "It's across the lake--dead right foryou fellers. And the snow'll make bully trails! If there's any moosemussing around up thar, they'll not get so much as a tail-end scent ofyou with the wind as it is. Good luck, Monsieur Defago!" he added,facetiously giving the name its French pronunciation for once, "_bonnechance!_"

  Defago returned the good wishes, apparently in the best of spirits, thesilent mood gone. Before eight o'clock old Punk had the camp tohimself, Cathcart and Hank were far along the trail that led westwards,while the canoe that carried Defago and Simpson, with silk tent and grubfor two days, 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 toppedthe wooded ridges and blazed with a luxurious warmth upon the world oflake and forest below; loons flew skimming through the sparkling spraythat the wind lifted; divers shook their dripping heads to the sun andpopped smartly out of sight again; and as far as eye could reach rosethe leagues of endless, crowding Bush, desolate in its lonely sweep andgrandeur, untrodden by foot of man, and stretching its mighty andunbroken carpet right up to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.

  Simpson, who saw it all for the first time as he paddled hard in thebows of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty. Hisheart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungsdrank in the cool and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat,singing fragments of his native chanties, Defago steered the craft ofbirch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all hiscompanion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On suchoccasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they becomehuman beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer,and Defago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply--twomen, the "guider" and the "guided." Superior knowledge, of course,assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought intothe quasi-subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting whenDefago dropped the "Mr.," and addressed him as "Say, Simpson," or"Simpson, boss," which was invariably the case before they reached thefarther 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 timehe had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland--the hugescale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realized,to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While todwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, aninitiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certainshifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.

  Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held thenew. 303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless,gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lakeand portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that hewas about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they werecamped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as Europeitself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effectof delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable ofappreciating. It was himself and Defago against a multitude--at least,against a Titan!

  The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests ratheroverwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern qualityof the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless andterrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon,and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized hisown utter helplessness. Only Defago, as a symbol of a distantcivilization where man was master, stood between him and a pitilessdeath by exhaustion and starvation.

  It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch Defago turn over the canoeupon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceedto "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of analmost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say,Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' bythese marks;--then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home campagin, see?"

  It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said itwithout any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened toexpress the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that wassymbolic 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. Thosesmall yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the onlyindications of its hiding place.

  Meanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying his ownrifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen trunks andacross half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that fairly gemmedthe forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards five o'clockfound themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods, looking out across alarge sheet of water in front of them, dotted with pine-clad islands ofall describable shapes and sizes.

  "Fifty Island Water," announced Defago wearily, "and the sun jest goin'to dip 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 amovement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut andcozy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk cooking fireburned with the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman cleaned thefish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, Defago "guessed" hewould "jest as soon" take a turn through the Bush for indications ofmoose. "_May_ come across a trunk where they bin and rubbed horns," hesaid, as he moved off, "or feedin' on the last of the maple leaves"--andhe was gone.

  His small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while Simpsonnoted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed him intoherself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.

  Yet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood somewhatapart, 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 rockthat thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground, it mightwell have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one might haveseen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however, began thegreat burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its realcharacter--_brule_, as it is called, where the fires of the previousyear had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt andugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match heads stuck into theground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal andrain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.

  The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of thefire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were theonly sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all thatvast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, thewoodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, mightstretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front,through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch ofFifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tipto tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky ofrose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had everknown, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, wherethe islands--a hundred, surely, rather than fifty--floated like thefairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crestsfingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards asthe light faded--about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathw
ays of theheavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

  And strips of colored cloud, like flaunting pennons, signaled theirdeparture to the stars....

  The beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting. Simpson smoked the fishand burnt his fingers into the bargain in his efforts to enjoy it and atthe same time tend the frying pan and the fire. Yet, ever at the back ofhis thoughts, lay that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifferenceto human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note ofman. 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 hiscompanion's returning footsteps.

  There was pleasure in the sensation, yet with it a perfectlycomprehensible alarm. And instinctively the thought stirred in him:"What should I--_could_ I, do--if anything happened and he did not comeback--?"

  They enjoyed their well-earned supper, eating untold quantities of fish,and drinking unmilked tea strong enough to kill men who had not coveredthirty miles of hard "going," eating little on the way. And when it wasover, they smoked and told stories round the blazing fire, laughing,stretching weary limbs, and discussing plans for the morrow. Defago wasin excellent spirits, though disappointed at having no signs of moose toreport. But it was dark and he had not gone far. The _brule_, too, wasbad. His clothes and hands were smeared with charcoal. Simpson, watchinghim, realized with renewed vividness their position--alone together inthe wilderness.

  "Defago," he said presently, "these woods, you know, are a bit too bigto feel quite at home in--to feel comfortable in, I mean!... Eh?" Hemerely gave expression to the mood of the moment; he was hardly preparedfor the earnestness, the solemnity even, with which the guide took himup.

  "You've hit it right, Simpson, boss," he replied, fixing his searchingbrown 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; itwas a little too suggestive for this scenery and setting; he was sorryhe had broached the subject. He remembered suddenly how his uncle hadtold him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of thewilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them sofiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to theirdeath. And he had a shrewd idea that his companion held something insympathy with that queer type. He led the conversation on to othertopics, on to Hank and the doctor, for instance, and the natural rivalryas to who should get the first sight of moose.

  "If they went doo west," observed Defago carelessly, "there's sixtymiles between us now--with ole Punk at halfway house eatin' himself fullto bustin' with fish and coffee." They laughed together over thepicture. But the casual mention of those sixty miles again made Simpsonrealize the prodigious scale of this land where they hunted; sixty mileswas a mere step; two hundred little more than a step. Stories of losthunters rose persistently before his memory. The passion and mystery ofhomeless and wandering men, seduced by the beauty of great forests,swept his soul in a way too vivid to be quite pleasant. He wonderedvaguely whether it was the mood of his companion that invited theunwelcome suggestion with such persistence.

  "Sing us a song, Defago, if you're not too tired," he asked; "one ofthose old _voyageur_ songs you sang the other night." He handed histobacco pouch to the guide and then filled his own pipe, while theCanadian, nothing loth, sent his light voice across the lake in one ofthose plaintive, almost melancholy chanties with which lumbermen andtrappers lessen the burden of their labor. There was an appealing andromantic flavor about it, something that recalled the atmosphere of theold pioneer days when Indians and wilderness were leagued together,battles frequent, and the Old Country farther off than it is today. Thesound traveled pleasantly over the water, but the forest at their backsseemed to swallow it down with a single gulp that permitted neither echonor resonance.

  It was in the middle of the third verse that Simpson noticed somethingunusual--something that brought his thoughts back with a rush fromfaraway scenes. A curious change had come into the man's voice. Evenbefore he knew what it was, uneasiness caught him, and looking upquickly, he saw that Defago, though still singing, was peering about himinto the Bush, as though he heard or saw something. His voice grewfainter--dropped to a hush--then ceased altogether. The same instant,with a movement amazingly alert, he started to his feet and stoodupright--_sniffing the air_. Like a dog scenting game, he drew the airinto his nostrils in short, sharp breaths, turning quickly as he did soin all directions, and finally "pointing" down the lake shore,eastwards. It was a performance unpleasantly suggestive and at the sametime singularly dramatic. Simpson's heart fluttered disagreeably as hewatched it.

  "Lord, man! How you made me jump!" he exclaimed, on his feet beside himthe same instant, and peering over his shoulder into the sea ofdarkness. "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 Canadianhad turned white down to his very gills. Not even sunburn and the glareof the fire could hide that.

  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 treestems gleamed like bronze in the firelight; beyond that--blackness, and,so far as he could tell, a silence of death. Just behind them a passingpuff of wind lifted a single leaf, looked at it, then laid it softlydown again without disturbing the rest of the covey. It seemed as if amillion invisible causes had combined just to produce that singlevisible effect. _Other_ life pulsed about them--and was gone.

  Defago turned abruptly; the livid hue of his face had turned to a dirtygrey.

  "I never said I heered--or smelt--nuthin'," he said slowly andemphatically, in an oddly altered voice that conveyed somehow a touch ofdefiance. "I was only--takin' a look round--so to speak. It's always amistake to be too previous with yer questions." Then he added suddenlywith obvious effort, in his more natural voice, "Have you got thematches, Boss Simpson?" and proceeded to light the pipe he had halffilled just before he began to sing.

  Without speaking another word they sat down again by the fire. Defagochanging his side so that he could face the direction the wind camefrom. For even a tenderfoot could tell that. Defago changed his positionin 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 evidentlynothing in the forest that had sent so strange and sudden a warning tohis marvelously trained nerves.

  "Guess now I don't feel like singing any," he explained presently of hisown accord. "That song kinder brings back memories that's troublesome tome; 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 of the other. But theexplanation, in that it was only a part of the truth, was a lie, and heknew perfectly well that Simpson was not deceived by it. For nothingcould explain away the livid terror that had dropped over his face whilehe stood there sniffing the air. And nothing--no amount of blazing fire,or chatting on ordinary subjects--could make that camp exactly as it hadbeen before. The shadow of an unknown horror, naked if unguessed, thathad flashed for an instant in the face and gestures of the guide, hadalso communicated itself, vaguely and therefore more potently, to hiscompanion. The guide's visible efforts to dissemble the truth only madethings worse. Moreover, to add to the younger man's uneasiness, was thedifficulty, nay, the impossibility he felt of asking questions, and alsohis complete ignorance as to the cause ...Indians, wild animals, forestfires--all these, he knew, were wholly out of the question. Hisimagination searched vigorously, but in vain....

  * * * * *

  Yet,
somehow or other, after another long spell of smoking, talking androasting themselves before the great fire, the shadow that had sosuddenly invaded their peaceful camp began to shift. Perhaps Defago'sefforts, or the return of his quiet and normal attitude accomplishedthis; perhaps Simpson himself had exaggerated the affair out of allproportion to the truth; or possibly the vigorous air of the wildernessbrought its own powers of healing. Whatever the cause, the feeling ofimmediate horror seemed to have passed away as mysteriously as it hadcome, for nothing occurred to feed it. Simpson began to feel that he hadpermitted himself the unreasoning terror of a child. He put it downpartly to a certain subconscious excitement that this wild and immensescenery generated in his blood, partly to the spell of solitude, andpartly 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 toan effect of firelight, or his own imagination ...He gave it the benefitof the doubt; he was Scotch.

  When a somewhat unordinary emotion has disappeared, the mind alwaysfinds a dozen ways of explaining away its causes ...Simpson lit a lastpipe and tried to laugh to himself. On getting home to Scotland it wouldmake quite a good story. He did not realize that this laughter was asign that terror still lurked in the recesses of his soul--that, infact, 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 onhis face. The two men stood, side by side, kicking the embers aboutbefore going to bed. It was ten o'clock--a late hour for hunters to bestill 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 thatmoment," stammered Simpson, coming back to what really dominated hismind, and startled by the question, "and comparing them to--to allthis," 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 inthere nobody won't never see into--nobody knows what lives in thereeither."

  "Too big--too far off?" The suggestion in the guide's manner was immenseand horrible.

  Defago nodded. The expression on his face was dark. He, too, feltuneasy. The younger man understood that in a _hinterland_ of this sizethere might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of theworld be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort hewelcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time forbed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging thestones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing.Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found it difficultto "get at."

  "Say, you, Boss Simpson," he began suddenly, as the last shower ofsparks went up into the air, "you don't--smell nothing, do you--nothingpertickler, I mean?" The commonplace question, Simpson realized, veileda dreadfully serious thought in his mind. A shiver ran down his back.

  "Nothing but burning wood," he replied firmly, kicking again at theembers. The sound of his own foot made him start.

  "And all the evenin' you ain't smelt--nothing?" persisted the guide,peering at him through the gloom; "nothing extrordiny, and different toanything 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 thequestion.

  The Canadian came closer in the darkness. He shook his head. "I guessnot," he said, though without overwhelming conviction. "It must've beenjust that song of mine that did it. It's the song they sing in lumbercamps and godforsaken places like that, when they're skeered theWendigo's somewhere around, doin' a bit of swift traveling.--"

  "And what's the Wendigo, pray?" Simpson asked quickly, irritated becauseagain he could not prevent that sudden shiver of the nerves. He knewthat he was close upon the man's terror and the cause of it. Yet arushing passionate curiosity overcame his better judgment, and his fear.

  Defago turned swiftly and looked at him as though he were suddenly aboutto 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'snuthin'--nuthin' but what those lousy fellers believe when they've binhittin' the bottle too long--a sort of great animal that lives upyonder," he jerked his head northwards, "quick as lightning in itstracks, an' bigger'n anything else in the Bush, an' ain't supposed to bevery good to look at--that's all!"

  "A backwoods superstition--" began Simpson, moving hastily toward thetent 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'stime we were in bed and asleep if we're going to be up with the suntomorrow...."

  The guide was close on his heels. "I'm coming," he answered out of thedarkness, "I'm coming." And after a slight delay he appeared with thelantern and hung it from a nail in the front pole of the tent. Theshadows of a hundred trees shifted their places quickly as he did so,and when he stumbled over the rope, diving swiftly inside, the wholetent trembled as though a gust of wind struck it.

  The two men lay down, without undressing, upon their beds of soft balsamboughs, cunningly arranged. Inside, all was warm and cozy, but outsidethe world of crowding trees pressed close about them, marshalling theirmillion shadows, and smothering the little tent that stood there like awee white shell facing the ocean of tremendous forest.

  Between the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed anothershadow that was _not_ a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast bythe strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly uponDefago in the middle of his singing. And Simpson, as he lay there,watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plungeinto the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profoundstillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs ... and when the nighthas weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil aboutit.... Then sleep took him....