Outside the cabin purple twilight hugged the deep snow and gathered in the limbs of the pines, larches, spruces, hemlocks, and Douglas firs. Temperatures had dropped to below zero and a wind came whispering out of the north.
This place in extreme northwest Alaska was bugwayji, the Ojibwe’s word for a wild, natural place. Tru-Blood had come to think of it as unnatural. It should have more game. It should at least support one lone man with food enough to last him through a winter. This year it hadn’t. Tru-Blood’s stash of dried salmon and moose meat had been too small to last him. Though he’d hunted all summer, he hadn’t found enough game to preserve. He knew it would be hard and even thought of going into the town forty miles distant to take a job sweeping floors or hauling wood, but he let the thought pass until it was too late and he was snowed in.
He brought the little squirrel’s body into his lap and pulled out the stick carefully. He ate in a complete state of gratefulness, in prayer to the Great Spirit there would be more than this offered his palate the next day. He munched the stringy meat until it became mush before swallowing. He sucked marrow, what there was of it, from the little bones. He even ate the tiny succulent brain.
Outside the cabin he heard the wind rise and expected a chinoodin to hit by midnight. That would be a big wind, a man-killing wind that would drive the cold so deep into a man’s chest it could freeze his heart.
What am I to do? Tru-Blood wondered.
He had left the Canadian prairie reservation to go off on his own when he was a young man heading for Alaska. He despised reservation life and didn’t believe Ojibwe deserved such a fate. Back in the day they had lived around Lake Superior and had been moved as a tribe into Canada. He had never seen Lake Superior, or for that matter any of the United States except for Alaska. He had thought he could live as a real man in the seclusion of this north country. He could be as native as he wanted without others making remark on it. He could be free.
For twenty years he had done so. He’d finally married a native Cree girl and brought her to his hand-made log cabin in the woods, but she had died not two years later from influenza. He used every native root and potion he knew about to save her and failed.
Tru-Blood felt he had failed a lot. He had failed to keep his woman safe and now he had even failed to feed himself. He sat back in his chair, bones and fur at his feet, feeling his failure like a great rock lodged in his chest.
He heard the wind rise, screaming along the cabin eaves and it jolted him from reverie and recrimination. He must reinforce the door so the wind couldn’t come inside and find him. He must bar the one window with the plank sheathing he’d made to cover it from the inside.
After doing these things, he hauled his pine log bed closer to the fire, put on more wood, and crawled beneath bear hides for warmth.
It was going to be one hell of a night. It wasn’t his hunger he must fear tonight. It was the bastard wind.
****
It was hunger that drove him the next day. He’d drunk a weak pot of coffee, as his supplies were nearly at an end and the coffee wasn’t going to last a month more. He ate nothing, for there was nothing to eat. He had a few cupfuls of flour, two maggot-infested dried salmon lengths in the storage house, and that was it. That was all. He was saving both for when he was truly starving. For when he grew faint from lack of sustenance.
Maybe he could reach Baden’s house… It was ten miles north of him and Michael Baden was like him, a loner, a throwback. He had just as little care about society and quite an anger issue, one that had seen him thrown in jail a few times. But they knew one another. Maybe Baden had been luckier in finding game.
No. He’d think of a visit like that–one essentially to beg–when everything ran out completely. When he had no choice.
He hefted his gun on his shoulder and trudged on through the snow. His snow machine had died for the last time weeks ago. Tru-Blood had run out of gasoline for it. Since these items he couldn’t make with his own two hands, like gasoline, had to be bartered for, he’d not been able to secure enough fuel for the winter. For he hadn’t enough fox and bear hide to trade.
Which is why he had run out of food.
It was a vicious circle. It always had been, but through all the years he’d lived in the cabin, there had never been a year as bad as this one.
He heard a rustle in the limbs of a Douglas fir and turned quick, rifle aimed. Snow fell from the branch and hit with a splat on the hard-packed snow. Tru-Blood’s gaze searched the limbs, but he saw nothing out of order. Maybe it was just the weight of the snow causing it to fall.
Still, the hair on the back of his neck had risen. That usually meant something living was there, something that could be a menace to him. He stood quite still, scanning the tree and the ones next to it. He couldn’t pick out anything odd.
Shrugging, he turned to move forward again. He moved as quietly as the squeaky snow against his shoe leather let him. If only he could find something, anything. He moved toward the frozen stream, hoping for a beaver in his trap.
Once there, pulling on the chain, he hauled the trap up, breaking ice that crackled like fire. Nothing. Empty. It was always empty. He withdrew a small piece of dried salmon from his pocket and re-baited the trap. Something took the bait. But took it so stealthily the trap jaw never slammed shut on it. It was a mystery.
Again his mouth watered at the sight of the salmon. Should he stuff it in his mouth rather than waste it on the trap?
His mind was like a rope pulling this way and then that. Eat it, bait it. Eat it, bait it.
Finally he baited the trap and placed it back in the hole in the ice. Maybe it would catch that beaver yet. He could live for a month, if he had to, on one fat beaver.
Just as his stomach rumbled noisily, making him wince, Tru-Blood heard something trampling through the wood. He turned with his rifle held up and ready.
What appeared to be an adult Alaskan brown bear weighing close to eight hundred pounds, tore through the underbrush. It might be after prey. It might have been trying to catch some running mammal. Tru-Blood lofted his old Springfield bolt action .30-06 rifle and shot. He saw the bear swivel from the hips and knew he’d hit it. The beast let out a high-pitched scream that caused his attacker to pause. It sounded like a woman being murdered. Yet this was food! If he could bring it down, this bear could get him through the entire winter season that was left. The Springfield was a 5-shot repeater and Tru-Blood did not hesitate to pull the lever action, aim the front sight post, and shoot again. He didn’t care how he might spoil the meat or break the bear’s bones, he had to bring it down. He lusted to kill it.
His second shot twirled the animal backwards. The span of its hairy back was wide and muscled. Tru-Blood knew the .30-06 loads were going right through it. He levered and shot again. The beast stumbled forward. Tru-Blood levered for a fourth time and squeezed off a steady shot aimed at the left side of the bear’s upper ribs, hoping to strike the heart.
Finally it fell with a thud, face forward, into the snow.
The silence after the scream and the rifle shots was absolute. Even snow clung to the trees, holding their weighty gifts solidly. Tru-Blood stood frozen in place, lowering the rifle. He was breathing hard, the plumes of his breath long and full. He blinked. He looked at the sky and thanked whatever spirit might be there for this wonderful kill. He had been saved now. He would not have to go to Baden and beg or sit in his cabin and starve slowly.
Finally he moved, clomping through the snow to the bear. As he neared his brow furrowed and his mind grew puzzled. The bear was misshapen it seemed now he was closer to it. The torso was longer than necessary and the hind legs, too, were much too long for a brown bear. As Tru-Blood closed in on his kill, his thoughts first grew jumbled and then collided with reality. He was up against a brick wall in his mind. This. This was not a bear. What it was he couldn’t say, but it was definitely not a bear.
He dropped to his knees and put his gun on the snow. He reached for the dead
beast and pulling with all his power was able to turn it onto its side. He crept around it and stared into the face of a wildman–a skoocoom!
Tru-Blood set back on his heels, his mouth hanging open. Blood trickled from the creature’s exit wounds turning the snow beneath it scarlet. Not a sound punctuated the cold air. Even Tru-Blood made no sound, having halted his breath in startled surprise. A skoocoom! This was the Ojibwe word for what the whites called Bigfoot. Tru-Blood never believed it to be real. He’d been told as a child, as all native children of the tribe were told, that the skoocoom would come get them and eat them if they strayed too far from camp. The creature, surely a myth, had haunted Tru-Blood’s childhood nightmares. He would wake screaming, thinking the thing had caught him alone in the woods and was about to bite off his head.
Now he had killed one. He kneeled before no myth, no scary story for children. This was truly a great beast of lore, but it lay in its own blood, it had cried out in death, it was as real as the snow it lay upon and the lifeblood it leaked.
What was he to do? Tru-Blood wondered. What foul sin had he done now?
****
Sickened by his killing, Tru-Blood left the skoocoom and hurried back to the cabin. He had never been in the service of any country, and he had not lived in the era when his native tribe indulged in war. He had never killed a man. Beast, yes, many of them, of all sorts, and he believed they had been put on earth to feed him, as he was put on earth to feed the worms and the birds and the wild insects. But not a man. The skoocoom was more man than animal, that was a certainty. It had large brown eyes, a prominent brow, and its head was crested. Still, its features were such to indicate it was some sort of man. Man covered with fur, yes, but a man all the same. What Tru-Blood had committed was murder, pure and simple.
He sat in his cabin by the fire, warming his hands. His knuckles ached for he was nearly fifty-five years old and he suspected he was getting the old people’s disease they called arthritis. His shoulder sockets ached, his knuckles, his knees.
His stomach rumbled and he tried to ignore the pain in his gut from the hunger. He made a pot of weak coffee and poured the hot tea-colored liquid over and over the grounds to get as much flavor as possible.
You can eat the skoocoom, came an unbidden thought.
“I cannot!” he said aloud to refute the idea.
But he knew he could. In fact, he knew he must. If he was going to survive, he had to go back in the early morning and take meat from the beast for eating. He had to cannibalize the human-animal in order to live. Otherwise he would die and that itself was the greatest sin, letting himself die. The Ojibwe spoke of the wendigo, the gaunt, skeletal demonic spirit that claimed the lives of natives who indulged in cannibalism. Surely that was a myth! It was said the Ojibwe should commit suicide or resign himself to starvation rather than turn to eating the flesh of man.
Well, he was Ojibwe, but he was not willing to die in fear of a demon. Yes, the skoocoom had proved to be real and in the world, and he did appear to be some kind of human being, but the wendigo was just a taboo against the Ojibwe eating one another during hard times. Tru-Blood did not believe in the wendigo.
He believed in filling his belly and sustaining his body. That’s all he believed.
****
The beast weighed too much to pull the entire corpse on a sled back to the cabin. Once Tru-Blood cut it open and exposed the flesh, predators would probably come to feast. However, there were so few instances of game around the area this winter–which is why he must eat this thing–Tru-Blood doubted he’d lose much of the meat to predation.
He sliced from the buttock down the back of the leg to below the calf. He spread the furry thick hide and began to take strips of meat that he laid into a long wooden box he’d brought with him. He filled the box, thought to close it, then looked closely at the skoocoom’s chest. In there was the heart, and since he’d bled the beast, the heart might still be fresh enough to take. By tomorrow, who knew? Making an instant decision, he climbed onto the massive chest and began the precise cuts with his sharp skinning knife, going down through fur, skin, fat and muscle. He reached the ribs, broke them apart with his hands and the butt of his knife, then reached in for the bloody heart. Overall the beast smelled horrible, like a man who has not bathed in years, so even as Tru-Blood gagged, he snagged the immense pump and tore it loose from its moorings in the chest. He plopped it into the box, sealed the box, and held it close to his chest as he made his way back to the cabin.
Excitement made his cheeks bloom and hunger made his belly roar and greed made him think he could eat all this meat at one sitting.
It came to pass that he nearly did eat it all. He ate as a glutton, burped, walked around to relieve pressure on his stomach, and went back to the fire to eat more charred meat. It tasted like horse. Tru-Blood had eaten horse once as a kid when a drunk on the reservation killed and cooked up a kettle of it. He’d offered all the kids hanging around his shack a bowl full not telling them what it was.
That’s what this tasted like and it tasted heavenly. The whole cabin was fragrant with cooking meat. It turned the cold dark interior into a palace for the nostrils. Once he’d eaten his ultimate fill, Tru-Blood fell across his bed, pulled bear hides over his shoulders, and fell into a food-induced coma of sleep.
He dreamed.
He dreamed he had to take a piss so he walked outside the door of the cabin in the night. He unzipped and the hot fluid began to filter to the snow making a round yellow hole. He heard a screeching sound that almost reminded him of the skoocoom’s death cry. He glanced up at the woods nearest him and narrowed his eyes, focusing on a vision of a skinny, tattered-skinned being sitting hunched on a thick limb. It watched him with sunken eyes. Along the thin shoulders Tru-Blood could see black feathered wings stretching out a bit and then back in, stretching, disappearing, stretching.
Tru-Blood’s urine stopped altogether. He quickly zipped up and backed toward the door, his gaze glued to the thing in the tree. It watched him. The wings stretched out about half way from the body and then folded in. The creature’s long arms and skeletal hands hung over its upraised knees. Bones of white shown through the skin at spots and skin riffled in the breeze like dirty brown torn ribbons.
“Oh!”
Tru-Blood came awake in bed, the room still dark, the firelight from the fireplace now low and weak. Shadows danced like rolling pumpkins across the walls.
Wendigo!
But it was just a dream, a nightmare. He had not gone outside the cabin. He had not seen it in the tree limbs. It was not there. Was it?
He crept from the covers and slid his feet into a pair of fur moccasins. He went to the one window and unlatched the inside cover from the wall. He opened it slowly. He stared out the frosted window pane at the near trees.
Had something just moved? Moved so rapidly only the blur of its passing remained behind on his retinas?
He shivered. He scoured the trees to see what was there and convinced nothing was, he was merely spooked by his nightmare, he boarded the window over, threw more wood on the fire, and crawled happily into his bed.
Oh, he was so full! It was the first time he’d woken in the night and not been starving. He was blessed.
****
All the next day he carried sliced meat from the dead beast to his cabin. He hung most of it coated with salt in the smokehouse and set a fire there to cure it. He set a pot of it to boil in a big pot hanging from the handle inside the fireplace. He made a dozen trips to the dead, bringing its body bit by bit back to be saved and eaten during the next couple of months until the streams and rivers thawed and he could try to make his way to town for staples and at least a small can of gasoline for the old snow Ski-Doo.
He began to feel himself again. He hadn’t realized his mood had plummeted to such depths he was hardly more than a starving dog rooting and hunting for any living thing to eat. It had made him lose most of his humanity and dulled not just his senses, but his mind and his d
ignity.
Having gotten all he could carry away from the dead beast in the woods, he left it in the open for scavengers. He couldn’t bury it; it was much too large. He measured it by his boot lengths and guessed it to be between eight and nine foot tall. It was a male and buried in its dark, thick fur he found a penis and testicles. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds, but he didn’t know how much though he guessed it to be between seven and eight hundred pounds. It was a terrible thing. Not man, not animal, but a monster that didn’t belong on the earth.
Not once did Tru-Blood feel remorse in killing it, no more than if it had truly been a bear. It tasted gamy and wild and strange, but it filled his stomach and made him strong. That was enough. It had served a purpose in saving his life and for that he thanked and blessed it.
The only problem was the dreams. The nightmares. The wendigo in his night terrors came more often as the weeks passed. The more he ate of the wildman, the more dreams plagued him. The wendigo always sat just outside his cabin in the trees there. It shouldn’t have had wings to flex at him, but it certainly did. He’d never heard of a wendigo with wings, but then no one he knew had ever really seen one, including him, so how was he to know for sure what the demon looked like?
Finally, waking all through the nights for a week on end, he was so fatigued he could hardly rise, bathe, and dress. He caught himself nodding off in his chair before the fire, or lying down on the bed for long, troubled naps. Also, the dried meat he was eating now from the beast began to taste spoiled. He looked it over carefully for mold or gray mottling and found nothing. Still, when he cooked it, or tried to eat it like jerky, the taste would back up on his tongue and his stomach began to reject it. A couple of times he even vomited, the meat coming out more putrid than anything he could imagine.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 8
