“Henry!” Pop leapt from the wagon and grabbed me by the arms just in time to steady me as my knees gave out. He lifted me up as though I were a little boy and laid me out in the back of the wagon.
The stars swam above me in the black sky, and I passed out. When I opened my eyes, Emma was kneeling behind me with my head in her lap. My left arm was wrapped with a strip of cloth I suspected had come from her petticoat.
“Shh, stay still, Henry, we’re almost home,” she said as I struggled to rise.
“I’m all right,” I said, pushing myself with my right arm to a sitting position in the bouncing, rattling wagon. I was mortified to realize I had pissed my trousers during the attack. Emma, bless her heart, didn’t mention my wet thighs or the odour of urine about me. “Slow down, Pop!” I called out in an effort to redeem myself. “You’ll kill us all before I die from any cat bite!”
The wagon didn’t slow down that I noticed, and moments later we pulled into the farm yard.
Evidently warned of something amiss by the arrival of Emma’s mare sans Emma, Mum had every lantern in the house lit. She rushed out with Pal, our black and white collie, bounding in front of her. She and Emma helped me inside.
Mum carefully removed my shredded shirt, made me lie down on the cleared kitchen table, and immediately began inspecting my wounds.
Aside from the deep bite marks on my left arm, I had four long scratches across each shoulder, but none of them appeared life threatening. Mum washed my wounds with cool boiled water she kept in a jar just for this purpose, and wrapped them with clean strips of cloth. I spent an unrestful night in my bed, disturbed countless times by pain in my arm and shoulders, Mum checking on me, and nightmares of a monster catamount with glowing eyes the size of the moon.
Pop rode one of the geldings into town the next morning to fetch Dr. Williams, who made a lot of “hmm” and “aah” sounds over my wounds while he disinfected them with alcohol. That burned like the dickens, but it was nothing compared to having my scratches stitched up. I clamped my jaws together, biting my lower lip until it bled, but I would not scream or cry in front of my family. After all, at fifteen I was nearly a man and determined to act like one.
Mum took pity on me and gave me a glass of whiskey. It burned my throat as I gratefully gulped it down, but it did help dull the pain of the doctor’s administrations.
Dr. Williams finished by dressing my wounds with fresh linen bandages. He said I had been lucky, told me to keep the stitches clean and dry, and made me promise to come to his surgery in two weeks to have them taken out.
I thought I would rather pull out the stitches myself, but I smiled and thanked him for his care. I spent the rest of the day promising Mum, Emma, and the little ones that I would be right in no time. Mum let me out of the house with Emma to check on her mare, who seemed quite recovered from yesterday’s ordeal. We agreed the mare wasn’t silly at all, but had smelled or sensed the cougar stalking her. Smart horse, I thought, I should have paid more attention.
Once he was sure I would survive, Pop had left to round up a group of men and dogs to search for the catamount. He returned at sunset admitting they had been able to follow the cougar’s trail for some distance, but lost it in the rain. Judging from the amount of blood it had lost, they were hopeful it would die from its wounds.
Later, after the little ones were put to bed, Pop added that they had found the remains of a retired British officer known as Captain Wilson and his wife near their cabin in the woods. The man’s body looked to be many weeks dead, but Mrs. Wilson had passed away within the last twenty-four hours. Mr. Finney and Dr. Williams would return tomorrow with a constable to collect the bodies so they could be examined and given a decent Christian burial.
“You think it was the cougar, Pop?” I asked. “Did it get them?”
“I don’t know, Henry. But I do believe Dr. Williams was right. You were very lucky last night. Very lucky, indeed.”
A shiver ran down my spine as the impact of his words hit me. “You saved me last night, Pop,” I gulped. “If you hadn’t shot it, that cat would have got me, and no mistake.” At that moment I didn’t feel like a man at all, and throwing my arms around my father’s neck, I mumbled, “Thank you, Pop.”
Pop hugged me back. He coughed and said gruffly, “I’d do anything to protect my family, son. You know that.”
After three days at home resting and recuperating, I insisted I was well enough to go to school. I marched the hour to town with Emma, Billy, and Alice and found upon taking my seat that everyone had heard of my adventure. I spent lunch period telling about it in my own words and feeling like the hero in a storybook.
Julia Williams, the doctor’s daughter and an even bigger know-it-all than Billy, said I should look out for symptoms of an illness called rabies, common in wild animals in Europe. I reminded her that we were in Canada, but that didn’t stop her describing how rabies would give me fever and a terrible fear of water before driving me insane and killing me.
“Thank you,” I said, thinking how sorry I was for the boy who would end up her husband.
The next ten days passed as slowly as any days ever. We all worried that the catamount would make another appearance, although as far as we heard, it did not. I went to school, helped Mum and Pop bring in the crops of corn and oats, and took care of the livestock, all the while fretting about rabies even though I hadn’t developed the slightest sign of it. I was quite willing when Mum took me to Dr. Williams’ surgery in town.
The removal of my stitches proved to be far less torturous than the stitching up had been, and the good doctor relieved my mind somewhat by assuring me that rabies was almost unheard of in Ontario. My wounds had healed wonderfully, he said, and I should be left only with minor scars.
It was near another fortnight past stitch removal day, and I was bringing the horses in from their pasture to the barn for the night. The bay mare – who was quite sensible when there were no cougars afoot – became spooky as the dickens, and it was all I could do to get her inside with both of us still in one piece.
“I think the catamount’s around,” I told Pop back in the house. The words were hardly out of my mouth that Pop was out the door with his shotgun in hand and Pal at his heels.
“Stay here in the house!” Mum commanded as Billy and I made to follow him.
We threw ourselves at the kitchen window, where we watched Pop cross the yard between the house and barn, shotgun ready at his shoulder. We lost sight of him as he went behind the barn, but there was no sound of gunshot or scream of a man being attacked by a beast.
Pop eventually returned to the house, little beads of sweat on his forehead attesting to the fact that he had been more scared than he would ever let on. But he hadn’t seen the catamount.
I was rounding the chickens up into the hen house at dusk the next afternoon when a sudden moment of weakness came over me. I fell to my knees with a moan, tears springing to my eyes as pain exploded in my bitten arm. I threw up my supper in a vile, steaming heap as another wave of pain hit me. When the nausea passed I struggled to my feet, clutching the wires of the chicken pen to remain upright. Another shot of pain hit me, this one in all my limbs at once, and I fell to the ground flat on my back.
Gazing up at the whitewashed barn and the full moon rising above its roof, I figured the rabies had got me after all. Then I rolled up my sleeve to find the skin on my arm erupting with short, tawny fur. In a mindless panic, I pulled off my shirt completely. Fur was sprouting across my chest and down my right arm. I rolled in the barnyard dirt as pain enveloped my entire body.
My last coherent thought was; I’m having the nightmare to end all nightmares . . . or that cat gave me something worse than rabies.
***
“Henry! Henry, do you hear me?” I heard a voice, fading in and out of my consciousness. “Mum! I think he’s coming around!”
I opened my eyes, blinking in a flood of sunlight, and realized I was lying in my bed in broad daylight.
/> “Henry!” Emma sat on the edge of my bed and clasped my nearest hand in hers.
“Wh—what happened?” My voice was so hoarse I barely recognized it.
“Oh Henry, love, we thought we’d lost you for sure.” Tears filled Mum’s eyes as she appeared behind Emma. Alice and Billy were at her side. Alice was weeping.
“I’m all right,” I said, pushing myself up on my elbows. “What am I doing in bed?”
“Please tell us, how do you feel?” Mum answered my question with one of her own. “Are you hurt?”
I sat up all the way with my back against the pine headboard, stretching my arms and legs. Everything seemed to be in working order. “No, I…I think I’m all right. I’m thirsty, though. And hungry.”
Mum put a firm hand on my shoulder to dissuade me getting up, while Emma sprang to her feet.
“I’ll get you something, Henry,” my sister said all in a fluster. “You just sit tight.”
I looked up at Mum’s worried blue eyes. “I feel all right, Mum. Why am I in bed?”
“Later, Henry. You just rest and…and we’ll talk of it later.”
Mum ushered Alice and Billy away when Emma returned with a glass of milk and a bowl of hot porridge. Emma watched me eat in silence, the tension in the air practically crackling, and took away the dishes when I was done.
Shortly after that, Billy crept into our room.
“Are you really all right?” he asked, plopping down on the edge of my bed.
“Yes,” I said, “but what happened? The last thing I remember is—” I stopped to think for a minute. “I was getting the chickens put away. Uh, yesterday?”
“Friday,” Billy said ominously. “It’s Monday now, Henry. Almost time for supper.”
“What?”
“You disappeared Friday night. We found your torn up shirt, and three dead chickens with nothing left but feathers and feet. We thought maybe, you know, the cougar dragged you off somewhere. Pop and the men looked for you all weekend. The cougar, it got one of the Halls’ hounds. Then this morning, uh—” His words trailed off.
“Come on, Billy, spit it out!”
“Emma found you by the barn door when she went out to milk the cows. You were naked as a newborn, Henry, and covered in blood. And you were, I don’t know, asleep? You didn’t wake up even when Mum and me cleaned you up.”
I squeezed my eyes tight in an effort to rid myself of that image. “I don’t remember anything.”
“It wasn’t your blood,” Billy said in a choked voice. “Except for some scratches, you don’t have a mark on you.”
“Well then, I can get up, can’t I?” I rose and dressed in a clean shirt and trousers, and joined my family downstairs in the kitchen.
Everyone gawked at me like I was risen from the dead. Then Alice squealed and threw herself into my arms. The next thing I knew, they were all around me, hugging me and clapping me on the back and laughing with relief until Emma and Alice cried again.
Later, after a supper of beef stew and bread which I ate as though famished despite the earlier bowl of porridge, Pop cautiously told me what Billy had already blabbed to me.
We were full of questions that had no answer. The only sure thing was that I was uninjured, and I was safe. I never did remember what had happened those two days, but I was dogged with nightmares of the catamount, of blood and fur and thinking my next breath might be my last. I woke up drenched in the sweat of pure terror a night out of three, inconsolable until the sun came up and I was able to gather my wits about me.
“It’s not a regular catamount,” Julie Williams said to me a few weeks later after school. “My father saw a patient this week, a trapper from up north. He’s a Red Indian. Algonquin. I was helping Father in his surgery, and I heard…I probably shouldn’t tell you.” She hesitated, clearly enjoying this moment of knowing more than me.
“Tell me what?” I made a gesture of impatience with one hand.
“He said it might be something like…they call it a wendigo.”
I snorted. “Never heard of it.”
“Neither had I. Tobias – that’s the trapper – he said the wendigo is a monstrous beast. It’s possessed by an evil spirit that craves blood and meat. Sometimes it’s born when a person tastes of human flesh. Henry,” Julia paused for effect. “Tobias said that sometimes, a wendigo’s spirit can infect a person it’s bitten but not killed. Then they become a beast, too.”
I held back a laugh. “And he thinks the catamount is a…a wendigo?”
Julia shook her head. “No. But he thinks it might be something akin to it. Something that’s awakened by the full moon. Haven’t you noticed, Henry? All the attacks have happened when the moon’s full!”
“That’s pure nonsense, Julia,” I said, turning away. “That Indian just wanted to scare you folks and it looks like it worked.” But as I walked across the school yard, my mind was calculating the attacks. I stopped in my tracks and whirled back to Julia, who looked like she had been expecting this. “You’re right!” I exclaimed as I marched back to her. “The catamount got the Halls’ hound three weeks ago. And it was at our place. I remember the full moon!” I gasped as the recollection came to me. “I was attacked under a full moon a month before that. A month earlier, the Halls lost their heifers. And before that, oh my Lord, a month before was July. That’s when the Finneys’ little boy was killed. They thought it was wolves, but it wasn’t, was it? It was the cat!” My knees gave out, and I sat down hard on the grass.
Julia sat down opposite me and spread her skirt over her legs. “There’s one more thing, Henry. It’s horrible, but you should know. My father did autopsies on Captain Wilson and his wife. The old man was chewed up something terrible, and Mrs. Wilson, she…she had a bullet in her thigh, but that’s not what killed her. She cut her own throat, Henry. They found the knife right by her body. She killed herself, and no mistake.”
“What are you saying, Julia?” I asked as the pieces clunked into place in my mind. “That Mrs. Wilson was, what? A man-eating beast that chewed on her husband? That it was her that bit me and now I’m going to become—?” I leapt to my feet so quickly the world swam around me for a moment. When things righted themselves, I glared down at Julia and yelled, “How can you talk such filth? I always thought you were a stuck up know-it-all townie, but now I think you’re just plain mean!”
I stumbled away, breaking into a run when I got my legs under me. I didn’t stop until I was halfway home and too out of breath to go on. I continued to turn Julia’s words around in my head, reasoning them every which way in an effort to convince myself she was wrong. Finally, the sensible part of my brain won out. Impossible, I told myself. People don’t turn into furry beasts with claws and fangs that go about attacking other people.
I avoided Julia Williams like the plague the rest of the week. I didn’t tell anyone what she had said and, as far as I could see, she hadn’t told anyone else, either.
I began feeling funny the morning before November’s full moon. I ate twice what I usually had for breakfast and still didn’t feel full. Pal, my faithful companion for the last six years, growled at me and slunk away under the kitchen table, refusing to come outside with me.
The first pangs of nausea hit me as I closed up the barn that evening – and I knew that Julia had been right after all. Instead of waiting for the change to hit me here, I took off into the woods. If I was going to turn into a beast, I wanted to be as far away from my family as I could be.
***
I woke up on the pebbly shore of the stream in the woods. I was buck naked, bleeding from a multitude of cuts and scrapes and a deep gash across the right side of my ribs, with the taste of blood in my mouth. From the position of the sun peeking through the clouds, I guessed it was mid-day.
I stumbled the few steps to the stream and crouched to wash myself in the frigid water. I could hear my name being called in the distance, but I wasn’t ready to be found just yet.
“Henry!” Emma burst out from betw
een the pines and beech trees only moments later. She was dressed for a trek through the woods in one of my own overalls and coats. “Henry, oh my Lord!” she cried, shrugging out of my coat and throwing it around my shoulders as I came shivering out of the stream. “We’ve been searching for you Pop!” Her voice rose in the calling. “Pop! I—”
I clamped a hand hard over her mouth and hissed, “Not yet! Emma, I need to know. Has Julia Williams told you anything, uh, unusual?”
Emma nodded, her blue eyes wide as saucers and glued on my face.
“All right. Now I’m going to take my hand away. Please, don’t call Pop yet.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she nodded again.
I took my hand off my sister’s mouth and she blurted, “Julia came out with her father yesterday to look at Alice.”
“Alice?” A large lump formed in my throat. “What’s wrong with Alice?”
“Naught but the fright of her life.”
Teeth clenched, I said, “Tell me, Emma. What happened?”
“Oh my. Alice went out to the hen house yesterday morning to collect the eggs. It was there, Henry. The catamount. We heard Alice scream all the way to the house. By the time Pop got outside with his shotgun, she was running to us and Pal . . . Pal was battling with the cat. Pop got a shot off and it ran away. Oh Henry, I’m so sorry, but Pal, he’s dead. The beast tore him to pieces.”
As she spoke, fleeting bits of recollection came to me: the smell of wet earth and leaf mold, a little girl’s scream, a blur of black and white, the searing pain of the bullet grazing my side. The lump in my throat slid down to settle in the pit of my stomach. “I did, you mean,” I said forlornly, blinking back hot tears.
“So you think it’s true?” Despite the evidence, she sounded doubtful.
“I have to. Look at me.” I pushed my coat aside to show her the raw crease across my ribs. “That’s where Pop shot me. I’m a beast, Emma, and I don’t know what to do about it. Only, I can’t go on like this, changing every full moon and coming back to myself to learn what or who I killed! What if next time it’s one of you?”
Morbid Metamorphosis Page 17
