The Curse of the Wendigo (9 page)

“Or a scalpel, Sergeant. Will Henry, I’ll need more light here—no, take the opposite side and hold the lamp low. That’s it.”

“What are you doing?” demanded Hawk. He drew closer, curiosity getting the better of his revulsion.

“There is something very peculiar. . . .” The monstrumologist’s hand disappeared inside the hole. Operating by sense of touch and his knowledge of anatomy, he made several quick slices
with the scalpel, then handed the instrument to me.

“What is?” asked Hawk. “What’s peculiar?”

“Ack!” the doctor groaned. “I can’t do both. . . . Will Henry, set down the lamp a moment and pull this apart. No, deeper; you’ll have to get hold of the ribs. Pull
hard
, Will Henry. Harder!”

I felt someone’s breath upon my cheek—Hawk’s. He was staring at me.

“Indispensable,” he whispered. “
Now
I understand!”

The doctor’s hands disappeared between mine. Then, with a dramatic flourish, the monstrumologist hauled out the severed heart, cradling it in his hands and holding it high like a bloody offering. I plopped onto my backside, the muscles of my forearms singing with pain. Warthrop turned toward the fire and allowed the light to play over the organ. As he pressed on the pericardium, thick curds of arterial blood dribbled over the severed lip of the pulmonary artery and fell into the fire, where it popped and bubbled, steaming in the intense heat.

“Most peculiar . . . There appears to be denticulated trauma to the right ventricle.”

“What?” Hawk fairly shouted. “What to the what?”

“Teeth marks, Sergeant. Something bored a hole through his chest and took a bite out of his heart.”

There would be no sleep that night for the monstrumologist. Around three in the morning he shooed me to bed—“You’ll
be no use to me in the morning otherwise, Will Henry”—and urged Hawk to get some rest as well. He would take both watches. Our shaken escort did not take kindly to the suggestion.

“What if you fall asleep?” he asked. “If that fire goes out . . . the smell of . . . It will draw all sorts of things. . . .” He was hugging his rifle as a child might his favorite blanket. “Not to mention whoever did this is still out there. They could be watching us right now, waiting for us to fall asleep.”

“I assure you, Sergeant, I will not doze off, and I shall keep my rifle close. There is nothing to fear.”

Hawk would have none of it. He did not know the doctor as I did. When the hunt was on, he could stay awake for days. Now Warthrop’s eyes were bright, and all fatigue had fled. He was in his element now.

“Nothing to fear! Sweet Mary and Joseph, listen to the man!”

“Yes, I would beg that you do, Sergeant. Now is not the time to lose our heads and submit to our baser instinct. How far are we from the Sucker encampment?”

“A day . . . a day and a half.”

“Good. We are of the same mind here. The quicker we reach our destination, the better. You know these people, Sergeant. Have you ever heard of anything like this?” He nodded toward the body, its arms outstretched as if waiting for a hug. “Is there anything in their culture to suggest such desecration, perhaps for shamanistic reasons?”

“You’re asking if they’d ever skin a man and eat his heart?”

The doctor smiled wanly. “There are certain indigenous beliefs about taking on the spirit of what one consumes.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Mr. Monstrumologist, but I’ve never heard of the Cree doing anything like what was done to poor Larose here. They say they’ll chop off the head sometimes—chop off the head, cut out the heart, and burn the body to keep it from coming back.”

“To keep what from coming back?”

“The
Outiko
—the Wendigo!”

“Ah. Yes, of course. Well, whatever snacked on Monsieur Larose’s heart was no Cree—or anyone of any color for that matter. The bite radius is too large, for one thing, and every cut is jagged—an indication that the mouth that bit him lacked incisors.”

“Lacked . . . ?”

“The cutting teeth. These here.” The doctor tapped his front teeth with a blood-encrusted fingernail. “In other words, whatever bit him had a mouth full of fangs.”

The night wore on, and Hawk wore down, at last throwing himself upon the ground beside me with an agonized moan. Warthrop remained outside the tent, keeping watch over his special charge while keeping the fire stoked. If not in actuality, at least the fire gave off the illusion of defense against whatever might lurk just beyond the range of its beneficent light.

Soon my tent mate’s
moans were replaced by the pleasant drone of his humming, perhaps to comfort himself in the way a man might whistle in a graveyard, the same haunting voyageur song he had sung before:

I was roused from my restless slumber by something tugging upon my boot. I sat up with a small cry.

“Easy, Will Henry; it’s only me,” the monstrumologist said. He was smiling. His face had taken on the same feverish glow I had seen a hundred times before. He gestured for me to join him outside. The cold, moist air made my lungs ache, but my heart sang with the shimmering bars of golden light streaming through the welcoming arms of the trees. The fire had all but died, and now in its smoldering ruin sat the coffeepot, steam rising languorously from its spout. The doctor gave a soft clap of his hands and desultorily asked how I had slept.

“Very well, sir,” I said.

“Why do you lie, Will Henry? Have you never heard that a person who will lie about the smallest of things will have no compunction when it comes to the largest?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“‘Yes, sir.’ Again with the ‘yes, sir.’ What have I told you about that?”

“Yes . . .” I
hesitated, but now I was somewhat committed. “. . . sir.”

“Come, I’ve found a suitable spot.”

A suitable spot for
what
? I followed him a few yards into the trees, where I found a shallow trench; the camp shovel lay abandoned beside it.

“Finish up and be quick about it, Will Henry. You may break your fast afterward. If Sergeant Hawk is correct and not indulging in some wishful thinking, we may reach Sandy Lake before sundown.”

“We’re going to bury him?”

“We can’t very well bring him with us, and it wouldn’t do to leave him here exposed to the elements.” He sighed. His steamy breath roiled in the cold air. “I had hoped the morning light would reveal more clues as to what happened to him, but there’s little else I can do without the proper equipment.”

“What did happen to him, sir?”

“It appears from the evidence that someone impaled him upon the broken trunk of a hemlock tree, Will Henry,” he said dryly. “Snap to now! Remember, he that would have fruit must climb the tree.”

And many hands make light work,
I thought as I snapped to with the shovel. The handle was half the length of a proper shovel’s, the ground was rocky and unyielding, and blisters
soon formed on my hands and a dull ache set in between my shoulders. From the campsite I heard my companions arguing—Hawk must have gotten up—their disembodied voices sounding ethereal and tinny in the labyrinthine halls of the arboreal cathedral.

Presently I spied them stumbling along the crooked path toward me, bearing between them the body of poor Larose, the sergeant holding the upper half, Warthrop the legs. Hawk, who was forced by the narrowness of the passage to walk backward with the load, lost his balance on the dew-slick ground and fell, pulling the body sideways and down as the doctor remained upright. The gash inflicted by Warthrop the night before split wide with a sickening crunch, and the corpse broke completely in two. The top half came to rest in Hawk’s lap, the head with its shock of red hair nestled in the crook of Hawk’s neck, the open mouth pressed under the sergeant’s jaw in an obscene mockery of a kiss. Hawk dropped the torso, scrambled to his feet, and cursed Warthrop roundly for his failure to “go down” with him.

As the possessor of the sole shovel, the honors of the dead guide’s internment fell to me. Hawk grew impatient; he seemed nearly mad with the desire to quit this part of the forest. He fell to his knees beside the grave, dragging handfuls of earth into the hole, all the while muttering obscenities under his breath. Then he collapsed against a tree trunk, his gasps all out of proportion to the difficulty of his efforts.

“Someone should say something,” he said. “Do we have anything to say?”

Apparently we did not. The doctor absently wiped bits and pieces of tacky viscera from his duster. I twirled the tip of the shovel in the dirt.

Wearily, with words that struck me as hollowed out of all import, Hawk recited the Hail Mary prayer:

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. . . .”

Something stirred in the bush. A large crow, its ebony body as shiny as obsidian, its black eyes brightly inquisitive, was watching us.

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. . . .”

Another crow hopped out from the shadows. Then another. And another. They stood, motionless, balanced upon their skeletal legs, four pairs of depthless black and soulless eyes, watching us. More appeared from the tangle of vine and scrub; I counted a baker’s dozen of crows, a mute congregation, a deputation of the desolation, come to pay their respects.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Overcome, Hawk began to weep. The monstrumologist—and the crows—did not. The birds commandeered the rite when we left. I looked back and saw them hopping about the makeshift grave, pecking at the offal Warthrop had flicked from his coat.

After a hurried breakfast of dried biscuit and bitter coffee, we broke camp. Though both men were anxious to finish the final leg to Sandy Lake, they recognized the necessity of exploring the clearing and its environs in the daylight, and so for an hour we tramped the grounds, looking for any evidence that might help solve the riddle of our macabre discovery the night before. We found nothing—no tracks, no scrap of clothing, no personal belongings or trace of anything human. It was as if Pierre Larose had dropped from the sky to land in an extremely infelicitous spot.

“It’s not possible,” mused our guide, standing before the broken spine of the hemlock tree.

“It happened, so it must be possible,” replied the monstrumologist.

“But how? How did he heft the body eight feet off the ground like that—unless he stood on something—and if he did, where is it? I’d say there were at least two, maybe more. Hard to imagine a single author to this story. But the more bothersome is not
how
it was done but
why
was it done? If I were to murder a man, I would not go to all the trouble of skinning him and heaving him onto a pike. What is the point of
that
?”

“There seems to be a ritualistic aspect to it,” said Warthrop. “The author, as you call him, might have been getting at something symbolic.”

Hawk nodded thoughtfully. “Larose was in debt to half the town. I’ve dealt with more than one complaint of his swindling.”

“Ah.
So perhaps an angry creditor kidnaps him, hauls him miles into the wilderness, skins him—how poetic!—then takes a bite out of his heart.”

Hawk chuckled in spite of himself. “I like it better than the alternative, Doctor. I suspect our friend Jack Fiddler would say the Old One of the Woods got a little clumsy and dropped him from on high!”

The monstrumologist nodded grimly.

“I am very interested in what our friend Jack Fiddler has to say.”

“I Have Come for My Friend”

His real name was Zhauwuno-geezhigo-gaubow—“He Who Stands in the Southern Sky”—or, according to records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with whom he traded, Maisaninnine or Mesnawetheno, Cree for “a stylish person.”

He was the son of the chief, Peemeecheekag (“Porcupine Standing Sideways”), and he was the tribe’s
ogimaa
, or shaman, respected to the point of fear by his clansmen for his skill and power, particularly over the evil spirit that possessed his kinsmen in times of famine. He claimed in his lifetime to have killed fourteen of these creatures that “devour all mankind,” the last in 1906—Wahsakapeequay, the daughter-in-law of his brother, Joseph. His reward for this selfless act of altruism was his arrest by the Canadian authorities the following year.

After being convicted of murder and sentenced to death, Jack Fiddler escaped—from prison and from the indignity of the white man’s justice. He carried out the sentence himself. The day following his escape they found him hanging from a tree.

He was a bit shy of his fiftieth year when he met his spiritual brother—Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, expert in the natural philosophy of aberrant species—though in appearance he seemed far older. Season after season in the brutal cold, and the unimaginable hardship and deprivation of the harsh subarctic wilderness, had taken its toll; he appeared closer to seventy than fifty, his skin cracked and laced with deep wrinkles, his face as dark and worn as old shoe leather, in which the eyes dominated, dark, deep set, intense but kind. His were the eyes of one who has seen too much suffering to take suffering too seriously.

As night fell, we reached Jack Fiddler’s primitive kingdom hacked out of the Canadian bush on the shores of Sandy Lake, after the most grueling day of our long trek from Rat Portage, pushed by Warthrop’s eagerness and Hawk’s unease to the limit of our endurance. The latter’s agitation grew as the day aged, his eyes flitting back and forth along the trail, seeing menace in every shadow, bad omens in even the most minor of delays.

“Have you noticed, Doctor,” he said when we halted briefly for lunch, “that we haven’t seen a single animal since leaving Rat Portage? Not a moose or a deer or a fox or anything.
Nothing but birds and insects, but I don’t count them. I’ve never been up in these woods without seeing
something
. Even the squirrels—this is the busiest time of year for the squirrels—but not even a squirrel!”