by W.H. Blake
from Brown Waters and Other Sketches. Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1915.
Who knows what horrors lurk in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield. The Native peoples knew and feared the cannibal spirit they called the Wendigo.
His story comes back to me in sharp and vivid outline, though I look across years not a few to the telling of it, and to our little tent pitched high and lonely in the Grand Jardin des Ours. Who can say what share time and place, the wild August storm, and my friend’s emotion, had in etching the picture so deeply on my memory? Perhaps the impression is not communicable; perhaps it may be caught, if you will consent to make camp with us in those great barrens that lie far-stretching and desolate among the Laurentian Mountains.
We had been fishing the upper reaches of one of the little rivers that rise in the heart of the hills, quickly gather volume from many streams and lakes, loiter for a few miles in dead waters where a canoe will float, through amazing gorges, to the St. Lawrence and the sea. An evening rare and memorable, when the great trout were mad for the fly; more than a dozen of these splendid fellows, a man’s full load, lay on the bank, where they rivalled the autumn foliage in crimson, orange, and bronze. This first good luck came after many barren days, the smoke-house of bark was still unfilled — so it happened that we did not leave the river till the darkness, and the thunder of an oncoming storm put down the fish. From the towering cumulus that overhung us immense drops plumped into the waterlike pebbles, and the steady roar of the advancing squall warned us to hasten. Gathering up the trout we dashed for the tent, to find it will nigh beaten to the ground by the weight of the wind and the rain. Though a clump of stunted spruces to windward gave a little shelter, we had much ado to keep the friendly canvas roof over our heads by anchoring it with stones.
After putting on dry clothes we explored the provision sack, discovering nothing more inviting that pork and crumbled biscuit. Tea there was, but even an old hand could not boil a kettle, or cook fish, in such a tumult of rain and wind. Three weeks of wandering had brought us to the lowest ebb, and our men, who had departed in the morning for an outpost of civilization where supplies could be obtained, would scarcely return in such weather. We guessed, and rightly as it turned out, that they had chosen to spend the night at La Galette, the nerve-extremity, responding faintly to impulses from the world of men, where the gossip of the countryside awaited them.
So were we two alone in one of the loneliest places this wide earth knows. Mile upon mile of gray moss; weathered granite clad in ash-coloured lichen; old brûlé — the trees here fallen in windrows, there standing bleached and lifeless, making the hilltops look barer, like the sparse white hairs of age. Only in the gullies a little greenness — dwarfed larches, gnarled birches, tiny firs a hundred years old — and always moss, softer than Persian rug — moss to the ankle, moss to the knee, great boulders covered with it, the very quagmires mossed over so that a careless step plunges one into the sucking black ooze below.
Through the door of the tent the lightning showed this endless desolation, and a glimpse of the river forcing its angry way through a defile.
When the sorry meal was over we smoked, by turns supporting the tent pole in the heavier gusts. My companion was absent-minded and restless; he seemed to have no heart for the small talk of the woods, and to be listening for something. Breaking into an attempt of mine at conversation, he asked abruptly:
“Did you ever hear about the disappearance of Paul Duchene?”
The name came back to me in a misty way, and with some tragic association, but the man himself I had never known. Any sort of a yarn was welcome that would take one’s mind off the eeriness
and discomfort of our situation, and H required no urging. He
spoke like a man who has a tale that must be told, and I try to give you neither more nor less than what he said:
“Duchêne was in camp with me years ago, in fact it was he that brought me into this country in the old days before trails were cut, and when no one came here but himself and his brothers, and a few wandering Montagnais Indians. The Duchênes were trappers, and they guarded the secrets of the place very jealously, which was natural enough as it yielded them game and fur in plenty. Though he showed me good sport, it was quite plain that he never told all that he knew. The paths he followed, if indeed they were paths, were not blazed. He seemed to steer by a sense of direction, and from a general knowledge of the lie of the mountains, valleys, and rivers. Seldom did we return by the way that had taken us to the feeding grounds of moose or caribou. Duchêne was contemptuous of easy walking, and almost seemed to choose the roughest going, but he jogged along in marvellous fashion through swamps and windfalls, with a cruel load on his back. The fellow was simply hard as nails, and, measured by my abilities, was tireless.
“Looking back to that autumn, it strikes me that there was something demonic in his energy. Food and rest did not matter to him. He was always ready to go anywhere — leaving me to follow as best I could; and though I was a pretty stout walker, and carried but little compared to him, it was only shame that kept me from begging for mercy on the long portages.
“Only a few weeks after our trip together Duchêne went out of his mind, and took to the woods. For ten days he wandered in the mountains without food, gun, or matches, but he appears to have partially regained his senses, and made for La Galette, where he arrived in a very distressing condition. Under his father’s roof he fell into a harmless, half-witted existence, which lasted for several months. With the spring the fit came upon him again and he disappeared. The brothers followed his trail for days, but lost it finally in the valley of the Enfer, nor were they ever able to discover further trace of him. No man knows what end he made, nor where in this great wilderness his bones are bleaching.
“You have heard, perhaps, the belief of the Montagnais — strange medley of Paganism and Christianity, that those who die insane without the blessing of a priest become wendigos — werewolves, with nothing human but the their form, soulless beings of a diabolic strength and cunning, that wander for all time seeking only to harm whomever comes their way. A black superstitious race these Indians are, and horribly sincere in their faith. They shot down a young girl with the beads of her rosary, because her mind was weakening, and they thought thus to avert the fate from her, and themselves. You would not doubt the truth of this, had you seen the look in the eyes of the man who told me that he had been a helpless witness of the murder.
“I have never spoken of what happened to me the following summer, because one does not like to be disbelieved; perhaps tonight, with the storm-hags abroad and the voices of the sky filling our ears, you will understand. Our tent is pitched so near that infernal spot, — the whole thing takes possession of me again. I keep listening —
“You know the Rivière à l’Enfer, but you have not seen its headwaters, and never will if you are wise. A queer lot of tales old and new, but all pointing to prodigious trout, took me past the mouth of the canyon that gives the river its name. A bold man might follow this cleft in the mountain, but he would go in peril of his life; the precipitous ascent on the left side is safer, if not easier.
“Duchêne would not guide me there, but he gave an extraordinary account of the fishing in the lake which is the source of the river. There is an Indian tradition, and these traditions usually have a foundation of some kind, that it contains trout of tremendous size. Duchêne asserted that stout lines he had set through the ice, in the morning were found broken. Trying again, with the heaviest gear, his tackle was smashed as easily. Heaven knows what the lake holds; nothing came to my fly but half a dozen ink-black trout a few inches long.
“Very little over a hundred years ago it was firmly believed that an active volcano existed not far from here, and this lake, at the very summit of one of the hills to the northwest of us, fills to the brim what looks like an old crater.
“The good fellows who were with me did not seem to like this fancy of mine to push to the source of the stream, but I cannot say whether this was due to the uncanny reputation of the place, or to the fact that we had nothing but Duchêne’s vague description, and the flow of the water to guide us. It was a heavy task to get a canoe up to the lake through that difficult country, and it is very safe to say that mine was the first craft ever launched on its gloomy surface.
“I began fishing at once, but nothing stirred; this was what one might expect in water without a ripple, beneath a cloudless sky; there could be no fair trial under such conditions, before the time of the evening rise. I made some soundings, but my two lines together did not fetch bottom a hundred feet from the shore. The slope under water is very steep, and huge fragments of stone hanging there, seem ready, at a touch, to plunge into the depths. It is hard to describe the colour of the water; like neither the clear brown of the river we fished today, nor the opaque blackness of the swamp rivulets; transparent ink comes nearest to it.
“No stream feeds the lake, but there must be powerful springs below, for the dé charge flows strongly through a channel of boulders, with water weed moving in the current like something snaky and alive. The tent was pitched on a patch of black sand at the farther shore, the only level spot we could find, and, climbing a few feet higher, I looked out over the bleakest prospect of crag and valley, of moss and granite, till the eye met and welcomed the line of the horizon, and the blue above. Beside me three dead whitened firs, the height of a man, were held in a cleft of the rock, and some fantastic turn of the mind made of the place a wild and dreary Cavalry.
“The sea is old and the wind is old, but they are also eternally young. Of the elements it is only earth that speaks of the never-hastening, never-resting passage from life to death — where the years of a man are an unregarded moment in the march of all things toward that end which may be the beginning. Here on this peak of the world’s most ancient hills it seemed to me as though creation had long passed the flood, and was ebbing to its final low tide.
“There fell upon me that afternoon one of those oppressions of the spirit that never weigh so heavily as when they visit you in the full tide of health, under the wide and kindly sky. How shall one account for the apprehensions that crowd upon you, and seem not to have their birth within? In what subtle way does the universe convey the knowledge that it has ceased to be friendly? Even in the full sunlight, the idea of spending a night there alone was unwelcome.
“Soon after arriving I had despatched my men to La Galette for supplies, as we did today, but the distance is shorter by the old Chemin de Canot trail, and they should easily return before sunset. Although knowing this well, and that nothing but serious mischance would detain them, it was with a very definite sense of uneasiness that I watched the canoe cross the lake, saw them disembark, and in a few seconds disappear.
“The afternoon wore away in little occupations about the camp, and in fishing along the shore; later on I intended to scramble around the edge of the lake to the canoe, and try casting in the middle. Out there, quite beyond the reach of my flies, one tremendous rise showed that Duchêne’s stories were not wholly fables, and when evening fell there might be a chance to prove them true. But this fortune was not for me; another must discover the secrets of that mysterious water.
“Already the barometer had shown that a swift change of weather was at hand; gradually, and scarcely perceptibly, the ever-thickening veil of cirrus mist dimmed the brightness of the sun, until, pale and lifeless, it disappeared in tumultuous clouds that rose to meet it. As the storm came rapidly on, it seemed to me, in the utter stillness, that I could hear the rush of the vapours writhing overhead. Then with a roar that fairly cowed the soul, the wind, leaping up the mountain side, fell upon the little habitation, and would have carried it away had my whole weight not been thrown against the tent pole. In the darkness that drew like a curtain across the sky I waited miserably, dreading I knew not what, beyond the gale and the javelins of the lightning.
“Sitting with an arm around the pole I heard, through the wind and the rain, a cry. Even answering it, I doubted that it was human; when it came again I tried to think that some solitary loon was calling to his familiar spirits of the storm. Never have I passed such an hour under canvas. The wind had the note you hear in a gale of sea. Lightning showed the surface of the lake torn into spindrift that was swept across it like rank on rank of sheeted ghosts. The thunder seemed to have its dwelling-place in both earth and sky.
“In a lull to gather force for a fresh assault, the cry again: again, and nearer, when the wind burst upon the mountaintop, as though released from some mighty dam in the heavens. This was not voice of beast or bird, and courage fell from me like a garment. The numbness of terror possessed me; I sat with nails digging into the wood, saying over and over some silly rhyme. Close at hand the cry — heart-breaking, dreadful, unbearable ...
“Wrenching myself free, as from the grip of a nightmare, I leaped to the door of the tent; five paces away in the howling blackness stood something in the form of a man, and in one stricken moment the lightning revealed what I would give much that is dear to blot from memory. As the creature sprang, with its hellish voice filling my ears, I flung into the water, diving far and deep. Swimming with frantic strokes for the farther shore, I did not, in the greater fear, bethink me that this indeed was the Lake of Hell. The pursuing cry, rising ever and anon above all other sounds, kept nerve and muscle strung in the agony of the desire to escape. Crawling out exhausted and breathless, but stopping no instant, I plunged down the mountain-side — staggering, falling, clutching, somehow I reached the bottom, and pitched into a bed of moss, like an animal shot through the neck.
“When I could breathe and feel and hear again, my ears caught only the sounds of the retreating storm and of a rapid on the river. Stumbling painfully towards it, I saw with inexpressible joy the light of a fire, where my men had camped when overtaken by darkness and the tempest.
“The next day I went out of the woods, the men returning to bring in tent and canoe. They met with nothing, but I don’t believe that their heart was in the search.”
“And what in God’s name was it?”