Chapter 11
“I seen it,” Pierre had said, lying on his narrow bed.
“I seen what the Whitigo done to them people.”
He twisted in his bed, grimacing as he spoke, perhaps from the cancer, which had joined dementia in the battle for which affliction could wreak the most havoc on his bent body. Perhaps the grimace came from the memory. It didn’t matter to Henry, who wasn’t sure what was more horrifying, the story itself, or whether this awful tale indicated what was left of his father’s mind.
“I seen it,” Pierre said again from his deathbed. “And no matter how much I tried, I can’t never unsee it.”
Henry lay at the top of the bluff, elbows pressed against the rocky ground, thoughts of his long-dead father coming to a halt with the sound of the rifle shot below them.
They had been here for an hour, worming their way to the rim of the valley, reconning just like they would when they were out hunting. The forest behind them was thick with balsam fir, and the needles had drifted down over many decades to form a dense carpet on the rocks. The rain filtered through the needles, and the ground wasn’t too wet. A northwest breeze had developed, the first wind of autumn shaking the last of the rain out of the pine needles.
Below them, a battlefield. Henry did not know how else to characterize it. The ground on the far side of the river was split and marred; it looked like a giant child had slashed the valley open with his equally enormous sword. The gashes were filled with muddy water, and one ran almost the length of the valley, zigzagging among the rock formations at the base of the far slope. The drill rig no longer smoldered, but they could see the scorched grass around it, and a few yards away some sort of shelter that had fallen down. Henry could make out the bright domes of several tents on the far ridgeline, above the mess.
Almost straight below them, three figures scrambled up the narrow spine of rock that led to the pass. The hogback would bring them to just a few feet away from where Henry and the rest lay waiting underneath the balsams. Henry could not make out their faces or tell who they might be, but the fact that they had crossed the swollen river and were moving away from their tents told a story, too.
“Twenty bucks,” Garney said. “I can get them with three shots. Boom, boom, boom. Weasel, gimme your. 308.”
“Shut up,” Darius said. “No guns, not yet.”
Yes, Henry thought. Let’s have some patience. They needed to know who these people were, what they wanted, what they had done. He was surprised at the damage they had done to the valley in such a short amount of time, especially since he could see no heavy machinery.
If it was even these people who did this, Henry thought, the moisture wicking up from the pine needles into his still-damp clothes.
His thoughts returned to his father, to the last story he had told Henry. It was not long after the Great War, but before Henry’s father had gone to Holland with the Second Armored to fight the Huns in World War II. There had been a string of incredibly harsh winters in the Highbanks area. Back then it had been just a loose collection of rough cabins and shelters, a few whites around but mostly just the Swampy Cree. The winters had started early and ended late, sometimes lasting into May or even June before the grass turned green. And while there were always a few who experienced the awful sickness sometimes referred to by the innocuous term cabin fever—a certain percentage who could not withstand the mental toll that these winters brought—it was during this time that there was an unusual amount of killings, an uptick in gruesome murders. Of things worse than murder.
It was unclear whether Pierre’s account was based in fact or was a product of his dementia; all Henry knew was that nobody, not even his own mother, had heard it before.
* * *
Pierre had been in his teens. It was late April, and he had been making his way through the snow-covered woods, his rifle at the ready. The winters had been hard on the moose numbers, and the caribou had migrated far to the south, so it was not only long, cold nights and lack of warmth that weighed on the people, it was hunger. Raw, screaming hunger, almost all of the people emaciated, able to count not only ribs with their shirts off but also the indentations and bumps along sternum and clavicles, able to identify healed broken bones as easily as with an X-ray. A technology, even at that early age of the technological era, which was already being used to identify illnesses. But even this emerging technology would not have been able to diagnose the malady Pierre was about to witness.
He was far out in the forest on this day when he smelled charred meat. It was not a smell Pierre could have ignored if he tried; he had been physically unable to slow himself in his headlong charge to find the source of the scent. He plunged forward on his snowshoes, tripping several times before making it to the small clearing where a low, rough cabin sat soaking in the April sunshine, smoke seeping out of a crude stone chimney. The snow around the cabin was littered with frozen turds and yellow with urine, and the ammonia smell was finally enough to cause Pierre to pause, to survey where he was. He was old enough to understand that just because a person had found game did not necessarily mean that person would be willing to share. Or that such a person would welcome company of any kind, especially when that person lived so far out in the bush.
But the smell of meat was divine, even with the bitter tang of several months of piss soaking into the ground, and Pierre was, quite literally, starving. He hallooed the cabin, stopping halfway across the clearing to shout again. There was no welcoming shout, but neither was there any warning or indication he should retreat. He paused outside the door and could hear someone moving inside. He knocked on the door and the movements stopped, then started again.
The door creaked open, and whatever Pierre had expected, the sight of a grizzled, ruddy-cheeked, smiling, five-foot-two white man was very low on that list. Pierre had seen the man before in Highbanks: Claude Depere, a French-Canadian trapper, a Canuck, who had married a local woman and raised five hellacious children over the next decade, children who terrorized Pierre and the other children on those rare occasions when they came to the smattering of dwellings on the banks of the river for a festival. But now the cabin was empty, except for Claude and the smell of people who had been crammed into the same space for the past six months, that heavy and cloying odor overlain by the smell coming from the frying pan suspended over the hearth fire.
“Oh, you smell da bacon?” There was a lingering French cadence in his English, which softened the harsher clipped tones of his wife’s language. “Smells good, eh boy? Yeah, you come in then, is good.”
Pierre unstrapped his snowshoes and went in. He allowed Claude to guide him to the rough-hewn table and sat, watching as the Canuck danced around the frying pan, poking a slab of meat with his hunting knife. The sizzling was a musical sound; what little game Pierre’s family had found over the past few months had been winter lean, and it had been months since Pierre had felt the liquid energy of fatted game in his belly. The table was streaked with blood and gore from the butchering that had taken place, and such was Pierre’s condition that the smears of blood and curls of yellowing fat did not in any way affect his appetite. Had he been alone, he might not have hesitated to reach down and scrape some of that dried meat from the planks of the table and put it in his mouth.
“I was glad I didn’t,” Pierre said, seventy years later, twisting in his bed. “Was I glad? Sure I was.”
At the fire, Claude stopped suddenly and whirled around to face Pierre, his knife stuck in the slab of meat in the pan. His good-natured grin was gone, and his expression had narrowed so that he resembled a marten, hard on the scent of a hare. “You ain’t been running with that big old friend o’ mine, has you, boy?”
Pierre’s natural curiosity, which otherwise would have prompted him to ask exactly who this big friend was, was overshadowed by his desire to eat. He retracted a finger, which had crept toward a meat scrap, and just shook his head. “No, I’m all alone.”
Claude’s forehead smoothed. “Well, dat’s good then, ain’t it? Sometimes, you never know, it could be that he talk to other people . . .”
Claude’s voice trailed off, and for a moment Pierre sensed a bit of protectiveness in Claude’s tone, as though he suspected his lover had been out cavorting with another. Which led Pierre to his next thought, and despite his desire to avoid any further delays—his mouth was filling repeatedly with saliva, which he had to swallow down every few seconds—he knew he had to ask the question. Claude might be friendly, but if that horde of Depere children threw open the door to discover him eating their dinner (not true bacon, which would be moldy and inedible this late in the year if it had somehow been saved; rather, bacon being the regional term for young moose that still had a layer of milk fat) any one of them would be as likely to slit his throat as say hello.
“Is your family here?”
Claude paused for a second, the tip of the knife deep into the slab of meat. “They around, yeah, but don’t you worry, boy. We had us a good winter, they grow plenty fat.” He lifted the chunk of meat out of the pan and held it aloft, the drippings smoking when they hit the pan. “How much you want?”
Pierre started to answer, when his eyes caught sight of something that made his insides tighten, like sucking in a great lungful of January air. Hanging on a hook near the back corner were several shirts, ranging in size from what would about fit the youngest Depere child—a rough-mouthed cur of seven—to the oldest, Rainey, who at the ripe age of fifteen was already suspected of raping two local girls. There were gashes in the clothes, and the gashes were lined with rusty stains. Pierre’s eyes drifted down to the cot, which was just a mass of balsam boughs covered by a wool blanket. There was a dress arranged neatly atop the blanket, a worn and torn dress made from flour sacks and stitched together with rawhide in places. The stains on this dress were brighter red, the same color as on the table in front of him.
“Well come on now, boy.” Claude grinned, and Pierre saw that his few remaining teeth were stained a deep yellow-green, as dead and rotted as stumps in the swamp. “You can’t have the whole thing, that ain’t fair no how no way.”
“Is it . . .”
Claude’s grin faltered. “What, boy?”
Pierre watched Claude’s face, saw the shrewdness and insanity swirling in his muddy eyes. “Your friend,” Pierre said, grasping for a different tact. “Maybe you should save some for him.”
Claude paused, and for a moment Pierre considered running, just running blindly, because he thought the little wild-eyed man was going to pluck the knife out of the roast and throw it at him. Instead, Claude leaned back and began to laugh into the soot-streaked rafters. “Oh, he don’t like this kind of meat, no how no way. Not this old bacon, and with a char on it to boot.” Then his gaze narrowed again, and his laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started. “Did he say something to you?” Claude stepped closer to him, still holding the roast aloft. “Did he say he wanted some?”
Pierre stood. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but his rifle was pointed at Claude’s chest, and neither of them seemed overly surprised at this development. He began to back away and Claude followed, the juices from the meat running down his wrist and soaking into the stained cuff of his buckskin shirt.
“Did he, boy? You been running with him, ain’t you? Come down here to tempt me, say something bad about him?”
Pierre reached behind him and lifted the hasp on the door. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I think things, sometimes,” Claude said, the words suddenly dreamy, coming out soft and lispy through his rotted teeth. “Like maybe I shouldn’t o’ listened, shouldn’t o’ made da bacon so close to home. Maybe I think them things, boy, but I ain’t never said them, not never. He been . . . he been good to me, he has. Like a brother. And Lordy, the things we saw, way up there . . .”
Pierre leaned back, and the door creaked open. A wedge of sunlight fell across the cabin’s packed dirt floor. Claude stepped back, his eyes dilating. “I ain’t never said no bad words, you tell him dat.”
Pierre nodded, backed out onto the stoop, and tucked his snowshoes under his arm. He retreated slowly, walking backward with his eyes on the front door, waiting for the little man to come charging out, or for the long barrel of Claude’s hunting rifle to poke through one of the narrow slits that passed for windows on either side of the doorway. The snow was still two feet deep, but it had been warm for days, and the snowshoe trail in the sunny, foul-smelling clearing was packed down. It supported his weight enough that he could move without his snowshoes. Still, when he told his wife and son the story seven decades later, he said that it seemed like hours before he was able to reach the safety of the balsams, followed by an eternity as he strapped the willow-and-sinew snowshoes onto his boots, crouched over in the snow, rifle at the ready, looking up every few seconds expecting to see the little Canuck coming out after him, his yellow-green teeth bared.
“Coming for more bacon,” Pierre had croaked. “He was thinking about it, sure he was.”
That was the end of the story. When Henry asked what became of the man, Pierre waved it off as of no consequence. Several men went out to the cabin in the clearing, led by Pierre, but by that time Claude was gone. They made a perfunctory circle around the cabin, and to the east, near a low bog with the moss poking out of the snow, they found the butchered remains of all five Depere children, as well as his wife. The latter had been selectively butchered; “only the choicest cuts,” is how Pierre had related it. They also found Claude’s boot prints, headed north, and the men followed them, but only for a while. After a mile or so another set of tracks joined Claude’s—rough-shaped, enormous prints that were hard to identify in the rapidly melting snow. The men of the party halted their pursuit shortly thereafter and turned back toward the village, pausing only to burn down Claude’s cabin.
“I wish that was the end,” Pierre had said. “But that old Canuck wasn’t the only one who seen the Whitigo that winter, and the next year it was even worse. Came to be, there wasn’t a babe left in any cabin from Highbanks to Sawtee, and the next winter he come awful early. It started right after the leaves fell.”
Pierre reached out a trembling hand. Henry, a man of thirty with his own hand suddenly trembling, gave him a glass of water.
Pierre drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his scrawny neck. “’Twas the next spring we knew it wasn’t going to leave us alone. That we had to do something, had to put it to bed.”
“Put it to bed?” Henry had asked.
“Sure, sure,” Pierre said, his good-natured term for agreement. Shore, shore. Even his eyes had lost some of their cloudiness. “When the Whitigo runs with folks that much, it’s because it’s ready to go sleep. Wants to store up what it needs for a long rest, like a bear. But sometimes it gets . . . distracted. So you got to help put it to sleep.”
“Sleep,” Henry said. He meant it to sound a bit scornful. His father was dying, yes. His father was losing his mind, yes. But that didn’t mean he could talk nonsense. Henry sure hadn’t been able to, even as a babe.
“Sleep,” Pierre affirmed. “You can’t have it doing that other thing.”
Henry had avoided drinking out of the same glass, or eating off the same plate, once his father’s dementia had set in, for a completely unfounded reason: he was scared that whatever had infested his father’s mind could be transferred to him. He knew it wasn’t true, but it was a terribly strong taboo in his own mind, as shameful as it was. Now he reached out and drank the rest of his father’s water in three long swallows.
“What other thing?”
Pierre’s eyes were already starting to lose focus, reverting to that addled, faraway look. But before he lost that brief flame of acuity, one of his eyes had drooped down into a long, deliberate wink.
“Staying awake.”
* * *
The three people were making slow but steady progress, now less than a quarter mile away. Two of them were bent over, hands on their hips; the third was standing, scanning the valley floor and the swollen river below. It was strange watching people exert themselves from a distance, Henry thought, especially when they’re people you mean to kill. You expect them to keep coming on, immune to exhaustion. But they were people, and they were perhaps not even bad people, although the scene below seemed to indicate they were, at the very least, careless people. Intruders. Henry was not averse to killing them.
He was not sure they should kill them here, however.
His father’s story had not ended with those three cryptic words, It stays awake. Three days before he died, Pierre told Henry the rest of the story, how they had supposedly put the Whitigo to bed, the story so strange and awful that Henry had never repeated it. It was the story of a gift, of a sacrifice. Sacrifices were not part of the Cree spiritual ways, for the most part. But this was a special case, and the people were desperate.
“Whatever you give it,” Pierre had said, “it makes it bigger, faster. Give it life, and it makes that life frantic.”
Pierre’s eyes had glinted cunningly in his bed. “But we didn’t give it life, did we, boy? We gave it something else entire.”
* * *
Henry scrunched his way along the pine needles, being careful not to silhouette himself on the ridgeline, and hunkered next to Darius. “We should take them deep into the woods. Get away from this place.”
Darius flicked his eyes sideways and grunted non-commitally.
Henry jutted his chin at the leaning, scorched remains of the drill rig. “They called this in, Darius. More people are on the way.”
“We’ll see. Now be quiet.”
Henry moved away. Darius would do what he would do, and the others would follow. Henry glanced over to Billy, who had been watching their exchange. Billy didn’t know anything about this place, didn’t know anything about anything worth knowing. But he wasn’t a dumb person, Henry thought. Not at all. You’re scared of Darius and you’re scared of this place, even though you don’t know why.
“Stash your rifles,” Darius said. “Here they come.”