During the following morning, Sasha was up and walking around. She favored her right front leg keeping the other tucked against her chest, although she seemed to be making her way around the cabin with little difficulty. After passing by Barney a few times, who had flopped down in David’s comfortable recliner, Sasha stops and brandishes an admonishing snarl toward the Blue Heeler. Barney tilts his head, rolls over, and whimpers playfully. He makes no effort to surrender the comfortable chair. Sasha eventually grows tired of the Blue Healer and strolls over to the cabin door. She lifts herself up looking for David outside.
Just before dawn broke across the morning sky, David backed the Chevy into the workshop behind the cabin. He draped a tarp over the bed of the truck and secured it in place by threading a nylon rope through the truck’s eyelets. Afterward, David covered the tarp with wide hanging blankets and then blacks out the shop’s only window with cardboard and duct tape. When he was satisfied and knew the wendigo would rest safely without the threat of the sun, Bill crawled into the bed of the truck, and David locked him inside the workshop for the day.
David spent the better part of the morning cutting thick branches from aspen trees in the wooded area around the cabin. He then peeled the bark from each limb in thin lengthy straps, these he would use to construct the framework for the sweat lodge he intended to build. He marked twelve spots in the dirt for digging; the marks were separated by two-foot intervals in a circle where he would later set the longest and thickest of the aspen branches into the earth—each two feet deep. Twelve is the number of ribs found in a woman’s body, and so David would reconstruct the womb of the Great Mother, from which all things came.
By noon, he had already stretched and shaped the flexible branches fastening them together using the bark straps. While fastening limbs, David took care to insure the door faced north, toward the lake. This was the point of purity during the ceremony and the direction of the spirit realm and the Creator.
Next, David followed a straight line out past the doorway and dug a large fire pit. He measured it five feet long and seven feet across with the walls standing a foot high. Later, David would pack the dirt into the shape of a crude alter to the right of the sweat lodge. Once he finished the pit, he looked into the sky to gain the position of the sun; it was nearly three in the afternoon. He still had roughly four hours to finish.
Quite active in regular sweat sessions, David always kept large piles of round stones from a nearby riverbed piled up next to his workshop, along with a couple ricks of hickory wood. Knowing it would save time, he only needed to transfer their location using a wheel barrel. Once finished, David began constructing the firebox at the center of the fire pit, which would cook the stones used to heat the lodge. The box was roughly three square feet, using the thickest logs on the bottom for support. When he finished, the firebox stood three feet high with and extra foot of kindling at its center in the shape of a cone or tepee.
To complete his task, David draped elk, deer, and moose hides over the tarp covering the framework. He also placed several large stones at the lodge’s base to prevent possible updrafts. The door was fashioned from folded blankets wider than the doorway, tied together at the corners, and fastened to pegs inside the lodge; these acted as hinges keeping the door sturdy and secure. Lastly, David covered the floor of the sweat lodge with generous amounts of sage leaves he picked from his garden. Typically, a sparse amount of sage should cover the floor as a form of relaxation therapy when the heat intensified. However, David anticipated, or at least hoped, the larger amounts of spice will conceal the wendigo stench. He did not think he would be able to remain inside the lodge with the wendigo if it did not.
As David finished up, the sunlight was already beginning to diminish behind the western horizon. He felt the strain of his endeavors weighing heavy on weary bones and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. David then lit a cigarette while making his way back to the cabin to feed Sasha and Barney and to wake Bill from his slumber.
He had never once stopped to ask himself why he was doing any of it or why he didn’t elect to end Bill while he slept. Instead, David chose to build a sweat lodge and help the wendigo. After all, Bill was his people’s ancient enemy, and it was David’s sacred duty to dispatch him. So why?
As David approached the shop, the question became his only thought, and it continuously circled his thoughts. He pauses with one hand on the lock; a key dangles from his other hand. He asks himself, Could I trust something like Wendigo Bill? After all, he is not entirely wendigo, is he? There is still a measure of humanity lingering within him no matter how minute it might be.
Sweat continues drenching his dirty haggard face as he stares at the lock without an answer. He then shakes his head, regardless of the stiffness and aching he now felt deep within his bones. David then quietly finds his answer after unlocking the flimsy wooden doors. I am going to help Wendigo Bill for my grandson’s sake. He swings the doors open.
Immediately, the rotten stench assaults David’s senses and steals his breath away. Bill’s ripe dead flesh had been baking in the heat all afternoon and nearly has David disgorging the contents of his stomach onto the ground. He topples over with a sudden overwhelming disorientation and flees backward away from the shop clearing his throat through a series of loud dry heaves. He had no further intentions of rousing the wendigo from its sleep; he would allow Bill to awake in his own time and trails back to the cabin to let Sasha and Barney out.
Barney trots past David, slipping through the porch’s screen door, while Sasha, still favoring one leg, hobbles out the door and onto the porch where she perches herself next to David with undeterred diligence; she senses the wendigo stirring.
David opens the water cooler containing the brook trout and pulls two headless fish from the melted ice. They were beginning to smell ripe and would soon turn. There was little David could do about the fish other than offer them to Sasha and Barney for dinner. He flings the trout into the dirt with much regret; the gray wolf and cattle dog are quick to claim them.
* * *
Bill rises the moment the sun has disappeared from the sky. He is neither foggy nor disoriented by sleep—he is simply aware. The day marks his eleventh day without eating. Before long, Bill would be helpless as madness consumes him. He stands behind the truck, gathering his strength for a second encounter with Nuke’s grandfather. Bill knew he should be eating the Ojibwa.
Bill thinks about the condition David has put forth as his price for helping him. Now, more than ever, he welcomed death. Anything would be better than the pain of starvation he endured. He decided to focus solely on the task at hand before he slipped into a darker psychosis, and Cold Bill emerged out of necessity.
Before leaving the confines of the shop, Bill pauses one last time to recall the details that led him to this point in time. More so, he broods over the thin alliance he had struck with David and wondered if the Ojibwa’s ceremony would actually work and, if so, what he would do afterward and where he would go. He wanted to return home to grieve for his parents. Bill also needed to see where Abigail was in a life without him. Had she moved on, or was she lost to despair and unfortunate circumstances as he was? He might have had a clue had Malsum not intervened earlier. Bill approaches the front of the cabin with thoughts of Abigail pacifying his hunger.
David slips out of the cabin wearing nothing more than knee-length cut-off sweat pants, a leather vest, and cowboy hat. Around his neck, he wears a small leather pouch decorated with colorful beads, and as usual, he has strapped his octopus bag across his bare tan chest. David carries a dark green knapsack in his hand, and a lit cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth. He does not seem surprised to see Bill coming around the side of the cabin. David caught wind of Bill’s presence long before he was in sight—even over the smell of spoiling trout in the evening air.
David stands uneasily still in Bill’s looming presence. Watching with steady eyes and waiting for a grimmer reality to reveal itself, David half-expected Bill to pounce on him and rend the flesh from his body. He flirts with dark thoughts as the wendigo stuffs chunks of his meat into his hungry jaws to feed a starving belly. However, Bill would do neither of those things. He would keep to his word for now.
If you were to meet, my brothers, David… your grandson, as he is now… then you will have met the wendigo you hate and fear so much, Bill cautions him and alerts David to his mind reading capabilities.
“Stay out of my head.”
It is your honest thoughts, David. I understand.
He continues studying the wendigo despite Bill’s gruesome appearance. David then shakes his head a second later followed by a slow nod. “I’ve made the necessary preparations.”
Lead me. I want this curse to be over for good.
David leads Bill down a trail through a thick gathering of alpine, aspen, and birch trees with Barney and Sasha walking alongside them. The forest is unnaturally quiet, as if under a spell. Yet after another hundred yards or so, the thick woods open into a grassy meadow and Bill stops, stunned by the toil of David’s labor.
You kept your word. He carefully inspects the nearby sweat lodge.
“I assume you will keep to your word as well, Wendigo Bill?” David drops the knapsack to the ground and immediately begins to recheck the sturdiness of his work.
The name you have given me, I do not like it. Your grandson and the others called me Cold Bill. I did not care for that name either but at least it is better than, Wendigo Bill.
“Very well… I think we will just call you Bill for now.”
I guess it really does not matter one way or the other, I will be finished with this curse tonight.
“And if you are not?”
Like I said, one way or the other—
“I won’t hesitate.”
I know you won’t, David.
“I won’t show you any mercy. I can’t.”
Agreed.
David reaches into his bag and pulls out his Zippo lighter. He steps down into the fire pit, thoroughly inspecting the sturdiness of the firebox.
“I need to light the fire to begin heating the stones. You should prepare yourself?” He looks back at Bill with abiding concern. “And whatever you do, do not follow me. We cannot sever the path between the lodge and the firebox. It serves as the connection to the Great Mother and the Creator. Do you understand?”
I understand, and I am ready.
David strikes the wheel on his Zippo lighter and produces a small licking flame. Leaning into the firebox, David touches the flame to the tepee-shaped kindling in various spots until burning pine needles, pinecones, and dry leaves spread the fire on their own. Within minutes, the fire consumes the tepee and spreads throughout the box. David invites its warmth against his skin; Bill, however, backs into the safety of the shadows and away from the despised flames.
Bill becomes increasingly nervous. The firebox, which resembled a Viking funeral pyre, hurt his eyes and disrupted his vision, reducing his sight to indecipherable blurs of bright color. Before long, Bill knew he would be completely at the Ojibwa’s mercy.
David crouches down and unbuckles the straps on the knapsack, pulling from it a small tribal drum, a quart-sized baggy filled with fresh sage leaves, and the antlers of a young buck. “The fire will need to burn for some time to thoroughly heat the stones. While doing so, I will prepare the sweat lodge for the ceremony. I need to purify the water in the gourd I have placed down by the creek. I need you to gather one final ingredient for me while I do so.”
Bill remains hidden. However, he listens carefully to David’s instructions from the shadows.
“On the east side of the creek, just before the tree line to the northwest, you will find a small grassy knoll. It is easy to recognize, as it once belonged to a family of beavers before vipers pushed them out of their home. What is left of the dam is still thick with a gathering of timber and brush held together with mud and stone and now serves as a den for the vipers. I want you to go there and retrieve the one with scales, as black—”
Bill snaps down on all fours, bringing himself low to the ground. Then extending his legs upward, he leaps high into the air, perching himself on the thick upper branch of an aspen tree. David visually follows the ascent into the above darkness and continues to search for Bill long after he had disappeared. Before long, David spots the wendigo’s glowing orbs that unnerved him so. He glares down at David with intense burning hatred. Bill recalled the wendigo fever and the ceremony involving such a poisonous snake. The outcome that followed the ceremony ended with Malsum dismembering and then feeding upon him.
I have foolishly placed my trust in you!
“WHAT?” David’s voice carries upward into the trees. “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, but you don’t have anyone else you can trust… If not me, then who?”
Foolish old man… I have suffered at the hands of your ceremony many times! I am aware of the viper you ask me to retrieve. Its scales are black, and it is rare to its kind. You intend to summon the wolf god, Malsum, to dispose of your problem.
“It is true… the viper I require for the ritual is a rare creature, but an animal’s journey has many paths.”
Not for wendigo. We have but one path—to eat!
“Damn it! You ugly black-blooded hobgoblin! If I wanted you dead, I would have killed you while you slept, instead of foolishly trying to do so out in the open where you would have the advantage! And I would have certainly smoked those trout today rather than let them spoil in the heat while catering to your selfish needs!”
Clenching his teeth under the disdain of tensed lips, David spits into the fire pit. “Malsum is not called the wolf for no little reason. He is as clever as he is calculating.”
Do not presume to preach to me old man. I could show you a few things I have learned about being meticulous.
“Did you ever stop to think that Malsum has foreseen this meeting between you and me? Before jumping into that tree like a frightened little girl, did it once cross that rotten brain of yours that Malsum intervened intentionally? Well… DID IT?”
David waits for Bill to answer, hoping that reason would prevail, but there was no further communication between them; he had lost sight of Bill in the above darkness. David then rips the hat from his head and heatedly dusts it across his leg. After another moment, and after searching for Bill in the above darkness, he places the hat back on his head and hunkers down over his knapsack, muttering to himself, “I need a cigarette.” David then feverishly pats his vest, feeling for his pack of smokes. “You hear me, you ugly son of a bitch! I need a goddamn cigarette!”
Bill drops down from the trees catching the Ojibwa off guard. In a startling gesture of goodwill that has David staggering backward and then falling on the flat of his ass, Bill offers him the black viper coiling itself around his thin gray appendage; he holds its broad flat head firmly within a closed fist.
David, unblinking, stares at the wendigo. He scrambles to find his hat in the dirt and, once in hand, replaces the dirty misshapen Western hat on his head—all the while, he repeatedly stares at the snake and then at Bill.
“I see,” he speaks calmly, trying to appear unaffected, although Bill easily listens to the rapid pounding of his heart. Realizing he has planted himself in the dirt, David climbs to his feet, with his knapsack in one hand and a crumpled pack of cigarettes in the other. After another moment passes and after studying the squirming viper, David lights the bent cigarette and regains his composure. “You came to your senses. Good.”
Our alliance is shaky at best… but you are right about one thing, David. I have nowhere left to turn. Without you, I am without salvation.
“Just remember our deal—I will do my part as promised.”
Bill’s uneasiness does not settle as he later watches David reenact each step of the nightmare that once plagued his every dream back in the cave in Kuwait. The Ojibwa, with his arms extended above his head, dances along the ridge next to the fire pit; the viper coils around one arm as his medicine bag dangles and shakes freely from his hand. Often swaying low in a worshipful bow as if to praise the cleansing fire or the poisonous snake, or perhaps both, David continues his ritual to awaken the spirits. Undecipherable chanting, varying in pitch and volume, rise upward from the depths of his throat and out through his mouth. This goes on for nearly thirty minutes until David suddenly halts in deafened silence and tosses his medicine bag into the blazing fire.
“For the Creator of all things… I offer only purity in the form of bone and stones.”
Continuing the chant, David twirls and spins along the ridgeline in slow defined movements and ritualistic gestures that revere the viper; he makes his way toward the dirt-packed altar bordering a short berm to the southeast. Just as Bill recalled from his nightmares, David then pulls a small cone-shaped blade from his octopus bag and places the flat of the snake’s head firmly against the surface of the altar.
“You seek to free yourself from this unnatural state, and so first, you must understand the grievous unbalance you have caused to the natural order. The thing you have chosen to become is an apostate to life. It is nothing if not seething hatred and unquenchable hunger. If your sole desire is to cleanse yourself of this abomination, then you must bargain for your life before the one true Creator. I will show you the path Glooskap walks upon—it will be up to you to find and confront him.”
David raises the knife high into the air and swiftly brings it down, severing the head of the viper. As the serpent writhes in constricting spasms, it repeatedly loops over itself with the sudden shock of imminent death. David wraps his hand around its dank shadowy scales just before the rattle and runs his hand down the entire length of the snake, forcing the blood from its tail to spill out of the fatal wound and onto the altar.
“The black serpent is sacred to the Ojibwa people. It offers its life to you. Let its death serve as the last of your victims, Cold Bill.”
Placing the severed head of the viper on the altar and discarding the rest into the fire, David then removes two owl feathers from his octopus bag. The tip of one feather, David places facing north, and the second, he faces east, both arranged on the outer rim of the altar.
“The venom that drips from the vipers fangs is the very poison that contaminates your soul. The feathers of the snow owl represent change and direction. Both will aid you in finding the Creator, allowing you to slip unnoticed into the spirit realm.”
David then picks up the shovel he used earlier to dig the fire pit and lifts one of the smoking stones from the firebox, placing it securely within the deer antlers. He cradles the antlers between both arms and carries the stone inside the lodge, placing it in a depression at the center of the sweat lodge. He repeats this five times and explains to Bill that once inside, he must take a stone at his choosing. Afterward, David carries a gourd of purified water into the lodge and closes the draped door, allowing the stones to heat the lodge. Next, David shovels hot coals from the fire pit into the broad scoop of the shovel and sprinkled fresh sage over the glowing embers. As light herbal notes from the spicy greenery lift into the air, David chants in circles around Bill, inviting the relaxing aroma of smoldering sage to purify the wendigo.
“William Blake Colden. I call you by the name given to you by your mother and father. Your parents brought you into this world naturally. I invite your unnatural self to enter the realm of your true Creator.” David lifts the blanketed door, ushering Bill inside.
Bill hunkers down, crawling cautiously on all fours inside the lodge. Dry heat presses against his cold desiccated body, and he immediately feels discomforted. He makes his way to the far right of the lodge and seats himself with his arms resting over his knees; Bill’s grotesquely elongated claws scrape the ground. He then watches carefully as David, carrying his drum, enters the lodge. He closes the flap and secures the edges of the blankets to wooden pegs.
Outside, Sasha and Barney position themselves watchfully at the base of the doorway, like marbling sentries posting steadfast vigilance over palace gates. Sasha snips at Barney’s leg to let him know she is in charge. She then yawns, settling back on her hindquarters.