The Curse of the Wendigo (6 page)

He fell silent. After a time I thought he must have fallen asleep, and then suddenly he spoke again.

“He loved practical jokes, particularly at my expense. You may be surprised to hear this, but the Warthrops have
always been known for their lack of humor; it’s a sort of congenital defect. In his lifetime I heard my father laugh only once, and that politely. It delighted John to short-sheet my bed or dip my hand in warm water as I slept. Once he drained the blood from the carcass of a Tanzanian
Ngoloko
we were to dissect the next day and placed the pail on top of the door going into our room. Well, you can guess what happened. He put sealing wax in the earpieces of my stethoscope; he mixed dried feces in my tooth powder; and, in one memorably unfortunate incident, right before I was to take my final exams before the entire governing board of the Society, he laced my tea with an extract of dried beans heavy in oligosaccharides, a sugar that most human beings—including me—cannot digest, causing excessive bloating and, at least in my case, explosive gas. I literally farted my way through the entire dissertation, and the tears that flowed from every eye had little to do with the profundity of my presentation. The hall seemed larger than the Metropolitan Opera house when I entered. By the time I left, it seemed as cramped as a water closet, and was just as odiferous. . . . What is that sound, Will Henry? Are you laughing?”

“No, sir,” I managed to gasp.

“I hated John Chanler,” he said. “He was my best friend, and how I hated him!”

We arrived in Rat Portage the next morning under a cloudless sapphire sky, with a biting north wind at our backs that ruffled the surface of Lake of the Woods like the invisible
hand of a giant baby splashing its bathwater. Fishing boats bobbed upon the chop, loons dove and splashed in their wake, and I spied a steamboat chugging along the far southern shore, a bald eagle soaring high above its billowing stacks.

A wiry lad of native descent wearing a buckskin jacket and beaver hat popped out from the milling crowd and offered in broken English to tote our bags to the hotel for twenty-five cents. His offer inaugurated a prolonged negotiation. Like many of substantial means, Warthrop was tighter than a clam. I had witnessed him dicker for an hour to save a penny on a two-day-old loaf of bread. Add to this his native distrust of his fellow man’s honesty—he never could shake the suspicion that he was being cheated—and a simple transaction that should have lasted no more than a minute could stretch out to seventy times that. By the end of their prolonged dickering—offer and counteroffer and counter-counteroffer—both the doctor and our porter seemed dissatisfied with the outcome; each felt a little had by the other.

My master’s mood did not improve upon our arrival at the Russell House. Our room was small, containing a washstand, a dresser that looked as though it had been cobbled together by a blind man, and a single equally rickety bed. Warthrop was forced to rent a cot from the proprietor for an extra ten cents a night, a fee he likened to highway robbery.

We tarried only long enough to drop our bags and find something to eat at a smoke-clogged restaurant across the street, where men spat mouthfuls of oily tobacco juice into battered brass spittoons and eyed our eastern clothing with frank suspicion. We then set about to find Muriel’s correspondent, a task that proved more frustrating than the doctor had anticipated.

From the hotel clerk who checked us in: “Larose? Yes, I know him. He’s a popular guide; few know the backwoods better than Larose. Haven’t seen him in over a month, I’d say. Don’t know where he’s gone to, but let me know if you find him, Dr. Warthrop. He owes me money.”

From the Rat Portage postmaster: “Yes, I know Larose. Nice enough fellow when he isn’t three sheets to the wind. Can’t remember the last time I saw him. . . .”

“He posted a letter from here sometime in late July,” the monstrumologist said.

“Yes, that would be about right. I remember that. Falling down drunk. He’d just come in from the bush, he said. Seemed out of sorts, not his usual self. He wouldn’t say any more about it. If you can’t find him, I’d say he’s back in the woods, maybe up Sandy Lake way, but he’ll be back. He always comes back.”

“He has a family?”

“Not that I know of. He comes back for the liquor and the gambling. Which reminds me, if you see him, tell him I haven’t forgotten about the money he owes me.”

From the storekeepers along Main Street, to the dockworkers on the wharf, from the gambling halls and crowded halfpenny beer dives, from the offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to the deafening interior of sawmills choked in swirling wood chips, it seemed the entire town knew Pierre Larose, or at least knew of him, but no one knew where he might be. All agreed he had not been seen for some time, and he owed all, it seemed, for one debt or another. The consensus was that he either had picked up stakes and returned to his native Quebec or had fled into the wilderness to escape his burgeoning debt. The few who claimed to have seen him around the time he’d posted the letter to Muriel Chanler whispered of a man who had lost his mind, who had stumbled about the streets lost in a besotted fog, “spitting and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog,” slapping at his ears until they bled, whimpering and moaning and muttering on and on about a voice only he seemed able to hear.

Before that, Chanler had been seen with Larose at the chief outfitting shop on Main Street. (The clerk recognized Warthrop’s description of his colleague.) Chanler had paid for their supplies—ammunition, a tent, bedding, and the like—and when asked what was their game, Larose had winked and cagily replied, “We be goin’ after the Old One of the Woods.”

The clerk chuckled now, and added, “I knew what he was about with that, and sure enough, next he asks if we’ve got any silver bullets! ‘For what do you need silver bullets?’ I ask,
but I know why he’s askin’. . . . Say, that Chanler—is he the one they was looking for couple weeks back? Whole troop of the NWMP were through here looking for some big shot that got lost in the bush, I recall.”

On the boardwalk outside, Warthrop shook his head ruefully.

“I am a fool, Will Henry. The NWMP is the first place we should have asked.”

He obtained directions from a man loitering outside the blacksmith shop, and we dashed across the dusty thoroughfare, dodging dray and carriage, to the other side, where the long shadows of late afternoon lay. We hopped over the steaming mounds of horse manure and slid through a small knot of miners standing in front of the tavern, fresh in town from their subterranean digs, their faces as black as players in a minstrel show, the whites of their eyes startlingly bright, each wearing a gun strapped to his waist. From the open door tinny music floated onto the street, faint and ethereal, unnervingly cheery, interrupted suddenly by what sounded to my anxious ears like a gunshot, only to resume again to the accompaniment of raucous laughter.

We ducked into the offices of the North-West Mounted Police, the precursor to the Royal Canadian Mounties. A strapping young sergeant dressed in a crisp red uniform rose from his desk.

“May I help you gentlemen?”

“I sincerely hope so,” replied the doctor. “I am looking
for an American by the name of Dr. John Chanler. I understand you’ve been advised of his disappearance.”

The sergeant nodded, and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Are you a friend of Dr. Chanler?”

“I am. His wife asked that I look into the matter.”

“Well,” the man said with a careless shrug of his broad shoulders, “you are free to look, Mr.—”

“
Doctor
Warthrop.”

The Mountie’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Not the same Warthrop who’s the monster hunter?”

“I am a scientist in the natural philosophy of aberrant biology,” the doctor corrected him stiffly.

“Right—you hunt monsters! I’ve heard of you.”

“I’d no idea my reputation had preceded me so far north,” replied Warthrop dryly.

“Oh, my mother used to tell us children tales of your exploits—and I always thought it was to get us to mind!”

“Your mother? Then they were not my exploits. She must have been speaking of my father.”

“Well, whoever’s they were, they frightened the pants off us! But this Chanler—was he a monster hunter too?”

“His wife did not tell you?”

The man shook his head. “She said he’d come for the moose. He and his guide went in, and only the guide came out.”

“Pierre Larose.”

“Yes, that’s his name. Only he’s gone missing too, is my understanding.”

“So you were not able to question him?”

“Be the one I’d most like to lay my hands on, Dr. Warthrop, if I
only knew where to put them. He’s the key to this whole riddle—last to see the man alive and then gone into thin air without even reporting it to us. We spent nearly a month in the bush trying to pick up their trail, all the way up to Sandy Lake and the Suckers encampment—”

“The Suckers?”

“Right. Jack Fiddler’s people.”

“Fiddler. I’ve heard that name before.”

“I’ll wager you have! He’s no doctor of monster philosophy, but he hunts them just the same. He’s a shaman, too—a medicine man—and fairly civilized for a savage. Speaks passing English. Used to work down here on the boats. Makes fiddles, that’s how he got his name.”

“And you questioned him about Chanler and Larose?”

“And got nothing from him—nothing of any use anyway. Told us the same thing Larose told Chanler’s poor wife—”

“Lepto lurconis,”
murmured the doctor.

“
Lepto
what?”

He sighed. “The Wendigo.”

The sergeant nodded slowly, and then the connection dawned on him. His voice shook with wonder as he said, “You don’t mean to say—I never put any stock in those stories. Is
that
why you’ve come? It’s
real
?”

“Of course it isn’t real,” the doctor said irritably. “It’s a
convenience, like the stories your mother told to frighten you into submission.”

“You mean those weren’t real either?”

“No, those probably were. It’s an entirely different species.”

“The Wendigo?”

“The
stories
. My good man, I understand Chanler is missing, but I’d hoped I might be able to dredge up information on Larose’s whereabouts . . .”

“You and half the town of Rat Portage. The man’s melted away like a puff of smoke.”

“It has been my experience that men do not simply ‘melt away,’ Sergeant. But it seems to me the best place to start is the last person to see both men alive.”

“You mean Jack Fiddler, but I told you I’ve already talked to him and he claims to know nothing about it.”

“Perhaps he will be more convivial with someone of the same spiritual inclinations.”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

“A fellow monster hunter.”

“You Will Live to Regret It”

When the monstrumologist asked where he might find the best man to guide us to Sandy Lake, the young sergeant, whose name was Jonathan Hawk, eagerly volunteered his services.

“There’s no one knows these woods better than me, Dr. Warthrop. I’ve wandered them since I was no bigger than your boy here. Why, I used to hunt the very same creatures my mother told me
you
hunted—all in play, you understand, and it’s surely a comfort to know none of them were real! My relief arrives from Ottawa this evening, so we can set out tomorrow at first light.”

The doctor was delighted, saying later we could not have procured a more ideal guide than a member of the North-West Mounted Police. Hawk then inquired as to what kind
of gear we had brought along for the expedition. Our passage would be a hard one through dense boreal forest, a hike of more than four hundred miles round-trip. Warthrop admitted we’d brought little but our resolve, just some warm clothes and, he added darkly, as if to make an impression, his revolver, at which point the sergeant laughed.

“Might do you some good against the muskrats or a beaver, maybe—not much else. There’re grizzlies and wildcat and of course the wolves, but I’ll find you a rifle. As for the rest, leave it to me. I will tell you, Doctor, I had a funny feeling when I spoke to Fiddler—like he wasn’t telling all he knew. But his kind don’t trust us—the police, I mean—and maybe you’re right; he’ll talk to a brother monster hunter.”

They parted for the time being, each with the highest estimation of the other, though Hawk was clearly the more impressed. He seemed positively starstruck, unable to grasp that the hero of his childhood fantasies was the elder Warthrop and not my master.

The doctor, his spirits buoyed by this serendipitous turn of events, made straight for the telegraph office, where he fired off a telegram to Muriel Chanler in New York:

ARRIVED RAT PORTAGE THIS MORNING STOP LAROSE HAS DISAPPEARED STOP LEAVING AT DAWN FOR SANDY LAKE WITH SGT HAWK STOP WILL ADVISE

“I can’t
imagine her reaction when she receives the telegram,” he confided over our supper. His face fairly glowed with the thought. “Surprised, I would guess, but not shocked. I probably should keep mum till I have a definitive answer—I don’t want to get her hopes up. The odds that the poor fool is alive are practically nil, but I fear she might take it into her head to come look for him herself. It would be just like her. Muriel is a woman of remarkable—some might say damnable—stubbornness. She will not believe he is gone until she lays her hands on his lifeless corpse.”

So expansive was his mood, I decided to step foot into the no-man’s-land of his past and risk getting my head blown off.

“What happened, sir?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Between you and Muriel—Mrs. Chanler, I mean.”

“Weren’t you there? I distinctly remember it, though I also distinctly remember telling you to leave.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I meant before . . .”

“Why do you presume anything at all happened?”

My face grew hot. I looked away. “Some things that she said . . . and that you said, afterward, when you couldn’t sleep. I—I heard you calling out her name.”