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.”
EIGHT
“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!”
Warthrop grunted. “We haven’t exactly been as quiet as church mice, Sergeant. Still, I agree it is unusual. They say the animals of the island rushed pell-mell into the sea just before Krakatoa blew.”
“What do you mean?”
The monstrumologist was smiling. “Perhaps a great disaster is upon the horizon and we are the only animals stupid enough to remain.”