It was a decision that feigned as action, but the alternatives were unthinkable to us both. I scavenged about the immediate vicinity for more kindling and anything the miserly forest might offer up by way of victuals, while the doctor crouched in the tent with Chanler, trying to coax from him something a bit more intelligible than gebgung grojpech and cankah!
Dr. Warthrop gave up after an hour and joined me by the resurrected fire, where we spoke little and kept our eyes forward and our hands on our weapons, starting at every crack of a twig or stir of a dry leaf, while low-hanging clouds scudded across the sky, diluting the light to an exhausted gray, the cover pushed along by a high wind that shunned the sullen earth.
The air about us was motionless, an acrid shroud of rotting vegetation laced with the faintest tincture of death, the palpable tartness of decay. The stench of rot, the smell of putrefying filth! Hawk had called it. It suffused the campsite. I smelled it rising from my clothes. We have gone far in our public places to push death aside, to consign it to a dusty corner, but in the wilderness it is ever present. It is the lover who makes life. The sensuous, entwined limbs of predator and prey, the orgasmic death cry, the final spasmodic rush of blood, and even the soundless insemination of the earth by the fallen tree and crumbling leaf; these are the caresses of life’s beloved, the indispensable other.
Dusk crept over the land, and still there was no sign of the missing sergeant. Warthrop wore a path between the tent and the fire, fetching water and bits of forage for John Chanler. The water he managed to get into him, but the food Chanler refused, letting the morsels fall from his mouth with a gagging cry of revulsion. The eyes remained open, fixed, incognizant.
My uneasiness grew as the light faded. The likelihood of there being an innocent explanation for the sergeant’s absence diminished with each passing hour. If he had gone ahead to scout the trail or had ventured into the bush for some much-needed animal protein, he would have returned by now. The viable explanations remaining were not pleasant to contemplate—especially for a twelve-year-old boy who up to that voyage had not journeyed more than twenty miles from his front doorstep. Forgetting for a moment with whom he kept company, that boy turned to the sole source of comfort available to him. Unfortunately for him, that happened to be Dr. Pellinore Warthrop.
“What do you think has happened to him?” I asked.
“How am I to answer that, Will Henry?” he asked in turn, stuffing a piece of hickory bark into his mouth. Chewing it helped tamp down the gnawing aches in our bellies. “We may speculate until the sun comes up, and that’s all it would be. In the morning . . .” He did not finish the thought. He fondled the polished stock of the rifle lying across his lap, an effort to ease another gnawing ache. “I suspect he heard—or thought he heard—something in the bush and like a fool took off after it. Perhaps he has decided ‘to hell’ with us and now is seated comfortably by his hearth in Rat Portage. Though I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“He left his rucksack. And his canteen. He intended to return.”
Unless he did not leave of his own accord. That possibility the doctor did not give voice to. He chewed thoughtfully upon the wood; the firelight flickered in his eyes.
“We are lost,” he said matter-of-factly. “That is the only explanation. You observed his reaction to the suggestion yesterday. So at first light he struck out to pick up the trail again. Darkness caught him in the bush, and he’s waiting for daylight to come back for us.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
The doctor frowned. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“He’s afraid.” I remembered the wild look in his eyes, the spittle flying from his chapped and swollen lips. I did not offer the other reason—that he wouldn’t return because he couldn’t. I thought of Pierre Larose, impaled upon a tree.
“All the more reason to find his way back,” argued the doctor. Then, as if he had read my thoughts, he said, “I wouldn’t choose solitude in these circumstances, and I am one who chooses it in nearly every circumstance!” His jaw worked the shavings incessantly; his eyes shone. “Secrets,” he murmured.
“Secrets, sir?”
“The reason I became a monstrumologist, Will Henry.” He lowered his voice, now whispery warm, as intimate as a lover’s. “She cloaks herself in mystery. She hides her true face. I would unmask her. I would strip her bare. I would see her as she is.”
He lifted his face toward the veiled heavens. He considered the treetops genuflecting to the high wind. “‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh.’ . . . She is fickle and jealous and completely indifferent—and therefore completely irresistible. What mortal woman can approach her? What earthly maiden possesses her eternal youth or can inspire such rapture—and despair? There is something profoundly terrifying about her, Will Henry, and utterly seductive. In my lust to master her, I became her slave. In my rising, I fell. I fell . . . very far.”
Though I sat three feet from the fire, I shivered. I wondered if, like Sergeant Hawk, the doctor was coming down with a case of “bush fever.” If so—if I lost him, too—what would become of me?
He looked at me, shook his head, and laughed softly. “I warned you. I wanted to be a poet.”
“Was that a poem?”
“No, of course not.”
“It didn’t sound like any poem I’ve ever read.”
“You are a clever boy, Will Henry. That could be both a compliment and an insult.”
He pulled the gnarled bit of wood from his mouth and tossed it into the fire.
“Terrible! Like chewing on a chair leg. But it’s what we have. And we must learn to be satisfied with what we have, no matter how bland or bitter the taste.”
We were quiet for a moment. The fire cracked and popped. The wind whistled in the bowed heads of the spruce and pine. Behind us John Chanler moaned in gentle harmony.
“Did he feel the same as you, Doctor?” I asked. “About . . . her?”
“John has more the soul of a boxer than a poet. He never quite grew up, in my opinion. Monstrumology is a sport to him, like hunting fox or playing cricket.”
“He thought it was fun?” The idea that anyone could find the doctor’s business enjoyable was bizarre.
“Oh, he thought it was great fun.”