“A bullet can’t take him down, unless it’s made of silver. Anything silver can kill him, but it’s the only thing that can, but even then you have to cut out his heart and chop off his head, and then burn the body.”
He took a deep breath and glanced at my master with a chagrined expression.
“So we have covered most of the physical attributes,” the doctor said in the manner of a headmaster leading a class. “Humanoid in appearance, very tall, more than twice the size of a grown man, extremely thin, so thin, you say, as to defy physics and become invisible upon turning sideways. One thing you failed to mention is that the heart of Lepto lurconis is made of ice. The Wendigo’s diet consists of human beings—and, interestingly, certain species of moss, if I may append—and it has the ability to fly. Another attribute you failed to mention is its method of propagation.”
“Its what?”
“Every species on the planet must have some way of producing the next generation, Sergeant. Every schoolboy knows that. So tell me, how does the Wendigo make little Wendigos? Being a hominid, it is a higher order of mammal—putting aside the issue of how a heart made of ice can pump blood—so it is not asexual. What can you tell me about its courtship rituals? Do Wendigos date? Do they fall in love? Are they monogamous, or do they take multiple mates?”
Our guide laughed in spite of himself. The absurdity of the thing had become too much for him.
“Maybe they do fall in love, Doctor. It’s nice to think we’re not the only ones who can.”
“One must be careful not to anthropomorphize nature, Sergeant. Though, we must leave room for love in the lower orders—I am not inside Mr. Beaver’s head; perhaps he loves Mrs. Beaver with all his heart. But to return to my question about the Wendigo: Are they immortal—unlike every other organism on earth—and therefore have no need to reproduce?”
“They take us and turn us into them.”
“But I thought you said they ate us.”
“Well, I can’t say exactly how it happens. Stories come out of the bush, a hunter or trapper or, more often, an Indian ‘goes Wendigo.’”
“Ah, so it’s like the vampire or werewolf. We are its food as well as its progeny.” The doctor was nodding with mock gravity. “The case is nearly unassailable, isn’t it? Much more likely than the alternative, that the Wendigo is a metaphor for famine and the taboo of cannibalism in times of starvation, or a boogeyman to frighten children into obeying their parents.”
Neither spoke for a few minutes. The fire crackled and popped; shadows danced and whirled about our little camp; the lake shimmered in the moonlight, its waves sensually licking the shore; and the woods reverberated with the song of crickets and the occasional snap of a twig underfoot of some woodland creature.
“Well, Dr. Warthrop, I’m almost sorry I asked about monstrumology,” said Hawk wistfully. “You’ve darn near taken all the fun out of it.”
The men flipped a coin to see who would take the first watch. Though we were but a day’s hike from civilization, we were already well within wolf and bear country, and someone would need to keep the fire going throughout the night. Warthrop lost—he would have to be the last to sleep—but seemed pleased with the outcome. It would give him, he said, time to think, a statement that struck me as rich with irony. It was my impression he did little else with his time.
The burly Sergeant Hawk crawled into the tent and threw himself onto the ground next to me; so small were our quarters that his shoulder rubbed against mine.
“Sort of a queer fellow your boss is, Will,” he said quietly, lest Warthrop hear him. I could see the doctor’s silhouette through the open flap, hunched before the orange glow of the fire, the Winchester propped against his thigh. “Polite but not very friendly. Kind of coldlike. But he must have a good heart to come all this way after his friend.”
“I’m not sure if all of it’s about his friend,” I said.
“No?”
“He thinks Dr. Chanler is dead.”
“Well, that’s my thought too, and why we called off the search. But it’s like this Wendigo. Odds are your boss ain’t going to find him—and that won’t prove he is or isn’t dead.”
“I’m not sure it’s even about finding him,” I confessed.
“Then, what the devil is it about?”
“I think it’s mostly about her.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Chanler.”
“Mrs. Chanler!” Sergeant Hawk whispered. “What do you—Oh. Oh! Is that what—Well, you don’t say!” He chuckled sleepily. “Not so coldlike after all, eh?”
He rolled onto his side, and within a few seconds the sides of the tent began to vibrate from the potency of his snores. I lay sleepless for a long time, not kept awake by his snoring so much as by the disorienting lightness of being, the sense of being very small in a vast, empty space, far from all that was familiar, adrift in a strange and indifferent sea. I watched through half-closed eyes the shape of my master outside; it comforted me somehow. I fell asleep holding close that unexpected balm, drawing it into me or allowing it to draw me into it—the conceit of the monstrumologist watching over me.
The unease I suffered that first night in the bush—made all the more distressing after the keen anticipation I had felt on the outset of the journey—persisted in the days that followed, an odd mixture of boredom and anxiety, for as hour followed monotonous hour, the woods took on a dreadful sameness, each turn of the path bringing more of the same, mere distinctions with no difference. At times the trees suddenly parted, like a curtain being whipped aside, and we’d stumble from the forest’s perpetual gloom into the sudden sunlight of a clearing. Huge boulders thrust their heads from the earth, stony leviathans breaking the surface of the glen, their craggy faces sporting shaggy beards of lichen.
We crossed innumerable streams and creeks, some too wide to jump across; we’d no choice but to ford their icy waters on foot. We scrambled over washouts and through deep ravines where the shadows pooled thickly even at midday. Ruined landscapes that Hawk called brûlé rose up to meet us, where the charred bones of silver birch and maple, spruce and hemlock, marched to the horizon, victims of the spring fires that had raged for weeks, creating an apocalyptic vista stretching as far as the eye could see, where the restless wind whipped the inch-deep ash underfoot into a choking fog. In the midst of this desolation, I looked up and saw high above a black shape against the featureless gray, an eagle or some other great bird of prey, and for a shuddering moment I saw us through its eyes—pitifully small, wholly insignificant nomads, interlopers in this lifeless land.