by Will Hill
It looked more like a fort than a trading post. A high rectangle of walls enclosed warehouses, offices, bunkhouses, stores, and other less clearly identifiable buildings. Towers stood at each corner of the compound, along with a tall central watchpost that rose from the end of one of the main buildings. Set into the walls, and above the main entrance, were heavy cannons, pointing outwards.
“What place is this?” asked a man whose name was Logan. He was standing beside Wallace on the deck of the Orlean, his thick red beard coated with ice.
“I have no idea,” said Wallace. “I presume it is home.”
With dinner finished, McTavish built the fire, ordered Grant and Munro to take watch, then settled down in his bedding to sleep, huddled tightly alongside Paterson.
The temperature was plummeting, and were Wallace a normal man, he would already be feeling the creeping numbness of frostbite in his fingers and toes, despite the thick gloves and heavy boots that encased them. His recycled body seemed immune to the condition that was the worst fear of the Hudson’s Bay Company men; he had seen a good number of men taken to the doctor to have their noses and fingers cut off before the dead flesh turned black with infection. Men with a full complement of digits were not quite a minority at York Factory, but were certainly noteworthy.
The light went quickly, as though some enormous lamp had been snuffed out. Wallace could no longer see beyond the nearest trees that surrounded their camp, could barely see the shapes of Grant and Munro as they walked the perimeter, stamping their feet to keep warm. Snoring rose thick and steady from the sleeping men, their breath clouding and drifting on the freezing air. When dawn broke, they would head for York Factory, and if he delayed them, they would tie him to a pole and carry him. By the end of the following day, accounts of what had happened in the forest would be presented to the Factors, and Wallace knew that, despite his good standing, it would not be his version that was believed.
He shifted his arms, trying to keep the blood circulating. They were numb, the combined result of cold and restraint, and pins and needles stabbed at his flesh as it was forced into action. When he could again feel his fingers, he settled back against the post that had been driven into the ground to hold him, and cast his mind back to what had befallen Scott, turning it over and over in his mind, searching for any detail that might be turned to his advantage, that might extricate him from the situation in which he found himself.
The first winter had also been the last for many.
The temperature rarely rose above twenty-five below, and the exertion of simply moving one’s body in such conditions drained vitality that was almost impossible to replace. Men who had boarded the Orlean as giants, highlanders full of brawn and muscle, shrivelled away before the eyes of their colleagues, despite dried venison and fish and abundant fat geese. The snow was deep, thick and relentless, and the cold was beyond anything the men had known. It was hard to think, let alone move. More than one man was found dead in his bunk as the dawn rose, his body, or perhaps his spirit, having simply given up, and the isolation and the cold raised madness in men who were not built to cope with such extremes; fights were common, many of them bloody, several fatal. Less than a month after Wallace’s arrival, an entire trading party vanished in the interior, not far from the Red River; nothing was found but their scattered packs and patches of blood that had frozen solid. One of the lost was Alan Logan, who had crossed the Atlantic on the Orlean with Wallace, and had seemed tailor-made for Hudson Bay: tall and heavy-set and wickedly handy with an axe, qualities that had clearly not been enough to prevent whatever had befallen him and his colleagues.
When the ice thawed and the first company ship made its way into the bay, almost seven months after the Orlean had departed, the clamour for berths among men who had changed their minds was fierce, despite the wages they would forfeit by returning home. The lucky ones staggered on to the ship without a backward glance, their faces set with misery.
John Wallace, on the other hand, had never been happier.
It became quickly apparent that the command of letters and numbers that Heath had been so interested in was not going to be greatly taxed by his new employment; it was mostly basic bookkeeping and inventory, the completion of ledgers and receipts, the tallying of simple columns of figures. He quickly excelled, and by the time that first, hard winter had passed, he had turned down promotion on two occasions. It was not ingratitude; it was rather that he had no desire to spend even more time hunched over a desk in his office, while the wilderness howled and roared beyond its walls.
After three months, he had requested permission to join a trading party on their journey into territory the Company had recently granted to the Métis, the offspring of Cree and Algonquin mothers and French fathers who hunted buffalo far west of Hudson Bay. It was a dangerous mission; the granting of the land had angered the North West Company, who operated on the western shores of the bay, and whose trade routes had been compromised by the Métis settlement.
Wallace’s superiors had been reluctant to grant his request – his value to the Company was already clear – but they had eventually relented, and Wallace had set out with a party of men on a blindingly bright March morning, his feet bound in a pair of enormous snowshoes that had been specially made for him.
And despite the tension between the company and the native peoples, the blistering cold and the harshness of the terrain, the trip went well; the Métis had prospered over the winter, and the buffalo skins and furs they had to offer were both plentiful and of the highest quality. All at York Factory were delighted upon the party’s return, with a single exception.
John Wallace had felt something profound in the wilderness.
The cold affected him less than other men, he knew, and his unusual strength and size made the hard landscape more manageable than it might have been. But it was not these advantages that had caused him to enjoy the journey; it had been the remarkable sense of freedom. Here, near the top of the world, his guilt fell away from him like thawing snow, washed away by ice and freezing air and sunlight so bright it was blinding. He was liked well enough by his colleagues, men whose bodies were barely stranger or less uniform than his own, and who asked no questions, and cast no aspersions. They worked together, ate together, and looked after each other, but there was no softness to either the men or the world around them, despite its remarkable beauty. It was a land of sharp edges, a land that punished carelessness and stupidity, and in it, for the first time, John Wallace had found peace.
There were dangers in the forest, beyond the conditions and the terrain. The spring brought newly-awakened bears, their bellies rumbling with hunger, irritable and unpredictable after long months asleep. Wolves roamed the wilderness in packs, more than capable of taking a full-grown man who found himself separated from his colleagues. Tracks in the snow were never ignored; they were pored over and taken into careful consideration when the trade missions were selecting their routes in and out of the interior of Rupert’s Land.
But beyond the all too real animal threat, there were other dangers less easily described. Tales were told, by the elders of the natives whose lands these really were, of things that moved between the trees, things that made no sound and left no tracks. The spirits of the dead, the lost and the restless, ghouls that had no form, but who howled on the coldest winter nights. Wallace was not a superstitious man, although he knew more about what could scientifically be classed as the supernatural than almost any other man alive. But even he had seen and heard things in the wilderness that he could not readily explain. Lights that moved low across the snowy ground, tracks that corresponded to no animal he recognised, howls and whines that chilled the blood. He had often felt like he was being watched as he journeyed along the Hudson Bay tributaries, even though he usually attempted to dismiss such sensations as the results of isolation, and the fear it caused.
Among the whispered stories and legends of the north, there was one that froze the blood more completely than any o
ther. The Algonquian tribes believed that everything – every living animal and plant, every inert object like a rock or a body of water – contained a spirit. These spirits were known as Manitou, and the most terrible of them all was the wendigo. Tied on an elemental level to the north, to winter cold and starvation, the wendigo was a spiritual being of enormous power, a malevolent creature that ate the flesh of men, but could never be sated. It haunted the darkest places, the deep forest, an emaciated being of frightful, rotting appearance, murdering and eating and possessing those men who had resorted to cannibalism, a taboo that was not as unthinkable in the wilderness as it would have been comfortable to believe.
Wallace knew at least three men who claimed to have seen such a creature with their own eyes, to have faced it across darkened clearings or come upon it as it fed on some unfortunate soul. He had not scoffed, as there was much that seemed plausible in the north that would have seemed ludicrous if discussed in the drawing rooms of London or Paris, but he did not believe that the men had seen what they thought they had; he believed that there would be rational explanations for the encounters, given time to investigate them more thoroughly.
Now, he was no longer so sure.
He and Scott had been sent out to gather wood for the fire while McTavish and the others secured the furs and cleared snow from the clearing that would serve as their campsite. They were on the final leg of their journey home from a trading mission to the Selkirk Settlement, where they had acquired four heavily laden carts of pemmican, the mixture of dried meat and fat that was essential for survival in the northern wilderness.
At the edges of the settlement, they had come across a tribe of Métis that Wallace had traded with on a number of occasions, but who had been forbidden by law from taking pemmican out of the wide swathe of land that comprised the Selkirk Settlement to sell. The judgement had been unpopular, particularly with the North West Company, who had previously traded large quantities of it with the Métis, and it had been impossible not to notice the unpleasant atmosphere that had descended as they drove their full carts past the tribesmen. No harsh words had been exchanged, but the tension had been tangible. There were whispers in the forest that the Métis were preparing for war with Selkirk, at the urging of the North West Company, rumours that Wallace hoped were untrue, but found entirely plausible.
As a result, his first thought when Scott screamed was that a rogue Métis warrior had followed them along the Red River Trails, waited until the two of them were separated from their colleagues, and attacked from the shadows. Wallace dropped the armfuls of branches he had gathered and turned in the direction of the scream, his hand going to the long knife that hung from his belt.
Scott was staggering through the trees, screaming and clawing at something on his back. Wallace ran forward, sending up clouds of white as he churned the snow with his huge feet, then skidded to a halt as the thing on his colleague’s back turned to look at him. It appeared to be a man, but if so, how it had the strength to even move was beyond Wallace’s understanding. The thing looked starved, the sharp points of its bones visible beneath a thin covering of grey skin and tatters of wool and cloth. Long white hair hung down its back and its face was ashen, the colour of winter, grey and empty. A matted beard hung almost to its waist below an open mouth, a black maw from which animal grunts were emerging, and its eyes glowed red, the flickering colour of Hell. It hissed at him, then buried its face in the back of Scott’s neck. Blood flowed, and Scott screamed again, breaking Wallace’s paralysis.
He ran forward again and barrelled into the clawing, thrashing figures, sending them crashing to the ground. They separated as they fell, and he leapt at the grey thing, hacking at it with his knife, a bellow of fury erupting from him. Skin split, spraying blood across his arms and face, and the creature screamed in pain as it bucked and twisted beneath him. Wallace didn’t relent; he brought the sharp edge of the blade down again and again, hacking thick, wedge-shaped wounds in the grey flesh, until the creature managed to free an arm and drive it into his face.
Wallace rocked back, stunned by the power in the blow. The arm propelling the fist was as thin as a newborn’s, but he doubted he had ever been hit harder. Blood ran down his throat from his nose, and he tipped back on to the snow. He was moving again instantly, but the creature was gone; he heard movement in the trees, saw the ghost of something flicker in the distance, but then Scott started to scream again, and he crawled over to the man. His limbs were thrashing wildly, and he took a tight hold of them, trying to calm him, to hold him steady. Wallace looked round, and saw Paterson in the distance, staring at him with his hand over his mouth, his eyes wide with horror. In his arms, Scott screamed and screamed, and he was about to bellow for Paterson to get help when something thundered into the back of his head, and everything went black.
Wallace opened his eyes. Somehow, despite the numbing cold and the pain in his bound wrists and ankles, he had fallen asleep, or at least passed out with exhaustion. The fire burned low in front of him, barely more than embers, giving off no heat that he could feel, the darkness around it deeper than ever. Surrounding it, packed tightly together, were his colleagues. The men were all asleep, the watch cancelled, or simply abandoned.
He twisted his limbs to the extent of their range, and was relieved when feeling began to return to them. He was not susceptible to frostbite, but nor was he certain that he was immune to it, and the conditions he found himself in were a recipe for disaster if his flesh turned out to be as fragile as that of normal men. He was about to shout for the rest of the men to wake up, for no other reason than spite, when he heard something moving in the darkness.
It was a scratching sound, low and barely audible. Something moving through snow that was mostly ice. Wallace tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, searching the air for the strong animal scent of a bear or a wolf, and found neither. The scratching paused, then began again, more urgently. Fear, which was an entirely unusual sensation for John Wallace, trickled through him. The light cast by the fire extended barely a foot beyond the smouldering wood, far enough to illuminate the outlines of his colleagues, but little else. Around him, the landscape was black, and empty.
The sound came again, fainter this time, more distant, as though whatever was making it was moving away. And suddenly Wallace understood.
“McTavish!” he bellowed. “Grant! Paterson! Awake now, for God’s sake!”
The men around the fire popped up as though they had been stung by hornets, their eyes wild with fear in the pale orange glow of the fire. McTavish was first to his feet, his knife in his hand.
“I’ll cut yer bloody throat,” he shouted. “Keep makin’ that racket and see if ah dinnae, ye foul thing.”
“Build up the fire,” shouted Wallace. “We need light.”
“Why, for God’s sake?” asked Grant.
“It’s Scott,” he said. “Check him, and see for yourselves.”
McTavish narrowed his eyes, then turned to the rest of the men. “Build ’er up, lads,” he said. “Then we’ll see, aye.” As the men piled wood on to the embers, he pulled an oil lamp from his pack, and lit it with a burning stick from the fire. Yellow light spilled from its glass, along with the familiar smell of whale oil, and McTavish stomped round the fire to where Scott had been lying.
He stopped dead, staring down at the ground. The watery lamplight illuminated the patch of snow where Scott had been, confirming instantly to Wallace that he had been right.
Scott was gone.
“Whit devilment is this?” asked McTavish, then turned towards him. “You! What ha’ ye done wi’ him?”
“Do you not see my bindings?” asked Wallace, his voice low. “This is not my doing, and you know it.”
“He’s gone?” asked Paterson, his voice trembling. “Why would he have gone? His injuries were terrible.”
“Whit ye askin’ me for?” spat McTavish, rounding on the young man. “I dinnae huv aw the answers fur ye. Think fer yersel, ya wee shite.”
“There’s a trail,” said Grant, peering down at the snow. “It looks like he crawled.” He took three careful steps away from the fire, and pointed at the ground. “The tracks stop here.”
“Stop?” asked Paterson. “How can they stop? Are there no footprints?”
“Not one,” said Grant, softly.
“Perhaps he flew,” said McTavish, and laughed, a loud bark with no humour in it. “Danced awa’ intae the sky wi’ the fairies.” He spat thickly into the fire. “Spread oot an’ find him. He cannae be far.”
Wallace shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “There’s something hungry out there.”
McTavish stormed across the campsite and pressed the blade of his knife against Wallace’s cheek. “There isnae anythin’ oot there!” he bellowed, flecks of spit landing on Wallace’s face. “There’s nothin’ but bears an’ wolves. Only devil in these woods is tied up a front o’ me. Dae ye ken?”
Wallace didn’t respond. There was clearly no point in attempting to convince McTavish of what he had seen, especially given Paterson’s refusal to admit the truth. He had tried, and that was all he could do.
McTavish withdrew the knife, then turned on the rest of the men, who were standing as still as statues, watching him.
“Get movin’!” he shouted. “Dinnae make me tell ye again!”
The three men jumped, then turned and made their way tentatively towards the trees. McTavish eyed them, then stomped away in the opposite direction, slamming through branches and kicking up snow until he disappeared into the darkness.