But the smell of meat was divine, even with the bitter tang of several months of piss soaking into the ground, and Pierre was, quite literally, starving. He hallooed the cabin, stopping halfway across the clearing to shout again. There was no welcoming shout, but neither was there any warning or indication he should retreat. He paused outside the door and could hear someone moving inside. He knocked on the door and the movements stopped, then started again.
The door creaked open, and whatever Pierre had expected, the sight of a grizzled, ruddy-cheeked, smiling, five-foot-two white man was very low on that list. Pierre had seen the man before in Highbanks: Claude Depere, a French-Canadian trapper, a Canuck, who had married a local woman and raised five hellacious children over the next decade, children who terrorized Pierre and the other children on those rare occasions when they came to the smattering of dwellings on the banks of the river for a festival. But now the cabin was empty, except for Claude and the smell of people who had been crammed into the same space for the past six months, that heavy and cloying odor overlain by the smell coming from the frying pan suspended over the hearth fire.
“Oh, you smell da bacon?” There was a lingering French cadence in his English, which softened the harsher clipped tones of his wife’s language. “Smells good, eh boy? Yeah, you come in then, is good.”
Pierre unstrapped his snowshoes and went in. He allowed Claude to guide him to the rough-hewn table and sat, watching as the Canuck danced around the frying pan, poking a slab of meat with his hunting knife. The sizzling was a musical sound; what little game Pierre’s family had found over the past few months had been winter lean, and it had been months since Pierre had felt the liquid energy of fatted game in his belly. The table was streaked with blood and gore from the butchering that had taken place, and such was Pierre’s condition that the smears of blood and curls of yellowing fat did not in any way affect his appetite. Had he been alone, he might not have hesitated to reach down and scrape some of that dried meat from the planks of the table and put it in his mouth.
“I was glad I didn’t,” Pierre said, seventy years later, twisting in his bed. “Was I glad? Sure I was.”
At the fire, Claude stopped suddenly and whirled around to face Pierre, his knife stuck in the slab of meat in the pan. His good-natured grin was gone, and his expression had narrowed so that he resembled a marten, hard on the scent of a hare. “You ain’t been running with that big old friend o’ mine, has you, boy?”
Pierre’s natural curiosity, which otherwise would have prompted him to ask exactly who this big friend was, was overshadowed by his desire to eat. He retracted a finger, which had crept toward a meat scrap, and just shook his head. “No, I’m all alone.”
Claude’s forehead smoothed. “Well, dat’s good then, ain’t it? Sometimes, you never know, it could be that he talk to other people . . .”
Claude’s voice trailed off, and for a moment Pierre sensed a bit of protectiveness in Claude’s tone, as though he suspected his lover had been out cavorting with another. Which led Pierre to his next thought, and despite his desire to avoid any further delays—his mouth was filling repeatedly with saliva, which he had to swallow down every few seconds—he knew he had to ask the question. Claude might be friendly, but if that horde of Depere children threw open the door to discover him eating their dinner (not true bacon, which would be moldy and inedible this late in the year if it had somehow been saved; rather, bacon being the regional term for young moose that still had a layer of milk fat) any one of them would be as likely to slit his throat as say hello.
“Is your family here?”
Claude paused for a second, the tip of the knife deep into the slab of meat. “They around, yeah, but don’t you worry, boy. We had us a good winter, they grow plenty fat.” He lifted the chunk of meat out of the pan and held it aloft, the drippings smoking when they hit the pan. “How much you want?”
Pierre started to answer, when his eyes caught sight of something that made his insides tighten, like sucking in a great lungful of January air. Hanging on a hook near the back corner were several shirts, ranging in size from what would about fit the youngest Depere child—a rough-mouthed cur of seven—to the oldest, Rainey, who at the ripe age of fifteen was already suspected of raping two local girls. There were gashes in the clothes, and the gashes were lined with rusty stains. Pierre’s eyes drifted down to the cot, which was just a mass of balsam boughs covered by a wool blanket. There was a dress arranged neatly atop the blanket, a worn and torn dress made from flour sacks and stitched together with rawhide in places. The stains on this dress were brighter red, the same color as on the table in front of him.
“Well come on now, boy.” Claude grinned, and Pierre saw that his few remaining teeth were stained a deep yellow-green, as dead and rotted as stumps in the swamp. “You can’t have the whole thing, that ain’t fair no how no way.”
“Is it . . .”
Claude’s grin faltered. “What, boy?”
Pierre watched Claude’s face, saw the shrewdness and insanity swirling in his muddy eyes. “Your friend,” Pierre said, grasping for a different tact. “Maybe you should save some for him.”
Claude paused, and for a moment Pierre considered running, just running blindly, because he thought the little wild-eyed man was going to pluck the knife out of the roast and throw it at him. Instead, Claude leaned back and began to laugh into the soot-streaked rafters. “Oh, he don’t like this kind of meat, no how no way. Not this old bacon, and with a char on it to boot.” Then his gaze narrowed again, and his laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started. “Did he say something to you?” Claude stepped closer to him, still holding the roast aloft. “Did he say he wanted some?”
Pierre stood. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but his rifle was pointed at Claude’s chest, and neither of them seemed overly surprised at this development. He began to back away and Claude followed, the juices from the meat running down his wrist and soaking into the stained cuff of his buckskin shirt.
“Did he, boy? You been running with him, ain’t you? Come down here to tempt me, say something bad about him?”
Pierre reached behind him and lifted the hasp on the door. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I think things, sometimes,” Claude said, the words suddenly dreamy, coming out soft and lispy through his rotted teeth. “Like maybe I shouldn’t o’ listened, shouldn’t o’ made da bacon so close to home. Maybe I think them things, boy, but I ain’t never said them, not never. He been . . . he been good to me, he has. Like a brother. And Lordy, the things we saw, way up there . . .”
Pierre leaned back, and the door creaked open. A wedge of sunlight fell across the cabin’s packed dirt floor. Claude stepped back, his eyes dilating. “I ain’t never said no bad words, you tell him dat.”
Pierre nodded, backed out onto the stoop, and tucked his snowshoes under his arm. He retreated slowly, walking backward with his eyes on the front door, waiting for the little man to come charging out, or for the long barrel of Claude’s hunting rifle to poke through one of the narrow slits that passed for windows on either side of the doorway. The snow was still two feet deep, but it had been warm for days, and the snowshoe trail in the sunny, foul-smelling clearing was packed down. It supported his weight enough that he could move without his snowshoes. Still, when he told his wife and son the story seven decades later, he said that it seemed like hours before he was able to reach the safety of the balsams, followed by an eternity as he strapped the willow-and-sinew snowshoes onto his boots, crouched over in the snow, rifle at the ready, looking up every few seconds expecting to see the little Canuck coming out after him, his yellow-green teeth bared.
“Coming for more bacon,” Pierre had croaked. “He was thinking about it, sure he was.”
That was the end of the story. When Henry asked what became of the man, Pierre waved it off as of no consequence. Several men went out to the cabin in the clearing, led by Pierre, but by that time Claude was gone. They ma
de a perfunctory circle around the cabin, and to the east, near a low bog with the moss poking out of the snow, they found the butchered remains of all five Depere children, as well as his wife. The latter had been selectively butchered; “only the choicest cuts,” is how Pierre had related it. They also found Claude’s boot prints, headed north, and the men followed them, but only for a while. After a mile or so another set of tracks joined Claude’s—rough-shaped, enormous prints that were hard to identify in the rapidly melting snow. The men of the party halted their pursuit shortly thereafter and turned back toward the village, pausing only to burn down Claude’s cabin.
“I wish that was the end,” Pierre had said. “But that old Canuck wasn’t the only one who seen the Whitigo that winter, and the next year it was even worse. Came to be, there wasn’t a babe left in any cabin from Highbanks to Sawtee, and the next winter he come awful early. It started right after the leaves fell.”
Pierre reached out a trembling hand. Henry, a man of thirty with his own hand suddenly trembling, gave him a glass of water.
Pierre drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his scrawny neck. “’Twas the next spring we knew it wasn’t going to leave us alone. That we had to do something, had to put it to bed.”
“Put it to bed?” Henry had asked.
“Sure, sure,” Pierre said, his good-natured term for agreement. Shore, shore. Even his eyes had lost some of their cloudiness. “When the Whitigo runs with folks that much, it’s because it’s ready to go sleep. Wants to store up what it needs for a long rest, like a bear. But sometimes it gets . . . distracted. So you got to help put it to sleep.”
“Sleep,” Henry said. He meant it to sound a bit scornful. His father was dying, yes. His father was losing his mind, yes. But that didn’t mean he could talk nonsense. Henry sure hadn’t been able to, even as a babe.
“Sleep,” Pierre affirmed. “You can’t have it doing that other thing.”
Henry had avoided drinking out of the same glass, or eating off the same plate, once his father’s dementia had set in, for a completely unfounded reason: he was scared that whatever had infested his father’s mind could be transferred to him. He knew it wasn’t true, but it was a terribly strong taboo in his own mind, as shameful as it was. Now he reached out and drank the rest of his father’s water in three long swallows.
“What other thing?”
Pierre’s eyes were already starting to lose focus, reverting to that addled, faraway look. But before he lost that brief flame of acuity, one of his eyes had drooped down into a long, deliberate wink.
“Staying awake.”
* * *
The three people were making slow but steady progress, now less than a quarter mile away. Two of them were bent over, hands on their hips; the third was standing, scanning the valley floor and the swollen river below. It was strange watching people exert themselves from a distance, Henry thought, especially when they’re people you mean to kill. You expect them to keep coming on, immune to exhaustion. But they were people, and they were perhaps not even bad people, although the scene below seemed to indicate they were, at the very least, careless people. Intruders. Henry was not averse to killing them.
He was not sure they should kill them here, however.
His father’s story had not ended with those three cryptic words, It stays awake. Three days before he died, Pierre told Henry the rest of the story, how they had supposedly put the Whitigo to bed, the story so strange and awful that Henry had never repeated it. It was the story of a gift, of a sacrifice. Sacrifices were not part of the Cree spiritual ways, for the most part. But this was a special case, and the people were desperate.
“Whatever you give it,” Pierre had said, “it makes it bigger, faster. Give it life, and it makes that life frantic.”
Pierre’s eyes had glinted cunningly in his bed. “But we didn’t give it life, did we, boy? We gave it something else entire.”
* * *
Henry scrunched his way along the pine needles, being careful not to silhouette himself on the ridgeline, and hunkered next to Darius. “We should take them deep into the woods. Get away from this place.”
Darius flicked his eyes sideways and grunted non-commitally.
Henry jutted his chin at the leaning, scorched remains of the drill rig. “They called this in, Darius. More people are on the way.”
“We’ll see. Now be quiet.”
Henry moved away. Darius would do what he would do, and the others would follow. Henry glanced over to Billy, who had been watching their exchange. Billy didn’t know anything about this place, didn’t know anything about anything worth knowing. But he wasn’t a dumb person, Henry thought. Not at all. You’re scared of Darius and you’re scared of this place, even though you don’t know why.
“Stash your rifles,” Darius said. “Here they come.”
Chapter 12
Jake was three quarters of the way up the ascent when he felt the first trickle of blood on his feet. Ahead of him, Warren and Rachel moved up the narrow ridge of stone at a measured pace, using their hands as well as their feet to climb. It was not a difficult path except when you were barefoot. He considered wrapping something around his feet, then decided to wait until he reached the top. At least he could feel the rocks with his toes and heels, could anchor himself by digging his toes into the small crevices. It was a long tumble back to the bottom of the valley.
He paused on a small, flat bench and inspected his feet. The blood wasn’t from a serious wound, just a ruptured blister on the pad of his big toe. His socks had worn away, and he kept thinking of Jaimie, of her mutilated feet. She had somehow worn through boots—good ones, too; Jake had seen the Red Wing insignia—and her lightweight socks, and then the skin on the bottoms of her feet. Running, she had said, but where? And with whom?
“Almost there,” Warren called out from above. “Easy, now. We don’t want to rush it.”
Our fearless leader, Jake thought. Back in control. The thought didn’t have much venom behind it. There were, he thought, worse things to deal with than this particular asshole.
Rachel looked down at Jake and saw him inspecting the bottoms of his feet. “How bad?”
“Fine,” Jake said. He twisted his socks around, so the unworn tops were now on the bottom. It would help sop up the blood, keep his footing from getting any more slippery. No need to think about the consequences. Lose his footing and slide back down there, leg busted. Or spine. Lay there on that little shelf of a beach between the river and the bluff, and wait.
“Do you think it can climb up here?” he asked.
She glanced downward. There was no movement, but the cuts in the earth had not closed over, and the vegetation was marked by dozens of muddy washes where the larger tendrils had carved tracks. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Is there more than one?”
She shrugged. “It could be just the one. That honey mushroom I mentioned, in the Willamette Valley? It extends for miles.”
He thought about that for a moment, all those tendrils leading back to something at the core, a central mass deep in the spongy earth. “Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s keep going.”
Warren was already climbing again, sending the occasional pebble cascading down on them. The grade was steepening a bit near the top, and Jake winced as he wedged his foot into a fissure and pushed upward. Above him, Rachel’s legs flexed and bunched. In another place and time he supposed he would have been more appreciative of the view.
Concentrate, Jake. Get to the top, then allow yourself the luxury of distraction. Not a second sooner. He slipped a fraction of an inch, then wedged his toe into a crack in the rock. Or, he thought, how about you just skip the distractions?
Warren said something ahead of them, his voice muffled. Jake glanced up. He couldn’t see Warren, who had reached the lip of the bluff and pulled himself over. Ten more yards to go. Warren spoke again, his voice indistinct as it deflected back over the open valley. Rachel pau
sed as she swung herself over the lip, her elbows on the flat ground at chest level, her head framed in the gray sky between two large balsams. She stayed like that for a moment, then swung her leg over and disappeared from his view.
Something was wrong. The alternative was to stay here, clinging to the lichen-covered rocks, or retreat down to the valley.
He reached the lip, paused for a second, and then swung himself over. The first thing he saw when he looked up from where he lay on a bed of balsam needles was that there were way too many legs in his view. He looked up and saw an old Cree man peering down at him, his lined face impassive, his eyes assessing, cool to the point of coldness. Behind him, four other men, all Cree with the exception of a small, pale man, were arranged in a loose semicircle, with Warren and Rachel in the middle.
Well, he thought. They aren’t tendrils, at least.
Jake pushed himself to his feet and faced the older man. The wind was blowing toward him and he could smell the men’s wet clothes, their wet hair. Warren, his face red with exertion, was tight-lipped, his eyes flitting from man to man.
Jake wiped away the balsam needles that were stuck to his cheek. They cascaded down the front of his shirt and fell soundlessly to the forest floor.
“Hey, Uncle Henry.”
The old man’s face didn’t change expression. “Hello, Jake.”
* * *
He wasn’t really an uncle.
When Jake had been seven years old, he woke in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother screaming. She was screaming at his father, and Jake, though no stranger to the occasional argument between his parents, had never heard anything quite this intense. It was a one-sided argument, and Dawn, his mother, was beseeching Martin, Jake’s father, not to do something. Jake couldn’t understand what it was, only that his father could not do it, according to his mother, at least, who was shrieking over and over again the same plea:
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