Before she could reply a shadow fell over them, and Jake twisted around to see Weasel standing a few feet away. He had taken his damp shirt off to dry next to the fire, and his bare torso was almost hairless, thin to the point of gauntness. Jake could see bumps along his ribs where they had been broken, and the raised skin of an appendectomy scar. He was holding a Buck 110 folding knife, the wood handle framed by brass ends. Weasel flicked the knife open, closed it. Opened it again and squatted down, looking at them as he ran the blade up and down his pant leg. Jake looked away. After a while, Weasel straightened and went back to the fire, where Henry and Darius were talking.
“You know where I heard it?” Henry was saying. “That same old lady that you’ve been running with.” He paused. “And I’m not scared, I’m just telling you we should be careful. Thoughtful.”
“Elsie said something similar to me,” Darius murmured.
Henry looked up. “Did she tell you about the old priest, the old maskih?”
Darius shook his head. “She didn’t say much. Didn’t want to talk about it.”
Henry poked at the fire with a stick, sending a cloud of sparks drifting upward. The northwest wind had strengthened, and although they could hear it rushing overhead they were sheltered in the lee of the cliff. Garney tossed another chunk of driftwood onto the coals. The wood popped and spat, dried resins and sap making tiny explosions in the seasoned spruce. Billy sat a few yards off, his back to the river. It had already dropped several feet, but the current continued to carry sticks and logs downstream behind him, silhouettes that caught the firelight for an instant before winking out of sight.
“Some people,” Henry said, his cadence punctuated by the pops and hisses of the burning wood, “think there are times, and places, where certain actions—violent actions—can cause a reaction. An amplified reaction.”
“Fairy tales,” Darius said.
“Someone shoots an archduke,” Henry said, “and twenty million people die. That’s not a fairy tale.”
“That’s war,” Darius said. “And it was about money, and power. Not an amplified reaction.”
Henry stared blearily at the fire, his eyelids drooping. He’s tired, Jake thought, a tired old man who pushed himself to his limit getting out here. He doesn’t want to argue, he doesn’t want to debate. He wants to get a bit of sleep, but there’s something he wants them to know. Behind Billy, a large log rolled in the current like an alligator surfacing, and just as quickly disappeared.
“Their people died over there, according to them,” Darius said. “Whatever you’re worried about has already happened.”
“They died. They weren’t killed.”
“Whatever.”
“Did anybody ever try to appease their god by letting someone die of natural causes, Darius? I’m talking about deliberate action. That’s what wakes things up, gets their attention.”
Darius sighed. “Just tell us, then. Or go to sleep.”
Henry tapped the charred end of his stick on a flat rock absently, leaving a series of black marks. He pushed an unburned piece of wood deeper into the fire. Overhead, the wind moaned and sighed. Henry tossed his stick into the fire, the stars blazing above him. “Have any of you ever wondered,” he said, “why we never come here anymore?”
* * *
Pierre twisted and moaned on his death bed. Then Henry’s dying father opened his pain-addled eyes, saw his son sitting next to him, and continued his story.
It was the spring following the third bad winter, and there were only a few children left in Highbanks.
The local community, sparsely populated to begin with, had shrunk by roughly half. Of those who remained, perhaps a quarter were suffering with what researchers would half a century later term Seasonal Affective Disorder. At that time, the whites called it by a simpler term: cabin fever. The Cree had other names for the malady, most lost to history. Regardless of the label it bore, the effects of long periods of cold, darkness, and malnutrition were well known and well feared. Three winters where the snow came early and departed late, three winters where thirty-below-zero temperatures were routinely coupled with winds so intense that any exposed skin felt as though it had been seared by an open flame. In a way, three bad winters were viewed with a bit of relief, as three was the number known to break cycles, the number of change.
But these past few winters had been different for the people who called themselves the Swampy Cree. First and foremost there were the whites, with their foreign language and their often-wondrous tools and their strange ways. There was talk about great palaces and buildings to the south and east, structures that defied description. They brought with them steel and religion and evil vapors that caused many of the Swampy Cree to die, coughing out their lifeblood, their bodies wracked by fever. It was an intrusion, an opening up of their world to forces unknown. And with this intrusion came a deadening of something intangible, a softening. Suddenly, the unbelievably complex challenges like building a fire or killing a moose were now reduced to mere flicks of the wrist.
And during those winters, at the confluence of bad winters and the dwindling of something – of Something—the children had begun to disappear. Only one or two that first year, but even more the next, and by the time the ground had begun to thaw in May of the third year, over twenty children, Cree and white, had disappeared into the green tangle of the Canadian wilderness.
It was the grandparents who were the most scared, even more so than the distraught parents and siblings. For the oldest of them remembered the last cycle, when their cribmates had disappeared, the times when the snow in the spruce was crisscrossed with the great and shaggy tracks of the Whitigo.
But it had never been quite this bad, and the children continued to go missing well into May. Several were pulled back at their doors or shelter flaps by their parents, the children blinking, fully awake and invariably crying because they couldn’t go outside, couldn’t join their friend who had promised them warmth and food and fun as they had never known. Squirming and writhing in their parent’s grasp, stomachs bloated from malnutrition, and their arms and legs thin as twigs, screaming to be let go so they could run barefoot into the woods. And as often as not, when the child was put back to bed and the father awoke from where he lay sleeping in front of the door, to venture outside into the thin and uncertain light of the northern dawn, the tracks would be there. Pressed into the snow, not quite as large as someone wearing snowshoes, but many times larger than the boot prints of a man, indistinct in shape but always with the same smell, the odor of a denned animal mixed with the damp smell of moss. The tracks were spaced ten or twenty feet apart in places, sometimes disappearing for the length of an entire valley only to reappear on the far side.
The local maskihkîwiyiniwiw, an aged man named Kiwiw, held a council. It was a fact that the people were dying, he said. He read in the spring winds that another bad winter was coming, perhaps worse than the other three. They could not continue on in this place; they needed to leave their home, to scratch out a new existence somewhere else. But they had settled in this cold, mosquito-infested region for a reason: it was also a place of unbelievable bounty and beauty, and it was just as much a part of their souls as the children they had lost. Yet Kiwiw said it was clear that their home had been usurped, that the great wanderer had either taken offense or had become infatuated with them. Neither scenario was tenable.
At this point there were two versions of how Frederick, the excommunicated priest who had settled in the area a few years earlier, became involved. Some said it was voluntary, that he had witnessed the despair and desperation of his fellow men, that this manifestation of evil had rekindled his soul and his faith. The other story was that some of the men had decided that perhaps the reason they had been the subject of such intense attention in recent years was because of Frederick’s faith, supposedly discarded long ago but still clinging to the man—along with the near constant odor of cheap whiskey—which may have given offense to the great wanderer. T
hese men had decided that tying Frederick up in the woods, perhaps with a belly wound or two, might be a good way to appease their tormentor.
Wherever the truth lay regarding his entry into the desperate situation, there seemed to be agreement that, for all his faults, Frederick still possessed great oratory skill. Whether it was out of compassion or self-preservation, he used that skill to insert himself into the drama unfolding that spring in an Indian encampment, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest Catholic church.
Frederick told Kiwiw and the elders of the group a story, reading out of a tattered and soiled Bible. It was a story of another group of people tormented by another demon, and he talked of a man who cast that demon into a herd of swine. He had to explain what swine were, as well as many other things, and his command of Cree was tenuous at best, so there was much lost in translation. But he must have made a convincing case, and the elders agreed that it had to be tried, even though none trusted Frederick . . . and what he proposed was terribly risky. Still, there was little choice. Their land had turned sour, perhaps because the old ways were dying, perhaps only because of bad luck. And the Swampy Cree did not want to leave their home.
Two days later, Frederick, Kiwiw, and three elders stood in the bottomlands of Asiskiwiw. They had no swine in Highbanks, and the only domesticated animals were a few scruffy dogs that were now as wild as wolves. The few horses and the lone ox in the region had been butchered and eaten long ago. But the Cree knew of a place where the earth was filled with a presence, a dark and moldy life that had the size and the substance to act as a suitable proxy for a herd of swine. And there, in the center of a muddy valley bordered by a steep rock bluff on one side, a spruce post had been pounded deep into the soft ground. Tied to the post were three emaciated children, two of them crying. The third stared vacantly into the sky, as he had done since his second year. Some of the crueler people in the village simply referred to him as metoni, the idiot. In actuality, he was terminally ill with some unnamed brain disease, which robbed him of first his language and now most of his motor skills. He had only months, perhaps weeks, to live. None of this was a comfort to his parents as Kiwiw took him from their arms the evening before, Frederick mumbling something about Abraham behind him as they left.
The evening waned. The sun set; the fingernail moon rose above the balsams ringing the valley, a cold, white curl of light reflecting on the last patches of snow. The two healthy children were still snuffling and occasionally crying out for help, asking for a blanket, for water. The five men stood some distance away, Kiwiw with a staff adorned with raven feathers, Frederick with a canteen of water he had pulled from the Little Glutton River, murmuring over it and making motions with his hands. The Cree watched this, impassive. They were no strangers to ceremony.
Then it was deep in the night and the men were talking, speaking in hushed whispers just loud enough to hear each other over the children’s whimpers. They were divided on whether or not they should continue. It was conceded that the wanderer was devious as well as deviant, and such a simple trick, such a simple trap, had been doomed to failure from the start. Their words came out in steaming puffs of air that dissipated a few feet above them. After a particularly heated exchange, Kiwiw noticed that the children had stopped crying. They were all looking to the east, their heads cocked slightly. One of the children smiled, another—the one who was sick—laughed for the first time in over a year. They began pulling at their ropes again, tugging harder and harder, stopping their struggles only long enough to cast their eyes into the blackness of the forest. The night had gone absolutely still and the only sound was the children’s struggling, the rough rope scraping against the spruce pole, their breathing growing ragged from exertion.
Then their efforts stopped, and the children settled back to the ground. Above them, at the edge of the forest, something stepped out of the woods.
Three of the Cree men turned and ran. Kiwiw dug his staff into the soft ground and pressed his bony chest against it, wrapping his arms around the thin wood. Frederick watched the creature approach with a rapturous expression, his fingers clenched around his Bible in one hand and the canteen in the other. It seemed made of darkness, a massive shape with a dancer’s grace, twisting and winding its way down the valley slope, its long hair catching the weak moonlight in long wisps of silver. It leapt over a boulder, springing so high that Frederick thought it might not come back to earth. But it landed and continued on, and the children giggled and squealed with pleasure.
It stopped a few yards away from them. For a moment, it resembled nothing more than an enormous spring bear, hungry for meat. Frederick blinked several times, for now it seemed to resemble a massive bull moose, perhaps crazy with brainworm. Then a cloud passed over the moon, and the images of bear and moose dissolved into features less distinct, half-formed and wild, framed by long tendrils of hair.
It opened its mouth, and above them a loon cried out, the mad cackle of the fish-eater. The creature turned to the children, who were jostling for position to better see their visitor, then back to Kiwiw and Frederick. It took a step back, suddenly cautious, and one of the children cried out in dismay. The creature paused, looking back at the ragged assortment of children. A long and tortured moan came from above them, far above the trees on either side of the valley, the sound of a creature whose intense desire was struggling against its innate caution.
Then it stepped forward with a rush, crossing over the rough circle Kiwiw had drawn in the soil eleven hours earlier, and bent over the children. A series of wet slopping and grinding noises came from the circle, and Kiwiw shoved Frederick forward.
Frederick shook his head, his movements stiff as he began sprinkling water from his canteen around the edge of the circle Kiwiw had drawn, speaking Latin for the first time in more than a decade. The creature was still huddled over the children. One of the children was laughing, another was crying out in pain. The last seemed to be doing both at once.
The creature straightened just as Frederick came back to his starting point, as though it were going to bolt, but it was a fraction of a second too late. It stopped at the edge of the circle as though chained, the long hair around its mouth caked with gore. Its eyes caught the reflection of the moon, and for a moment Kiwiw thought he saw something Cree, something that resembled his father’s proud and haughty features, in its terrible visage.
Frederick spoke in Latin. “In the name of the Father and the Son, I cast thee out.” He paused, poured a palmful of water into his hand, and threw it at the creature. It did not react to the water, nor change its appearance to Kiwiw or Frederick. But one of the children at its feet, who had been reaching out to caress its great furry leg, drew his hand back in horror and began to scream.
“I cast thee into the ground, unclean one,” Frederick said, “into the dust from whence you came.”
With that, Frederick stepped forward and shook out the rest of the contents of the canteen onto the creature’s hide. It stood impassively, not struggling nor reacting, until Kiwiw stepped forward. He said something in Cree, his voice as clean and joyful as the song of a spring robin, and struck the creature with his staff.
“Now you take what you have stolen,” Kiwiw said. He looked down at the small corpse of the one some in his village called metoni. “Take it and run with it.”
From above them came another twisted cry, the tone alternating between pain and rage in discordant timbres.
The creature did not disappear but dwindled, shrinking and twisting, the hair changing, what appeared to be a face lengthening and dissolving. It dropped from two legs down to all fours, then back to two legs, then finally settled on four legs. It spun in a tight circle like an ass-shot dog, twisting down next to the children, its jaws popping. It fell to the ground, snorting in ragged breaths. Kiwiw drew a short copper knife from his belt and plunged it deep into the ruff of hair at the base of the creature’s head. It slumped to the ground, silent.
When the three elders who had fled retur
ned the next morning, Kiwiw and Frederick sat slumped against the pole. At their feet was an ancient-looking black bear, as emaciated as the children, its ribs pressing against the mangy fur. Its yellowed teeth were worn down to nubs, and the retractable claws were dull and chipped. There was little that was unique about it, save for the knife still buried in the back of its neck. Its gray muzzle was streaked with gore, and in between its back molars were the masticated remains of moss it had been chewing on.
The children were dead.
The men returned to the village, dragging the bodies of the children in a hastily built travois. They left the bear where it was.
Nobody went back to look at the bear, to check on their story, not even the parents of the dead children. It was a well-known fact that black bears would sometimes revert to human prey when they grew too old and weak to chase their usual prey. Of course, the attacks had happened largely in winter over the past three years, when bears would be hibernating. Of course, the gaunt carcass slumped near the spruce pole could not make such large tracks in the snow, nor go dozens of yards between strides. But it was a relief to be able to say it was a bear, to say it and mourn and go on living. They could feel spring in the air for the first time, could feel the lifting of the biting cold.
The following winter would be mild, as would the next several. In a couple of years, the sound of children could be heard again along the banks of the Little Glutton River, and they were not troubled by any more bears.
The fates of Frederick and Kiwiw were largely lost in the tangles of time, but they passed the story on, Kiwiw to the new maskihkîwiyiniwiw, and Frederick to the Catholic church in Winnipeg, where he traveled over the course of several months to let them know what had transpired in the great wilderness to the north, of the power of the Lamb even in the savage woods, a power that had been matched, perhaps exceeded, by that unnamed Cree religion. The acolyte and priest who heard his tale were pleasant and accommodating to this stinking, wild-eyed, obviously insane man who claimed to have once been a priest himself, and sent him to the local house for the destitute for a bath and a meal, after which he disappeared and was never heard from again.
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