The Wendigo | Page 5

intelligent man could undergo without a certain
shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.
Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held
the new.303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless,
gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lake
and portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that he
was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they
were camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as
Europe itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an
effect of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of
appreciating. It was himself and Défago against a multitude--at least,
against a Titan!
The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather
overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern
quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as
merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon
the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He
realized his own utter helplessness. Only Défago, as a symbol of a
distant civilization where man was master, stood between him and a
pitiless death by exhaustion and starvation.
It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch Défago turn over the canoe
upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then
proceed to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of
an almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say,
Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by
these marks;--then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home camp
agin, see?"
It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it without
any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to express the

youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was symbolic of
the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it. He was alone
with Défago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe, another
symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those small
yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only indications
of its hiding place.
Meanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying
his own rifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen
trunks and across half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that
fairly gemmed the forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards
five o'clock found themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods,
looking out across a large sheet of water in front of them, dotted with
pine-clad islands of all describable shapes and sizes.
"Fifty Island Water," announced Défago wearily, "and the sun jest goin'
to dip his bald old head into it!" he added, with unconscious poetry; and
immediately they set about pitching camp for the night.
In a very few minutes, under those skilful hands that never made a
movement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut
and cozy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk cooking
fire burned with the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman
cleaned the fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, Défago
"guessed" he would "jest as soon" take a turn through the Bush for
indications of moose. "May come across a trunk where they bin and
rubbed horns," he said, as he moved off, "or feedin' on the last of the
maple leaves"--and he was gone.
His small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while Simpson
noted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed him into
herself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.
Yet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood somewhat
apart, well spaced; and in the clearings grew silver birch and maple,
spearlike and slender, against the immense stems of spruce and
hemlock. But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of
grey rock that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground,
it might well have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one
might have seen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however,
began the great burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its real
character--_brulé_, as it is called, where the fires of the previous year

had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt and
ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match heads stuck into the
ground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal
and rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.
The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the
fire and the wash of little