THE WENDIGO

I


A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without
finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and
the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families
with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest. Dr.
Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought
instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the
bull moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was
interested in other things besides moose--amongst them the vagaries of
the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his
book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided
once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part
in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole....

Besides himself and his guide, Hank Davis, there was young Simpson, his
nephew, a divinity student destined for the "Wee Kirk" (then on his
first visit to Canadian backwoods), and the latter's guide, Défago.
Joseph Défago was a French "Canuck," who had strayed from his native
Province of Quebec years before, and had got caught in Rat Portage when
the Canadian Pacific Railway was a-building; a man who, in addition to
his unparalleled knowledge of wood-craft and bush-lore, could also sing
the old _voyageur_ songs and tell a capital hunting yarn into the
bargain. He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell
which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the
wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to
an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him--whence,
doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries.

On this particular expedition he was Hank's choice. Hank knew him and
swore by him. He also swore at him, "jest as a pal might," and since he
had a vocabulary of picturesque, if utterly meaningless, oaths, the
conversation between the two stalwart and hardy woodsmen was often of a
rather lively description. This river of expletives, however, Hank
agreed to dam a little out of respect for his old "hunting boss," Dr.
Cathcart, whom of course he addressed after the fashion of the country
as "Doc," and also because he understood that young Simpson was already
a "bit of a parson." He had, however, one objection to Défago, and one
only--which was, that the French Canadian sometimes exhibited what Hank
described as "the output of a cursed and dismal mind," meaning
apparently that he sometimes was true to type, Latin type, and suffered
fits of a kind of silent moroseness when nothing could induce him to
utter speech. Défago, that is to say, was imaginative and melancholy.
And, as a rule, it was too long a spell of "civilization" that induced
the attacks, for a few days of the wilderness invariably cured them.