Chương Chương 6 · 第6章

The sudden entrance of his prosaic uncle into this world of wizardry

and horror that had haunted him without interruption now for two days

and two nights, had the immediate effect of giving to the affair an

entirely new aspect. The sound of that crisp "Hulloa, my boy! And what's

up _now_?" and the grasp of that dry and vigorous hand introduced

another standard of judgment. A revulsion of feeling washed through him.

He realized that he had let himself "go" rather badly. He even felt

vaguely ashamed of himself. The native hard-headedness of his race

reclaimed him.

And this doubtless explains why he found it so hard to tell that group

round the fire--everything. He told enough, however, for the immediate

decision to be arrived at that a relief party must start at the earliest

possible moment, and that Simpson, in order to guide it capably, must

first have food and, above all, sleep. Dr. Cathcart observing the lad's

condition more shrewdly than his patient knew, gave him a very slight

injection of morphine. For six hours he slept like the dead.

From the description carefully written out afterwards by this student of

divinity, it appears that the account he gave to the astonished group

omitted sundry vital and important details. He declares that, with his

uncle's wholesome, matter-of-fact countenance staring him in the face,

he simply had not the courage to mention them. Thus, all the search

party gathered, it would seem, was that Défago had suffered in the night

an acute and inexplicable attack of mania, had imagined himself "called"

by someone or something, and had plunged into the bush after it without

food or rifle, where he must die a horrible and lingering death by cold

and starvation unless he could be found and rescued in time. "In time,"

moreover, meant _at once_.

In the course of the following day, however--they were off by seven,

leaving Punk in charge with instructions to have food and fire always

ready--Simpson found it possible to tell his uncle a good deal more of

the story's true inwardness, without divining that it was drawn out of

him as a matter of fact by a very subtle form of cross examination. By

the time they reached the beginning of the trail, where the canoe was

laid up against the return journey, he had mentioned how Défago spoke

vaguely of "something he called a 'Wendigo'"; how he cried in his sleep;

how he imagined an unusual scent about the camp; and had betrayed other

symptoms of mental excitement. He also admitted the bewildering effect

of "that extraordinary odor" upon himself, "pungent and acrid like the

odor of lions." And by the time they were within an easy hour of Fifty

Island Water he had let slip the further fact--a foolish avowal of his

own hysterical condition, as he felt afterwards--that he had heard the

vanished guide call "for help." He omitted the singular phrases used,

for he simply could not bring himself to repeat the preposterous

language. Also, while describing how the man's footsteps in the snow had

gradually assumed an exact miniature likeness of the animal's plunging

tracks, he left out the fact that they measured a _wholly_ incredible

distance. It seemed a question, nicely balanced between individual pride

and honesty, what he should reveal and what suppress. He mentioned the

fiery tinge in the snow, for instance, yet shrank from telling that body

and bed had been partly dragged out of the tent....

With the net result that Dr. Cathcart, adroit psychologist that he

fancied himself to be, had assured him clearly enough exactly where his

mind, influenced by loneliness, bewilderment and terror, had yielded to

the strain and invited delusion. While praising his conduct, he managed

at the same time to point out where, when, and how his mind had gone

astray. He made his nephew think himself finer than he was by judicious

praise, yet more foolish than he was by minimizing the value of the

evidence. Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on

the basis of insufficient knowledge, _because_ the knowledge supplied

seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.

"The spell of these terrible solitudes," he said, "cannot leave any mind

untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative

qualities. It has worked upon yours exactly as it worked upon my own

when I was your age. The animal that haunted your little camp was

undoubtedly a moose, for the 'belling' of a moose may have, sometimes, a

very peculiar quality of sound. The colored appearance of the big tracks

was obviously a defect of vision in your own eyes produced by

excitement. The size and stretch of the tracks we shall prove when we

come to them. But the hallucination of an audible voice, of course, is

one of the commonest forms of delusion due to mental excitement--an

excitement, my dear boy, perfectly excusable, and, let me add,

wonderfully controlled by you under the circumstances. For the rest, I

am bound to say, you have acted with a splendid courage, for the terror

of feeling oneself lost in this wilderness is nothing short of awful,

and, had I been in your place, I don't for a moment believe I could have

behaved with one quarter of your wisdom and decision. The only thing I

find it uncommonly difficult to explain is--that--damned odor."

"It made me feel sick, I assure you," declared his nephew, "positively

dizzy!" His uncle's attitude of calm omniscience, merely because he knew

more psychological formulae, made him slightly defiant. It was so easy

to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally

witnessed. "A kind of desolate and terrible odor is the only way I can

describe it," he concluded, glancing at the features of the quiet,

unemotional man beside him.

"I can only marvel," was the reply, "that under the circumstances it did

not seem to you even worse." The dry words, Simpson knew, hovered

between the truth, and his uncle's interpretation of "the truth."

* * * * *

And so at last they came to the little camp and found the tent still

standing, the remains of the fire, and the piece of paper pinned to a

stake beside it--untouched. The cache, poorly contrived by inexperienced

hands, however, had been discovered and opened--by musk rats, mink and

squirrel. The matches lay scattered about the opening, but the food had

been taken to the last crumb.

"Well, fellers, he ain't here," exclaimed Hank loudly after his fashion.

"And that's as sartain as the coal supply down below! But whar he's got

to by this time is 'bout as unsartain as the trade in crowns in t'other

place." The presence of a divinity student was no barrier to his

language at such a time, though for the reader's sake it may be severely

edited. "I propose," he added, "that we start out at once an' hunt for'm

like hell!"

The gloom of Défago's probable fate oppressed the whole party with a

sense of dreadful gravity the moment they saw the familiar signs of

recent occupancy. Especially the tent, with the bed of balsam branches

still smoothed and flattened by the pressure of his body, seemed to

bring his presence near to them. Simpson, feeling vaguely as if his

world were somehow at stake, went about explaining particulars in a

hushed tone. He was much calmer now, though overwearied with the strain

of his many journeys. His uncle's method of explaining--"explaining

away," rather--the details still fresh in his haunted memory helped,

too, to put ice upon his emotions.

"And that's the direction he ran off in," he said to his two companions,

pointing in the direction where the guide had vanished that morning in

the grey dawn. "Straight down there he ran like a deer, in between the

birch and the hemlock...."

Hank and Dr. Cathcart exchanged glances.

"And it was about two miles down there, in a straight line," continued

the other, speaking with something of the former terror in his voice,

"that I followed his trail to the place where--it stopped--dead!"

"And where you heered him callin' an' caught the stench, an' all the

rest of the wicked entertainment," cried Hank, with a volubility that

betrayed his keen distress.

"And where your excitement overcame you to the point of producing

illusions," added Dr. Cathcart under his breath, yet not so low that his

nephew did not hear it.

* * * * *

It was early in the afternoon, for they had traveled quickly, and there

were still a good two hours of daylight left. Dr. Cathcart and Hank lost

no time in beginning the search, but Simpson was too exhausted to

accompany them. They would follow the blazed marks on the trees, and

where possible, his footsteps. Meanwhile the best thing he could do was

to keep a good fire going, and rest.

But after something like three hours' search, the darkness already down,

the two men returned to camp with nothing to report. Fresh snow had

covered all signs, and though they had followed the blazed trees to the

spot where Simpson had turned back, they had not discovered the smallest

indication of a human being--or for that matter, of an animal. There

were no fresh tracks of any kind; the snow lay undisturbed.

It was difficult to know what was best to do, though in reality there

was nothing more they _could_ do. They might stay and search for weeks

without much chance of success. The fresh snow destroyed their only

hope, and they gathered round the fire for supper, a gloomy and

despondent party. The facts, indeed, were sad enough, for Défago had a

wife at Rat Portage, and his earnings were the family's sole means of

support.

Now that the whole truth in all its ugliness was out, it seemed useless

to deal in further disguise or pretense. They talked openly of the facts

and probabilities. It was not the first time, even in the experience of

Dr. Cathcart, that a man had yielded to the singular seduction of the

Solitudes and gone out of his mind; Défago, moreover, was predisposed to

something of the sort, for he already had a touch of melancholia in his

blood, and his fiber was weakened by bouts of drinking that often lasted

for weeks at a time. Something on this trip--one might never know

precisely what--had sufficed to push him over the line, that was all.

And he had gone, gone off into the great wilderness of trees and lakes

to die by starvation and exhaustion. The chances against his finding

camp again were overwhelming; the delirium that was upon him would also

doubtless have increased, and it was quite likely he might do violence

to himself and so hasten his cruel fate. Even while they talked, indeed,

the end had probably come. On the suggestion of Hank, his old pal,

however, they proposed to wait a little longer and devote the whole of

the following day, from dawn to darkness, to the most systematic search

they could devise. They would divide the territory between them. They

discussed their plan in great detail. All that men could do they would

do. And, meanwhile, they talked about the particular form in which the

singular Panic of the Wilderness had made its attack upon the mind of

the unfortunate guide. Hank, though familiar with the legend in its

general outline, obviously did not welcome the turn the conversation had

taken. He contributed little, though that little was illuminating. For

he admitted that a story ran over all this section of country to the

effect that several Indians had "seen the Wendigo" along the shores of

Fifty Island Water in the "fall" of last year, and that this was the

true reason of Défago's disinclination to hunt there. Hank doubtless

felt that he had in a sense helped his old pal to death by

overpersuading him. "When an Indian goes crazy," he explained, talking

to himself more than to the others, it seemed, "it's always put that

he's 'seen the Wendigo.' An' pore old Défaygo was superstitious down to

he very heels ...!"

And then Simpson, feeling the atmosphere more sympathetic, told over

again the full story of his astonishing tale; he left out no details

this time; he mentioned his own sensations and gripping fears. He only

omitted the strange language used.

"But Défago surely had already told you all these details of the Wendigo

legend, my dear fellow," insisted the doctor. "I mean, he had talked

about it, and thus put into your mind the ideas which your own

excitement afterwards developed?"

Whereupon Simpson again repeated the facts. Défago, he declared, had

barely mentioned the beast. He, Simpson, knew nothing of the story, and,

so far as he remembered, had never even read about it. Even the word was

unfamiliar.

Of course he was telling the truth, and Dr. Cathcart was reluctantly

compelled to admit the singular character of the whole affair. He did

not do this in words so much as in manner, however. He kept his back

against a good, stout tree; he poked the fire into a blaze the moment it

showed signs of dying down; he was quicker than any of them to notice

the least sound in the night about them--a fish jumping in the lake, a

twig snapping in the bush, the dropping of occasional fragments of

frozen snow from the branches overhead where the heat loosened them. His

voice, too, changed a little in quality, becoming a shade less

confident, lower also in tone. Fear, to put it plainly, hovered close

about that little camp, and though all three would have been glad to

speak of other matters, the only thing they seemed able to discuss was

this--the source of their fear. They tried other subjects in vain; there

was nothing to say about them. Hank was the most honest of the group; he

said next to nothing. He never once, however, turned his back to the

darkness. His face was always to the forest, and when wood was needed he

didn't go farther than was necessary to get it.