The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wendigo, by Algernon Blackwood

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Wendigo

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: January 31, 2004 [EBook #10897]

[Last updated: March 10, 2012]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WENDIGO ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Dave Morgan and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

The Wendigo
Algernon Blackwood
1910
 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.
This, then, was the party of four that found themselves in camp the last
week in October of that "shy moose year" 'way up in the wilderness north
of Rat Portage—a forsaken and desolate country. There was also Punk, an
Indian, who had accompanied Dr. Cathcart and Hank on their hunting trips
in previous years, and who acted as cook. His duty was merely to stay in
camp, catch fish, and prepare venison steaks and coffee at a few minutes'
notice. He dressed in the worn-out clothes bequeathed to him by former
patrons, and, except for his coarse black hair and dark skin, he looked in
these city garments no more like a real redskin than a stage Negro looks
like a real African. For all that, however, Punk had in him still the instincts
of his dying race; his taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his
superstition.
The party round the blazing fire that night were despondent, for a week
had passed without a single sign of recent moose discovering itself. Défago
had sung his song and plunged into a story, but Hank, in bad humor,
reminded him so often that "he kep' mussing-up the fac's so, that it was
'most all nothin' but a petered-out lie," that the Frenchman had finally
subsided into a sulky silence which nothing seemed likely to break. Dr.
Cathcart and his nephew were fairly done after an exhausting day. Punk was
washing up the dishes, grunting to himself under the lean-to of branches,
where he later also slept. No one troubled to stir the slowly dying fire.
Overhead the stars were brilliant in a sky quite wintry, and there was so
little wind that ice was already forming stealthily along the shores of the
still lake behind them. The silence of the vast listening forest stole forward
and enveloped them.
Hank broke in suddenly with his nasal voice.
"I'm in favor of breaking new ground tomorrow, Doc," he observed with
energy, looking across at his employer. "We don't stand a dead Dago's
chance around here."
"Agreed," said Cathcart, always a man of few words. "Think the idea's
good."
"Sure pop, it's good," Hank resumed with confidence. "S'pose, now, you
and I strike west, up Garden Lake way for a change! None of us ain't
touched that quiet bit o' land yet—"
"I'm with you."
"And you, Défago, take Mr. Simpson along in the small canoe, skip
across the lake, portage over into Fifty Island Water, and take a good squint
down that thar southern shore. The moose 'yarded' there like hell last year,
and for all we know they may be doin' it agin this year jest to spite us."
Défago, keeping his eyes on the fire, said nothing by way of reply. He
was still offended, possibly, about his interrupted story.
"No one's been up that way this year, an' I'll lay my bottom dollar on
that!" Hank added with emphasis, as though he had a reason for knowing.
He looked over at his partner sharply. "Better take the little silk tent and
stay away a couple o' nights," he concluded, as though the matter were
definitely settled. For Hank was recognized as general organizer of the
hunt, and in charge of the party.
It was obvious to anyone that Défago did not jump at the plan, but his
silence seemed to convey something more than ordinary disapproval, and
across his sensitive dark face there passed a curious expression like a flash
of firelight—not so quickly, however, that the three men had not time to
catch it.
"He funked for some reason, I thought," Simpson said afterwards in the
tent he shared with his uncle. Dr. Cathcart made no immediate reply,
although the look had interested him enough at the time for him to make a
mental note of it. The expression had caused him a passing uneasiness he
could not quite account for at the moment.
But Hank, of course, had been the first to notice it, and the odd thing was
that instead of becoming explosive or angry over the other's reluctance, he
at once began to humor him a bit.
"But there ain't no speshul reason why no one's been up there this year,"
he said with a perceptible hush in his tone; "not the reason you mean,
anyway! Las' year it was the fires that kep' folks out, and this year I guess—
I guess it jest happened so, that's all!" His manner was clearly meant to be
encouraging.
Joseph Défago raised his eyes a moment, then dropped them again. A
breath of wind stole out of the forest and stirred the embers into a passing
blaze. Dr. Cathcart again noticed the expression in the guide's face, and
again he did not like it. But this time the nature of the look betrayed itself.
In those eyes, for an instant, he caught the gleam of a man scared in his
very soul. It disquieted him more than he cared to admit.
"Bad Indians up that way?" he asked, with a laugh to ease matters a little,
while Simpson, too sleepy to notice this subtle by-play, moved off to bed
with a prodigious yawn; "or—or anything wrong with the country?" he
added, when his nephew was out of hearing.
Hank met his eye with something less than his usual frankness.
"He's jest skeered," he replied good-humouredly. "Skeered stiff about
some ole feery tale! That's all, ain't it, ole pard?" And he gave Défago a
friendly kick on the moccasined foot that lay nearest the fire.
Défago looked up quickly, as from an interrupted reverie, a reverie,
however, that had not prevented his seeing all that went on about him.
"Skeered—nuthin'!" he answered, with a flush of defiance. "There's
nuthin' in the Bush that can skeer Joseph Défago, and don't you forget it!"
And the natural energy with which he spoke made it impossible to know
whether he told the whole truth or only a part of it.
 Hank turned towards the doctor. He was just going to add something
when he stopped abruptly and looked round. A sound close behind them in
the darkness made all three start. It was old Punk, who had moved up from
his lean-to while they talked and now stood there just beyond the circle of
firelight—listening.
"'Nother time, Doc!" Hank whispered, with a wink, "when the gallery
ain't stepped down into the stalls!" And, springing to his feet, he slapped the
Indian on the back and cried noisily, "Come up t' the fire an' warm yer dirty
red skin a bit." He dragged him towards the blaze and threw more wood on.
"That was a mighty good feed you give us an hour or two back," he
continued heartily, as though to set the man's thoughts on another scent,
"and it ain't Christian to let you stand out there freezin' yer ole soul to hell
while we're gettin' all good an' toasted!" Punk moved in and warmed his
feet, smiling darkly at the other's volubility which he only half understood,
but saying nothing. And presently Dr. Cathcart, seeing that further
conversation was impossible, followed his nephew's example and moved
off to the tent, leaving the three men smoking over the now blazing fire.
It is not easy to undress in a small tent without waking one's companion,
and Cathcart, hardened and warm-blooded as he was in spite of his fifty odd
years, did what Hank would have described as "considerable of his twilight"
in the open. He noticed, during the process, that Punk had meanwhile gone
back to his lean-to, and that Hank and Défago were at it hammer and tongs,
or, rather, hammer and anvil, the little French Canadian being the anvil. It
was all very like the conventional stage picture of Western melodrama: the
fire lighting up their faces with patches of alternate red and black; Défago,
in slouch hat and moccasins in the part of the "badlands" villain; Hank,
open-faced and hatless, with that reckless fling of his shoulders, the honest
and deceived hero; and old Punk, eavesdropping in the background,
supplying the atmosphere of mystery. The doctor smiled as he noticed the
details; but at the same time something deep within him—he hardly knew
what—shrank a little, as though an almost imperceptible breath of warning
had touched the surface of his soul and was gone again before he could
seize it. Probably it was traceable to that "scared expression" he had seen in
the eyes of Défago; "probably"—for this hint of fugitive emotion otherwise
escaped his usually so keen analysis. Défago, he was vaguely aware, might
cause trouble somehow ...He was not as steady a guide as Hank, for
instance ... Further than that he could not get ...
He watched the men a moment longer before diving into the stuffy tent
where Simpson already slept soundly. Hank, he saw, was swearing like a
mad African in a New York nigger saloon; but it was the swearing of
"affection." The ridiculous oaths flew freely now that the cause of their
obstruction was asleep. Presently he put his arm almost tenderly upon his
comrade's shoulder, and they moved off together into the shadows where
their tent stood faintly glimmering. Punk, too, a moment later followed their
example and disappeared between his odorous blankets in the opposite
direction.
Dr. Cathcart then likewise turned in, weariness and sleep still fighting in
his mind with an obscure curiosity to know what it was that had scared
Défago about the country up Fifty Island Water way,—wondering, too, why
Punk's presence had prevented the completion of what Hank had to say.
Then sleep overtook him. He would know tomorrow. Hank would tell him
the story while they trudged after the elusive moose.
Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the
jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath
the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their
silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges
and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak
odors of coming winter. White men, with their dull scent, might never have
divined them; the fragrance of the wood fire would have concealed from
them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening swamp a
hundred miles away. Even Hank and Défago, subtly in league with the soul
of the woods as they were, would probably have spread their delicate
nostrils in vain....
But an hour later, when all slept like the dead, old Punk crept from his
blankets and went down to the shore of the lake like a shadow—silently, as
only Indian blood can move. He raised his head and looked about him. The
thick darkness rendered sight of small avail, but, like the animals, he
possessed other senses that darkness could not mute. He listened—then
sniffed the air. Motionless as a hemlock stem he stood there. After five
minutes again he lifted his head and sniffed, and yet once again. A tingling
of the wonderful nerves that betrayed itself by no outer sign, ran through
him as he tasted the keen air. Then, merging his figure into the surrounding
blackness in a way that only wild men and animals understand, he turned,
still moving like a shadow, and went stealthily back to his lean-to and his
bed.
And soon after he slept, the change of wind he had divined stirred gently
the reflection of the stars within the lake. Rising among the far ridges of the
country beyond Fifty Island Water, it came from the direction in which he
had stared, and it passed over the sleeping camp with a faint and sighing
murmur through the tops of the big trees that was almost too delicate to be
audible. With it, down the desert paths of night, though too faint, too high
even for the Indian's hair-like nerves, there passed a curious, thin odor,
strangely disquieting, an odor of something that seemed unfamiliar—utterly
unknown.
The French Canadian and the man of Indian blood each stirred uneasily
in his sleep just about this time, though neither of them woke. Then the
ghost of that unforgettably strange odor passed away and was lost among
the leagues of tenantless forest beyond.
 II

In the morning the camp was astir before the sun. There had been a light
fall of snow during the night and the air was sharp. Punk had done his duty
betimes, for the odors of coffee and fried bacon reached every tent. All
were in good spirits.
"Wind's shifted!" cried Hank vigorously, watching Simpson and his guide
already loading the small canoe. "It's across the lake—dead right for you
fellers. And the snow'll make bully trails! If there's any moose mussing
around up thar, they'll not get so much as a tail-end scent of you with the
wind as it is. Good luck, Monsieur Défago!" he added, facetiously giving
the name its French pronunciation for once, "bonne chance!"
Défago returned the good wishes, apparently in the best of spirits, the
silent mood gone. Before eight o'clock old Punk had the camp to himself,
Cathcart and Hank were far along the trail that led westwards, while the
canoe that carried Défago and Simpson, with silk tent and grub for two
days, was already a dark speck bobbing on the bosom of the lake, going due
east.
The wintry sharpness of the air was tempered now by a sun that topped
the wooded ridges and blazed with a luxurious warmth upon the world of
lake and forest below; loons flew skimming through the sparkling spray that
the wind lifted; divers shook their dripping heads to the sun and popped
smartly out of sight again; and as far as eye could reach rose the leagues of
endless, crowding Bush, desolate in its lonely sweep and grandeur,
untrodden by foot of man, and stretching its mighty and unbroken carpet
right up to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.
Simpson, who saw it all for the first time as he paddled hard in the bows
of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty. His heart drank
in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs drank in the cool
and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his
native chanties, Défago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life,
answering cheerfully all his companion's questions. Both were gay and
light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly
distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common
end. Simpson, the employer, and Défago the employed, among these
primitive forces, were simply—two men, the "guider" and the "guided."
Superior knowledge, of course, assumed control, and the younger man fell
without a second thought into the quasi-subordinate position. He never
dreamed of objecting when Défago dropped the "Mr.," and addressed him
as "Say, Simpson," or "Simpson, boss," which was invariably the case
before they reached the farther shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles
against a head wind. He only laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it
at all.
For this "divinity student" was a young man of parts and character,
though as yet, of course, untraveled; and on this trip—the first time he had
seen any country but his own and little Switzerland—the huge scale of
things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realized, to hear
about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in
them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that
no 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 waves along the rocky lake shore were the only
sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast
world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland
gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch
their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front, through
doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island
Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and
perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of rose and
saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still
dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands—a
hundred, surely, rather than fifty—floated like the fairy barques of some
enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately
the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded—about to
weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the
currents of their native and desolate lake.
And strips of colored cloud, like flaunting pennons, signaled their
departure to the stars....
 The beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting. Simpson smoked the fish
and burnt his fingers into the bargain in his efforts to enjoy it and at the
same time tend the frying pan and the fire. Yet, ever at the back of his
thoughts, lay that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human
life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man. The sense
of his utter loneliness, now that even Défago had gone, came close as he
looked about him and listened for the sound of his companion's returning
footsteps.
There was pleasure in the sensation, yet with it a perfectly
comprehensible alarm. And instinctively the thought stirred in him: "What
should I—could I, do—if anything happened and he did not come back—?"
They enjoyed their well-earned supper, eating untold quantities of fish,
and drinking unmilked tea strong enough to kill men who had not covered
thirty miles of hard "going," eating little on the way. And when it was over,
they smoked and told stories round the blazing fire, laughing, stretching
weary limbs, and discussing plans for the morrow. Défago was in excellent
spirits, though disappointed at having no signs of moose to report. But it
was dark and he had not gone far. The brulé, too, was bad. His clothes and
hands were smeared with charcoal. Simpson, watching him, realized with
renewed vividness their position—alone together in the wilderness.
"Défago," he said presently, "these woods, you know, are a bit too big to
feel quite at home in—to feel comfortable in, I mean!... Eh?" He merely
gave expression to the mood of the moment; he was hardly prepared for the
earnestness, the solemnity even, with which the guide took him up.
"You've hit it right, Simpson, boss," he replied, fixing his searching
brown eyes on his face, "and that's the truth, sure. There's no end to 'em—
no end at all." Then he added in a lowered tone as if to himself, "There's
lots found out that, and gone plumb to pieces!"
But the man's gravity of manner was not quite to the other's liking; it was
a little too suggestive for this scenery and setting; he was sorry he had
broached the subject. He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him
that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness,
when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that
they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death. And he had a
shrewd idea that his companion held something in sympathy with that queer
type. He led the conversation on to other topics, on to Hank and the doctor,
for instance, and the natural rivalry as to who should get the first sight of
moose.
"If they went doo west," observed Défago carelessly, "there's sixty miles
between us now—with ole Punk at halfway house eatin' himself full to
bustin' with fish and coffee." They laughed together over the picture. But
the casual mention of those sixty miles again made Simpson realize the
prodigious scale of this land where they hunted; sixty miles was a mere
step; two hundred little more than a step. Stories of lost hunters rose
persistently before his memory. The passion and mystery of homeless and
wandering men, seduced by the beauty of great forests, swept his soul in a
way too vivid to be quite pleasant. He wondered vaguely whether it was the
mood of his companion that invited the unwelcome suggestion with such
persistence.
"Sing us a song, Défago, if you're not too tired," he asked; "one of those
old voyageur songs you sang the other night." He handed his tobacco pouch
to the guide and then filled his own pipe, while the Canadian, nothing loth,
sent his light voice across the lake in one of those plaintive, almost
melancholy chanties with which lumbermen and trappers lessen the burden
of their labor. There was an appealing and romantic flavor about it,
something that recalled the atmosphere of the old pioneer days when
Indians and wilderness were leagued together, battles frequent, and the Old
Country farther off than it is today. The sound traveled pleasantly over the
water, but the forest at their backs seemed to swallow it down with a single
gulp that permitted neither echo nor resonance.
It was in the middle of the third verse that Simpson noticed something
unusual—something that brought his thoughts back with a rush from
faraway scenes. A curious change had come into the man's voice. Even
before he knew what it was, uneasiness caught him, and looking up quickly,
he saw that Défago, though still singing, was peering about him into the
Bush, as though he heard or saw something. His voice grew fainter—
dropped to a hush—then ceased altogether. The same instant, with a
movement amazingly alert, he started to his feet and stood upright—sniffing
the air. Like a dog scenting game, he drew the air into his nostrils in short,
sharp breaths, turning quickly as he did so in all directions, and finally
"pointing" down the lake shore, eastwards. It was a performance
unpleasantly suggestive and at the same time singularly dramatic.
Simpson's heart fluttered disagreeably as he watched it.
"Lord, man! How you made me jump!" he exclaimed, on his feet beside
him the same instant, and peering over his shoulder into the sea of darkness.
"What's up? Are you frightened—?"
Even before the question was out of his mouth he knew it was foolish, for
any man with a pair of eyes in his head could see that the Canadian had
turned white down to his very gills. Not even sunburn and the glare of the
fire could hide that.
The student felt himself trembling a little, weakish in the knees. "What's
up?" he repeated quickly. "D'you smell moose? Or anything queer, anything
—wrong?" He lowered his voice instinctively.
The forest pressed round them with its encircling wall; the nearer tree
stems gleamed like bronze in the firelight; beyond that—blackness, and, so
far as he could tell, a silence of death. Just behind them a passing puff of
wind lifted a single leaf, looked at it, then laid it softly down again without
disturbing the rest of the covey. It seemed as if a million invisible causes
had combined just to produce that single visible effect. Other life pulsed
about them—and was gone.
Défago turned abruptly; the livid hue of his face had turned to a dirty
grey.
"I never said I heered—or smelt—nuthin'," he said slowly and
emphatically, in an oddly altered voice that conveyed somehow a touch of
defiance. "I was only—takin' a look round—so to speak. It's always a
mistake to be too previous with yer questions." Then he added suddenly
with obvious effort, in his more natural voice, "Have you got the matches,
Boss Simpson?" and proceeded to light the pipe he had half filled just
before he began to sing.
Without speaking another word they sat down again by the fire. Défago
changing his side so that he could face the direction the wind came from.
For even a tenderfoot could tell that. Défago changed his position in order
to hear and smell—all there was to be heard and smelt. And, since he now
faced the lake with his back to the trees it was evidently nothing in the
forest that had sent so strange and sudden a warning to his marvelously
trained nerves.
"Guess now I don't feel like singing any," he explained presently of his
own accord. "That song kinder brings back memories that's troublesome to
me; I never oughter've begun it. It sets me on t' imagining things, see?"
Clearly the man was still fighting with some profoundly moving emotion.
He wished to excuse himself in the eyes of the other. But the explanation, in
that it was only a part of the truth, was a lie, and he knew perfectly well that
Simpson was not deceived by it. For nothing could explain away the livid
terror that had dropped over his face while he stood there sniffing the air.
And nothing—no amount of blazing fire, or chatting on ordinary subjects—
could make that camp exactly as it had been before. The shadow of an
unknown horror, naked if unguessed, that had flashed for an instant in the
face and gestures of the guide, had also communicated itself, vaguely and
therefore more potently, to his companion. The guide's visible efforts to
dissemble the truth only made things worse. Moreover, to add to the
younger man's uneasiness, was the difficulty, nay, the impossibility he felt
of asking questions, and also his complete ignorance as to the cause
...Indians, wild animals, forest fires—all these, he knew, were wholly out of
the question. His imagination searched vigorously, but in vain....

Yet, somehow or other, after another long spell of smoking, talking and
roasting themselves before the great fire, the shadow that had so suddenly
invaded their peaceful camp began to shift. Perhaps Défago's efforts, or the
return of his quiet and normal attitude accomplished this; perhaps Simpson
himself had exaggerated the affair out of all proportion to the truth; or
possibly the vigorous air of the wilderness brought its own powers of
healing. Whatever the cause, the feeling of immediate horror seemed to
have passed away as mysteriously as it had come, for nothing occurred to
feed it. Simpson began to feel that he had permitted himself the unreasoning
terror of a child. He put it down partly to a certain subconscious excitement
that this wild and immense scenery generated in his blood, partly to the
spell of solitude, and partly to overfatigue. That pallor in the guide's face
was, of course, uncommonly hard to explain, yet it might have been due in
some way to an effect of firelight, or his own imagination ...He gave it the
benefit of the doubt; he was Scotch.
When a somewhat unordinary emotion has disappeared, the mind always
finds a dozen ways of explaining away its causes ...Simpson lit a last pipe
and tried to laugh to himself. On getting home to Scotland it would make
quite a good story. He did not realize that this laughter was a sign that terror
still lurked in the recesses of his soul—that, in fact, it was merely one of the
conventional signs by which a man, seriously alarmed, tries to persuade
himself that he is not so.
Défago, however, heard that low laughter and looked up with surprise on
his face. The two men stood, side by side, kicking the embers about before
going to bed. It was ten o'clock—a late hour for hunters to be still awake.
"What's ticklin' yer?" he asked in his ordinary tone, yet gravely.
"I—I was thinking of our little toy woods at home, just at that moment,"
stammered Simpson, coming back to what really dominated his mind, and
startled by the question, "and comparing them to—to all this," and he swept
his arm round to indicate the Bush.
A pause followed in which neither of them said anything.
"All the same I wouldn't laugh about it, if I was you," Défago added,
looking over Simpson's shoulder into the shadows. "There's places in there
nobody won't never see into—nobody knows what lives in there either."
"Too big—too far off?" The suggestion in the guide's manner was
immense and horrible.
Défago nodded. The expression on his face was dark. He, too, felt
uneasy. The younger man understood that in a hinterland of this size there
might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be
known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a
loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide
lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a
dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something
he wanted to say, yet found it difficult to "get at."
 "Say, you, Boss Simpson," he began suddenly, as the last shower of
sparks went up into the air, "you don't—smell nothing, do you—nothing
pertickler, I mean?" The commonplace question, Simpson realized, veiled a
dreadfully serious thought in his mind. A shiver ran down his back.
"Nothing but burning wood," he replied firmly, kicking again at the
embers. The sound of his own foot made him start.
"And all the evenin' you ain't smelt—nothing?" persisted the guide,
peering at him through the gloom; "nothing extrordiny, and different to
anything else you ever smelt before?"
"No, no, man; nothing at all!" he replied aggressively, half angrily.
Défago's face cleared. "That's good!" he exclaimed with evident relief.
"That's good to hear."
"Have you?" asked Simpson sharply, and the same instant regretted the
question.
The Canadian came closer in the darkness. He shook his head. "I guess
not," he said, though without overwhelming conviction. "It must've been
just that song of mine that did it. It's the song they sing in lumber camps
and godforsaken places like that, when they're skeered the Wendigo's
somewhere around, doin' a bit of swift traveling.—"
"And what's the Wendigo, pray?" Simpson asked quickly, irritated
because again he could not prevent that sudden shiver of the nerves. He
knew that he was close upon the man's terror and the cause of it. Yet a
rushing passionate curiosity overcame his better judgment, and his fear.
Défago turned swiftly and looked at him as though he were suddenly
about to shriek. His eyes shone, but his mouth was wide open. Yet all he
said, or whispered rather, for his voice sank very low, was: "It's nuthin'—
nuthin' but what those lousy fellers believe when they've bin hittin' the
bottle too long—a sort of great animal that lives up yonder," he jerked his
head northwards, "quick as lightning in its tracks, an' bigger'n anything else
in the Bush, an' ain't supposed to be very good to look at—that's all!"
 "A backwoods superstition—" began Simpson, moving hastily toward
the tent in order to shake off the hand of the guide that clutched his arm.
"Come, come, hurry up for God's sake, and get the lantern going! It's time
we were in bed and asleep if we're going to be up with the sun tomorrow...."
The guide was close on his heels. "I'm coming," he answered out of the
darkness, "I'm coming." And after a slight delay he appeared with the
lantern and hung it from a nail in the front pole of the tent. The shadows of
a hundred trees shifted their places quickly as he did so, and when he
stumbled over the rope, diving swiftly inside, the whole tent trembled as
though a gust of wind struck it.
The two men lay down, without undressing, upon their beds of soft
balsam boughs, cunningly arranged. Inside, all was warm and cozy, but
outside the world of crowding trees pressed close about them, marshalling
their million shadows, and smothering the little tent that stood there like a
wee white shell facing the ocean of tremendous forest.
Between the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed another
shadow that was not a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast by the
strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly upon
Défago in the middle of his singing. And Simpson, as he lay there,
watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plunge
into the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profound
stillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs ... and when the night has
weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil about it.... Then
sleep took him....
 III

Thus, it seemed to him, at least. Yet it was true that the lap of the water,
just beyond the tent door, still beat time with his lessening pulses when he
realized that he was lying with his eyes open and that another sound had
recently introduced itself with cunning softness between the splash and
murmur of the little waves.
And, long before he understood what this sound was, it had stirred in him
the centers of pity and alarm. He listened intently, though at first in vain, for
the running blood beat all its drums too noisily in his ears. Did it come, he
wondered, from the lake, or from the woods?...
Then, suddenly, with a rush and a flutter of the heart, he knew that it was
close beside him in the tent; and, when he turned over for a better hearing, it
focused itself unmistakably not two feet away. It was a sound of weeping;
Défago upon his bed of branches was sobbing in the darkness as though his
heart would break, the blankets evidently stuffed against his mouth to stifle
it.
And his first feeling, before he could think or reflect, was the rush of a
poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid
the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully
incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of
what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic.... Then, of
course, with fuller realization, and the memory of what had gone before,
came the descent of the terror upon him, and his blood ran cold.
"Défago," he whispered quickly, "what's the matter?" He tried to make
his voice very gentle. "Are you in pain—unhappy—?" There was no reply,
but the sounds ceased abruptly. He stretched his hand out and touched him.
The body did not stir.
 "Are you awake?" for it occurred to him that the man was crying in his
sleep. "Are you cold?" He noticed that his feet, which were uncovered,
projected beyond the mouth of the tent. He spread an extra fold of his own
blankets over them. The guide had slipped down in his bed, and the
branches seemed to have been dragged with him. He was afraid to pull the
body back again, for fear of waking him.
One or two tentative questions he ventured softly, but though he waited
for several minutes there came no reply, nor any sign of movement.
Presently he heard his regular and quiet breathing, and putting his hand
again gently on the breast, felt the steady rise and fall beneath.
"Let me know if anything's wrong," he whispered, "or if I can do
anything. Wake me at once if you feel—queer."
He hardly knew what to say. He lay down again, thinking and wondering
what it all meant. Défago, of course, had been crying in his sleep. Some
dream or other had afflicted him. Yet never in his life would he forget that
pitiful sound of sobbing, and the feeling that the whole awful wilderness of
woods listened....
His own mind busied itself for a long time with the recent events, of
which this took its mysterious place as one, and though his reason
successfully argued away all unwelcome suggestions, a sensation of
uneasiness remained, resisting ejection, very deep-seated—peculiar beyond
ordinary.
 IV

But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. His thoughts
soon wandered again; he lay there, warm as toast, exceedingly weary; the
night soothed and comforted, blunting the edges of memory and alarm. Half
an hour later he was oblivious of everything in the outer world about him.
Yet sleep, in this case, was his great enemy, concealing all approaches,
smothering the warning of his nerves.
As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with
a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail accuses the
whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events that now
followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind somehow that
the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in the confusion,
and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest delusion. At the back of
the sleeper's mind something remains awake, ready to let slip the judgment.
"All this is not quite real; when you wake up you'll understand."
And thus, in a way, it was with Simpson. The events, not wholly
inexplicable or incredible in themselves, yet remain for the man who saw
and heard them a sequence of separate facts of cold horror, because the little
piece that might have made the puzzle clear lay concealed or overlooked.
So far as he can recall, it was a violent movement, running downwards
through the tent towards the door, that first woke him and made him aware
that his companion was sitting bolt upright beside him—quivering. Hours
must have passed, for it was the pale gleam of the dawn that revealed his
outline against the canvas. This time the man was not crying; he was
quaking like a leaf; the trembling he felt plainly through the blankets down
the entire length of his own body. Défago had huddled down against him
for protection, shrinking away from something that apparently concealed
itself near the door flaps of the little tent.
 Simpson thereupon called out in a loud voice some question or other—in
the first bewilderment of waking he does not remember exactly what—and
the man made no reply. The atmosphere and feeling of true nightmare lay
horribly about him, making movement and speech both difficult. At first,
indeed, he was not sure where he was—whether in one of the earlier camps,
or at home in his bed at Aberdeen. The sense of confusion was very
troubling.
And next—almost simultaneous with his waking, it seemed—the
profound stillness of the dawn outside was shattered by a most uncommon
sound. It came without warning, or audible approach; and it was
unspeakably dreadful. It was a voice, Simpson declares, possibly a human
voice; hoarse yet plaintive—a soft, roaring voice close outside the tent,
overhead rather than upon the ground, of immense volume, while in some
strange way most penetratingly and seductively sweet. It rang out, too, in
three separate and distinct notes, or cries, that bore in some odd fashion a
resemblance, farfetched yet recognizable, to the name of the guide: "Dé-fa-
go!"
The student admits he is unable to describe it quite intelligently, for it
was unlike any sound he had ever heard in his life, and combined a
blending of such contrary qualities. "A sort of windy, crying voice," he calls
it, "as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable power...."
And, even before it ceased, dropping back into the great gulfs of silence,
the guide beside him had sprung to his feet with an answering though
unintelligible cry. He blundered against the tent pole with violence, shaking
the whole structure, spreading his arms out frantically for more room, and
kicking his legs impetuously free of the clinging blankets. For a second,
perhaps two, he stood upright by the door, his outline dark against the pallor
of the dawn; then, with a furious, rushing speed, before his companion
could move a hand to stop him, he shot with a plunge through the flaps of
canvas—and was gone. And as he went—so astonishingly fast that the
voice could actually be heard dying in the distance—he called aloud in
tones of anguished terror that at the same time held something strangely
like the frenzied exultation of delight—
 "Oh! oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire! Oh! oh! This height
and fiery speed!"
And then the distance quickly buried it, and the deep silence of very early
morning descended upon the forest as before.
It had all come about with such rapidity that, but for the evidence of the
empty bed beside him, Simpson could almost have believed it to have been
the memory of a nightmare carried over from sleep. He still felt the warm
pressure of that vanished body against his side; there lay the twisted
blankets in a heap; the very tent yet trembled with the vehemence of the
impetuous departure. The strange words rang in his ears, as though he still
heard them in the distance—wild language of a suddenly stricken mind.
Moreover, it was not only the senses of sight and hearing that reported
uncommon things to his brain, for even while the man cried and ran, he had
become aware that a strange perfume, faint yet pungent, pervaded the
interior of the tent. And it was at this point, it seems, brought to himself by
the consciousness that his nostrils were taking this distressing odor down
into his throat, that he found his courage, sprang quickly to his feet—and
went out.
The grey light of dawn that dropped, cold and glimmering, between the
trees revealed the scene tolerably well. There stood the tent behind him,
soaked with dew; the dark ashes of the fire, still warm; the lake, white
beneath a coating of mist, the islands rising darkly out of it like objects
packed in wool; and patches of snow beyond among the clearer spaces of
the Bush—everything cold, still, waiting for the sun. But nowhere a sign of
the vanished guide—still, doubtless, flying at frantic speed through the
frozen woods. There was not even the sound of disappearing footsteps, nor
the echoes of the dying voice. He had gone—utterly.
There was nothing; nothing but the sense of his recent presence, so
strongly left behind about the camp; and—this penetrating, all-pervading
odor.
And even this was now rapidly disappearing in its turn. In spite of his
exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature,
and define it, but the ascertaining of an elusive scent, not recognized
subconsciously and at once, is a very subtle operation of the mind. And he
failed. It was gone before he could properly seize or name it. Approximate
description, even, seems to have been difficult, for it was unlike any smell
he knew. Acrid rather, not unlike the odor of a lion, he thinks, yet softer and
not wholly unpleasing, with something almost sweet in it that reminded him
of the scent of decaying garden leaves, earth, and the myriad, nameless
perfumes that make up the odor of a big forest. Yet the "odor of lions" is the
phrase with which he usually sums it all up.
Then—it was wholly gone, and he found himself standing by the ashes of
the fire in a state of amazement and stupid terror that left him the helpless
prey of anything that chose to happen. Had a muskrat poked its pointed
muzzle over a rock, or a squirrel scuttled in that instant down the bark of a
tree, he would most likely have collapsed without more ado and fainted. For
he felt about the whole affair the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror
... and his scattered powers had not as yet had time to collect themselves
into a definite attitude of fighting self-control.
Nothing did happen, however. A great kiss of wind ran softly through the
awakening forest, and a few maple leaves here and there rustled tremblingly
to earth. The sky seemed to grow suddenly much lighter. Simpson felt the
cool air upon his cheek and uncovered head; realized that he was shivering
with the cold; and, making a great effort, realized next that he was alone in
the Bush—and that he was called upon to take immediate steps to find and
succor his vanished companion.
Make an effort, accordingly, he did, though an ill-calculated and futile
one. With that wilderness of trees about him, the sheet of water cutting him
off behind, and the horror of that wild cry in his blood, he did what any
other inexperienced man would have done in similar bewilderment: he ran
about, without any sense of direction, like a frantic child, and called loudly
without ceasing the name of the guide:
"Défago! Défago! Défago!" he yelled, and the trees gave him back the
name as often as he shouted, only a little softened—"Défago! Défago!
Défago!"
He followed the trail that lay a short distance across the patches of snow,
and then lost it again where the trees grew too thickly for snow to lie. He
shouted till he was hoarse, and till the sound of his own voice in all that
unanswering and listening world began to frighten him. His confusion
increased in direct ratio to the violence of his efforts. His distress became
formidably acute, till at length his exertions defeated their own object, and
from sheer exhaustion he headed back to the camp again. It remains a
wonder that he ever found his way. It was with great difficulty, and only
after numberless false clues, that he at last saw the white tent between the
trees, and so reached safety.
Exhaustion then applied its own remedy, and he grew calmer. He made
the fire and breakfasted. Hot coffee and bacon put a little sense and
judgment into him again, and he realized that he had been behaving like a
boy. He now made another, and more successful attempt to face the
situation collectedly, and, a nature naturally plucky coming to his
assistance, he decided that he must first make as thorough a search as
possible, failing success in which, he must find his way into the home camp
as best he could and bring help.
And this was what he did. Taking food, matches and rifle with him, and a
small axe to blaze the trees against his return journey, he set forth. It was
eight o'clock when he started, the sun shining over the tops of the trees in a
sky without clouds. Pinned to a stake by the fire he left a note in case
Défago returned while he was away.
This time, according to a careful plan, he took a new direction, intending
to make a wide sweep that must sooner or later cut into indications of the
guide's trail; and, before he had gone a quarter of a mile he came across the
tracks of a large animal in the snow, and beside it the light and smaller
tracks of what were beyond question human feet—the feet of Défago. The
relief he at once experienced was natural, though brief; for at first sight he
saw in these tracks a simple explanation of the whole matter: these big
marks had surely been left by a bull moose that, wind against it, had
blundered upon the camp, and uttered its singular cry of warning and alarm
the moment its mistake was apparent. Défago, in whom the hunting instinct
was developed to the point of uncanny perfection, had scented the brute
coming down the wind hours before. His excitement and disappearance
were due, of course, to—to his—
 Then the impossible explanation at which he grasped faded, as common
sense showed him mercilessly that none of this was true. No guide, much
less a guide like Défago, could have acted in so irrational a way, going off
even without his rifle ...! The whole affair demanded a far more
complicated elucidation, when he remembered the details of it all—the cry
of terror, the amazing language, the grey face of horror when his nostrils
first caught the new odor; that muffled sobbing in the darkness, and—for
this, too, now came back to him dimly—the man's original aversion for this
particular bit of country....
Besides, now that he examined them closer, these were not the tracks of a
bull moose at all! Hank had explained to him the outline of a bull's hoofs, of
a cow's or calf's, too, for that matter; he had drawn them clearly on a strip of
birch bark. And these were wholly different. They were big, round, ample,
and with no pointed outline as of sharp hoofs. He wondered for a moment
whether bear tracks were like that. There was no other animal he could
think of, for caribou did not come so far south at this season, and, even if
they did, would leave hoof marks.
They were ominous signs—these mysterious writings left in the snow by
the unknown creature that had lured a human being away from safety—and
when he coupled them in his imagination with that haunting sound that
broke the stillness of the dawn, a momentary dizziness shook his mind,
distressing him again beyond belief. He felt the threatening aspect of it all.
And, stooping down to examine the marks more closely, he caught a faint
whiff of that sweet yet pungent odor that made him instantly straighten up
again, fighting a sensation almost of nausea.
Then his memory played him another evil trick. He suddenly recalled
those uncovered feet projecting beyond the edge of the tent, and the body's
appearance of having been dragged towards the opening; the man's
shrinking from something by the door when he woke later. The details now
beat against his trembling mind with concerted attack. They seemed to
gather in those deep spaces of the silent forest about him, where the host of
trees stood waiting, listening, watching to see what he would do. The woods
were closing round him.
 With the persistence of true pluck, however, Simpson went forward,
following the tracks as best he could, smothering these ugly emotions that
sought to weaken his will. He blazed innumerable trees as he went, ever
fearful of being unable to find the way back, and calling aloud at intervals
of a few seconds the name of the guide. The dull tapping of the axe upon
the massive trunks, and the unnatural accents of his own voice became at
length sounds that he even dreaded to make, dreaded to hear. For they drew
attention without ceasing to his presence and exact whereabouts, and if it
were really the case that something was hunting himself down in the same
way that he was hunting down another—
With a strong effort, he crushed the thought out the instant it rose. It was
the beginning, he realized, of a bewilderment utterly diabolical in kind that
would speedily destroy him.

Although the snow was not continuous, lying merely in shallow flurries
over the more open spaces, he found no difficulty in following the tracks for
the first few miles. They went straight as a ruled line wherever the trees
permitted. The stride soon began to increase in length, till it finally assumed
proportions that seemed absolutely impossible for any ordinary animal to
have made. Like huge flying leaps they became. One of these he measured,
and though he knew that "stretch" of eighteen feet must be somehow
wrong, he was at a complete loss to understand why he found no signs on
the snow between the extreme points. But what perplexed him even more,
making him feel his vision had gone utterly awry, was that Défago's stride
increased in the same manner, and finally covered the same incredible
distances. It looked as if the great beast had lifted him with it and carried
him across these astonishing intervals. Simpson, who was much longer in
the limb, found that he could not compass even half the stretch by taking a
running jump.
And the sight of these huge tracks, running side by side, silent evidence
of a dreadful journey in which terror or madness had urged to impossible
results, was profoundly moving. It shocked him in the secret depths of his
soul. It was the most horrible thing his eyes had ever looked upon. He
began to follow them mechanically, absentmindedly almost, ever peering
over his shoulder to see if he, too, were being followed by something with a
gigantic tread.... And soon it came about that he no longer quite realized
what it was they signified—these impressions left upon the snow by
something nameless and untamed, always accompanied by the footmarks of
the little French Canadian, his guide, his comrade, the man who had shared
his tent a few hours before, chatting, laughing, even singing by his side....
 V

For a man of his years and inexperience, only a canny Scot, perhaps,
grounded in common sense and established in logic, could have preserved
even that measure of balance that this youth somehow or other did manage
to preserve through the whole adventure. Otherwise, two things he
presently noticed, while forging pluckily ahead, must have sent him
headlong back to the comparative safety of his tent, instead of only making
his hands close more tightly upon the rifle stock, while his heart, trained for
the Wee Kirk, sent a wordless prayer winging its way to heaven. Both
tracks, he saw, had undergone a change, and this change, so far as it
concerned the footsteps of the man, was in some undecipherable manner—
appalling.
It was in the bigger tracks he first noticed this, and for a long time he
could not quite believe his eyes. Was it the blown leaves that produced odd
effects of light and shade, or that the dry snow, drifting like finely ground
rice about the edges, cast shadows and high lights? Or was it actually the
fact that the great marks had become faintly colored? For round about the
deep, plunging holes of the animal there now appeared a mysterious,
reddish tinge that was more like an effect of light than of anything that dyed
the substance of the snow itself. Every mark had it, and had it increasingly
—this indistinct fiery tinge that painted a new touch of ghastliness into the
picture.
But when, wholly unable to explain or to credit it, he turned his attention
to the other tracks to discover if they, too, bore similar witness, he noticed
that these had meanwhile undergone a change that was infinitely worse, and
charged with far more horrible suggestion. For, in the last hundred yards or
so, he saw that they had grown gradually into the semblance of the parent
tread. Imperceptibly the change had come about, yet unmistakably. It was
hard to see where the change first began. The result, however, was beyond
question. Smaller, neater, more cleanly modeled, they formed now an exact
and careful duplicate of the larger tracks beside them. The feet that
produced them had, therefore, also changed. And something in his mind
reared up with loathing and with terror as he saw it.
Simpson, for the first time, hesitated; then, ashamed of his alarm and
indecision, took a few hurried steps ahead; the next instant stopped dead in
his tracks. Immediately in front of him all signs of the trail ceased; both
tracks came to an abrupt end. On all sides, for a hundred yards and more, he
searched in vain for the least indication of their continuance. There was—
nothing.
The trees were very thick just there, big trees all of them, spruce, cedar,
hemlock; there was no underbrush. He stood, looking about him, all
distraught; bereft of any power of judgment. Then he set to work to search
again, and again, and yet again, but always with the same result: nothing.
The feet that printed the surface of the snow thus far had now, apparently,
left the ground!
And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of
terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with
deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had
been secretly dreading all the time that it would come—and come it did.
Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and
wailing, he heard the crying voice of Défago, the guide.
The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of
dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood
motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then
staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized hopelessly
in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering
and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied
itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden draught.
"Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire
...!" ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this voice of
anguish down the sky. Once it called—then silence through all the listening
wilderness of trees.
 And Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself
running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and
boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the
Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience
veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false
lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic
of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice—the Power of untamed
Distance—the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys. He knew in that
moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering
the lust and travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of Défago,
eternally hunted, driven and pursued across the skiey vastness of those
ancient forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts ...
It seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his
disorganized sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a
moment, and think ...
The cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response;
the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond recall
—and held him fast.

Yet he searched and called, it seems, for hours afterwards, for it was late
in the afternoon when at length he decided to abandon a useless pursuit and
return to his camp on the shores of Fifty Island Water. Even then he went
with reluctance, that crying voice still echoing in his ears. With difficulty he
found his rifle and the homeward trail. The concentration necessary to
follow the badly blazed trees, and a biting hunger that gnawed, helped to
keep his mind steady. Otherwise, he admits, the temporary aberration he
had suffered might have been prolonged to the point of positive disaster.
Gradually the ballast shifted back again, and he regained something that
approached his normal equilibrium.
But for all that the journey through the gathering dusk was miserably
haunted. He heard innumerable following footsteps; voices that laughed and
whispered; and saw figures crouching behind trees and boulders, making
signs to one another for a concerted attack the moment he had passed. The
creeping murmur of the wind made him start and listen. He went stealthily,
trying to hide where possible, and making as little sound as he could. The
shadows of the woods, hitherto protective or covering merely, had now
become menacing, challenging; and the pageantry in his frightened mind
masked a host of possibilities that were all the more ominous for being
obscure. The presentiment of a nameless doom lurked ill-concealed behind
every detail of what had happened.
It was really admirable how he emerged victor in the end; men of riper
powers and experience might have come through the ordeal with less
success. He had himself tolerably well in hand, all things considered, and
his plan of action proves it. Sleep being absolutely out of the question and
traveling an unknown trail in the darkness equally impracticable, he sat up
the whole of that night, rifle in hand, before a fire he never for a single
moment allowed to die down. The severity of the haunted vigil marked his
soul for life; but it was successfully accomplished; and with the very first
signs of dawn he set forth upon the long return journey to the home camp to
get help. As before, he left a written note to explain his absence, and to
indicate where he had left a plentiful cache of food and matches—though
he had no expectation that any human hands would find them!
How Simpson found his way alone by the lake and forest might well
make a story in itself, for to hear him tell it is to know the passionate
loneliness of soul that a man can feel when the Wilderness holds him in the
hollow of its illimitable hand—and laughs. It is also to admire his
indomitable pluck.
He claims no skill, declaring that he followed the almost invisible trail
mechanically, and without thinking. And this, doubtless, is the truth. He
relied upon the guiding of the unconscious mind, which is instinct. Perhaps,
too, some sense of orientation, known to animals and primitive men, may
have helped as well, for through all that tangled region he succeeded in
reaching the exact spot where Défago had hidden the canoe nearly three
days before with the remark, "Strike doo west across the lake into the sun to
find the camp."
There was not much sun left to guide him, but he used his compass to the
best of his ability, embarking in the frail craft for the last twelve miles of his
journey with a sensation of immense relief that the forest was at last behind
him. And, fortunately, the water was calm; he took his line across the center
of the lake instead of coasting round the shores for another twenty miles.
Fortunately, too, the other hunters were back. The light of their fires
furnished a steering point without which he might have searched all night
long for the actual position of the camp.
It was close upon midnight all the same when his canoe grated on the
sandy cove, and Hank, Punk and his uncle, disturbed in their sleep by his
cries, ran quickly down and helped a very exhausted and broken specimen
of Scotch humanity over the rocks toward a dying fire.
 VI

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.
 VII

A wall of silence wrapped them in, for the snow, though not thick, was
sufficient to deaden any noise, and the frost held things pretty tight besides.
No sound but their voices and the soft roar of the flames made itself heard.
Only, from time to time, something soft as the flutter of a pine moth's wings
went past them through the air. No one seemed anxious to go to bed. The
hours slipped towards midnight.
"The legend is picturesque enough," observed the doctor after one of the
longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to
say, "for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which
some natures hear to their own destruction."
"That's about it," Hank said presently. "An' there's no misunderstandin'
when you hear it. It calls you by name right 'nough."
Another pause followed. Then Dr. Cathcart came back to the forbidden
subject with a rush that made the others jump.
"The allegory is significant," he remarked, looking about him into the
darkness, "for the Voice, they say, resembles all the minor sounds of the
Bush—wind, falling water, cries of the animals, and so forth. And, once the
victim hears that—he's off for good, of course! His most vulnerable points,
moreover, are said to be the feet and the eyes; the feet, you see, for the lust
of wandering, and the eyes for the lust of beauty. The poor beggar goes at
such a dreadful speed that he bleeds beneath the eyes, and his feet burn."
Dr. Cathcart, as he spoke, continued to peer uneasily into the surrounding
gloom. His voice sank to a hushed tone.
"The Wendigo," he added, "is said to burn his feet—owing to the friction,
apparently caused by its tremendous velocity—till they drop off, and new
ones form exactly like its own."
 Simpson listened in horrified amazement; but it was the pallor on Hank's
face that fascinated him most. He would willingly have stopped his ears and
closed his eyes, had he dared.
"It don't always keep to the ground neither," came in Hank's slow, heavy
drawl, "for it goes so high that he thinks the stars have set him all a-fire. An'
it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the tops of the trees,
carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him jest as a fish hawk'll drop a
pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its food, of all the muck in the whole
Bush is—moss!" And he laughed a short, unnatural laugh. "It's a moss-
eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his
companions. "Moss-eater," he repeated, with a string of the most outlandish
oaths he could invent.
But Simpson now understood the true purpose of all this talk. What these
two men, each strong and "experienced" in his own way, dreaded more than
anything else was—silence. They were talking against time. They were also
talking against darkness, against the invasion of panic, against the
admission reflection might bring that they were in an enemy's country—
against anything, in fact, rather than allow their inmost thoughts to assume
control. He himself, already initiated by the awful vigil with terror, was
beyond both of them in this respect. He had reached the stage where he was
immune. But these two, the scoffing, analytical doctor, and the honest,
dogged backwoodsman, each sat trembling in the depths of his being.
Thus the hours passed; and thus, with lowered voices and a kind of taut
inner resistance of spirit, this little group of humanity sat in the jaws of the
wilderness and talked foolishly of the terrible and haunting legend. It was
an unequal contest, all things considered, for the wilderness had already the
advantage of first attack—and of a hostage. The fate of their comrade hung
over them with a steadily increasing weight of oppression that finally
became insupportable.
It was Hank, after a pause longer than the preceding ones that no one
seemed able to break, who first let loose all this pent-up emotion in very
unexpected fashion, by springing suddenly to his feet and letting out the
most ear-shattering yell imaginable into the night. He could not contain
himself any longer, it seemed. To make it carry even beyond an ordinary cry
he interrupted its rhythm by shaking the palm of his hand before his mouth.
"That's for Défago," he said, looking down at the other two with a queer,
defiant laugh, "for it's my belief"—the sandwiched oaths may be omitted
—"that my ole partner's not far from us at this very minute."
There was a vehemence and recklessness about his performance that
made Simpson, too, start to his feet in amazement, and betrayed even the
doctor into letting the pipe slip from between his lips. Hank's face was
ghastly, but Cathcart's showed a sudden weakness—a loosening of all his
faculties, as it were. Then a momentary anger blazed into his eyes, and he
too, though with deliberation born of habitual self-control, got upon his feet
and faced the excited guide. For this was unpermissible, foolish, dangerous,
and he meant to stop it in the bud.
What might have happened in the next minute or two one may speculate
about, yet never definitely know, for in the instant of profound silence that
followed Hank's roaring voice, and as though in answer to it, something
went past through the darkness of the sky overhead at terrific speed—
something of necessity very large, for it displaced much air, while down
between the trees there fell a faint and windy cry of a human voice, calling
in tones of indescribable anguish and appeal—
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire!"
White to the very edge of his shirt, Hank looked stupidly about him like a
child. Dr. Cathcart uttered some kind of unintelligible cry, turning as he did
so with an instinctive movement of blind terror towards the protection of
the tent, then halting in the act as though frozen. Simpson, alone of the
three, retained his presence of mind a little. His own horror was too deep to
allow of any immediate reaction. He had heard that cry before.
Turning to his stricken companions, he said almost calmly—
"That's exactly the cry I heard—the very words he used!"
Then, lifting his face to the sky, he cried aloud, "Défago, Défago! Come
down here to us! Come down—!"
 And before there was time for anybody to take definite action one way or
another, there came the sound of something dropping heavily between the
trees, striking the branches on the way down, and landing with a dreadful
thud upon the frozen earth below. The crash and thunder of it was really
terrific.
"That's him, s'help me the good Gawd!" came from Hank in a whispering
cry half choked, his hand going automatically toward the hunting knife in
his belt. "And he's coming! He's coming!" he added, with an irrational
laugh of horror, as the sounds of heavy footsteps crunching over the snow
became distinctly audible, approaching through the blackness towards the
circle of light.
And while the steps, with their stumbling motion, moved nearer and
nearer upon them, the three men stood round that fire, motionless and
dumb. Dr. Cathcart had the appearance of a man suddenly withered; even
his eyes did not move. Hank, suffering shockingly, seemed on the verge
again of violent action; yet did nothing. He, too, was hewn of stone. Like
stricken children they seemed. The picture was hideous. And, meanwhile,
their owner still invisible, the footsteps came closer, crunching the frozen
snow. It was endless—too prolonged to be quite real—this measured and
pitiless approach. It was accursed.
 VIII

Then at length the darkness, having thus laboriously conceived, brought

forth—a figure. It drew forward into the zone of uncertain light where fire
and shadows mingled, not ten feet away; then halted, staring at them
fixedly. The same instant it started forward again with the spasmodic
motion as of a thing moved by wires, and coming up closer to them, full
into the glare of the fire, they perceived then that—it was a man; and
apparently that this man was—Défago.
Something like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in that
moment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it as though
they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.
Défago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his way
straight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peered close
into the face of Simpson. The sound of a voice issued from his lips—
"Here I am, Boss Simpson. I heered someone calling me." It was a faint,
dried up voice, made wheezy and breathless as by immense exertion. "I'm
havin' a reg'lar hellfire kind of a trip, I am." And he laughed, thrusting his
head forward into the other's face.
But that laugh started the machinery of the group of waxwork figures
with the wax-white skins. Hank immediately sprang forward with a stream
of oaths so farfetched that Simpson did not recognize them as English at all,
but thought he had lapsed into Indian or some other lingo. He only realized
that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, was welcome—
uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly and leisurely,
advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.
Simpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those next
few seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peering at
such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses at first. He
merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained will of the older
men that forced them into action in defiance of all emotional stress. He
watched them moving as behind a glass that half destroyed their reality; it
was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through the torrent of Hank's meaningless
phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's tone of authority—hard and
forced—saying several things about food and warmth, blankets, whisky and
the rest ... and, further, that whiffs of that penetrating, unaccustomed odor,
vile yet sweetly bewildering, assailed his nostrils during all that followed.
It was no less a person than himself, however—less experienced and
adroit than the others though he was—who gave instinctive utterance to the
sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situation by
expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.
"It is—YOU, isn't it, Défago?" he asked under his breath, horror breaking
his speech.
And at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other had
time to move his lips. "Of course it is! Of course it is! Only—can't you see
—he's nearly dead with exhaustion, cold and terror! Isn't that enough to
change a man beyond all recognition?" It was said in order to convince
himself as much as to convince the others. The overemphasis alone proved
that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held a handkerchief to
his nose. That odor pervaded the whole camp.
For the "Défago" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets,
drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like
the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is like a
daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another generation.
Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that parody,
masquerading there in the firelight as Défago. From the ruins of the dark
and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the face was
more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong proportions,
the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjected to
extraordinary pressures and tensions. It made him think vaguely of those
bladder faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that change their
expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint and wailing
imitation of a voice. Both face and voice suggested some such abominable
resemblance. But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking to describe the
indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a face and body that had
been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmosphere being removed, the
entire structure threatened to fly asunder and become—incoherent....
It was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume of
emotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to a
head without much ado. He went off to a little distance from the fire,
apparently so that the light should not dazzle him too much, and shading his
eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that held anger
and affection dreadfully mingled:
"You ain't Défaygo! You ain't Défaygo at all! I don't give a—damn, but
that ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!" He glared upon the huddled
figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. "An' if it is I'll swab
the floor of hell with a wad of cotton wool on a toothpick, s'help me the
good Gawd!" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.
It was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one
possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear—because it was the truth. He
repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more outlandish than the last.
The woods rang with echoes. At one time it looked as if he meant to fling
himself upon "the intruder," for his hand continually jerked towards the
long hunting knife in his belt.
But in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself
very shortly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on the
ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go into the
tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was witnessed by him
from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face peeping through the
crack of the tent door flap.
Then Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept
his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and stood
opposite to the figure of Défago huddled over the fire. He looked him
squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.
"Défago, tell us what's happened—just a little, so that we can know how
best to help you?" he asked in a tone of authority, almost of command. And
at that point, it was command. At once afterwards, however, it changed in
quality, for the figure turned up to him a face so piteous, so terrible and so
little like humanity, that the doctor shrank back from him as from
something spiritually unclean. Simpson, watching close behind him, says he
got the impression of a mask that was on the verge of dropping off, and that
underneath they would discover something black and diabolical, revealed in
utter nakedness. "Out with it, man, out with it!" Cathcart cried, terror
running neck and neck with entreaty. "None of us can stand this much
longer ...!" It was the cry of instinct over reason.
And then "Défago," smiling whitely, answered in that thin and fading
voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another
character—
"I seen that great Wendigo thing," he whispered, sniffing the air about
him exactly like an animal. "I been with it too—"
Whether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart
would have continued the impossible cross examination cannot be known,
for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his
voice from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes. Such
a howling was never heard.
"His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed—feet!"
Défago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the first
time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet Simpson had no
time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And Hank has never
seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like that of a frightened tiger,
Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of blanket about his legs with
such speed that the young student caught little more than a passing glimpse
of something dark and oddly massed where moccasined feet ought to have
been, and saw even that but with uncertain vision.
Then, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even
think a question, much less ask it, Défago was standing upright in front of
them, balancing with pain and difficulty, and upon his shapeless and twisted
visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in the true sense,
monstrous.
 "Now you seen it too," he wheezed, "you seen my fiery, burning feet!
And now—that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent—it's 'bout time for
—"
His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was
like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook their
tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a blast. And
something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the little camp and
seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of time. Défago shook the
clinging blankets from his body, turned towards the woods behind, and with
the same stumbling motion that had brought him—was gone: gone, before
anyone could move muscle to prevent him, gone with an amazing,
blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The darkness positively
swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later, above the roar of the
swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind, all three men, watching and
listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry that seemed to drop down upon
them from a great height of sky and distance—
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.
Dr. Cathcart—suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the others—
was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to dash
headlong into the Bush.
"But I want ter know,—you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! That
ain't him at all, but some—devil that's shunted into his place ...!"
Somehow or other—he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished
it—he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,
apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed his
own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably. It
was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave him
most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a
condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him
upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was
possible under the circumstances.
 And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the
lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into the
folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height and fire
mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "People with
broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace towards the
camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit up and stare into
the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terrible in the wilderness
are—are the feet of them that—" until his uncle came across to change the
direction of his thoughts and comfort him.
The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just as
it cured Hank.
Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr. Cathcart
kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there were strange
flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul battled with his
will all through those silent hours. These were some of the outer signs ...
At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others, and
by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp—three
perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his
inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.
 IX

They talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common
things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that clamoured
for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank, being nearest to
primitive conditions, was the first to find himself, for he was also less
complex. In Dr. Cathcart "civilization" championed his forces against an
attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he is not quite sure of certain
things. Anyhow, he took longer to "find himself."
Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions
probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out
there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed
something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived
somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a
scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a
glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still
oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed,
the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn.
To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon "savage and
formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in
themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists."
With his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier
between the two types of mind made it difficult. Only once, years later,
something led them to the frontier of the subject—of a single detail of the
subject, rather—
"Can't you even tell me what—they were like?" he asked; and the reply,
though conceived in wisdom, was not encouraging, "It is far better you
should not try to know, or to find out."
"Well—that odour...?" persisted the nephew. "What do you make of
that?"
 Dr. Cathcart looked at him and raised his eyebrows.
"Odours," he replied, "are not so easy as sounds and sights of telepathic
communication. I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself."
He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations. That was all.

At the fall of day, cold, exhausted, famished, the party came to the end of
the long portage and dragged themselves into a camp that at first glimpse
seemed empty. Fire there was none, and no Punk came forward to welcome
them. The emotional capacity of all three was too over-spent to recognize
either surprise or annoyance; but the cry of spontaneous affection that burst
from the lips of Hank, as he rushed ahead of them towards the fire-place,
came probably as a warning that the end of the amazing affair was not quite
yet. And both Cathcart and his nephew confessed afterwards that when they
saw him kneel down in his excitement and embrace something that
reclined, gently moving, beside the extinguished ashes, they felt in their
very bones that this "something" would prove to be Défago—the true
Défago, returned.
And so, indeed, it was.
It is soon told. Exhausted to the point of emaciation, the French Canadian
—what was left of him, that is—fumbled among the ashes, trying to make a
fire. His body crouched there, the weak fingers obeying feebly the
instinctive habit of a lifetime with twigs and matches. But there was no
longer any mind to direct the simple operation. The mind had fled beyond
recall. And with it, too, had fled memory. Not only recent events, but all
previous life was a blank.
This time it was the real man, though incredibly and horribly shrunken.
On his face was no expression of any kind whatever—fear, welcome, or
recognition. He did not seem to know who it was that embraced him, or
who it was that fed, warmed and spoke to him the words of comfort and
relief. Forlorn and broken beyond all reach of human aid, the little man did
meekly as he was bidden. The "something" that had constituted him
"individual" had vanished for ever.
 In some ways it was more terribly moving than anything they had yet
seen—that idiot smile as he drew wads of coarse moss from his swollen
cheeks and told them that he was "a damned moss-eater"; the continued
vomiting of even the simplest food; and, worst of all, the piteous and
childish voice of complaint in which he told them that his feet pained him
—"burn like fire"—which was natural enough when Dr. Cathcart examined
them and found that both were dreadfully frozen. Beneath the eyes there
were faint indications of recent bleeding.
The details of how he survived the prolonged exposure, of where he had
been, or of how he covered the great distance from one camp to the other,
including an immense detour of the lake on foot since he had no canoe—all
this remains unknown. His memory had vanished completely. And before
the end of the winter whose beginning witnessed this strange occurrence,
Défago, bereft of mind, memory and soul, had gone with it. He lingered
only a few weeks.
And what Punk was able to contribute to the story throws no further light
upon it. He was cleaning fish by the lake shore about five o'clock in the
evening—an hour, that is, before the search party returned—when he saw
this shadow of the guide picking its way weakly into camp. In advance of
him, he declares, came the faint whiff of a certain singular odour.
That same instant old Punk started for home. He covered the entire
journey of three days as only Indian blood could have covered it. The terror
of a whole race drove him. He knew what it all meant. Défago had "seen the
Wendigo."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wendigo, by Algernon Blackwood

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WENDIGO ***

***** This file should be named 10897-h.htm or 10897-h.zip *****

This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/8/9/10897/

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Dave Morgan and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.

*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm

electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm

electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived

from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted

with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm

License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any

money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm

electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable

effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right

of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a

defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of

electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive

Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit

501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.

Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at https://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:

Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
gbnewby@pglaf.org

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg

Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide

spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit https://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we

have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic

works.

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm

concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed

editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's

eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
compressed (zipped), HTML and others.

Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
the old filename and etext number. The replaced older file is renamed.
VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
new filenames and etext numbers.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

https://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
are filed in directories based on their release date. If you want to
download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
download by the etext year.

https://www.gutenberg.org/etext06

(Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,

98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)

EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
filed in a different way. The year of a release date is no longer part
of the directory path. The path is based on the etext number (which is
identical to the filename). The path to the file is made up of single
digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename. For
example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:

https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/2/3/10234

or filename 24689 would be found at:

https://www.gutenberg.org/2/4/6/8/24689

An alternative method of locating eBooks:

https://www.gutenberg.org/GUTINDEX.ALL