Edgewise (26 page)

“We need to know if anybody ever caught one,” said Shooks.

“
Caught
one? Why would you want to know that?”

“Because
we
need to catch one,” Lily explained. “We need to catch it, and we need to kill it . . . or send it back to wherever it comes from—or whatever you have to do to rid yourself of a Wendigo.

“You're a woman and you're white. Catching Wendigos—that's not something that you should be getting yourself involved in.”

“I don't have a choice. If I don't kill the Wendigo first, then the Wendigo is going to kill me—and my children, and my parents, and maybe my friends, too.”

Shooks said, “Lily made a deal with George Iron Walker . . . he raised the Wendigo to help find her children when her ex-husband took them away.”

“George Iron Walker? There's a man I'd keep a good distance away from. What happened?”

“I couldn't keep my side of the bargain,” said Lily. “I promised him a piece of land at Mystery Lake, but I couldn't get the title to it. I offered him anything else instead—money, another piece of land—but he insisted. He's given me till sundown tomorrow.”

Thomas Bear Robe took a crumpled pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it with a trembling hand. “George Iron Walker isn't everything that he appears to be. Talks like a modern entre-prenewer, when you first meet him. Very smooth, very friendly, all charm and white teeth. But he has a dark side to him, that one. An
old
side. His family goes back a long, long way, to the days when men and animals could talk to each other, and whole forests could move overnight.”

“We still have to catch and kill the Wendigo,” said Lily. “I tried to leave the country . . . I was going to take my children to Europe. But it wouldn't let us. It came after us when we were driving to the airport.”

“It'll come after you no matter where you go,” said Thomas Bear Robe. He sounded completely unsurprised. “Once a Wendigo's looking for you, there's no escaping it, ever.”

He blew smoke out of his nostrils, and then he said, “There are so many different stories about the Wendigo, and most of them are not true—or only half-true. But let me tell you something for certain: the Wendigo is a spirit of the woods. And anything that lives in the woods, or is
of
the woods—whether it's a man or an animal or a spirit or a tree, or any mixture of any of those four—has one common enemy. One thing that terrifies them above all things.
Fire.
”

“But I thought that the Wendigo were actually supposed to
cause
fires,” said Lily. “Don't they swoop down and snatch hold of people and make them run so fast that their feet burst into flame?”

“That's right,” said Shooks. “It's all in that Algernon Blackwood story, isn't it?
‘Oh, my poor feet of fire!'
And they leave a trail of burning grass and trees, all the way through the forest, for miles.”

“That's where Algernon Blackwood got it ass-about-face,” said Thomas Bear Robe. “When he was researching that story, he talked to some senile old Ojibwe up at Mille Lacs, who couldn't remember half of the tribal legends, and the ones that he could remember he was too drunk to remember straight. Apart from which, he talked to Black-wood in Ojibwe, which was translated for him by some nine-year-old kid.

“Like I told you, the Wendigo is afraid of fire. About the only thing it
is
frightened of. Not only is it a tree spirit, with a close physical kinship to wood and leaves, it exists in a highly volatile state between this world and the world beside us. Two dimensions
here
, a third dimension
there
. . . so it's almost like a vapor. That's how it can slide into your house without even opening the door.

“But if you can catch hold of the Wendigo, and hogtie it, and drag it along the ground, it'll catch alight eventually, and burn, and it won't stop burning, and all the water in all Minnesota's ten thousand lakes won't put it out.”

Shooks thought about this, and sniffed. “So . . . what you're telling us is, that's the mistake that Algernon Blackwood made. It wouldn't have been the
guide
, burning like that. It would have been a Wendigo.”

“That's right.”

“And you know this for sure? I mean, there are reliable eyewitness accounts of Wendigos being offed like that?”

“No. But a chief called Red Thunder, who lived around the late 1660s, claimed he killed a Wendigo up near Fond du Lac someplace, and his account of that was written down by a French fur trader. And the story goes that a Wendigo was caught and killed in the Koochiching Forest in the 1880s.”

“Oh, yes? What happened then?”

“Well, it seems that there were two trappers, one by the name of Renville and the other by the name of Giddings. They were deep in the forest when they accidentally shot an Ojibwe boy mistaking him for a deer. The boy's father was so angry that he went to the tribal medicine woman and had her send a Wendigo after them.

“Renville and Giddings were tracked down by the Wendigo and it attacked them when they were sitting by their campfire. Of course it approached them edgewise and they couldn't see it coming. Giddings was torn open on the spot, clear back to his spine—but Renville held the Wendigo off with a burning brand, and managed to get a rope around it, and bring it down to the ground, and lash its arms. Then he got on his horse and rode through the forest dragging the Wendigo behind him.

“Now a Wendigo can run as fast as the fastest man, and when it isn't tethered it can fly above the treetops, but Renville rode that horse flat out and the Wendigo couldn't keep up with him. After three or four miles the Wendigo's feet caught fire, and it started to blaze, and there was Renville riding hell-for-leather through the forest with this fiery apparition running after him.

“Then the Wendigo fell apart, and lay there burning, until there was nothing left but silvery ash. And that is the only known account of a Wendigo being caught and destroyed in what you might call modern times.”

“This Renville got a rope around it, and tied its arms?” asked Lily. “How on earth did he manage to do that?”

“That's one of the questions that I was asking myself, too,” said Shooks. “All the Wendigo had to do was turn sideways, and he wouldn't have been able to
see
it, let alone tie it up. And I was also saying to myself, if
I
was deep in the forest and I had a drunken dispute with my companion and accidentally or purposefully killed him, how would I explain it? Nothing like blaming a Native American forest demon, wouldn't you say, of which there is now no trace, except for some ash?”

Thomas Bear Robe shrugged. “You can either believe it or not believe it.”

“Are these the only accounts you know of?” Lily asked him.

“Of course not. Many tribal legends tell of similar encounters with Wendigos, but they were passed down by word of mouth, and all of them fancifully elaborated with each telling, the way these legends are.

“All I can tell you is that every legend and every story is in agreement when it comes to
how
to kill a Wendigo. You tie it up, you drag it behind your horse, and you keep going until it bursts into flame—praying all the time that it doesn't catch up with you before it does.”

They drove back to Lily's house. Tasha and Sammy had gone out snowboarding with their friends the Lutmeyers from across the street, and so Lily and Shooks had some time to themselves.

Lily poured Shooks a whiskey. He knocked it back, and then he shook his head. “I'm too damned old for this, Lily. Too damned tired and too damned drunk.”

She poured him another one. He looked into the glass and said, “All the same, I'm going to do it. I got you into this fuckup. It's my duty to get you out.”

They sat down together at the kitchen table. “How do you suggest we go about it?” Lily asked him.

“Well . . . you have a power winch on the back of your SUV, don't you? We can pay some wire out, and make a loop of it on the ground, and hide it with snow. Then we set fire to the woods. When the Wendigo comes out, one of us is going to have to stand there and act as bait. A Judas goat.

“As soon as the Wendigo steps into the loop, you put your foot down and drive like hell.”

“That sounds to me like
you're
volunteering to act as bait.”

“I'm a lot older than you, Lily—a whole lot more wore out. And I don't have two kids to take care of.”

He leaned back in his chair. “All the same, I won't pretend that this won't be highly goddamned risky for you too. Anything goes wrong—you hit a tree or something—and you're royally screwed. And who knows?—the Wendigo might run faster'n that truck of yours can travel, and catch up with you. Those stories that Thomas Bear Robe told us . . . they were passed on by people who survived. How many others
didn't
?”

Lily looked around the kitchen. On the dresser stood a large color photograph of the three of them—Tasha and Sammy and her—all dressed up in their best clothes for Tasha's last birthday. Shooks saw where she was looking, and reached across the table and laid his hand on top of hers. He had a heavy silver ring on his wedding finger, with a human skull on it.

“Let's do it,” said Lily. “I'll go over to Marjorie Lutmeyer's and see if she can look after Tasha and Sammy for a few hours longer.”

“You're sure?”

“I don't have any alternative, do I?”

“You realize—if something goes wrong—those kids might never see you again?”

Lily looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing. Then she nodded, and whispered, “Yes.”

They both dressed up warmly. Lily put on her thick black padded jacket with the nylon fur hood, and she gave Shooks an old windbreaker that Jeff used to wear when he went snowmobiling, and a green woolly hat.

They went outside and checked the power winch in the back of Lily's Rainier. It was installed under the rear bumper, with a wire cable that could pull 2,500 pounds without breaking. Most of her friends and neighbors had one, to rescue anybody who might have skidded off the highway in the middle of winter.

She opened up the garage and Shooks carried out a five-gallon can of gasoline, which he loaded into the back of the SUV. At about four-fifteen they were ready to leave.

“Do you have a gun?” Lily asked Shooks as she steered out of the driveway.

“Sure I do. But I can't say that I'm America's greatest shot. And what good is a gun going to do us against the Wendigo?”

“I wasn't thinking about the Wendigo.”

“Oh, you were thinking about George.”

“When we've gotten rid of the Wendigo, I want George and Hazawin to help me find little William for me, wherever he is. I just wanted to make sure that we had the wherewithal to persuade them, if we need to.”

“You bet. When I point my gun at people—believe me, they're persuaded. I think it's the wildly shaking barrel that does it.”

The sky was so dark that it could have been midnight. As they drove south-westward out of the suburbs, however, a diagonal streak of reddish light appeared over Black Crow Valley, almost as if a wound had opened up, and the clouds had started to bleed.

“Red sky at night . . . Isn't there a saying about that?” said Lily.

“Sure. Something to do with staying at home, burying yourself under the bedcovers, and not annoying Native American spirits with a penchant for tearing people open.”

They turned off on to the track that led past the forest toward George Iron Walker's house. They jolted and bumped through the crimson-tinted gloom, with Shooks softly whistling “Hotel California” between his teeth:
“You can check in any time you like . . . but you can never leave . . .”

At last they saw the lights of George Iron Walker's house over the ridge. Shooks said, “Turn off here, up the hill a ways. We don't want him to know that we're here. Not yet, anyhow. He's going to, soon enough, when we start our little bonfire.”

Lily drove the Rainier up the slope at a sharp angle, as near to the trees as she could. Then she made a three-point turn, so that the SUV was facing back the way they had come. Even though she had snow-chains on her tires, they whirred and slithered on the snowy ground, but at last she managed it.

John Shooks climbed out and walked around to the back of the vehicle while Lily pressed the button that paid out the winch cable. He laid the cable in a ten-foot circle on the ground—fastening it with a running cleat so that when it was sharply pulled, it would tighten up like a slip-knot. Then he took out Lily's shovel and carefully covered it with snow.

Lily got out of the Rainier and went up to him.

“Listen,” he said. “They say that it's silent in the woods. But just listen.”

Lily could hear the soft rattling of branches, and the fluttering of birds, and all kinds of crackling and pattering noises. And, very faintly, she could hear music from George Iron Walker's house—a samba, which was so incongruous that it made her shiver.

“Want to dance?” asked Shooks, though he wasn't smiling.

“I think we'd better just get on with it,” said Lily.

“Okay . . . you get back in the truck. Keep the motor running. I'll torch the woods, and then all we can do is wait for the Wendigo to show up. That's if it
does
show up, but I got a feeling in my water about this. This is where it lives . . . this is where it hangs out. If we threaten its natural habitat, it's going to come after us.”

“I'm really worried about little William. The Wendigo has him here someplace. I don't want him to get hurt.”

“Lily, I really don't know. I don't understand this other-reality stuff any more than you do.” He hefted the gasoline can out of the back of the SUV and levered open the cap.