Over the Darkened Landscape (24 page)

“Can you find someone else and bring him here?” asked Thomson. “Does it work that way?”

Mac stared at the oncoming monster for a few seconds. Then he turned to Thomson. “I can try. Who am I looking for?”

“Big Goose.”

“A
what?
”

“Not a what, a who. I don’t know his Ojibway name, but he was a shaman, a medicine man, a long time ago.” Thomson spun the paddle in his hand and hefted it, ready to swing at the giant monster when it came into range.

“What can this Big Goose do for us?” I asked.

“When he faced the Windigo he was turned into Missahba the giant, and defeated the beast.” The Windigo was no more than a half-dozen steps away from us now.

“Great,” muttered Mac. He mopped at the sweat rising on his forehead with a handkerchief from his pocket, his skin smearing into a new series of patterns. “So I get to go digging for a medicine man who may not speak any English so that he can come and turn into a giant and defeat the monster, all before this Windigo gets to us.” His voice rose as he spoke, near hysteria by the end.

“Mac!” I barked. “Just try to find the Big Goose!” I jumped forward and bit the Windigo’s foot, and at the same time Thomson swung his paddle through the air, connected with a solid thunk on the creature’s forearm. It roared in response and slowly kicked at me, but I easily jumped out of the way.

Thomson hit the Windigo again, and this time it struck out and hit him in return. He stumbled back, his feet splashing through the shallows of the lake. “Hurry up, Mac!” I shouted.

“I’m trying, Pat, I’m trying, but nobody’s answer . . .” Mac’s voice trailed off, and the Windigo raised an arm, now close enough to strike him.

I bared my teeth and prepared to jump again, but a powerful new voice stopped me dead in my tracks. “Wetikoh! The Great Manitou helped me strike you down once before. Today he will help me do so again!”

I turned and looked, up and up and up. Mac was still there, but he was huge now, a giant every bit as big as the Wendigo. The voice wasn’t his, but it came from his mouth. He reached across and grabbed the creature by the throat; it let out a strangled cry and fought back, scoring lines in Mac’s body, but it seemed to my colourless eyes that he didn’t bleed, that instead the paint just furrowed and ran. He cried out and let go of its throat and it immediately leaned its head forward, striving to bite Mac, to eat his flesh.

“Tom!” I yelled. “We need to help!”

“I’m on it, pup!” Thomson called back. He ran from the water and pulled a book of matches and something that looked like a cross between a spatula and knife from his pocket. He knelt on the beach and, using the spatula, pulled portions of painted shore and plant together and built an enormous bonfire, which lit up with one spark of a match.

“Missahba!” he called. “Big Goose! Into the fire now!”

Mac—Missahba, Big Goose, whatever he was called right then—looked down and grinned, slapped the Wendigo’s head away just before it had reached his throat, then pushed it down towards the fire. “Your heart of ice will melt, Wetikoh, and the stone of your body will be destroyed.”

The Wendigo howled one more time, and then its body made contact with the fire, flames roaring higher and higher. The stone of its body cracked and popped, and within seconds steam hissed from the cracks as its heart of ice disappeared into the air. It made one more attempt to lash out, this time swinging at Tom, but he stepped back and took the spatula—something that Mac later told me was a palette knife—and worked away at what remained of the creature, scraped at it and rubbed its stone colours in until the paint of its body was a part of our surroundings.

“Thanks,” said Thomson, looking up at the still-giant Mac. “Without you and Missahba the giant, shaman, I don’t know if we could have stopped the Wendigo.”

“You did much of this, fire builder,” said Big Goose. As he spoke, Mac shrank back to regular size, the excess paint spilling off and mixing with the background. “Medicine man,” he said, now speaking to Mac from Mac’s own body, “you may return me to the lands of my fathers.”

Mac blinked in surprise. “Medicine man? Me?” He smiled, and then closed his eyes. I could sense the change as Big Goose returned to his own afterlife, and once more it was Tom Thomson’s painting alone, with Mac and me as guests.

Thomson took his palette knife and put out the fire, painted it and the remains of the Wendigo away, mixed them in with the shore and the woods. Then he took the palette knife to Mac’s body and repaired the scratches and cuts that the beast had made. After he had done that he shook Mac’s hand again and then reached over and scratched me behind the ears. “You both have my thanks,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to make your way into here, but you saved me. Uncommon bravery, Pat, attacking the Wendigo like that.” He patted me on the head again, and I winced.

“And without you, Mac, Big Goose would never have known to come.”

Mac lifted me into his arms, prepared to leave. “What about you, Tom? Where do you go from here?”

Thomson reached down to a patch of gravel on the shore and picked up his corncob pipe. It had been stepped on, but instead of breaking it had spread into the paint of the shore, but with a few deft moves of his fingers he once again had a working pipe. He lit it, and after sending up some slow, twisting puffs of smoke, he smiled. “Why would I want to go anywhere? Canoe Lake was always my idea of heaven, and everything around you,” here he waved at the surrounding landscape, “was my idea.” He next picked up the paddle, pushed off the canoe and floated out onto the lake. Before he was too far away, he turned and shouted, “Be sure you tell Jim to take good care of this painting! I’d hate to have to leave!” And after one last wave he paddled off towards a horizon that had suddenly leapt forward.

We both took one last look at Thomson’s rendition of creation, watched as it transferred itself from part of our world to a flat painting in front of our eyes. Mac set me down on the floor, and with a smile and a wink he pointed down to one corner, on the sand by the lake.

I stared closely for a second before I saw them: dog tracks, leading off into the bush.

Ancients of the Earth

T
hrough the frozen streets of Dawson, Samuel runs from two cavemen.

They’re well-dressed, these cavemen, one of them even in tie and tails. But their hair is long and scraggly, and Samuel would almost swear that their brows slightly protrude; aside from the already out-of-place fancy dress, a neanderthalian version of your typical northerner, not at all worried about the niceties of polite society, here at the ass end of the nineteenth century.

Except that most northerners, even trappers and prospectors who spend almost all of their time alone in the bush, can speak in more than grunts and gibberish, and Samuel doubts even the most ruthless of them would be so keen to smash in his skull.

It is late in the evening, and the temperature is most certainly below minus twenty. Samuel rounds a corner, skidding on packed snow and patches of ice, but he retains his balance. Down an alley to his right he catches a glimpse of two more, one a cavewoman, resplendent in a glittering evening gown, which is up around her waist as the male apparently has his way with her from behind. They both yell inarticulately as Samuel passes them by but do not break off their primeval assignation.

Another yell tells him the first two cavemen are back on his trail.

He rounds another corner, and the door to a dilapidated cabin swings open. From the blackness within a voice quietly calls to him. “Quickly! Inside!”

Samuel does as he is bid, and the door closes behind him. It is darker inside than out; he can see nothing, but outside, over the pounding of the blood in his temples, he hears the footsteps of the two cavemen going past and strains to listen as they fade into the distance.

He hears his rescuer stand and shuffle over to the window. In the sliver of light allowed in from outside, he can see now who it is. “How’d you get here?” he asks.

She puts a finger to her lips and holds up her other hand, and pretty soon two more sets of footsteps go running by, accompanied by words in a guttural, prehistoric tongue. When they’re gone she sits on the floor beside him. “They saw me when they first arrived, but I don’t think they’re after me. Still, I came here to stay safe until they’re gone.”

Samuel frowns. “How do you get to be so lucky? The moment they saw me I could see they wanted to get all over me like sled dogs on a bone.”

She takes his hand and feels at the makeshift bandage he still has wrapped there. “I think you know.”

Twenty-Two Days Earlier

Two miners managed to melt and dig their way through a patch of permafrost at the bottom of a stub of a cliff, and there they found the remains of a strange and large creature. News spread round the town, and soon a gaggle of onlookers stood in the mud surrounding the site, watching as the still-frozen remains were dug up.

Once the creature was finally completely disinterred from its grave of ice and soil, several of the bystanders allowed that they thought it looked something like an elephant. Perhaps a circus had come through town, one time long before anyone there could remember, and one of the beasts had passed on and been taken out onto the bush and pitched over the edge of the cliff and then had somehow been missed by the wolves and crows until it had finally been swallowed by the frozen earth.

No, by consensus that didn’t seem at all likely.

Standing in the cold wind, staring down at the remains of an alien creature that looked as if it could have died just yesterday, one of the miners had the idea to fetch Samuel. He was book smart, was Samuel, a former schoolteacher who’d come north to make his fortune in a fashion that involved as few personal ties and relationships as possible.

Unlike the miners who had discovered the creature, when the gold rush had petered out Samuel had given up on his stake and settled into his one-room cabin, writing the odd dispatch for the local rag and tutoring ill-lettered prospectors in exchange for flakes of gold dust or odd fossils that they felt had no value. Once Fanny Alice had even given him a molar from what Samuel assumed was a mammoth, one that she’d been given by a customer, and that tooth—larger than his fist, yellowed and dirty and well-worn from an apparently long life of grinding down vegetation—held a special place of pride in his small collection. She had told him that it had special “properties,” but he had dismissed that as exaggeration.

It so happened that Samuel was just bidding farewell to one of his students—scraggly and unkempt, smelling of tallow and burnt caribou flesh, as they all did—when a small crowd seemed to spontaneously form on the icy patch of road beside his sagging gray front stoop. He blinked in surprise at the sight of so many people, wondering if perhaps he’d drunkenly promised a group lesson the other night while consuming his self-assigned monthly allotment of alcohol.

“We need you to come see somethin’, Samuel,” said a trapper named Ozark who had a line not too far from town and who would come into town for drinks himself. “Mick and Temple come up with some strange creature while they was diggin’ at their claim, and we figure you’re the man who can tell us what the hell it is.”

Samuel scratched his head. “A creature, you say. How do you mean, like a bear or something?”

“Nope,” said Fanny Alice, who was out pretty early in the day considering the line of work she was in. “Bigger than that. Looks somethin’ like a smaller version of Jumbo the elephant.”

It turned out to not be an elephant. At least, not exactly.

The creature was still young, that much was apparent. Not just the fact that it was only about five feet tall at the shoulder, but also that there was something ineffably youthful about its appearance, like how a puppy could easily be distinguished from an adult dog. Excepting, of course, that this creature was not actually a dog.

It had a trunk, just like an elephant, but its ears were small and its tusks were still just ivory nubs, and it was covered with thick reddish-brown fur. It lay on its side in the partially frozen mud, and Samuel could see that a puddle was beginning to form below its belly as it thawed in the weak mid-day sun, which was soon to disappear behind the small overhang immediately behind Samuel.

After a moment or two of searching, Samuel found his voice. “That’s no elephant,” he said, and he jumped down into the mud beside the beast. “It’s a woolly mammoth.” He grinned up at Fanny Alice. “A young one probably of the same type as the one that tooth you gave me last year came from.”

“A woolly what?” asked one of the miners.

“Mammoth,” said Samuel. “Probably an ancestor or distant cousin of the elephant, from many—many—thousands of years ago.” He looked back down at the animal’s corpse. “Maybe even longer.”

“An antediluvian beast somehow washed up on our frozen and landlocked shores,” said Pete Marliss, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Pete was a town councilman, a large and florid man with a full thatch of white hair and an equally white and bristly beard. He was also a local hotelier as well as a lapsed Presbyterian minister who still sometimes exhibited signs of that faith. “Certainly anything older than the time of Noah is, of course, impossible. It seems obvious to me that this poor unfortunate beast was unlucky enough to step off the edge of the ark one unfortunate night, perhaps as the result of a stumble when the vessel bumped up against an iceberg. Its poor mate likely spent the rest of its days alone and despondent, aware that she was the last of her kind.”

Samuel glared at Pete for a moment, astonished by his delusional line of reasoning, but after searching for the right words he finally shrugged in response. He knew from tired experience that there was no sense in stepping into an argument with Pete. Instead, he turned his attention back to the baby mammoth and put his hand on its shaggy coat and instantly felt the shock of ages drift past and run up through his arm and through his body, grappling with his memories all the way. For a fraction of a second he saw and smelled a different world, enormous stretches of gleaming white punctuated by small oases of green, and then he felt himself stumble as a dreadful pain lanced into his right side.