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Rated M
by Bookofshadows
Tags   supernatural   horror   | Report Content

A A A A

I sit here in my old, creaking office chair and write this with a heavy heart - my Uncle Henry passed on this morning, at 10:05 AM exactly. He was a good man, Henry was. I'll always remember him as an easy-going pillar of familiar stability in my childhood - and he was always there to lend an ear and some country wisdom in my later years, when childhood had long since become a shadow of the present, and life's follies and pitfalls had become more serious in their outcome. I can picture him now, standing outside the old red barn in behind the farmhouse, hands jammed deep into the pockets of his faded khaki pants and a slanted smile on his lean, weathered face.
 
The service is on Saturday, at the very same church where Gramps and Grandma used to drag the family to on Sundays. He wasn't a religious man in life, but I know that he'd want a church service - not to satisfy his own wishes, but for the others, the older members of our dwindling family who were raised in terror of the Romanian Lutheran church. He'd know that it would settle their fears of their own looming mortality to see his remains consecrated in the manner that their version of God deemed as being right and proper. I can almost hear him now, sitting in his hand-made, bench-seat rocking chair and grinning up at me through the haze of smoke from his Player's Unfiltered; "What the fuck do I care?" he'd laugh, "I'm dead. Let them watch their preacher do his song-and-dance routine over my corpse, why not? If it makes them feel better, then no harm done."
Old Henry, dead at eighty-four of a stroke, the big brother of the previous stroke which had left the poor guy wheelchair-bound for over a year before his death. After the first one, he had to leave the farm and take up permanent residence at the old folk's home outside of town. Although he hadn't lost any of his mental faculties when the initial stroke had felled him in his study, Henry just wasn't the same when he was in that nursing home. You could see it in his eyes, and hear it in his quavering voice. Hell, you could feel it ... there was no vitality left. There were no more stories and jokes while Henry was there; just polite, strained conversation about the various mundane affairs of day-to-day life. These visits always left me feeling pretty depressed, and I hope that Henry is happier now, wherever he may be.
 
In honor of his memory, I'd like to retell a story that Henry had shared with me over a case of beer, while sitting around and shooting the shit on a hot summer's afternoon. It got under my skin then, and it still does to this very day. Stories like this makes me wonder, sometimes, about how much we really know about the natural world around us. The deep woods are much like the primordial forest of the human psyche - both are dense with gloom and shadows ... who's to say what might lurk in their inky depths?
 
It was a year and a half ago, and we were right in the middle of a long, humid Elgin County summer. I remember that we were hiding in the shade of the big oak that dominates his side-yard, sitting on large wooden recliners that Henry had made himself long ago, back in a year when the Beatles were not yet even a rumor over on this side of the pond. We were drinking a few cold beers and discussing all the world and everything in it - just pissing away a Sunday afternoon. The discussion had veered, as it sometimes did with Henry, into the realm of the very strange. He had just finished telling me about the UFO that he'd seen back in '55, "right over that fuckin' meadow down the valley in front of us. Just hovered there like it was on a goddamn string, bright as day and totally silent."
 
"Why, oh why did you not get a picture of this, Henry?" I demanded. "It just hovered there for minutes on end, not two hundred yards away, and the house is, like, twenty feet behind us. You coulda-"
 
"Oh, shut your hole. You speak as though you wouldn't have been frozen in place with a lump sliding out your back door ... which is pretty much what happened, truth be told. Sometimes, a man just freezes. Call it cowardice, fear, common sense, whatever - every man has a moment or three in his life when he freezes up solid in the face of action. Just happens, champ. You'll be a man someday, and then you'll understand."
 
"Okay, sure - you saw a huge UFO, but you didn't get a picture of it, even though you had a camera nearby ... what else have you not snapped a picture of? Sasquatch? A chupacabra?"
 
"Hey, you don't know what might be in these woods. Well, maybe not now, but once upon a time, these woods were thick and wild. Half the farms on this road didn't exist yet in the late Forties, just acres and acres of woods and gullies. All kinds of shit used to live out there. All kinds."
"Yeah? Like what?" I asked. "You ever shoot something exotic in the face?"
 
Henry considered this. He was suddenly quite serious. "In a manner of speaking, yeah, I have." He looked at me for a long moment, and his lean, weathered face bore a look of somber consideration. His eyes had lost their customary sparkle of good humor and, quite abruptly, the warm feeling of familiar comadarie was gone from the air between us. Henry looked about as serious as I've ever seen him look. It made me feel a little uneasy, as if our conversation was a small, unsteady boat that was about to enter the rough waters of the unknown. Sometimes, Henry's stories could do that.
 
He exhaled, long and slow, and said, "So anyways, I woke up early one Saturday morning, back in the fall of '47 - I think it was late in September - and I says to myself, 'Fuck it. I'm going rabbit hunting.' The valley down there is always teeming with 'em, and there's a zillion of the little buggers out in the woods around us, too. You can hunker down in the scrub where the woods borders the corn fields and pop all kinds of the little buggers, if you're patient." A smile ghosted his lips, then was gone. "Rabbit stew, man, I love it. Your grandma made a great rabbit stew. "Anyway, I was out near the back of the property with my .22, waiting and watching as the sun rose up over the trees, when I saw someone come staggering up out of the gully. Even at the distance I was from him, I could see that whoever it was, he was hurt real bad. He was limping something awful, leaning on a stick to keep himself from falling over into the dirt. Something was wrong with his face. I didn't run over to him right away ... I just sat still and watched him limp and hobble out of the morning mist for a minute or so. I felt frozen in place. I felt like this guy was bringing something out of the woods with him, something dark and ... well, bad. I felt like he was bringing something out of the woods that was probably going to change the way that I saw my little corner of the world forever.
 
"Then the stick that he was leaning on snapped and he fell down, maybe forty yards away from me. He just kinda flopped face-first onto the edge of the field; didn't even try to put his hands out and stop his fall. I ran over to see if I could help him ... but I kept my rifle in hand, y'know? As soon as I got close, I seen two things right away - the guy was an Indian ... wait, sorry, you're not supposed to call them that no more, he was a Native ... and I saw that he was bleeding out from his front. The blood was leaking out from beneath him really fast, staining the sandy dirt dark red all around him. The old denim overalls that he was wearing were soaked right through with it. Right away, I knew that the guy was done for. You can't lose that much blood and live."
 
I popped the cap off another beer and leaned forward in my chair. "Yikes, man. Jesus. What didja do?"
 
"Well, I put down my gun and rolled him over, and shit - what a goddamn mess. I almost puked. His face was tore open on one side. I mean, one side of his face was literally just hanging off the skull by a few thick shreds of skin. I could see the skinny red ropes of muscle in his cheek, and the yellow row of teeth on that side of his jaw. The eye socket was in ruin, I mean it was just a complete mess. His coveralls were ripped open in a bunch of places, and the meat was all mangled underneath. The Native fella had been mauled just horribly and he was dying, right there in front of me. There wasn't a single damn thing that I could do for him except grab his hand and ask him what happened." Uncle Henry reached down into the old cooler that sat between us and pulled an OV out of the melting ice. He cracked the cap slowly, ksshhhhh. I was gaping at him, feeling somewhat incredulous. How could it be that I'd never heard this story before?
 
Henry continued. "I said, 'Jesus, what done this to you, man?'" The Indi- sorry, the Native guy opened his mouth to speak, but the tendons in the messed-up side of his jaw were pretty tore up, and something let go when he tried to talk. I actually heard the damn thing snap; there was a little pop, and then suddenly his lower jaw was just kinda flapping around, open and useless. He was struggling to sit up, thrashin' around in the wet dirt in front of me ... I tried my best to make him be still, but the poor bastard was having some kind of fit and I knew that he was on his way out, right then and there. The blood was still runnin' outta him, but a lot slower, because he was just about bled out. The guy's body got really rigid for a few seconds, then he shuddered and collapsed back down onto the ground. His good eye rolled back in his head and his breathing got labored - it sounded like an old car with rattling valve stems and a rusted-out muffler. The guy's heels drummed against the ground, he shit himself, and then he just kinda crumpled down and was still in the dirt."
 
Henry stopped to light a smoke and coughed, harsh and dry, one drag closer to bursting a blood vessel in his brain. He said, "I leaned in closer to check if he was breathin'. The guy's arms suddenly shot out and he grabbed me by the shoulders with a grip like iron; he pulled me closer and stared into my face with his remaining eye. It was full of pain, and fear. A lot of fear.
 
"He tried real hard to whisper something at me, something in his language. But his jaw ... well, he couldn't really form the words. It sounded like he was saying,'en-ee-oh', over and over, urgently - he was dying, see, and he was trying so hard to make me understand, but I couldn't. I says to him, 'What the hell are you trying to tell me, man? I don't understand you!' but his good eye had already stopped looking at anything in particular. The native fella was dead, and the last of his life's blood was all over my arms and pant-legs."
 
"Shit, Henry ... I mean ... wow. Fuck. What did you do then? Call the police, I guess?"
 
"You guess correctly. When I made sure that the man was no longer drawing breath, I hightailed it back to the house. I tried to tell your Grandma and Grampa what happened but they couldn't make much sense of my blabbering, so Ma sits me down for a mug of tea with rum, and Dad jumps in the old '34 Chevy flat-bed that we used around the farm. Ah, that truck was a real bitch, but she could motor back in her day, hell yes! I remember that your Grampa had screwed a heavy lattice-style rail on either side of the bed, so that we wouldn't go flying out on the corners when he took us all out into the fields in the morning -"
 
"Henry, getting sidetracked ..."
 
"Yeah, yeah, I'm getting there. Pa races out there with the old truck and comes back fifteen minutes later, lookin' grim. He asked me to call the cops - you remember your Grandpa, his accent was so thick that not a single soul could understand the man. So I go and get on the horn ... I remember that I had to ask Mrs. Greer to get off the party line, she was stone deaf but always on the fucking phone ... so I make the call, tell 'em there's been an animal attack or something, and a man is dead on our property. 'Do you know the deceased?' the desk cop asks me, and I says, 'No sir, it's no one that I know. It's an Indian fella, I don't know his name.' Well, there was a long pause, then the cop says, 'Okay, then - don't go anywhere, and we'll send someone out there in a while. No hurry.' I said, 'Hell, there's a man been killed out here, why wouldn't you hurry?' and the bastard says, 'He's a dead Injun, right? It's not your sweetheart or your Grandma, buddy, so relax. He ain't gonna get any deader on us, so yeah, no hurry. Try and keep your dogs and such off of him in the meantime, sir, if you could, and we'll be out when we get there. Thanks,' then he hung up on me."
 
As much as I didn't want to believe this, I could. Consideration for the basic human rights of Native people has never been a real concern for the Canadian government or their minions. I nodded, stiffly, for my uncle to continue.
 
"Different times, kiddo, it was different times. Not that anything's really changed, I guess. Anyhow, it took 'em hours to get here, so in the meantime Me and Dad went out and covered the poor bastard up with an old sheet of canvas. When we got back, we didn't know what to do with ourselves, so we sat right here where we're sitting now and waited for the cops to get out here. We didn't talk much about what might have happened to the guy. Your Grampa muttered something about a wolf and I nodded, and we both knew that a wolf didn't do that to him. It was something else. I was kinda scared, and I think your Grampa was too."
 
"Did you know where the dead guy was from? You didn't have any clue who he was?"
 
"Oh, we had a good idea where he'd come from, yep," Henry replied. He fished another smoke out of his rumpled, battered pack; he considered it, then lit it. "He had to be from the 55, which was the local Native Reserve. Where else?"
"Wait," I interrupted, "there's no Native reserve anywhere near here. The closest one is Muncie ... well, maybe Oneida, but it's not actually a rez-"
 
"No, there's never been an official reserve around here, but there certainly were more than a few unofficial communities like that - well, back in those days, anyway. The 55 was one of 'em. That's what we called it; just 'The 55'. I have no idea what the people themselves called it. See, there used to be a really narrow, rough little road off of County Road 55 that led into the woods, and eventually to a big clearing. Maybe twelve or so families lived out there; they didn't have no electricity or oil furnaces ... they had chickens runnin' around as they pleased and there were corn liquor stills in the woods behind the shit houses. They were Algonquins, I think, or maybe Ojibwe. They'd been displaced from way up north a long time before, and when they got down here in the late 1800's the locals didn't treat them very well, not at all. As a kid, I overheard the grown-ups tell stories of forced head shavings with a straight razor, of beatings and rapes and arson. The authorities just turned a blind eye to it. Could be that some of 'em even got into the action themselves."
 
Again, I nodded at this. Despite what some people say, not all law enforcement officers are bad, not by a long shot. However, they're far from all good, as well. The late 1940's was not an enlightened time, especially not in rural Canada. A certain amount of xenophobia was the norm back then. Hell, it still is.
 
Henry nodded back at me, sourly. "The cops showed up just before noon. They looked bored and hot. We took them out in the truck to were the body was. The flies were buzzing around it something terrible. They looked at it and prodded it with the toe of their shiny leather shoes and then one of them said, 'Yep, that's a dead Indian, all right. Goddamn, the boy's all messed up, isn't he?' It was like they were looking at a dead buck at the side of the road; it was mostly just a mess to clean up. They didn't bother taking any pictures of the crime scene or calling in a forensics guy or coroner or any goddamned thing: they just threw the tarp back over the body and started rolling him up in it. I felt ashamed by them, you know? The way they were doing things wasn't right or ... good, I guess. Your Grandpa watched 'em doing this and he got mad. He said, 'Hey! That's a man there, just like you - what's wrong with your mothers that you'd be raised to be such a pair of goats?'
 
I smirked, and Henry gave a dry-throated, rusty little chuckle. That was Grandpa, all right - small and fiery, hard and righteous. "Yeah, Dad was a tough little bastard. He said what was on his mind, no matter what. He was forcefully conscripted into the Kaiser's army in the first World War, you know that? Yep. That missing finger? Got cut off by an American bayonet, that's what happened to it."
 
"Wow, that's fucking crazy. I never knew that." I slugged down some more of that good, cold brew, and swiped the cold bottle against my forehead. "Did the cops understand what Gramps had said to them?"
 
"Nope, but they understood by his tone and body language that they were getting cussed out, and they weren't too happy about it. I apologized and said that he was just mad because he had to take a day off to wait for them to get out here, and there was work that needed to get done. The cops glared at us and told us to pull our truck over closer. Then they heaved the dead Native's body into the bed and made us drive it back to their squad car. They took some stuff out of the squad car's trunk and made room, you know ... for the body. Just tossed it in there like it was garbage. I suppose it was, to them."
 
We both sat quietly for a minute or two, thinking and sipping our beers. Man, the world can be shitty sometimes, can't it? We should all be ashamed of the outrages that we allow to exist in this world, all of us.
 
"After supper was done and squared away, we had a visitor, the Dutchman that owned the orchard down the road. He was right wound up, talkin' a mile a minute. There was a rumor spreading around that there'd been a multiple murder out at the 55 the night before. An entire family, slaughtered and ripped to pieces. Johann Brubeck and some of his hired hands found them that afternoon while out on a run to buy some moonshine. No one who lived out there knew anything about it - or that was what they were claiming, anyway. An entire family, murdered in the dead of night, and not one soul had heard a sound."
 
"The guy you found out in the field-"
 
"-must of escaped from the shack while the killers were having at it. It gave me a shiver, to know that I'd seen a murder victim breathe his last. I started to tell old VanKlein about him, but your Grampa cut me off and glared at me. I asked him why later on, and he told me to save it for the police, cuz they'd probably be back soon. It wasn't just one dead Indian anymore, it was multiple murder. There was gonna be an investigation for sure."That night, I slept like shit, tossing and turning. When I finally did fall asleep, something woke me up with a start. I sat right up and listened hard. Something was ... I dunno, howling, kinda, and screaming, and even maybe laughing, too. Something far out into the woods. I had my .22 in the room with me; I curled up in my sweaty sheets with it clutched in my hands and barely slept another wink that night."
 
"It wasn't just a coyote?"
 
"Naw, it wasn't a just a coyote. Think I don't know what a coyote sounds like?" Henry was feeling dry - he finished his beer in a few long gulps, his grizzled neck pumping up and down as he swallowed. He grunted gratefully and continued. "The next day, old VanKlein came back out to see us. He waited til Ma left the kitchen for some reason, then he told us that another murder had taken place out at the 55. A older guy, no wife or kids in his house. The killer took his head clean off, and the old fella was gutted. The head and guts were missing."
 
I said, "Get the fuck outta here. This happened?"
 
"Yep, it happened. That night I sat up with Dad and kept watch over the farm. We both had a gun on our lap. The next day, the cops came back out. They didn't send out some dumb-ass patrolmen this time, either - it was a detective with the RCMP, wearin' a suit and tie and the whole deal. He asked us a lot of questions, and some of them were really peculiar. For example, he asked us if we knew of any mental cases that lived around the area - you know, simpletons and folks that were touched in the head. He also asked us if we'd ever seen any evidence of a cougar or some other big cat on our property. I told him about the god-awful caterwauling that I'd heard the night before, and he had me describe exactly what it sounded like. I mentioned to him that the Native fella had tried to tell me something right before he died, and the Mountie had me try and sound out what I'd heard him say. When he was climbing back into his car to leave, he stopped for a moment and told us to stay indoors at night, and to keep a firearm on hand. He was the most serious-looking man I'd ever seen. His eyes looked right through you. Believe me, you wouldn't hide nothing from this guy, no way."A couple days after that, the Dutchman comes over early in the morning, and he's scared and he's mad. He told us that something had tried to break in through his back door the night before. He woke up to the sound of his dogs howling and yipping - hell, all of his animals were making a racket, the rooster and the goat and the whole fucking barnyard, bleating and barking and hollerin' away. He could hear glass breaking, and the screech of metal being twisted. Old Willy come downstairs in his nightshirt and blasted a hole through his own goddamned back door with a shotgun. He didn't hit the thing that was on the other side, but he did scare it off. He told us that the fucker had howled like a banshee as it ran off into his apple trees, and the sound made the hairs on the back of Willy's neck stand on end.
 
"VanKlein told us that he'd waited until he was absolutely sure that the thing was gone before he came out to check the damage to his door. He sounded ashamed when he said that, embarrassed, but defiant, too - Willy was a big, rough old character; if he had been scared, well, then I guess I woulda been terrified. When he came outside he called to his dogs, but they wouldn't come out of hiding. As for the door ... whatever it was that managed to scare Old Willy's entire farm shitless, it was strong as hell. It had pried his heavy screen door back like the fucking thing was made outta foil. There were deep gouges in the wooden door frame, marks that looked like they'd been left by claws. VanKlein didn't manage to catch even a glimpse of the thing through the window - it was too fast - but he'd found a few tracks that it had left behind in a soft, muddy spot in his barnyard. He asked us to come see them. Like I said, the man was really upset, just about vibrating - we dropped what we were doing and went out to his place. And I'll tell you what, man ... it wasn't any animal that I'd ever seen around these parts that left those tracks behind. No sir. They were kinda like a man's footprint, but a lot longer - they were wider at the ball of the foot and narrower at the heel. There were only four toes, and each one was tipped with a claw at least three inches long. We stared at these prints for a long while, your Grandpa and me. They scared us."
 
Henry saw the look on my face and snorted. "Don't believe me? Shit on you, bucko. I might be old and feeble-headed, but I remember those tracks just as clearly as breakfast this morning. They looked like something a gargoyle might leave behind. They could have been faked easy enough, sure, but we knew that they weren't. There were clots of dirt scattered in the grass behind the muddy patch, chunks of earth that were flung back when this thing came chargin' through. Even the depth and angle at which prints were set into the ground ... coulda been faked, but it wasn't ... not to mention the damage to the screen door. It was bent almost in two, just hangin' there by the bottom hinge. This was back in the days when things weren't made out of flimsy aluminum, mind you. Some men might be strong enough to do something like that, but not very damn many."
 
I held my hands up in a placating sort of way and said,"Okay, fine, they were real, we'll go with that. What happened next?"
 
"I'll tell you what happened next - us'n Willy decided that we weren't gonna wait on the cops or the game warden anymore. So we got a hunting party together - or a lynch mob, however you wanna look at it, I guess. VanKlein and me made some phone calls and face-to-face visits, and we ended up with nine guys; it was me, your dad, your Grampa, Willy VanKlein, his son Fredrik and his brother Randolph, a local character from Calton named Bill Walsh, and two Frenchmen farm-hands that were over drinking with Bill in his garage when we came calling on him. Every one of us was armed with a rifle, and Bill had his service pistol in a shoulder holster. We got everyone together at old Willy's place, and set out following the thing's trail. I remember that Bill was following behind us all a little ways back, huffing and sweating and complaining about his heart. He told us, 'You fellers up there can soften the son of a bitch up for me, then I'll finish him off,' and rest of us laughed a little too hard at that. I'll tell ya, we were strung tight, man. Tight like a goddamned piano wire."
 
"I'll tell something, Henry - there's no fucking way I would have gone out looking for this thing. Maybe in a tank ..."
 
Henry grunted in a negative manner and said, "Yeah, you would've. You know why? Because it was gettin' after our own, and a man instinctively won't tolerate danger to his own. I'll tell you something, young feller ... the Dirty Thirties left us all with a strong sense of family and community, not like today. It also left us hardened to the plight of strangers. I know it sounds bad when you say it out loud, but when that thing was preying on the Natives out on the 55, well ... it was a horrible business, sure, but they weren't our own. Now, old VanKlein, he was one of ours. His kin had lived and worked on that orchard since before the invention of the automobile. We'd visit with his family on Christmas day, and we'd help each other take in our harvests. I know that it's hard to imagine now, but the land around here was still pretty wild, back then. There was nothing but bush for miles and miles around us. Most of these roads were still laid with loose gravel, or even dirt. All us farmers and such, well ... we knew each other, and we looked out for each other. Because otherwise, we'd just be little specks of humanity here and there; just little pockets of people, all of us lost in the wilderness. That's hard to comprehend nowadays, but back then it was a reality." Henry gulped some more beer down his grizzled neck, then flapped a hand at me, dismissively. "Naw, you woulda been there with us, I'm sure of it - because a man takes care of his own, whether he wants to or not. Any man worth being called a man, anyhow."
 
I thought about this and nodded. If I felt that my little family was being menaced, I'd take action, scared shitless or not. Sure I would. Because love is stronger than fear.
 
"None of us were the world's greatest trackers, but this thing was big, man, and it didn't look like the fucker had been very concerned about leaving a trail when it was running away from VanKlein's Remington, either. We followed the tracks and scuffs in the grass through the barnyard and past his chicken coop. Your dad says, 'Hey, you know what's peculiar to me? Your dogs were hidin' from the son of a bitch, right, and here's the chicken coop ... it didn't go after 'em. I seen what it done to your door; it coulda got into the hen house, no problem. What kinda predator just strolls right past the coop and tries to break into the goddamn house?' Well, that spooked us pretty good. No one had considered that. The bastard had gone straight for the VanKleins, and ignored their livestock completely. It was more than peculiar. It was downright scary.
"We followed the trail into the apple orchard. There were branches broken off here and there, wherever the thing had pushed itself through a row of trees. The height that they were broken at, though ... the bastard was huge, man, at least seven feet high, and it was wider'n two men standing side by side. And strong - goddamn, this thing was powerful! Some of them branches it broke off were four and five inches thick. It just snapped 'em like toothpicks, broke the bastards clean off without a second thought.
 
"We followed the trail through the orchard and a meadow, and then into the woods. Deep, deep into the woods. We trudged through wet marsh and clusters of thorny vines, through shallow streams and in and out of gullies. Eventually, someone realized that we must be near the 55 - and sure enough, after a few more minutes we see a clearing ahead, ringed by a bunch of piss-poor shanties leaning out of the ground like tombstones. They were arranged in sort of a rough circle, and in the middle there was a big community fire pit. When we come into the circle there were a few of the men sitting around a low fire in that pit, sitting on the ground and staring at us like they were expecting us.
 
"Bill Walsh was the one to approach them, as he sorta knew some of them, being a customer of the moonshine trade and all. Bill said, 'We're sorry to disturb you like this, fellers, we truly are - God's mercy on your dead, that's a hell of an awful thing. But we've been tracking something through the bush today, and the trail led us here. I think you know what we've been tracking. Did anything happen around here, last night? Did-" and then a big boy with a scar on his cheek and long hair interrupts him and says, 'We know what you're doing, and we think that you're a bunch of jackasses. Get the fuck off of our land, white men, and don't come back until you've got money in your pockets for liquor. This is not a time for you people to be coming out here, playing at being the great white hunters. People are grieving here, do you get it? You're just wasting your time out here anyway. You won't find what you're looking for, not in the daytime - and sure as hell, none of you dummies want to run into it at night. Stupid white bastards. You come onto our land with loaded guns? Fuck off and beat it.'
 
"Well, your dad ... shit, you know your dad. War hero and all that, drunk all the time, angry and ready to fight. He yelled, 'What the hell did you just say to us, you fucking Wahoo? How about I put this loaded gun down, then kick your rotten lungs right the fuck out the back of you? You talk to me like that again, boy, and that's exactly what's gonna happen. I'll knock your dick in the dirt.' He was walking towards the fire pit with your Grampa trying to pull him back, and the Native with the scarred face was already up on his feet with his fists raised, and then suddenly boom! We all jump and whirl around and it's Willy VanKlein, standing there with his shotgun pointed in the air and his weathered old face set like stone. Willy stepped up and he said, 'I won't be going home just yet. Something tried to rip its way into my house last night. My house, where my wife and kids sleep. We tracked it here. I'm sorry for your kinfolk, but I think someone here knows what's going on and I want to talk to that someone.'
 
"The men around the fire stared at us some more, then the big old boy with the scar snorts some mean laughter and says, 'You people ... always giving orders. Always demanding things. You want to know what's going on? You wouldn't even begin to understand. The Wendigo wears human skin and lives in the house beside you. He has two lives; one in the light, and one in darkness. He'll wave to you while he's washing his car on a Sunday morning, then come to you at night and eat the guts from your body while you're still alive. Do you know what you all should do? Go home and pray to God. That's what your people do when you're scared, right? Go pray to him, and don't come back."
I could see it, in my mind's eye - a circle of men facing each other in the clearing, a sputtering little fire separating the racial lines. I could see shabby little tar-paper shacks in the background, and stoic faces peering out of the cracked windows.
 
Watching the showdown.
 
"Well, there's silence for a minute, dead silence, just us and them facing each other with not a sound in the air except the mosquitoes - then all of a sudden there was this older character standing there in the middle of us ... kinda just popped up from out of nowhere. It was the weirdest thing ... the old guy was tall, had long white hair in a braid, and he looked a lot like an older version of the scar-faced guy. He says, 'No, don't tell them that. Prayer does no good at all. I prayed to the spirits of our ancestors when the white man came and burnt our village to the ground in the spring of 1888, but they stood idle and watched as the bastards laughed and drove us from our burning homes with horse whips. I prayed to God when the white man took me from my family and put me in a prison that they called a school, and I prayed again when they sent me to live with a Cree family who I'd never seen before in my life when I was done. And I prayed one last time, to Whoever might be listening, that this curse might be lifted from the land, and we might live without fearing the night ... and my prayer was answered with death. Some of the dead were our children; my grand-nephew was one of them. He was only eight.' He shook his head and wiped his eyes. I felt a lump in my throat. I didn't ever think that some of the dead might have been kids, though I guess I should've ... Jesus, man ... I can't even imagine it, kids being murdered like that. I don't think any decent person could.
 
"Pretty soon, the chief strangled back his tears and got himself under control, and he croaked, 'There has been death here, and there might be more still, but I won't be saddened by it - because my heart has already been broken. Prayer won't help you, white men. As far as I can tell, prayer has never helped anyone.' Man, his eyes were nothing but pain, and looking into those eyes took the fight out of everybody. Even your dad was lookin' like he felt just awful for this guy.
 
"I piped up and says to him, 'We're all sorry about your loss. One of yours made it all the way to our farm after he ... uh, got attacked, and I tried to make his final moments as comfortable as I could. I won't even pretend to know what you've all been going through, no sir. We only came out here today 'cuz something was trying to get into Mr. VanKlein's house last night, and we think that it might be the same critter as what's been getting after your people. We followed its trail today, and it led us here. This thing came right through your homestead last night. No one saw it?' The old chief looked at me hard and I could see that he wasn't just angry and grieving, he was deathly afraid, too. We were all scared shitless, every one of us, and I think that none of our little hunting party really wanted to hear what the old chief was about to say to us."
 
Henry paused to fish himself another beer out of the slushy water in the cooler, and I realized that I was dry now, too. The breeze had picked up a little, and I told myself that it was my drying sweat that was making me shiver. Sure it was.
 
Henry grimaced a bit at the feel of the cold carbonation hitting his parched neck, then motioned at me with the bottle. "So the chief says to us, 'It comes here every night for two weeks running, now. It looks into our windows and scratches bad symbols onto our doors. This thing is not an animal from the natural world. It's a Wendigo - a person who is sick in his heart and in his mind, so sick and evil that his spirit leaves his body in despair. What's left isn't human anymore. He looks and behaves like a man in the day, but at night, he transforms into a monster. A Wendigo eats only raw human flesh.'
 
"Well, we were all grown men - rational men, some of us war veterans and all of us survivors ... but deep down we were all still peasant immigrants, for the most part; farmers and sons of farmers from the rural darklands of Europe. Most of us grew up hearing bedtime stories about the horrible creatures that lurk in the woods and live in the night. We grew up being told that science and magic can co-exist, and the natural world is full of unnatural things. We believed what this man with the mortal fear in his eyes was telling us. Gimme a smoke, wouldja? I got another pack, but it's in my truck."
 
I did, and Henry lit it with his tarnished old Zippo. I watched this impatiently. I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat, hauling on my own cigarette with deep, anxious anticipation.
 

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