Chapter 28: The Wild
The network of ribbon farms surrendered to unbroken woods before sunset on the day I left Trois-Rivieres heading northwest, feeling a bit like the black chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. Helen had a lot of observations to make about the apples and the cows and the horses and after a while I just let her talk, handling her like a husband of decades.
I smelled rain in the air before the western horizon betrayed any sign of storm, and as I enjoyed the cold slap to my face after the stifling heat of midday I thought half-seriously of thunderbirds. Maybe there was at least one flapping around, ready to snatch me up if I came too close to someone’s sacred Mount Tremblant. Some distant rolling thunder came with the rain that I could feel through the soles of my feet, but nothing else, though churning clouds in the west would hide the sun for the rest of the day once the shower had ended. I felt a little bit stronger when the clouds thickened, a little more of a spring in my step.
Not long after entering the treeline I found a bush of wild blackberries still wet with drops of rain and tried to snarf a few up – my first attempt at ‘normal’ food since my turning, surprisingly enough. The sugar burned in my lips, and burned hotter down my throat. These ones smelled like blood and not like berries at all, just like the blackberries at the market, and I sat on a rock beside an old deer path, waiting to either vomit, pass out, or feel my body make use of this other fuel. Caught in limbo, I got bored and reviewed the map again. The five nearest towns were all named after Saints – of course they were.
The berries did not come ripping out of me in either direction. They seemed to be tightening into a knot inside my guts, and maybe I had to cough that thing up like an owl pellet.
The woods thickened and darkened with each kilometer, patches of white birches appearing at times to speak of old forest fires, the smell of campfire smoke detouring me safely enough to avoid anyone’s dog. Swampier areas stank powerfully to my senses, and a small patch of quicksand was a challenge even for my new strength, nearly costing me a boot. I decided that I needed some way to measure my strength, to quantitatively measure it and see what exercises increased it. Once I was out of here I’d have to get some distance tracker.
Relentlessly marching without sleep for three days was the natural answer to my gift of three days rest in Trois-Rivieres – I had been lying down regrowing my spine for too long, and if I tried to rest in these woods my nerves started jittering. I could half-believe that it was just the fidgeting of someone who was bored and not the nervous terror that a normal man would feel in the middle of unmarked woods that go on and on to the tundra, woods that creak and groan and host a living wind that might speak words in a too-familiar voice at any moment.
The next three days of hiking had one highlight: of the many tiny lakes I passed, one was occupied by something you will not find in any zoo. Like the brown cat that had guarded Helen’s favorite store of green nonsense, a great creature was sunning itself in the morning of my second day, stretched upon a flat rock in the lake’s centre, just a quick swim to the shore if it had cared to notice me and spring. When I halted and stared I felt true human panic at its size, and between dawn and noon I would be about as likely to escape as a human.
It seemed to be a great lynx, with tufts of black fur on its raised ears and yellow eyes that barely opened as it napped, one huge paw twitching to slowly sheath and unsheath huge grey-pink talons; but it could not be a cat, not even a giant cat from the ice ages, because from its shoulders down it was covered in black reptilian scales, and its back bristled with white spines – some as long as my arm – that were smoothed flat against each other as it lay upon the rock. A flick from its tale across someone’s face would have the effect of a chainsaw.
I had a thought that was not my own
(big lake after a thousand years small lake but in a thousand years my lake will be big again so take no copper from my land little wendigo)
and suddenly I was free to move. And the enormous cat-porcupine-alligator thing started to snore. I had been released, and could move on.
At the end of the third day from Trois-Rivieres I was on the eastern shore of some place called Lac Forbes – there were signs on a dirt road leading to campsites giving me the name – when it was time to collapse and sleep. I had finally walked the St. Elmo’s fire out of me.
The trees around me had turned almost entirely into pine, and the land had risen out of swamps and the paths of old forest fires and previous lumbering. This was the first normal, unspirited lake that I deemed to be completely free of any pollution, passing all environmental regulations with a vampire’s nose approving. That campsite on the southern shore was a tiny dot of human presence, and there were no motors on the lake today. All around me was wooded, quiet isolation, lit by sunset that would begin my next night as a vampire. My count of the days and nights since beginning this journey in Sherbrooke had gotten scrambled – I had not thought to check the date in Trois-Rivieres.
I let the wind sigh through the trees, not searching for any sneaky voice. I was too tired to care about wendigos or lake monsters or thunderbirds, barely able to care about hiding myself from a random encounter with campers. Once I had rested I would need to feed, if I could bear to stand on my two feet ever again. My ankles, knees and hips were blazing with the ghostly phosphorescence that sailors of old took to be a good omen – probably because it meant that whatever unclean spirit plagued them was on its last legs. Leaning against a tree as I searched for a dark spot out of sight from the road left me bumping my head, as my coordination was all shot.
Bright side – that tiny knot in my guts from the blackberries had vanished. I had slowly digested and used their power after all, though I’d have to eat them three days in advance to use that fuel again.
My head flew again, as I dreamed. I didn’t think that I really dreamed anymore though – I had visions now. In this one I was being batted back and forth by a circle of kittens, but these were monstrous kittens with scales and spines.
Look what I caught!
Let me play with it!
Two kittens jumped on each other. I suddenly saw that the kittens were paddling in a circle, and when the fight started the splashing sent water high into the night sky as if a sea mine had exploded. The kittens were huge.
Can we take him home?
Drag him down he has to go down he bled out through his dick (isn’t that funny) so he has to go down if he has no more blood under the water in the big lake …
The kittens were trying to drown me, their playful bites inescapable, their weight smothering. Under the water their yellow eyes were smoking and bubbling like flares.
Down down every man and woman comes down to play with us …
Let him go.
The kittens stopped trying to squash and bite me, their spines splayed under the water to make one look more like a lionfish than a land animal. I started racing toward the surface like a cork.
But I wanted to play with him!
There’s a baby with pneumonia in Hull, you can play with her instead.
The other voice, the scolding adult-voice, was from deeper in the dark, deep beyond even my sight in this dream.
Someone else wants to play with this one. And you don’t want to play with her.
Deep down all the waters in all the lakes might merge, and this wet network is filled with these underwater monsters. They come up at times to pull someone down, to play with them, the kittens taking babies and children because they are the most fun to play with. The adults are more discriminating, only asking that you not take their copper.
I didn’t forget any of this upon awakening, and I certainly didn’t forget those last words: someone, a female someone, wanted to play with me. Deer Woman? A wounded Nocome? The pale bitch who started it all?
Well, there was a way to cross out one name on this list of dangerous females. I could just ask her.
Waking up and circling around and then beyond Lac Forbes, I was properly in wilderness without any whiff of a campfire, no distant motors on the lakes I passed, and only one contrail in the sky to the deep south. I had slept in the night like a human and awoken near dawn, so I needed to wait until the afternoon until I was in any condition to chase down and question a deer.
The land rose again as I kept hiking northwest, wanting to get away from that lake if it was one of the ‘exit points’ for those underworld cats. Swimming in lakes out here would be less than a good idea, for Marie’s map hadn’t known about the first cat’s lake and there was a whole community of the things. Helen Forgrave started chatting out of nowhere in my head as I tried to focus on something other than my feet, which still ached a little – she told me that as a girl she had gone camping somewhere out here and heard a story about ‘underwater panthers’ from a man who claimed to be an Indian. The panthers in the lakes were the enemies of the thunderbirds, and sometimes they fought because they wanted to snatch the same person. That was about all she could remember, for a long time, until the hour of noon came.
“Oh! Something else! They said that Mont-Tremblant shakes whenever the spirits are mad.”
Thanks, Marie, for helping me avoid that mess of native magical nonsense. If I didn’t screw up again as with Sainte Casimir and Nocome I had a chance of living long enough to be killed by my own kind.
Winding deer tracks leading to a stream in a nameless valley of tightly-pressed pines made my thirst heighten, though the blood diamond might be safer than taking a second animal from this guardian. Creeping about and then hunching and listening, I did about as well as that Australian in Jurassic Park hunting the velociraptors.
“Clever g-”
The deer that had materialized by my side in the thick press of needles lunged, knocking me over. I just avoided getting my ear ripped off.
I rolled. A lot. When I slowed I decided to keep rolling, bashing into young pine trunks and changing direction down the slope back down to the stream, as the trees behind me were parted by the spirit’s current mount. If she could flatten me with a desiccated deer corpse possessing a living deer would probably allow for more pain.
When I was finally in a divot I couldn’t roll out of I hopped upright, and this time the hoof zooming in to smash my throat was actually visible. I avoided it, smashing my temple into a pine branch.
“Are-”
In her natural environment she was almost totally silent and next to invisible unless she was in striking range. Another lashing hoof tried to trip me, but I jumped over it.
“-you-”
I was very nearly smashed into from behind, falling to the ground into a bush of berries that seared me when they broke. Wild elderberries, Helen reported.
“-the one who is-”
She tried to steal my backpack. I rolled and scampered up an older pine like a squirrel, spitting sap out of my mouth as it dripped upon me.
“-following me?”
I looked down.
She was right in my face, huge brown eyes glaring up from a shape half-twisted from deer into woman, teratogenic and hideous.
As she yanked me back down to Earth, she almost took my pants. I decided to stop bouncing around and just lay there, slowing pulling them back up.
“I give up.” I let my legs and arms flop, lying on the backpack in the dirt under the tree with the possessed deer hunching over me. Its hands were blurring things, sometimes with fingers, sometimes with hooves. An anorexic ledge of bone poked up at a naked hip, and I realized that the whole thing was close to naked if it was turning into a human shape. The deer teeth in the mouth still made it more freakish than anything that could fill the role of siren.
For a long time those teeth were chattering – chattering with rage, I understood. Her entire meat-puppet was shuddering and mad, but slowly it calmed, and she didn’t hit me again. She half-turned her back on me, and then she said:
“Wendigos don’t have deer heads.”
Chapter 29: Bitch in My Corner
Image credits: Christian Aubry, D. Gordon E. Robertson, Eric Salard, Martin Cigler