The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist, Book 2)

“bark stew” was also beneficial for the digestion, the sergeant informed me, and was a native treatment for diarrhea and venereal disease.) We also gathered wolf’s claw, an evergreen moss that grew in abundance on the forest floor, with dense needlelike leaves that Hawk boiled to make a kind of herbal tea. The taste was pungent and bitter—the doctor spat out his first sip—yet Hawk kept harvesting it. The spores were highly flammable, and he delighted in tossing them into the fire and watching the subsequent flash of hot white light.

We rose each day a little weaker than the day before, and halted each night a little hungrier. Our eyes took on the haunted, vacant look of slow starvation, and our voices were lean in the breathless air. We stumbled clumsily down trail and through dead meadow, and crossed the desolate miles of brule, the trackless snowbound desert, with the gray dome of the sky upheld by the blackened pillars of branchless trees. It was here that we spied the first sign of life since our escape from Sandy Lake. I tugged on Hawk’s coat and pointed to them, lazily circling overhead on immobile wings, riding the high wind directly above us. He nodded and quickly looked away.

“Buteos,” he said. “Buzzards.”

The doctor’s toe caught on a fallen branch. He pitched forward, twisting around just before he landed, to avoid crushing his precious cargo beneath him.

“I’m all right; I’m fine,” he snarled at Hawk, who had reached down to help him up. He slapped away the offered hand.

“Let me carry him awhile, Doc,” said the sergeant reasonably. “You look all done for.”

“Do not touch him. Do you understand? I’ll shoot you if you touch him. No one touches him but me!”

“I meant no offense,” replied Hawk. “Just trying to help.”

“This is mine,” the doctor gasped. “Mine!” He slipped his arms beneath Chanler’s body and struggled to his feet, where he stood swaying for an awful moment before falling again, landing this time with a muffled thump upon his backside. His friend’s head lolled against his chest.

“God damn you to hell,” the doctor whimpered to Chanler, the words smashed to nothing by the emptiness that engulfed him. “Why did you come here? What did you think you would find? You idiot . . . you imbecilic fool . . . What did you think you would find?”

He stroked the soft feathery hair. He pressed his cheek against the top of John Chanler’s head.

“Ah, come on now, Doc,” Hawk urged him. “It’s not as bad as all that.” He stepped toward him, and the doctor leveled his revolver at Hawk’s forehead.

“You could have prevented this!” he cried. “You were here a month ago. He was a stone’s throw from you and you left him. You left him!”

“Now, Doc, I told you what Fiddler said. . . .”

“The same thing he said to me, and did I listen? Did I take him at his word? Did I allow him to take me for a fool?”

“Well,” answered Hawk tensely, “maybe you’re just smarter than I am.”

“That is no compliment.”

With those words all passion drained from the doctor; his eyes glazed over; the hand holding the gun dropped to his side. His listlessness returned, the same curious apathy that had infected Hawk and me as well. Desolation’s progeny—the lifeless living, every word pointless, every gesture useless, every hope vain.

I cannot say what day it was—it may have been the tenth or eleventh since our escape from the Sucker camp—when Hawk pulled my master aside, telling me, “Stay with Chanler, Will. I need a word with your boss.” They walked several yards up the path, and I followed—which is completely understandable, I’m sure. I eased up behind them to eavesdrop on their hurried and anxious conversation.

“Are you certain?” the doctor was saying. He sounded worried but dubious.

Hawk nodded, wetting his lips. “At first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It happens in the bush. So I didn’t say anything, but there’s no mistaking it, Doctor. I’m sure of it.”

“Since . . . ?”

“First heard it yesterday morning. Nothing on the watch last night, then off and on today.”

“The Iyiniwok?”

Hawk shrugged. He wet his lips. “Something. I suppose it could be a wolf, though not a bear, nothing that big. It’s . . . strange.”

“If Fiddler’s men were responsible for Larose . . . ,” Warthrop began.

“Then it could be whoever filleted him,” Hawk finished, nodding. Again, his tongue swiped across his chapped lips. “Thought you should know.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” the doctor said. “Perhaps we should force a confrontation?”

Hawk shook his head. “Just two of us—and God knows how many of them. Plus, there’s Chanler and Will to think about.”

I returned to Chanler, my mind racing. Beneath the blackened lids Chanler’s eyes roamed the darkness. Encompassing us, the mute forest brooded, shrouded in winter white.

The gray land was deceptively still. It kept its secrets.

Something was following us.

That night I saw the yellow eyes for the first time. I attributed it to my fevered imagination, overheated by the conversation earlier in the day—a trick of the firelight, I thought. Perhaps the reflection off a moth’s wing or some shiny bit of fungus. The trees were festooned with all types of it. No sooner had I noticed them than they were gone. A moment later they returned, deep in the woods and this time farther to my left, hovering several feet above the ground, almond-shaped, glowing like twin beacons.

I grabbed Sergeant Hawk’s forearm—the doctor had already crawled into the tent to lie with Chanler—and pointed. By the time he turned to look, the eyes had vanished again.

“What is it, Will?” he whispered.

“Eyes,” I whispered back. “Over there.”

For an eternity we waited, barely drawing breath, scanning the dark, but they did not reappear.

The eyes returned the following night. Warthrop saw them first, and rose silently to his feet, staring into the bush with a look of almost comical astonishment.

“Did you see that?” he asked us. “My eyes are probably playing tricks on me, but—”

“If it was eyes you saw, Will here saw them too—last night,” Hawk said. He slung his rifle around; he kept it on his person at all times, even when he slept.

“Look!” I said, raising my voice in excitement. “There they are again—over there!”

And gone again in the time it took Sergeant Hawk to whip the barrel round. He kept the stock against his shoulder and swung the weapon slowly back and forth.

“A bear?” wondered the doctor.

“A bear, could be,” breathed Hawk. “If he’s strolling about on his hind legs. Those eyes were near ten feet off the ground, Doctor.”

The seconds spun out, turned to minutes. A strange gurgling sound commenced behind us, and the sergeant whirled around to face the tent. Warthrop pushed down the barrel of the rifle and snapped, “It’s Chanler,” and rushed through the opening. “Will Henry!” he called. “Bring me some light!”

Within, the doctor was leaning over his patient, while the man’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically, like a landed fish’s, with burbling deep in his throat. Warthrop rolled him onto his side and lightly patted him in the small of the back. The body convulsed, and greenish-yellow bile erupted from his open mouth, soaking the doctor’s shirt and trousers and filling the tent with an unearthly noxious odor. I pinched shut my nose and fought the urge to vomit. Warthrop wiped Chanler’s mouth with his filthy handkerchief, and then looked up at me.

“Some water, Will Henry.”

Chanler moaned, and Warthrop reacted as if he had sat up and said his name. The doctor’s face fairly glowed with elation.

“Is he waking up?” I asked.

“John!” Warthrop shouted. “John Chanler! Can you hear me?”

If he could, he gave no reply. He went limp. We waited, but he had left again. Wherever he had been, he had gone back.

We did not see the yellow eyes for several nights thereafter, but their absence did little to relieve our unease. Hawk in particular seemed affected. He often lagged behind even the doctor, who was not walking so much as