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It's the song they sing in lumber camps and godforsaken places like that, when they've skeered the Wendigo's somewhere around, doin' a bit of swift traveling. "And what's the Wendigo, pray?" Simpson asked quickly, irritated because again he could not prevent that sudden shiver of the nerves. He knew that he was close upon the man's terror and the cause of it.
The Midgan, or slave-caste of the semi-Semitic Somal, are sometimes reduced to the same extremity; but they are ever held, like the Wendigo, or man-eaters, amongst the North American Indians, impure and detestable. On the other hand, the Tupi- Guaranis of the Brazil, a country abounding in game, fish, wild fruits, and vegetables, ate one another with a surprising relish.
"The legend is picturesque enough," observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, "for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction." "That's about it," Hank said presently. "An' there's no misunderstandin' when you hear it. It calls you by name right 'nough."
Four hundred miles away, at the far headwaters of the rivers, those Indians who have held aloof from missionaries and traders are squatting round a fire of dry cypress before their lodges, and the world they see about them, as in the earliest days, is filled with dark mysterious powers: the giant Wendigo pursuing the trespassing hunter; strange potions, carrying death or healing, which wise old men know how to distil from roots and leaves; incantations and every magic art.
And then Simpson, feeling the atmosphere more sympathetic, told over again the full story of his astonishing tale; he left out no details this time; he mentioned his own sensations and gripping fears. He only omitted the strange language used. "But Défago surely had already told you all these details of the Wendigo legend, my dear fellow," insisted the doctor.
Others are now waiting for our arrival, and you, by deciding quickly, will assist us to get to them." KEENOOSHAYO: "Have you all heard? Do you wish to accept? All who wish to accept, stand up!" WENDIGO: "I have heard, and accept with a glad heart all I have heard." KEENOOSHAYO: "Are the terms good forever? As long as the sun shines on us?
"When an Indian goes crazy," he explained, talking to himself more than to the others, it seemed, "it's always put that he's 'seen the Wendigo. An' pore old Défaygo was superstitious down to he very heels ...!"
"It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions. "Moss-eater," he repeated, with a string of the most outlandish oaths he could invent. But Simpson now understood the true purpose of all this talk. What these two men, each strong and "experienced" in his own way, dreaded more than anything else was silence. They were talking against time.
"The Wendigo," he added, "is said to burn his feet owing to the friction, apparently caused by its tremendous velocity till they drop off, and new ones form exactly like its own." Simpson listened in horrified amazement; but it was the pallor on Hank's face that fascinated him most. He would willingly have stopped his ears and closed his eyes, had he dared.
For he admitted that a story ran over all this section of country to the effect that several Indians had "seen the Wendigo" along the shores of Fifty Island Water in the "fall" of last year, and that this was the true reason of Défago's disinclination to hunt there. Hank doubtless felt that he had in a sense helped his old pal to death by overpersuading him.
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