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Frenchmen and Indians turned out together to search for Louizon Cadotte. Though he never in his life had set foot to any expedition without first notifying his household, and it was not the custom to hunt alone in the woods, his disappearance would not have roused the settlement in so short a time had there been no windigo hanging about the Sault.
The priest was less successful with this kind of outcast than with any other barbarian on the frontier. "Have you seen him, Waubudone?" inquired Archange. "I wonder if it is the same man who used to frighten us?" "This windigo a woman. Porcupine in her. She lie down and roll up and hide her head when you drive her off." "Did you drive her off?" "No. She only come past my lodge in the night."
As soon as he was detected the name of "windigo" was given him, and if he did not betake himself again to solitude he was shot or knocked on the head at the first convenient opportunity. Archange remembered one such wretched creature who had haunted the settlement awhile, and then disappeared. His canoe was known, and when it hovered even distantly on the river every child ran to its mother.
When she thought of the windigo, of the rapids, of any peril which might be working his limitless absence, she set clenched hands in her loosened hair and trembled with hysterical anguish. But the enormity of his behavior if he were alive made her hiss at the rafters. "Good, monsieur! Next time I will have four officers. I will have the entire garrison sitting along the gallery!
My companion, who was working the spinning bait while I sat on the rock, casually observed, pointing to the Indian, "He's a Windigo." "A what?" I asked. "A Windigo." "What is that?" "A man that has eaten other men." "Has this man eaten other men?" "Yes; a long time ago he and his band were starving, and they killed and ate forty other Indians who were starving with them.
The Chippewa widow talked without being questioned, however, preparing to reduce Archange's mass of hair to the compass of a nightcap. "My grandmother told me there was a man dreamed he had to eat seven persons. He sat by the fire and shivered. If his squaw wanted meat, he quarreled with her. 'Squaw, take care. Thou wilt drive me so far that I shall turn windigo."
"White chief doesn't know what helps a windigo," explained a Chippewa; and the canoeman Jean Boucher interpreted him. "Bad spirit makes a windigo strong as a bear. I saw this one. She stole my whitefish and ate them raw." "Why didn't you give her cooked food when you saw her?" demanded Jacques. "She would not eat that now. She likes offal better."
Jean Boucher laid down his paddle sulkily, and his son did the same. Jacques took a long pistol from his belt and pointed it at the old Indian. "If you don't paddle for life, I will shoot you." And his eyes were eyes which Jean respected as he never had respected anything before. The young man was a beautiful fellow. If he wanted to save a windigo, why, the saints let him.
On the ridge above fort and houses the Chippewa lodges were pleasant in the sunlight, sending ribbons of smoke from their camp fires far above the serrated edge of the woods. Naked Indian children and their playmates of the settlement shouted to one another, as they ran along the river margin, threats of instant seizure by the windigo.
There are strange creatures in the woods and wilds of this new world." "There is the Loup Garou, but I have not seen him. He gets changed from a man to a fierce dog, and if you kill the dog, the man dies. There is the Windigo, and the old medicine woman can call strange things out of a sick person who has been bewitched, and then he gets well. But M. Destournier laughs at these stories."
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