• • •
A little distance past the place where Monsieur Trépagny had killed the porcupine years earlier he began to sense something. He slowed his pace, set each foot with care as silently as he could and listened. Nothing. He went on, but the sense of a menacing entity nearby persisted. Five years of Monsieur Trépagny’s talk of supernatural horrors in the forest, the mnemic ethos of the region, had damaged his French rationality. He had come to believe in the witiku and its comrades as he believed in the devil and angels. He walked on, the back of his neck exposed and vulnerable, his senses quiveringly alert. The Iroquois were far to the south and west, though he had heard a few raiding parties sometimes slipped through the forests unseen and massacred settlers. He considered what animals might stalk a man: bears, cougars, wolves. Of these, bears had the greatest magical powers. It might be a bear snuffling along his trail, yet he doubted it. At this time of year bears were cramming their bodies with berries and greasy moths, eating, eating. As he paused, looking for blaze marks — for they were weathered and grey, difficult to see in the deepening light — he heard the distinct sound of a breaking twig in the sombrous forest.
From that moment the fleering faces of daemons appeared among the interstices of the branches, among the needles. The fear of Iroquois and their unspeakable tortures flooded his bowels. He might never get back to Monsieur Trépagny’s clearing, he might never claim his land.
Away from the trail he saw acres of young dog-hair larch. In there perhaps he could hide, for no one, not even an impassioned Iroquois, would plunge into trees so tightly packed. He burrowed into the larch thicket.
The impression of something alien not far away persisted, and as he rummaged in his pocket for a corn cake he smelled a faint drift of smoke. It was the fire of the Iroquois.
Not daring to light a fire himself, he curled up under the larches and spent a shivering night dozing and listening for their approach. He could make out a pale clump of corpse flowers and other luminous fungi in the gloom. Such sullen smolderings, invisible by day, were the signs of demonic passage.
When the paling east presaged dawn he was on the barely discernible trail, moving swiftly. The feeling of being pursued grew stronger and he half-ran, panting, sure he heard an Iroquois’s heaving breath. Then he stopped. Fleeing would not help him. He took up a station behind a spruce a few yards off the trail and waited. He would let the Iroquois appear. He would face their tortures and die as others had died. It was the red thread in the fabric of life in New France.
A short time passed and then he heard not only snapping twigs but a voice, two voices. The few sung words in French—“… you’ll find many Iroquois bodies—plusieurs corps iroquois”—and then laughter. French! He saw motion through the trees and stepped onto the trail. But stood tense and ready for trouble. They saw him.
“Ah! He has waited for us!” They were short muscular men with black beards, top-heavy with huge shoulders and arms, thick black eyebrows and red lips—hommes du nord, voyageurs, men of the north. But he knew them by their large eyes, Monsieur Trépagny eyes, ebon black irises in flashing whites. They were dressed in the mode of voyageur—fur traders, one with a red tuque, the other with a neckerchief tied around his head, both with deerskin leggings and Indian-style breechclouts, oblivious to biting insects. Both wore brilliant sashes knotted around their waists, both wore woolen double shirts. They were drunk and carrying bottles of spirits, which they swigged as they walked. They were Monsieur Trépagny’s long-awaited brothers from the crowd of boatmen camped at Wobik.
They said their names: Toussaint, whose beard flowed down his breast, and Fernand, with a short bristle of whiskers. Oui, Tabernacle! Of course, by the Holy Tabernacle they were coming to attend Claude’s wedding, and yes, they had followed René, but also knew to look for the trail blazes. Some of their comrades would follow, for the chance of a wedding celebration would never be missed by anyone alive in this empty country. Another of their company knew the path, though he preferred not to join the revelry as he said he had a strong dislike of Claude Trépagny. He would stay in Wobik and guard their fur packs. They passed their bottles to René, and soon he was drunk and the brothers grew more boisterous, bragging of their wild and untrammeled lives, singing songs with endless verses. Toussaint said he knew more than forty songs; Fernand boasted that he had mastered more than fifty and that he would sing all of them this moment commencing with “Petit Rocher.” He began well but stopped after seven verses. He turned on René.
“You think this is all that we do, sing songs and walk through a forest? No! What they say, we live hard, love hard, sleep hard and eat moose nose!”
Toussaint pressed a dark chunk of food into René’s hand, saying it was not moose nose but pemmican. It had a burned, musty flavor and there were hairs in it and nodules of bright fat the color of a chicken’s foot. It was chewy stuff and the more he masticated it the more it swelled in his mouth. He took a gulp of whiskey and forced the pemmican down.
René had been thinking of what they said of their companion who would stay in Wobik with the fur packs, thinking of the man he had seen disappear into the spruce shadow, and he knew with sudden surety who it was.
“This one who stays in Wobik, does he have bad teeth?”
“Bad teeth? No. Chalice! He has no teeth at all. He dines on mush and broth. He cannot eat pemmican and would be a liability did he not prepare his own repasts.”
“Is his name perhaps Duquet? Or something else?”
“Duquet. How do you know?”
“He was an engagé with me, on the same ship and hired to the same man — your brother Monsieur Claude Trépagny. He disappeared into the woods one day. Your brother believes he was caught and eaten by the loup-garou.”
“Hah! He was not eaten, or if so, only a little around the edges. He is a man of affairs. He knows the important men in the fur trade — even the English. He says he will be a rich man one day.”
René had his own idea of why Duquet did not wish to see Monsieur Trépagny.
• • •
The reunion of the brothers and their uncle Chama was noisy and sentimental. They all wept, embraced, cursed, swigged whiskey, slapped each other on the back, looked earnestly at one another, wept again and talked. The brothers disapproved of the clearing. Their own way of life left no scars on the land, they said, denuded no forests. They glided through the waterways and in seconds the wake of their passage vanished in the stream flow and the forests remained as they had been, silent and endless.
“Uncle, you must come back with us to the high country, what good times we’ll have again.”
But Chama smiled sadly. He had a spine deformity that every year twisted him a little more sideways. He was no longer able to bear the hard voyageur life, a statement which motivated the pitiless brothers to describe tremendous paddling feats — twenty hours, thirty hours — without a pause. They named heroes of the water, wept for the memory of a friend who broke his leg so that the bone protruded from the bunched flesh. They had put him up to his neck in the icy water to die.