William Krueger: Iron Lake

“You don’t know about the Windigo?” he asked the boy. “You’ve lived in this country all your life and you don’t know about the Windigo?” He shook his head as if that were a dreadful thing.

Corcoran O’Connor sat on the far side of the campfire and stared at the blackened coffeepot that only moments before had jumped and rattled and moved across the coals without a human hand near it.

“I suppose,” Sam Winter Moon said, looking cautiously at the tin pot himself, “I should tell you, then. For your own good.” He carefully eyed the sky again and the stars, and he kept his voice low. “A Windigo’s a giant, an ogre with a heart of ice. A cannibal, a cold and hungry thing. It comes out of the woods to eat the flesh of men and women. Children, too. It doesn’t care.”

“Is it coming for us?” Cork scanned the shadows that jumped at the edges of the firelight.

“The way I understand it, a man pretty much knows when the Windigo’s coming for him.”

“Can you fight it?”

“Oh, sure. Can even kill it.”

“How?”

“Well, the Windigo’s a powerful creature, and there’s only one way so far as I know.” The ritual ash of the morning had worn off the smooth parts of Sam’s face, but it still blackened every deep line and crevice, so that in the firelight he looked like a fractured man. “You got to become a Windigo, too. There’s a magic for that. Henry Meloux’d most likely know the magic. But you got to be careful, because even if you kill the Windigo, you’re still in danger.”

“What danger?”

“Of staying a Windigo forever. Of being the ogre you killed. So you got to be prepared. You got to have help for what follows the killing of a Windigo. Someone’s got to be there with hot tallow ready for you to drink to melt the ice inside you, to melt you back down to the size of other men.”

“I hope I never meet the Windigo,” Cork said, eyeing the old tin pot.

“I hope so, too,” Sam agreed.

Cork was quiet a moment while the fire snapped and popped and sent smoke and glowing embers upward into the dark. “That’s just a story, right?”

Sam rolled a cigarette and considered while he sealed the paper with his tongue. “Maybe. But in these woods it’s best to believe in all possibilities. There’s more in these woods than a man can ever see with his eyes, a lot more than he can ever hope to understand.”

Although he was tired, Cork stayed awake by the fire a long time while Sam smoked and told stories about Cork’s father. Some of the stories made them both laugh. That night, as Cork lay in his bedroll, he thought about the bear they were after. He was glad Sam had changed his mind about killing the great animal, but he hoped they would at least see it. He thought about the Windigo, which was something he hoped he would not see. And he thought about his father, whom he would never see again. These were all elements of his life, and although they were separate things, they were now intertwined somehow like the roots of a tree. All his life he would remember the bear hunt with Sam Winter Moon. In some manner he didn’t quite understand, the hunt had opened a way in him for the grief to begin passing through. All his life he would be grateful to his father’s friend.

Almost thirty years would pass, however, before he would have cause to remember the Windigo. Thirty years before he heard it call his name.

For a week the feeling had been with him, and all week long young Paul LeBeau had been afraid. Of what exactly, he couldn’t say. Whenever he tried to put the finger of his thinking on it, it slipped away like a drop of mercury. But he knew that whatever was coming would be bad, because the feeling was exactly like the terrible waiting had been before his father disappeared. Each day he reached out into the air with all his senses, trying to touch what was coming. So that finally, on that morning in mid-December when the clouds rolled in thick and gray as smoke and the wind screamed over the pines and tamaracks and the snow began falling hard, Paul LeBeau looked out the window of his algebra class and thought hopefully, Maybe it’s only this.

Shortly after lunch, word of the school closing came down. Students quickly put on their coats and shouldered their book bags, and a few minutes later the yellow buses began to pull away, heading onto roads that threatened to disappear before them.

Paul left the Aurora Middle School and walked home, pushing into the force of the storm the whole way. He changed his clothes, put on his Sorel boots, took five dollars from the small cashbox on his dresser, and left his mother a note affixed with a butterfly magnet to the refrigerator door. Grabbing his canvas newspaper bag from its hook in the garage, he headed toward his drop box. By two-thirty he was loaded up and ready to go.

Paul had two paper routes covering nearly two and a half miles. He began with the small business district of Aurora and ended just at the town limits out on North Point Road. At fourteen, he was larger than most boys his age and very strong. If he hustled, he could finish in just under an hour and a half. But he knew this day would be different. The snow had been accumulating at a rate of more than an inch per hour and the bitter wind that swept down out of Canada drifted it fast and deep.

He took the routes in the time when his father was drinking heavily and his mother needed money. Delivering the papers, especially on days like this that seemed impossible, was a responsibility he took seriously. In truth, he loved the storms. The energy in the wind and the ceaseless force of the drifting snow thrilled him. Where another boy might see only the plodding task ahead of him, Paul saw challenge. He took pride in his ability to battle against these elements, trudging through the drifts, leaning hard into the wind in order to complete the job expected of him.

He was an Eagle Scout. Order of the Arrow. Member of Troop 135 out of St. Agnes Catholic Church. He had made himself capable in a hundred ways. He could start a fire with flint and steel; hit a bull’s-eye with a target arrow at thirty yards; tie a bowline, a sheepshank, a slip knot; lash together a bridge strong enough to bear the weight of several men. He knew how to treat someone for shock, drowning, cardiac arrest, and sunstroke. He believed seriously in the motto “Be Prepared,” and often as he walked his paper routes, he imagined scenarios of disaster in Aurora that would allow all his secret skills to shine.

By the time he neared the end of his deliveries, lights had been turned on in the houses along the way. He was tired. His shoulders ached from the weight of the papers and his legs felt leaden from wading through knee-deep drifts. The last house on his route stood at the very end of North Point Road, a pine-covered finger of land that jutted into Iron Lake and was lined with expensive homes. The last and most isolated of the houses belonged to Judge Robert Parrant.

The judge was an old man with a hard white face, bony hands, and sharp, watchful eyes. Out of fear Paul treated him with great deference. The judge’s paper was always placed securely between the storm door and the heavy wooden front door, safe from the elements. Whenever Paul came monthly to collect for his service, the judge rewarded him with a generous tip and more stories about politics than Paul cared to hear.

The judge’s house was almost dark, with only the flicker of a fireplace flame illuminating the living room curtains. With the last paper in hand, Paul threaded his way up the long walk between cedars laden with snow. He pulled the storm door open, plowing a little arc in the drift on the porch, and saw that the front door was slightly ajar. Cold air whistled into the house. As he reached out to draw the door closed, he heard the explosion from a heavy firearm discharged inside.