Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

“What is there to fear?” I scoffed. “They know of us. They have seen Black Robes before. Surely we have more to fear from them than they have to fear from us.”

“They have seen Black Robes before,” Askuwheteau said, with that maddening, implacable stolidity of the Savages. “They are not afraid of Black Robes. They are afraid of you.”

“Of me? Why?”

“They believe you are Weetigo . They believe you are like the other Black Robe. The one you go to.” Askuwheteau was silent for a long moment. Then, he spoke again. “You will sleep here, Black Robe. I will guard you. I am not afraid of you. I do not believe you are Weetigo . If you go to the village tonight, they will kill you. And tomorrow, we leave.”

“Why do they believe this?” I was again outraged. “This is nonsense. It is blasphemy.”

“They speak of the other Black Robe. They say he eats flesh. They say he drinks blood.”

“Askuwheteau,” I said, trying to calm myself. I spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, in French, which Askuwheteau rudimentarily understood. “We have told you the meaning of the Eucharist. You know of the rituals of the Black Robes-how the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ through the miracle of transubstantiation. We do not eat the flesh of human beings, nor do we drink their blood. The very thought is an affront to God. The people of this village do not understand. You should have explained it to them better. You speak their language. Tell them they are mistaken.”

“ Weetigo eats the body and drinks the blood,” he insisted stubbornly. He gestured to the village behind him. “There are many stories of Weetigo here. People have seen the Weetigo in the village where we go to your Black Robe. There are many dead.” He gestured again, this time towards the lake. “Many dead in the water. They fell from the sky.” He gestured overhead. “This Weetigo flies at night, like the owl. He runs like the wolf. He has killed many.”

I was frustrated by Askuwheteau’s dogged insistence that this gruesome Indian legend of a mythical demon (as I then understood it, an evil spirit that enters a human body and possesses it, turning the unlucky vessel into a cannibal monster) was true. I was horrified that it should be so blasphemously entangled with our own holy ritual of Communion. I was reminded again of Dumont’s disquieting raving on the shore at TroisRivières about Father de Céligny being something other than human.

While it had been relatively easy to dismiss Dumont as mad, it was harder to be as sanguine in the face of Askuwheteau’s declaration that he was all that was standing between me and a terrible death at the hands of an entire village of Ojibwa Savages who believed I was in league with a living demon.

Worse still was the ever more likely possibility that Father de Céligny had been murdered by a group of terrified Savages who believed they were ridding their village of a monster.

I opened my mouth to protest again, but Askuwheteau silenced me with a sharp gesture. “Be quiet, Black Robe,” he said. “You stay here. I will guard you. We leave in morning, when sun rises.”

That night in the moonlight, at several separate intervals I was aware of the sly sound of moccasin-shod feet on dirt and stone as the Indians came to stare at me whilst I lay under my blanket, feigning sleep and listening to the sound of my heart in my chest.

Their gruesome legends, their tales of flesh-devouring, blooddrinking demons, and the spirits that walked their forests at night, were easier to dismiss in the daylight. But when, like at that moment, the dull moon was the only light able to pierce this infernal darkness at the edge of the world, the borders between our world of the living and their land of the dead seemed to shimmer and grow indistinct.

The Indians did not come too near. From their soft, fretful whispering, I came to believe that they were not keeping their distance simply because I was under the protection of Askuwheteau, but also because the Indians were afraid of me .

That morning, I again woke, shivering, to a light covering of snow upon the ground. The dark green trees were likewise wreathed and crested with white and stood out starkly against the deadened sky. The sun remained hidden behind lead-coloured clouds that seemed an advance guard of the deadly coming winter.

As I prayed that morning, I entreated God that we might find Father de Céligny alive and well, presiding over his Christianized congregation at St. Barthélemy, and that I might either return with him to TroisRivières or winter with him in Sault de Gaston if the route back became impassable because of the killing cold.

We again loaded the canoes in preparation for our departure. Askuwheteau and his paddlers were solemn that morning, entirely different in their demeanour than they had been every morning during the last month of our voyage inland. They whispered amongst themselves and, though I may have been imagining it, I caught them looking at me when they thought me unawares, glancing away quickly when I returned their gaze.

At one point, a near brawl appeared to break out between Askuwheteau and Chogan, one of the younger men in our party of paddlers, who had been glaring at me all through the morning. Askuwheteau struck him about the shoulders and rebuked him in Algonquian, though I was too far away to understand his words. When Chogan pointed at me, Askuwheteau seized the younger man’s arm and forced it down to his side. Askuwheteau addressed him sharply, but in a low voice, and Chogan looked vindictively in my direction one more time, then dropped his eyes in submission to Askuwheteau, my protector.

Of course, I had seen the entire exchange, but still I pretended that I had not, as much for my own security as for Chogan’s pride.

As we launched into the water, I saw that the entire village had arrayed itself on the shore, as though to assure themselves that we had indeed departed from their midst. They stared solemnly in our wake as the canoes glided into the morning fog, not speaking nor shouting, but entirely, raptly following the trajectory of our canoes with their eyes.

So general was the ghostly silence, that when one of the paddles rapped against the side of the boat, I cried out in shock. The Indians kept their heads down and paddled, showing no reaction to my outcry, no laughter this time, and none of the usual well-meant mockery. Instead, we paddled in silence until the mist enveloped us and the land behind us vanished from sight.

After five hard, uncomfortable days of mostly silent paddling, we made a gruesome discovery in the early evening of the fifth day as we crossed a particularly vast lake. Lulled and hypnotized by the repetitive motion of the paddle, I was suddenly jolted to consciousness by a sharp shout of warning from the bowsman of the other canoe.

I raised my head and squinted to see where he was pointing. There, floating face down on the surface of the black water was the body of a girl of perhaps no more than twelve or thirteen. I crossed myself and stifled my despair at the tragic sight. The girl’s body must have floated on some sort of very strong underwater current, for we seemed several miles from either shore and there seemed no other earthly way for it to have found itself so far from land. The fantastical thought came to me that she had been dropped from the air, as though from the talons of some monstrous bird in mid-flight.

Too, there seemed to be no putrescence or other decay. She looked as though she had fallen asleep in the lake that very afternoon and simply drifted away on the waves.

“Pull her to us,” I implored them. “Let us take her to shore, so that I may say a prayer for her and we can bury her.”