Grey Owl (Archibald Stansfeld Belaney) - The Collected Works of Grey Owl

As he grows weaker he becomes the victim of hallucinations, and is beset by a form of insanity, the "madness of the woods," in which the dim arches become peopled with flitting shapes and formless apparitions. Gargoyle faces leer and grimace at him from out the shadows; Indians appear, stare momentarily beyond him as though he were invisible, to disappear again, eluding his frantic efforts to attract their attention. Acquaintances stand beckoning in the distance who, when he approaches, retreat yet further, and beckon again, finally fading to nothingness, or walking callously out of sight. And he shouts frenziedly that they may stop and wait for him, at which the woods become suddenly deserted, and his voice echoes hollowly through the endless, empty ramifications, which have now assumed the appearance of a tomb.

And there hangs over him as he blindly staggers onward, a Presence, an evil loathsome thing, which, as though to mark him as its own, envelops him with its shadow; following him like a hideous vampire, or some foul, carrion bird, waiting but for the moment when he will drop, watching with a terrible smile. For the ghoul that sits enthroned behind the ramparts of the North, holds always in his hand the strands of his entanglements, sleeping not at all, lest, of those who stumble unawares within them, there should one escape.

For another day, perhaps two, or even three, he stumbles on; muttering, at times raving; falling, getting up, only to fall again; crawling at last in that resistless urge of the lost to keep on while there is yet life; and always just ahead dangles the will-o'-the-wisp of hope, never fulfilled.

And if ever found, his bones will indicate his dying posture as that of a creeping man.

In northern Quebec, during one of the mining rushes which are yet in progress, a prospector came out to the railroad to report his partner lost. This had happened six weeks before his arrival at the "front." He had spared no effort, and had used every means that mortal man could devise to recover his companion, but without avail. As this had happened in a territory that could only be reached by something over two hundred and fifty miles of a rough and difficult route, which it would take at least two weeks to cover, it was considered useless to make any further attempt, as the man had no doubt been long dead.

The prospector, however, had his doubts. Both men were experienced bushmen, although perhaps not gifted with that sense of direction which not even all Indians possess. Being no tenderfoot, the missing man would not be likely to make any further false moves after the initial one of getting lost, and this thought had kept alive a spark of hope.

For two weeks the bereft man could not get his friend out of his mind; often he dreamed of him. After one of these dreams, more vivid than the rest, in which he saw his partner crawling, in the last extremity, along the sandy beach on the shores of a shallow lake, he decided to revisit the ground, having been lucky in his prospecting, by means of an airplane. In a few hours he was hovering over the scene of the mishap.

Nearly every lake in the district was visited for signs of life, but none of them answered the description of the dream lake. Eventually the pilot, fearing to run out of gasoline, advised a return. Influenced by his vision, as indeed he had been in deciding to make the trip, the miner asked the aviator to fly low over a cluster of lakes about twenty miles from the original camp site, one of them being plainly shallow, and having sand beaches down one side.

And, as they passed over the sheet of water, they saw a creeping thing, moving slowly along on the beach, stopping, and moving on. At that distance it could have been a bear, or a wolf hunting for food, and they were about to swing off to the south and civilization when they decided to make one last attempt and investigate.

Three minutes later the two men were confronted by an evidence of human endurance almost past belief. Practically naked, his body and face bloated with the bites of mosquitoes he no longer had the strength to fight, his two month's beard clotted with blood and filled with a writhing mass of black flies, emaciated to the last degree, the missing man, for it was he, was even yet far from dead.

But, after sixty-two days of suffering such as few men are called on to endure, this man who would not die could no longer reason. He stared dully at his rescuers, and would have passed on, creeping on hands and knees. And he was headed North, going further and further away from the possibility of rescue with every painful step.

Very gently he was carried, still feebly resisting, to the waiting plane, and in two hours was in safety.

Later the rescued man told how, confused by the non-appearance of the sun for several days, he had wandered in circles from which he could not break away, until he commenced to follow lake shores, and the banks of rivers, expecting them to lead him to some body of water that he knew.

On the re-appearance of the sun, after about a week, he was so far gone as to become possessed by the idea that it was rising and setting in the wrong places, and travelled, accordingly, north instead of south, continuing in that direction long after he had ceased consciously to influence his wanderings. For food he had dammed small streams and set a weir of sticks in a pool below, easily catching the fish left in the drained creek bed. During the weeks of the sucker run, he fared not too badly, as suckers are a sizeable fish of two or three pounds weight, and fish, even if raw, will support life. Later this run ceased, and the suckers returned to deep water. He was then obliged to subsist on roots and an occasional partridge killed with a stone, until he became too weak to throw at them.

He next set rabbit snares of spruce root, most of which the rabbits ate; so he rubbed balsam gum on them, which rabbits do not like, and occasionally was lucky. Soon, however, he lacked the strength to accomplish these things, and from then on lived almost entirely on the inside bark of birch trees. So far north there are miles of country where birch trees will not grow, so he was often without even that inadequate diet. At last he was crawling not over a couple of hundred yards a day, if his last day's tracks were any indication. To travel six or eight days without food is an ordeal few survive, and only those who have undergone starvation, coupled with the labour of travelling when in a weakened condition, can have any idea of what this man went through.

His mind a blank, at times losing sight of the object of his progress, daily he crept further and further away from safety. And there is no doubt that insanity would eventually have accomplished what starvation apparently could not.

This "madness of the woods" that drives men to destruction, when a little calm thinking and observation would have saved the day, attacks alike the weak-willed and the strong, the city man and the bush-whacker, when, after a certain length of time, they find themselves unable to break away from the invisible power that seems to hold them within a definite restricted area from which they cannot get away, or else lures them deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Men old on the trail recognize the symptoms and combat them before their reasoning powers become so warped that they are no longer to be relied on.

This peripatetic obsession causes men to have strange thoughts. Under its influence they will doubt the efficiency of a compass, will argue against the known facts, fail to recognize places with which they are perfectly familiar.

One lumber-jack foreman who became twisted in his calculations, struck a strange road, followed it, and arrived at a camp, and not till he entered it and recognized some of the men, did he realize that the camp was his own. Some men lost for long periods, and having been lucky enough to kill sufficient game to live on, although alive and well seem to lose their reasoning powers entirely. At the sight of men they will run, and are with difficulty caught, and with staring eyes and wild struggles try to free themselves and escape.