Given at Montréal, Québec in a the form of a Letter to the Very Reverend Father Vincenzo Caraffa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, at Rome
Anno Domini 1650
Very Reverend Father in Christ,
Pax Christi
I send this last Relation in the hopes that it will reach Your Reverence by the ship returning to France before the ice in this bitter region renders entirely compromised the passage of our vessels across the ocean.
I fear that my time here in this land is short, as the pox that has plagued hundreds of the Savages, thankfully a goodly number of them baptized and brought to our Christian Faith and now resting in the arms of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven, has taken me into its embrace as well.
I write with difficulty and have entrusted the care and delivery of this Relation to Your Reverence into the hands of my friend Father Charles Vimont. He has sworn to seal this document and not to cast his eyes upon its contents, which are for the eyes of Your Reverence alone, on the peril of his Immortal Soul.
For my part, my vain prayers that I should again see the shores of my homeland or the beautiful cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres where I first heard Our Lord’s call as a young man, or indeed once again touch the face of my beloved mother, have been denied by Our Lord, and I submit myself joyfully to His will.
My one true regret during these many years of service to the Savages of New France is that I should have been spared the great honour of martyrdom, the great blessing enjoined upon so many of our fallen Fathers at the bloody hands of the Hiroquois-most lately Father de Brébeuf, Father Chabanel, and Father de Lalande, who died so horribly at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons last year, praising the name of Christ and giving absolution to their Barbarian tormentors with their last breath, even after their tongues were cut out, for they kept preaching till death released them.
I pray for Your Reverence’s understanding, prayers, and meditation upon the reading of this, my last Relation and Testament, for it is with a heavy heart that I set down the strange and terrible events I witnessed at St. Barthélemy among the Ojibwa in the northern Lac Superiéur region of the country in the winter of the Year of Our Lord 1632.
These secrets I have kept to myself for nearly twenty years, confiding them not even in the Sacrament of Confession, though I regularly opened my heart to God and begged His forgiveness, not only for the blasphemies I have seen, but also for those I have wrought myself in my sad and pitiable effort to do His will as best as could be done by one so unworthy.
In the autumn of that dark year of which I write, word was received by Monsieur de Champlain at Trois-Rivières of the destruction of two of our settlements near Sault de Gaston, in Huronia, and the martyrdom of three of our Jesuit Fathers in what could only have been an attack by the Hiroquois, for their fiendish handiwork leaves a spoor as unmistakable as the handiwork of Satan himself.
In the first, the Mission of Sainte-Berthe, the martyrs were, by name, Father Renaud d’Olivier, Father Mathieu Glazier, and Father Nausson d’Uongue. The Fathers had travelled from France together and, it was reported, had been as close as brothers. I pray they found comfort in their brotherhood at the end. The Indian trappers reported the hideous sight of the maimed and tortured bodies of d’Olivier, Glazier, and d’Uongue. Their scorched bodies still hung from the stakes to which they were tied and left for carrion. The Savages, it was reported, had poured boiling water over their heads in mockery of Baptism and cut out their eyes and tongues, placing live coals in the sockets.
Likewise, they reported the smoke still heavy and foul over the burned village, and many dead, including a number of baptized Savages. We wept at this news, even though we knew that our fallen Brothers had attained the heights of Heaven, having died in the greatest possible service to Our Lord Jesus Christ. Never have the words of our Jesuit motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam, comforted me more than they did in the hours that followed the news of the Fathers’ martyrdom.
In the second instance, the strange news was of the mission of St. Barthélemy deep in the Ojibwa region of that country, a region noted for the cruelty of the terrain itself and of the strangeness of its customs, superstitions and legends. So tight, it is said, is the Devil’s hold upon these poor people that establishing a mission in this particular region had long been an ambition of the Crown in its support of our work here in New France.
In the case of the mission of St. Barthélemy, the trappers related that the mission seemed entirely abandoned.
Unlike the mission of Sainte-Berthe, which had clearly fallen to an attack by the Hiroquois, the mission at St. Barthélemy appeared deserted, as though the inhabitants, both Christian and Savage, had all departed freely and of their own volition.
The trappers observed this and more and related it to Monsieur de Champlain, who in turn related it to Father de Varennes, who was then the representative responsible for dispatching our Fathers on their missions upriver in the company of their Huron guides.
It was at this point that I was summoned to meet with Father de Varennes at Trois-Rivières. I was then still a very young man, all of twentyone, a year in New France since my departure from Chartres, and foolish in the fearless way of all young men, but determined to serve the will of God with all of my body and soul. I knew even then that martyrdom for the greater glory of God would be the highest attainment, and yet my poor flesh dreaded it, dreaded the agony of the flames of the stake as it dreaded the butchery of blade and spear. I confess that fear with shame, but with the openhearted humility that my own unworthiness demands.
Father de Varennes wasted no time in asking me what I knew of the settlement of St. Barthélemy. Sadly, I told him, I had only heard of it in passing through the stories of the other young priests. I knew little of the region or of the mission itself.
“Do you, for instance,” de Varennes asked me, “know anything of the Ojibwa people, Father Nyon? Do you know their language and customs?”
“I have studied their language, Father,” I replied. “I am not fluent, but I have tried to prepare myself as best I could in the event that my service in New France led me there.”
“You know by now, Father Nyon, of the recent destruction of our mission at Sainte-Berthe and the slaughter of our priests at the hands of the Hiroquois?”
I nodded, bowing my head. “Yes, Father. A great tragedy.”
“Have you then also heard,” he asked, “of the mystery of our settlement of St. Barthélemy near the shore of Lac Supérieur which has been reported as entirely deserted?”
“Yes, Father. But again, only in passing. Only in the form of rumour and conjecture. Stories from around the campfire in these last weeks. The gossip of trappers.”
The old priest smiled at that. But again he grew serious. “Father Nyon,” he said. “We have dispatched one of our priests, Father Lubéron, in the company of a party of Algonquians, to recover the bodies of our fallen Fathers at Sainte-Berthe and to give them a Christian burial. It is a gruesome assignation, but Father Lubéron has volunteered. We can only pray for his safe return, and that he does not meet the same fate that befell d’Olivier, Glazier, and d’Uongue.”
“I too will pray for that, Father,” I told him. “I would also have volunteered if I had known of the assignation.”
Father de Varennes looked hard at me and said, “Is that what is truly in your heart, Father Nyon?”
I replied that it was, indeed.
“Father Nyon. I would like you to travel north to the region of Sault de Gaston and visit the site of the St. Barthélemy settlement and see if what the trappers reported is true. I would like you to find the priest, Father de Céligny. If the Savages murdered him, I would like you to bury him and perform the Last Rites. If he is alive, I would like you to bring him back with you to Trois-Rivières so he may give his own account of what transpired at the Mission.”
“I accept joyfully, Father,” I said, quite proud of myself for having been put in charge of such an undertaking. “What can you tell me of Father de Céligny, Father? I have not heard that name before. Has he been long in New France?”
“Father de Céligny arrived in New France in 1625 as one of the priests who answered the appeal of the Recollet friars in order to aid them in their work with the Indian missions,” Father de Varennes explained. “The Recollets were insufficient in numbers to successfully cope with the nature and hardships of evangelizing the Savages.”
“But what of the man?” I persisted. “Who is he?”
“The man?” Father de Varennes laughed. “Ah yes, the man. I know only the priest, but you ask me about the man. Let us see. Father de Céligny is descended from a noble family in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the most northerly region of France. He is kinsman to the Vicomte de Moriève of that region. He took his vows in Paris, at Montmartre. And, as I said, he came to us here in New France in 1625. By reports it was a long and terrible voyage from Dieppe to Québec. An unknown wasting sickness descended on crew and passengers alike. Many shrivelled and died, including some priests. Father de Céligny survived. He was dispatched to the Ojibwa that very year. He is a learned man. As I recall, he was also grave in manner and demeanour. In truth, I don’t remember much of the man. And even now, it is the priest I am concerned with, not the man.”
“Forgive my impertinence, Father,” I said humbly. “But if he wasn’t murdered by the Savages, might there have been another reason for his abandonment of his Mission?”
Father de Varennes sighed at that. “Sadly, I believe we must prepare ourselves for the worst, Father Nyon.”
With courage I did not feel, I told Father de Varennes that I would do my duty and meet my fate joyfully, whatever it might be.
“Your journey will take you approximately five weeks,” Father de Varennes said. “It will be an exceptionally difficult one, and fraught with hardship. You speak the Algonquian language, I’m told?”
“Not well, Father, but I can understand the language better than I can speak it.”
“The Algonquians accompanying you will take you to the region of Sault de Gaston and will delivery you safely to the Mission of St. Barthélemy. They camp nearby and will wait to bring you back, either alone, or with Father de Céligny. Do you have any questions, Father?”
“No, Father,” I said. “I understand everything. When will I be leaving?”
Father de Varennes hesitated, as though considering my youth. Then he drew himself up to his full height and said, not unkindly, “At dawn, Father Nyon. And may God be with you.”
At that, we knelt together and prayed for some time in the chapel. Father de Varennes introduced me to my stoical Algonquian guide, Askuwheteau. He bade me spend the remainder of the afternoon in prayer and meditation, and then retire early for my departure from Trois-Rivières.
After the departure of Father de Varennes, I walked a bit about the post and then took myself down to the river, feeling the need to see it once, alone, before my departure at the dawn on the morrow.
As I approached the edge of the dark water, I noticed a man following me at a cautious distance. He was clearly French, one of those hommes du nord, or hivernants as the voyageurs who transport furs by canoe and overwinter in the regions beyond Montréal and Grand Portage are often called. Like so many of them, a crude and filthy-looking man who, through long exposure to the Savages and carnal knowledge of the vilest sort with Savage women, had begun to resemble the Indians more than he resembled a white man. By coincidence, I did know this man’s name: he was called Dumont, and was known to be of low moral character, over fond of spirits, a dishonest dealer with the Savages and an unrepentant consort of their women.
I paused by the water and waited, my intention being to ask him what he wanted. I had no fear of him, for what Frenchman here in TroisRivières would harm a priest? But he spoke first, and most strangely.
He asked me, “You are the priest who will be going to St. Barthélemy with the Algonquians?”
I told him yes, and I asked him what business it was of his. He laughed and showed me a reeking mouthful of rotten teeth. The stench issuing from his open mouth was a horror in its own right.
“Do you know what awaits you at St. Barthélemy? Do you know what is there?”
“I expect to recover the body of Father de Céligny of that Mission,” I said. “Though my heartiest prayers are that I will find him alive and well, and safely in the service of Our Lord.”
At that, Dumont laughed again. But it was not a laugh of joy, or even one of malice. It was a forced laugh, one in which I thought I detected a trace of something akin to fear. And yet this man Dumont had already openly lived a rough and vile life. I could not fathom what could have made him afraid of speaking openly about the Mission.
“What do you know of the Mission at St. Barthélemy?” I asked him, with a boldness I did not feel. “What do you know of the fate of Father de Céligny? If you have something to share, share it now or keep your peace.”
He shrugged again. “I know nothing,” said he. “I speak of nothing.”
“Not true, Dumont,” I replied. “Tomorrow I am leaving for St. Barthélemy. If there is something you know, or have heard, I charge you to tell me-and indeed to tell me now and in all haste.”
At that, Dumont leaned close to me and said, “The Indians of LacSuperiéur, they fear him.”
“Who,” I demanded. “Father de Céligny?”
“Yes, him.” Dumont crossed himself. The reverent gesture, so earnestly performed, seemed so incongruous in that setting, and from that man, that I fear I laughed.
“Of course they fear him,” I scoffed. “The Indians blame us for everything. These countries, and these poor, ignorant people, are in Lucifer’s thrall. They blame us when there is an outbreak of the pox. They blame us when there is a famine. They blame us when there is a drought. They call the Rite of Baptism water-sorcery. They accuse us of performing witchcraft in our chapels. They call us demons in black robes.”
“No,” Dumont whispered. “They fear de Céligny himself.” He looked all around as though to make sure no one was listening. “They call him Weetigo. An eater of human flesh and a drinker of blood. Human in form, but mji-manidoo, a demon.”
“The Savages do not understand the Rite of Communion,” I explained as patiently as I could, trying not to show my irritation. “They confuse it with their own barbarism, or the barbarism of the Hiroquois.”
“No,” Dumont insisted. “It is more than that. The Savages of which I speak have no quarrel with the Black Robes. But they give the mission of St. Barthélemy in Sault de Gaston a wide berth.”
“Then perhaps those are the Savages who have killed Father de Céligny,” I said in outrage. “If you have information about his fate, Dumont, you will come with me now to Father de Varennes, and you will tell him what you know, or what you have heard from the Savages.”
“I know nothing,” Dumont said. “I have heard nothing. And I will tell Father de Varennes nothing.”
“If you know nothing, my son, then what is your purpose here? Why did you seek me out today?” I asked him in bafflement. “Do you have something to confess? Do you not wish to be granted absolution? I can absolve you, but before I do, you must confess to me.”
Dumont again grew pale. Again, he crossed himself. This time, I did not laugh, for a mask of such dread and tragedy contorted his face that Melpomene herself would have recoiled from it. He seemed suddenly in the throes of a deep and profound spiritual terror. Were he not so clearly a man of a dissolute and profane reputation, I would have even said that he feared that his very soul was in peril from something he had done, or seen. So awful was Dumont’s expression that I had but one thought: that he had, himself, witnessed the awful martyrdom of Father de Céligny at the hands of the Savages and that it had been a most fearsome and terrible death. In his eyes, I found every nightmare that had tormented me, as a young priest in Chartres, about the terrible and agonizing fate that might await me here in New France.
“I need no absolution, Father,” Dumont said. “But perhaps God will grant you the strength and knowledge to conquer what awaits you in St. Barthélemy. We have brought terrible things to New France. There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.” He knelt and took my crucifix in his filthy hands, and kissed it. “I will pray for you, Father. Pray for me, also.”
With that, Dumont rose to his feet. He looked around him, and then quickly took his leave from my company by a trail that I knew led to the other side of the post where some of the hivernants kept their canoes. He did not turn or look back as he hurried along his way before disappearing from view behind the trees.
The cold I felt in the wake of Dumont’s leave-taking was due only in part to the sinking of the sun in the sky, or the freezing egress of the coming night. I looked all around me and saw anew the cruel beauty of this wild country of white rivers and black lakes and forests. I saw afresh the savagery here; in nature as in man. Truly, I thought, this is the Devil’s own dominion. Even poor, mad Dumont, in all of his fear and confusion, knew it. There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages, Father, he’d said. I realized again that we soldiers of God were little more than pinpricks of His light in the vast darkness of this terrible place, and the only beacons by which the Indians might be guided, with Christ’s help, away from Satan and into God’s glorious light. I puzzled over his statement that we, meaning the French, had brought those things here, for surely the light we brought with us has been not only the light of God, but also the light of civilization and knowledge. But ultimately I ascribed the words to his confusion. Perhaps, ultimately, Dumont, after so many godless years among them, had become Savage himself. I swore to pray for him.
And pray I did, that night, though not only for Dumont, or Father de Céligny. Sleep was reluctant to claim me, but eventually it did. It seemed I had barely closed my eyes before Askuwheteau was shaking me awake with the utmost force and impatience to begin the journey upriver to the Mission of St. Barthélemy among the Ojibwa in Sault de Gaston.
We departed in two canoes into a dark grey dawn wreathed in heavy fog and a lowering sky threatening rain. The rains of that first autumn of mine in Trois-Rivières were unlike any I had known as a boy coming to maturity in Beauce. It was of a particular, piercing cold, as though the angels themselves were hurling frozen nails from a celestial height to pierce and humble the proud and unaccustomed. The rivers here also bore no resemblance to any of the three branches of the gentle Eure, near my family’s home near Chartres. Instead, they were wild and serpentine, wending through the rocks and the forests to, it seemed, the very edge of the world.
The Indians are impermeable to hardship in a way that we Europeans cannot fathom. I had of course been made aware of the stoical inurement particular to these people before I left France, but hearing it described by returning priests was entirely different to seeing it in the flesh. The Savage women, too, paddle the canoes alongside their men, as well as carry their own heavy packs along the trails. Their hands are hard and calloused and would be unrecognizable, in France, as belonging to any but the hardest-working peasant.
I sat close behind Askuwheteau in the canoe and tried to match the force of his paddle-stroke. He bent his body to the task as though it were a Sisyphean machine, his back leaning into each stroke. Each time his paddle cut the black water, a perfect white-crested whirlpool spun away in its wake. Try as I might to imitate his movements, my own poor attempts were clumsy and ineffectual. In truth, I felt unmanned, and yet I set myself arduously to my own portion of the labour, remembering well the admonitions of Father de Varennes with regard to the Savages’ measure of me. My life depended in no small part on their protection and goodwill.
Indeed, my position relative to theirs became more and more obvious. While I might be their intellectual and spiritual superior through the agency of my education and my role as Christ’s humble representative in their world of godless ignorance, they were, in every practical sense, my superiors. I saw-and felt-this reality with every stroke of the paddle that took me farther and farther into the wilderness.
We camped that first night by the shore of a nameless lake- nameless to me, though I do not doubt the Savages had a name for it, as they have a name for everything in earthly nature, as well as names for their pantheon of pagan gods and spirits that, I had been told, dwelt not only in the heavens above, but shared the earth with them.
My hands were raw and bleeding from the repetitive friction of wet skin against wood after that first long day’s paddle. Sitting about the campfire that night with the Indians, one of the older women, Hausisse, noticed my pain. From one of her packs, she withdrew a greasy poultice. She started to apply it to my wounds. When I pulled back and uttered some instinctive protest, she grasped my wrist as firmly as if I were an unruly child and rebuked me in Algonquian. Then she applied the poultice even more vigorously upon my wounds. In truth, the sting in my hands from the paddle began almost immediately to subside, a cooling sensation spreading across my palms, and indeed everywhere the poultice touched my skin.
“ Meegwetch,” I said in awe, thanking Hausisse in my own crude Algonquian. I looked down at my hands in wonderment, for the pain had almost completely vanished, as though it had never been there.
She spoke again in Algonquian, calling me “stupid” or “foolish,” but in no way unkindly. She smiled and put the poultice back inside her buckskin pack, then shuffled off to join her putative “husband” by the fire.
The Indians regarded me with amusement as I continued to stare at my hands, but then made room for me when I went myself to sit closer to the flames. I found the smell of them comforting-that curious mixture of buckskin, sweat, dried lake water and smoke from the fire. In truth, their very presence was a bulwark against the terrors of the unknown and the unknowable. The darkness surrounding the fire was of an opacity the likes of which I had never known in France, or perhaps it seemed darker because, in France, I knew reasonably well what it might conceal. Here, in this savage Devil’s-land, God only knew what lay beneath night’s cloak, hidden and in wait.
As we lay down and prepared to sleep, I looked about me uneasily, for, unbidden, Dumont’s words had come back to me: There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages. I said a prayer for our safety and put myself in God’s hands as we slept. This time, I slept soundly and without dreams, surrounded by my Indian protectors.
The next morning, upon waking, I washed in the lake before my morning prayers. The poultice on my hands that had dried and crusted while I slept was rinsed off in the lake water. Miraculously, my hands had almost completely healed while I was asleep. Examining them in the pink light of the early dawn, I saw that the wounds were dry and had already scabbed.
I went to find Hausisse, the old woman who had acted as my surgeon, to show her this miracle, but when I did, she seemed uninterested. Hausisse looked away, muttering words under her breath in Algonquian I could not understand. After taking our morning meal, we packed up our rudimentary camp, loaded the two canoes, and again we set out across the water in the direction of Sault de Gaston.
The first few weeks passed without incident. They evolved into a backbreaking cycle of repetitive days that began at dawn and ended at sunset. The air had grown decidedly colder as the days shortened in anticipation of the coming winter. The hills and mountains surrounding the lakes and rivers were dappled in scarlet and saffron yellow, breathtakingly beautiful in the wildness of their colour. One morning, we woke to a light dusting of snow around the camp, but it melted with the sun, almost before we were underway again. The men shot wild fowl that the women would then prepare as part of our supper, and they fished the dark water with a dexterity at which I marvelled.
Though the work of paddling and camping became no easier, and in fact the land grew more rugged and forbidding the closer we came to our destination, making the portaging of the canoes and packs more difficult, a camaraderie of sorts seemed to have grown between us. I am under no illusion that the Indians saw me as one of them, and indeed they often mocked my seeming inability to master the most rudimentary of their skills, from paddling to portaging, yet we had settled into a peaceable accord.
My proficiency with the bow and arrow, however, surprised them, especially the men. Unbeknownst to them, of course, my father had hunted often on our family’s estate in Beauce, and he had drilled me throughout my boyhood in this one martial skill. Askuwheteau in particular took delight in my ability to shoot. On such occasions as we had time for recreation, which where precious few, he allowed me to practise with his own bow and arrow. While Askuwheteau was my unchallenged superior, I flatter myself that I won a measure of his respect in time.
I spoke my crude Algonquian with the other paddlers. With Askuwheteau, I spoke a mixture of Algonquian and French by which we both seemed to understand one another. We were not friends-the very idea seemed preposterous, especially then-but perhaps my utter dependence on him, coupled with my willingness to share a full portion of the work of our voyage and match the Indians effort for effort, had roused an answering kindness in him that made him more than merely my guide.
I came to find comfort in the sound of their voices, especially at night in the forest around the campfire. The sound had become a sort of lodestar of safety in the midst of the wilderness.
Blessedly there had been no sign of Hiroquois hunters along our route-in itself a miracle, for their appearance would have very likely signalled our doom. I realized that the Algonquians had been paid to protect me, and, as much as I might doubt their commitment to my safety, still I sensed that this group wished me no ill will, and indeed would safeguard me to the best of their ability and deliver me to the site of St. Barthélemy as promised, and wait there to return me to TroisRivières-either tragically alone, or in the company of Father de Céligny.
In the fourth week of our journey, we stopped in an Ojibwa village a week’s paddle or more from Sault de Gaston. It was apparently a village where Askuwheteau was known and respected, for the chief received him. The Chief and some of the Savages took my measure gravely, and with what appeared to be suspicion. Askuwheteau turned his back to me and spoke to them in a low voice. Over his shoulder, the Chief and the men with him continued to regard me with something I took to be either anger or fear, or indeed some mixture of both. Anger I had seen before, during my year in New France, but their fear was something with which I was unfamiliar.
Clearly, at Trois-Rivières the Indians were used to us, and even farther afield than the settlement there, we Fathers were more likely to be met with contempt than fear. And yet there it was in the eyes of the chief and his men: fear, or so it appeared to me.
Finally Askuwheteau turned to me and spoke in French. “Black Robe,” he said. “The Chief wants to speak with me alone. Go through the village, to the water’s edge and wait for me.”
I answered him in Algonquian, asking him what was wrong. I had a notion that the Chief might more kindly consider me if I spoke one of their languages.
Again, Askuwheteau spoke to me in French. “Go, Black Robe,” he said gruffly. “Go wait by the water. Do not answer me in Algonquian. Do not speak my name. Do not answer me at all. Go, now.”
Without a word, I turned and walked towards the village, which was not itself dissimilar to others I had seen: huts of birch-pole and tents, the whole place a seething, untidy coil of Savages, their filthy children, and their verminous dogs, all intermingling hither and thither in the mud, or squatting on their haunches, men and women both, in apparently earnest debate or parley. The acrid smoke from the wood cooking fires and the odour of the Savages themselves, combined with the noise of their squalling children and barking dogs, became almost overpowering. I was more eager than not to obey Askuwheteau, and so I went to the edge of the lake and waited for him there.
After a time, Askuwheteau came to where I was sitting. I had not heard him approach until he was standing behind me. I turned and looked up. The sun was behind him, so his face was hidden from my sight.
“Black Robe,” he said. “We may stay here tonight, but only tonight. And we are told we must stand guard over you until the dawn. Also, you may not sleep in the village. You must sleep here, near the water, away from the people.
“Why?” I queried, rousing myself to a standing position. “For what reasons?”
“They fear you,” Askuwheteau replied. He stared at me with no expression. It was as though the fact of the Indians fearing me was so entirely reasonable that it required no elucidation.
“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.”
The Indians, naturally, ignored me. But there had been no need for my exhortations in any case. The men were already carefully reaching for her, using their paddles almost as grappling hooks, pulling the girl’s body towards them.
The combination of their paddles and the motion of the waves that had sprung up in the breeze caused the body to roll in the water. As it did, the full abomination of the tableau revealed itself to all of us, and I again had occasion to cross myself.
The girl’s eyes had not rolled up in her head; rather they seemed to stare fixedly at us. The pupils were dilated so that they looked like two pieces of flat black glass. But O! the mute asseverations of dread in those eyes, the terror frozen eternally in violent death. Her mouth was stretched open in a silent scream of pain and terror. Worst of all, her throat had been all but torn out, as though by the jaws of a wolf, the flesh of the wound washed clean and pink by the lake water. Her poor fingers were fixed into claws, as though in her last moments she had been fighting to escape from whatever beast killed her.
The effect on the Indians was marvellous. With a collective cry of despair, they pushed the body away from them. They beat the water to a white froth with their paddles as they turned the canoes about, gaining distance between themselves and the poor dead girl’s body in a trice.
“Stop! Stop!” I screamed. “Go back! We must bury her!”
But stop the Indians did not. They laid their backs into their paddling as though the spot was accursed. The lost child’s body floating in that desolate lake shrank to a distant speck-a lonely sacrilege bobbing in the black waves as the sun sank behind the hills and the night came alive around us.
The next morning, Askuwheteau avowed to me that we were very near our destination. He said we would reach St. Barthélemy that night, and that we would portage inland from Lac Supérieur, then camp in the forest near a small lake, which, he told me, was hidden within a rocky region known to be treacherous.
It may have been the combined effect of the dramatic hibernal shift in the weather and the changing light, but the entire landscape appeared even more forbidding, remote and haunted than it ever had before. The water, dull pewter, violently wind-lashed and bitterly cold, smashed against the massive jutting islands of rock rising out of the oceanic vastness of Lac Supérieur. It froze my toughened hands, driving me almost mad with pain that I could not express in front of the Indians for fear of their reaction.
Their behaviour towards me had grown increasingly hostile, almost antagonistic. They now slept apart from me, and they built two fires, one for them and one for me, farther away. I ate separately from the Indians at their insistence, and never a word was passed between us now, except obligatorily, when Askuwheteau needed to communicate some detail of our voyage. Whatever the unfavourable sentence that had been passed upon me by the elders of the Ojibwa village where we had overnighted, it seemed that it had radically, unsympathetically, and permanently altered the Indians’ view of me.
Finally, we landed on a beach of smooth rock in a horseshoe-shaped inlet just as the sun was beginning to lower in the sky. The strong, gelid wind that had raised such waves upon the surface of Lac Supérieur now whipped at our bodies and faces. My clothing was wet from rogue waves over the side of the canoe, and now, on that rocky beach as we prepared to portage, I had begun to shiver violently.
“When will we camp?” I asked Askuwheteau. “I am cold and wet. Perhaps we should make camp here, on the beach?”
Askuwheteau gestured with a wide swing of his arm. “There is danger,” he said. “It is too easy to find us here. We must go deeper into the forest.”
“Who would find us?” I said. “The Hiroquois? Surely, we are in friendly country here? This is Ojibwa country. We are near the mission of St. Barthélemy, you said. The Ojibwa are not our enemies. From whom are we in danger?”
He stared at me, again that maddening Savage inscrutability. “Not the Hiroquois,” he said. “Not the Ojibwa.” Then he grew silent. He picked up his pack and began to carry it into the forest. All I could do was pick up my own pack and follow him.
As we portaged through the woods towards St. Barthélemy, my travelling companions grew more and more apprehensive in a way that was entirely out of character, for they had hitherto shown themselves to be fearless. It would not be incorrect to say that the Indians appeared to be at the ready, as taut as their own bow strings, the way they might be if hunting, or anticipating an attack by the Hiroquois, or some other enemy.
At last, in the growing gloom, we laid down our packs and made camp in the clearing of a coppice of trees and set about building temporary shelter. I began to gather wood for my own fire, as I had been forced to do throughout the last week of our voyage. When I had found several stout sticks, I made as though to arrange them apart from the larger fire being built by Askuwheteau and his men. The Indians regarded me strangely, though still with no hint of the amity I had known at the beginning of our voyage.
It was old Hausisse who spoke first-to Askuwheteau. Her Algonquian was so rapid that I was unable to follow it, though the urgency of her tone was unmistakable. Her hands flew in the air as she pointed to me, then gestured around her towards the trees, and the sunless sky above, then back to me. Whatever she said to him clearly gave him pause, because he told me to put my wood in the pile beside the fire that the Indians had already built, and which was already burning. Hausisse stared at me from where she sat, her regard almost approving. Askuwheteau told me that I would remain with the rest of them tonight. Too grateful to do anything but nod, I threw my wood into the pile.
The Indians reluctantly made room for me around the fire. When I say reluctantly, I mean that while they showed no overt malice or hostility, my apparent state of uncleanliness had not changed in their eyes, in spite of Askuwheteau’s invitation.
My awareness of our complete isolation could not have been sharper than it was at that moment. Even the Ojibwa village where I’d received such a hostile reception seemed like an outpost of warmth and civilization compared to this wild, dark place.
I needed the Indians; they did not need me. This was their world, not mine, and I was lost in it without them. Indeed it was difficult to imagine anything human, Savage or Christian, existing here. Anything could happen to me here, indeed, to any of us, and none would be the wiser.
But still, Hausisse continued to stare at me, at the crucifix lying against my robe, as though it were a sorcerous talisman instead of a holy object, for I knew she had not accepted Christ.
What woke me from my sleep that night I could not say with any certainty.
I had been dreaming of my family’s home in France, and of my mother. In the dream, I was still a young boy in her kitchen, by the fire. My mother was seated in a carved oak chair, and I on her lap, my body pressed against her soft breast as she ran her fingers through my hair. I smelled the lavender sachet from her black woollen dress beneath the starched white apron. From a massive pot on the hearth issued forth the magnificent odour of lamb stew with potatoes, vegetables, and red wine slowly cooking. The fragrance filled every corner of the room, making my mouth water. Never, I think, had I been as hungry as I was in that moment before waking.
At the very moment my eyes opened on the darkness, I was already fully awake, mouth still watering, every sense alert. All about me were the general sounds of the Indians snoring, and the crackle of the fire that had died to glowing embers. I smelled the smoke and the musky scent of the sleeping Savages.
I propped myself up on one elbow and glanced around. Nothing seemed amiss in the camp. The surrounding woods were silent as tombs, and I could see my breath in the air in front of me by firelight. I peered into the blackness, trying to ascertain what had roused me, for the sense was growing in me that I was being watched by something, or someone, beyond the tree line.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I thought I saw a shadow moving slyly towards us. Terror leaped in my chest, for I could think of only two things: that it could be some deadly animal, a wolf, or some terrible bear, the stories of which I had heard even before boarding at Dieppe. That, or an armed, bloodthirsty Hiroquois scouting party.
As I stared, the shadow itself divided into two smaller shadows, forms human in shape and contour.
I rubbed my eyes, marvelling at what I saw before me, for standing at the edge of the coppice of trees were two Savage children, a girl of perhaps nine years, holding hands with a small boy who could not have been more than five. The girl wore a simple buckskin shift, and her arms and feet were bare in the bitter cold. The boy was completely naked, though the lower half of his face, his neck, and his upper chest appeared to be smeared with mud, or some other blackish substance.
I thought it a curious trick of the firelight, but even from my vantage point in the doorway, I could clearly see their eyes shining through the trees, even though their faces were deeply painted with shadow.
The two children stared fixedly at our assemblage. They could have been a brother and sister on a walk through the woods on a summer day but for the fact that, by the position of the moon in the sky, it was well past midnight, dawn hours away. And though their state of nakedness would have been tolerable in the heat of August, we were already in the mouth of winter and yet they seemed entirely insensible to the bitter cold. The wind whipped the girl’s long black hair wildly about her face, but she made no move to push it back with her hands, or to cover her body against the deadly wind.
The thought came to me again that I might be dreaming, for it seemed impossible that they could survive, so lightly dressed in such cold, or that their appearance had not wakened Askuwheteau or his men, who could practically hear the day pass into night. But no, I pinched my own face and knew I was awake.
And lo! I realized that the children must be from the settlement at St. Barthélemy! If they were alive, then surely others must be also! But in this cold, I knew they would not survive, especially the naked little boy.
Carefully, so as not to wake the others, I pushed back my blanket and stood up. The cold struck me at once, and with terrible force. My teeth began to clatter and my body reacted with a violent spasm of shivering, but my only concern in that moment was for the two children. I stepped back inside and took up the blanket that had been covering me and wrapped it about me like a cloak. Carefully, I placed another log on the fire. It crackled, and then slowly caught the heat from the embers. Flames encircled it and a plume of smoke rose into the air. From one of the packs, I took another blanket, intending to swaddle the naked little boy with it before his poor little body froze.
I whispered to the children in my crude Ojibwa, indicating that they should come near the fire. I sensed, rather than saw, their response, for they stood as still as statues. And yet somehow I knew their bodies had tensed in anticipation. I beckoned with one arm, making sure to keep my own blanket wrapped about me for my own warmth. Still, they stood motionless.
Then, slowly, the girl raised her own arm and beckoned to me.
The gesture was a perfect facsimile of my own, an invitation to move away from the camp and come to where she was standing. Willingly, I took a step towards her. She and the boy took a reactive step backwards, farther into the trees. But at the same time, the girl beckoned me again. This time, her brother (for that is how I had come to think of him) gestured as well, as though imitating his sister’s invitation to me.
Then they took two more steps backward until they were nearly invisible.
I called out to them again in Ojibwa as I walked into the forest. I stared hard, straining my eyes to see where they stood. And while I could barely make out the shape of them, I again thought I saw the strange crimson firelight glow of their eyes winking in the blackness like sputtering reddish candlelight. I felt my way through the trees, occasionally colliding painfully with hard branches and stinging needles of pine. I glanced backward and saw that I had walked a considerably farther distance away from the camp than I had first thought. The whole sequence of events had taken on the qualities of a nightmare. But still I pushed through the trees in search of the naked little boy and his sister.
I heard a sigh, and then soft breathing, and I looked down. The children were standing directly in front of me, silent and unmoving. I reached out my hand to touch the little boy’s shoulder. His skin was unearthly cold, and it seemed a miracle to me that he could be alive, even given the legendary hardiness of these people.
Unfurling the blanket I carried under my arm, I draped it as best I could around the little boy’s body and drew him to me. I felt his tiny hand on my leg, stroking it as though to assure himself that I was there. From the other side, I felt his sister’s hands on my other leg, her fingers moving under the blanket, like spiders along the inside of my thigh through my robe. When the child’s fingers caressed my manhood with an insinuating knowledge surely beyond her years, I pulled back in shock. I reached down roughly and pushed her fingers away.
What happened next must have occurred in a matter of seconds, but I remember it as though it was hours instead, and it still haunts my nightmares today.
My hand was seized in a vise-like grip. It was not the grip of a little girl, though the fingers grasping mine gave every appearance of belonging to a human child. I screamed in pain, for it felt as though the bones in my hand would surely crack under the pressure. At the same moment, the gentle caress of the little boy became a heavy, vicious clamp on my thigh. A row of dagger-sharp fingernails ripped into the flesh of my leg and dug deeper, securing the little boy’s grip. I screamed again, and I heard a horrible serpentine hiss issue from the little boy’s mouth. I pushed him away with all my might, but still he held fast. The little girl, too, refused to relinquish her excruciating grip on my hand.
I shrieked in pain, twisted my body every way in a vain attempt to shake them off. I lost my footing and tripped, falling to the ground with the children still on top of me. The little boy’s teeth, impossibly long and sharp, sank into the meat of my thigh.
I screamed out to Askuwheteau, beseeching him to come to my aid. Behind me, I thought I heard faint shouts from the Indians, but it was impossible to be certain in the din. The little girl’s fingers entwined in my hair, brutally pulling my head backwards. I felt her other hand on my chest. She ripped at the blanket, clawing it as though she sought to shred it in order to expose the naked flesh of my chest underneath. I lay contorted on the ground with the two child-demons writhing on top of me, trying to push them away and calling out to God and the Indians to help me, for in that moment the two seemed interchangeable.
And then her hand brushed against the crucifix I wore. A dazzling flash of blue light lit up the surrounding trees, and I smelled an awful foulness, like burning flesh.
The little Savage girl-for I could now clearly see her in the supernatural viridian glow-leaped back into a crouching position in front of me, snarling like some cornered, feral creature. Her mouth, ringed with the jagged teeth of a shark, was open in a perfect oval of agony. Peal after peal, she rent the night with her torment, flailing her charred and smoking hand in the air as though to put out a fire. At the sight of his sister’s injury, the little boy also relinquished his grip and scuttled away from me in a sequence of crablike movements, taking up a cowering position behind her. His own cries of thwarted outrage blended with hers in an infernal cacophony such as I imagine must occur in the very bowels of deepest Hell. She lurched forward, baring her teeth at me and spitting like a cat, but again seemed to be stopped short by my crucifix, the effect of which upon her was not unlike that which might have occurred if she had hurled herself against a stone wall.
At once, I heard the thunder of many feet behind me. An arrow sang past my ear and embedded itself in a tree, just above where the children were crouched. The little girl glanced upwards at the arrow, then back at me, her face full of hate.
Before my eyes, as if by a miracle, the demon-child’s body appeared to collapse upon itself, turning to smoke that blew away into the night. I saw that her brother, too, had similarly vanished, leaving in his wake that curious smoke which appeared to move of its own volition into the forest.
I stared at the spot where they had been crouching mere seconds before. For a moment, I again doubted whether or not I was dreaming, but I could feel the blood running down my leg where the little boy had bitten me, and I still felt the little girl’s grip burn on my throbbing wrist. The arrow wobbled in the tree trunk as though stirred by a strong wind. The Indians stood behind me, their terrified faces recording that they had seen the entire hellish spectacle. This comforted me, as there was a part of my mind that refused to register what had just occurred. But the expression on the faces of the Savages was proof to me that I had in fact seen the demonic spectacle, and that it had been no nightmare.
But growing in me at that moment was the surety I now held the secret to the difference between faith and true knowledge. While the very existence of those two devils itself was a blasphemy, it could only be a warning from the Lord of the potent deviltry hidden in what I thought were the harmless pagan superstitions of these poor, lost people. Whatever witchcraft had been arrayed against me that night, I had defeated it with the power of Jesus Christ, through the medium of the symbol of His suffering. Triumphantly, I brandished my cross at the Indians, exhorting them to draw close and listen.
“Behold!” I cried. “You have now witnessed with your own eyes the miraculous banishment of demonic spirits from the forest, sent to torment us, but who fled at the sign of God! Can you doubt, any of you, the salvation that lies in accepting Jesus Christ and becoming one with Him? Askuwheteau? Can even you doubt? Your arrow could not hurt them, but the cross of Christ burned them. Will you now accept to be baptized before we forge ahead on the journey to St. Barthélemy? Shall we gird ourselves in the armour of God and finish the task to which we have set ourselves?”
To my shock, the Indians jumped back away from me and averted their eyes, as though I myself were one of the very demons of which I spoke. Two of them seized their bows and laid arrows in the nock, pulling the string back and aiming them at me.
I threw up my arms in front of me, though I knew that if the Indians chose to let their arrows fly, nothing I did by way of self-preservation would save me.
And yet they did not: the arrows remained pointed in my direction, but the intent seemed more to warn me not to come closer than as the issuance of any sort of threat.
“Askuwheteau,” I demanded, trying not to betray my terror, yet at the same time striving not to unnerve the Savages whose arrows were aimed at my heart. “What is the meaning of this?
Askuwheteau said nothing to me by way of reply, and the Indians were silent. Then Chogan spat on the ground. He whispered something to Askuwheteau, then turned and stalked determinedly away. The other Savages muttered amongst themselves and threw angry glances in my direction. Askuwheteau said something to my two would-be murderers, who lowered their bows, but did not look away from my face.
“What is wrong?” I asked Askuwheteau, gesturing towards Chogan. “Where is he going? What did he say?”
“He said I should kill you and leave you here,” Askuwheteau said. “He says to leave you to find the other Black Robe by yourself.” Askuwheteau pointed to my leg, where the little boy had bitten me and the blood had soaked through my robe. “He says your people brought demons with you to this place and that you are cursed. He says he will not take you any farther and we must not bring the other Black Robe, the Weetigo, to us.”
“But you yourself saw, Askuwheteau, that the demons were Indian in form and feature. They were spirits that sprang from your own forests. They did not spring from the realm of Christianity. I did not summon them, they were here already. I sent them away.”
“Enough,” said Askuwheteau. “Enough lies. You have brought terrible things here with you, you and the other Black Robe. You have cursed this land. You have brought death, and worse. They,” he said, gesturing to the Indians, who were rapidly packing up the camp and carrying their belongings back along the path to the lake, “want me to leave you here, but I told the French I would protect you. You can come with us now, Black Robe, or you can stay. The choice is yours to make. But we will not go farther. You choose.”
I felt as though all the blood had drained from my body. Surely I was not to be left here alone in this place to find the mission and Father de Céligny without their guidance and protection?
I begged and pleaded with Askuwheteau to stay with me, but even if he had been thusly inclined, he was outnumbered. There were some who actually wished me dead and it had become clear to me that he was the one person who was keeping me from that fate. I told him that, with me, even the deviltry of his own people was powerless before the power of Christ in the hands of one anointed.
I threatened that the French would punish them for abandoning me, but even as I said it I knew that it rang hollow. The Indians would say that I had drowned, or perished in some other way due to my own carelessness or clumsiness.
Likewise, I could not force them to stay with me. I had no leverage. We were not united in Faith, or by loyalty to our fellow man. We did not even have the same sense of “fellow man.” And the Indians would do as they wished, or rather, in this instance, as their terror of this place demanded. I did not count them as evil for abandoning me. I forgave them, even in the midst of my horror at the abandonment itself. I literally saw myself in the jaws of Hell, at the mercy of its Infernal ambassadors, two of which I had already met.
In the end, there was no choice, of course, though I wished there were.
My duty as a Christian and as a priest was clear: I was to find Father de Céligny and come to his aid, in whatever forms that might take. Perhaps this was to be my own particular martyrdom-not death under torture at the hands of the Hiroquois, but rather a slow death by starvation and freezing, looking for the Light of Christ in a dark forest on the very edge of the world. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
Askuwheteau pointed me in the direction of St. Barthélemy and said he hoped my God would save me. I told him I prayed my God would save us both, but he and I knew that we were not saying the same thing to one another.
When the Indians abandoned me, I forced myself not to run after them, just as I’d forced myself not to weep in their presence. Now, I did weep. I knelt down in the dirt of the forest that had become my personal Garden of Gethsemane and wept from the deepest possible pit of my soul. I wept. I cursed God. I begged forgiveness, but cursed Him again, and asked for forgiveness again, and felt myself granted absolution. I did not weep blood as Our Lord is said to have done, but I have never felt closer to Christ’s Passion than I did at that moment, for I felt truly alone. Throughout it all, I held tight to my crucifix, lest those two infernal devils return from the forest to taunt me.
When the first streaks of dawn lightened the eastern sky, I felt safe enough to release my hold on the crucifix. I was shivering. I spoke to myself as though I were my own friend, ordering myself to rise and collect some firewood in order to build up the fire and warm myself. There would be no one else to guide, help, protect, or support me in my aims unless, by some miracle, I found life and shelter at my destination.
Askuwheteau had told me that the Mission was half a day’s walk from where we had camped. He told me to mark the trees and walk in a northerly direction until I found the inland lake that bordered the Mission. He said it would be unmistakable. He had told me to follow the perimeter of the lake until I came to the place where great cliffs rose behind it. Then, he said, I would be at St. Barthélemy. The Mission was adjacent to the lake, below the cliffs.
The Indians had left me a portion of dried meat, bread made from corn, and beans. Some of this I warmed up in the fire and ate. I wrapped the rest of it and placed it carefully in my pack on top of the blankets. Then, taking up a stout stick, which could as easily serve as a weapon as it did a staff, I began to walk north.
In spite of the general terror of my new, unkind station, I took both pleasure and comfort from the rising sun, which spoke to me not only of safety (for I felt that even in this place, the demons must likely absent themselves in the daylight, even if the Hiroquois did not) but of hope.
While I knew that it was entirely likely that I would reach St. Barthélemy and find it burned to the ground and all its inhabitants dead, there was also a possibility that I would, at the very least, find shelter there, if not companionship in my abandonment. When I did not return with news of Father de Céligny, the Indians would be interrogated and the Fathers might yet send rescue of some sort. Failing that, perhaps some passers-by, either friendly Savages or French, would find me and help.
I told myself these things over and over again, even if I did not believe most of them. At least they calmed me somewhat as I walked. I measured out the hours through the medium of an eternity of footsteps across the carpet of dead leaves on the forest floor. And yet, every sound of a tree branch cracking in the distance and every scream of a bird brought me to the very cusp of madness.
The cold hard sun followed me as I walked. By midday, the forest thinned out, and I felt the air grow cooler and damper. It was my fervent prayer that the unnamed lake was just beyond the next part of the forest, and that my prayer, unlike so many others of late, was answered.
In a very short time, there it was in the near distance, larger than I expected, the water calm and the colour of dull iron. The cliffs did indeed rise up behind it like great hulking shoulders, giving the region a pagan look, as though it were once the realm of ancient gods. I realized, even as I thought these things, that I was skirting the outer edge of blasphemy. But in the face of the terror of my abandonment here by the Indians, nothing in the world looked the same to me and, likely, never would again.
While I knew God was in His Heaven looking down on His earth, I truly felt in that moment that He must be looking elsewhere, for the silence of the place was both a temporal and spiritual vacuum. The wind did not blow, and no bird sang in the trees.
I hurried along the perimeter of the lake, always in sight of the water lest I somehow lose my way, even this close to my destination. I scanned the horizon in vain for some plume of smoke that might signal human habitation, but there was none.
And then, over the crest of one of those infernal mounds of rock that seemed to burst forth out of the ground everywhere like monstrous teeth, I saw it in the distance: the village wherein lay the Mission of St. Barthélemy.
I had arrived at my destination at long last.
My first impression of the humble Jesuit house in the village (the residence building itself, containing the chapel for Mass and the refectory, situated on a small hill) was that it seemed as fresh-built as the day upon which the construction was completed by the tribe. It rose up out of a clearing in the forest like some miraculous flower of civilization in the midst of a wasteland of rock and pine.
Around it was a scattering of crude huts of bent poplar and bark where the Indians of the village themselves obviously lived. What struck me immediately was the absence of the cacophony that accompanied life in their villages, the screaming children, the barking dogs, and the general tumult. The eerie silence persisted here as it had in the forest leading to it, but there was no smell of smoke in the air, and none of the buildings looked like any flame had scorched them.
My joy at this was boundless for, at the very least, this meant that I would have shelter tonight, barring any discovery of a gruesome nature inside the buildings themselves.
As I drew close to the Jesuit house, I was met with a distressing sight: the wooden cross that stood in front of the residence building housing the chapel had been torn down. That is to say, while the pine pole, which formed the primary pillar of the cross, was still firmly entrenched in the earth, the crossbeams had been broken off, or pulled down. I told myself that it had been caused by some storm of wind and rain, for surely if the intent had been desecration, the entire cross would have been demolished.
I climbed the small hill with trepidation and pushed open the door. In the dimness of the chapel, nothing seemed immediately awry, though dirt from the outside lay heavily on the floor, and even the altar. Here too, there was no evidence of the symbol of Our Lord’s martyrdom, though neither was there anything suggesting destruction or other mischief, though again I was aware of that unnerving, tomb-like silence that lay over the chapel like a pall.
Instinctively I sniffed the air, at once terrified that I would catch the smell of death and relieved that I did not. The smell was one of general airlessness-lifelessness, even.
I walked slowly through the two “rooms” of the house, only to find more of the same.
In the section that obviously served as a kitchen, there was a crude table with cutlery and plates laid out as though for supper, but they too were covered with a dusting of dirt, as though those meant to dine had simply walked out and not returned. In the dead hearth, a black iron pot hung from a hook. In the pot, I observed, a spoon was encased in a dried mulch of some sort of grain stew that had petrified, but even from the pot there was no odour, for this meal had been cooked and abandoned a very long time ago.
The trappers who had reported back to Samuel de Champlain had not been wrong: St. Barthélemy was indeed entirely deserted. While there was ample evidence of the settlement having been inhabited, there was quite literally no trace of any living person in any part of it.
Feeling again that infernal chill, I stepped outside to retrieve some wood from the stack I’d noticed near the entrance. On a table, I found a tinder-box. I struck the steel and flint to some straw and built a fire in the hearth to warm myself. In the crude cupboards I found several bottle of wine, as well as stores of dry goods: beans, corn and the like.
I opened one of the bottles of wine and poured a healthy draught into one of the tankards on the table, caring little for its cleanliness after those many weeks on the water with the Indians. The taste of the wine on my tongue was wonderful. I had drunk nothing but lake water since we had left Trois-Rivières and my palette was starved for variance of flavour.
Before sunset, I hiked back to the lake and drew water, both for drinking and for cooking. It was a more arduous walk back carrying the water, but I made haste and imagine an hour or less passed between my departure and my return.
I boiled some of the beans on the hearth and ate plentifully for the first time in many days.
After I had eaten, I washed the plate and went back inside, where I found a crude bed made of a sheet of bark. Above it was a shelf. Clearly this had been the abode of Father de Céligny, for there I found some books and some clothes. His Bible and crucifix were not among the store. I dragged the bark-bed close enough to the hearth that I would be warm as I slept. I arranged the blankets on top of it and lay down, but not before bolting the door from the inside. Without thinking, I removed my own heavy crucifix for the sake of comfort.
The exhaustion of the past week on the water, coupled with my ordeal of abandonment by the Indians, had exhausted me beyond endurance and I fell deeply asleep before I could say any prayers for my own safety and protection during the night.
And then, there was a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently awake. I opened my eyes. In the glow of the embers in the fireplace I beheld the figure of a pale old man bending over me, dressed entirely in the black robes of the Jesuit.
My eyes widened in disbelief and for a moment I wondered if I was beholding a ghost, merely one more in a long line of nightmarish sights in this godforsaken Land.
The figure lovingly caressed my face. His fingers felt cold, as though he had just come in from outside. He pulled back the blanket and lifted my robe, exposing my leg where the child had bitten me. This he touched, tracing the injury with his finger, gently, as though he were a surgeon inspecting an infected wound. Then he leaned down and kissed me on both cheeks, a chaste kiss of welcome.
“You have found us,” he said in French-the first proper French I had heard since leaving Trois-Rivières. His voice was cultured, even aristocratic, a far cry from the coarse guttural peasant French of the voyageurs and hivernants in Trois-Rivières. “Praise God. I had given up hope that anyone would. I have been waiting for so very long.”
I struggled to sit up. Through eyes suddenly full of tears of joy and relief, I said, “Father de Céligny? Can it really be you?” I grasped his arms, finding them solid and real, not spectral. “I-we, all of us in TroisRivières-we feared you had been killed by the Hiroquois.”
“Yes, Father,” he replied. “I am de Céligny. I am not dead. Now, rest. We will speak tomorrow. All is well. You are safe, here, from harm. Sleep, now.”
“But the Hiroquois…”
My eyelids were heavy. I heard Father de Céligny’s voice as from a great distance, urging me to sleep. I tried to open my eyes, and with seemingly superhuman strength, I half-raised my lids to see him drawing away into blackness as he stepped from my bedside. I saw the glint of reflected firelight in his eyes, and then he was gone.
I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed of the young girl in the lake with the torn throat.
In my dream, her eyes were not opaque and lightless; they sparkled with bright black life. I looked to the Indians for succour, but found I was alone in the canoe, floating on an endless ocean of ash-coloured water with no land or horizon anywhere in sight. As I stared, trying desperately to scream and being unable to, her throat healed itself before my eyes until there was no mark or blemish anywhere on the wet bronze skin.
The dead girl swam up to the canoe, drifting snakelike through the water, her wet black hair plastered to her head and face. She reached up and grasped the gunwale of the canoe and began to rock it gently, and then with increasing violence. I believed she meant to swamp it and drown me, pulling me beneath the surface to live there with her there for a thousand years.
“You have brought terrible things here with you,” she said in a voice full of cold dark water and rotted black pine needles. Her voice was the voice of Askuwheteau, my Judas-abandoner. “You have brought death, and worse.” Then she opened her mouth to smile, and I saw her terrible teeth.
I woke myself with the sound of my own screams.
In the weak daylight that crept through the windows and under the doors of that haunted place, I wondered if I had only dreamed the appearance of Father de Céligny, for the door was still crudely barred from the inside, just as I had left it before falling asleep. Otherwise, the room was undisturbed. The windows were likewise barred and there were no tracks in any direction upon the floor other than my own. From outside came the sound of the trees shuddering with rain.
I touched the side of my face. I could still feel the imprint of the priest’s cold fingers on my cheek. If that was a dream, I told myself, it had been a most vivid and realistic one. Were dreams even dreams in this evil place, where the legends spoke of the dead walking in the forest, going about as they had when they were living? Or were they auguries, visions, or portents? I thought of my dream of the smiling dead girl in the water and I shuddered.
After a Spartan breakfast and an hour of prayer, I set out to find Father de Céligny, if only to prove to myself that I hadn’t been dreaming. While there was no evidence of him anywhere in the building, I believed in my heart that he was real and that I had not been dreaming. The puzzle of the door barred from the inside was one I would consider later, I told myself. So eager was I to believe I was not the only living soul in St. Barthélemy, I was prepared to overlook even the evidence of my own senses.
But if he were nowhere in the buildings, he must be nearby, perhaps in some secondary domicile, or perhaps dwelling among the Indians away from the village itself, however unlikely that seemed. I knew, for instance, that the Indians liked to visit our homes in the settlements, that they were attracted to objects of mystery to them, our crucifixes, our books, our writing instruments, and our clocks. But I had not seen them even in their own houses here, so why would they be elsewhere in the forest?
A cold rain was indeed falling outside, mining the ground with puddles. I covered my head with a shawl against the rain and set out to explore the area for some sign of where Father de Céligny might have taken shelter.
My intention had not been to wander too far from the village, for after inspecting every house I was able to ascertain that there was no human habitation at all within its confines and it did, indeed, appear to have been abandoned.
But my source of primary bafflement remained the lack of evidence of any kind of struggle or bloodshed. There were no bodies, obvious graves, no stains. As I have already written, nothing had been burned. I inspected every house, first tentatively and then with more boldness as I realized I was entirely alone. So the mystery remained, surely an entire village could not have simply vanished into thin air? Or, for that matter, migrated to some other part of this land, leaving behind their belongings, including weapons and cooking utensils?
Slowly and carefully I took my leave of the village and began walking towards the lake. The rain had not diminished. On the contrary, it fell in colder and more punishing sheets, seemingly with every step I took away from the settlement, into the forest and towards the lake.
I had been walking perhaps a half-hour and had almost reached the rocky hills above the lake when I heard a sound that chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. It came from behind one of the boulders in my path, and it froze me in my tracks with a terror so primeval that it must surely have descended from generation to generation from Adam in the Garden of Eden, after the fall from Grace, when all wild things had become his enemy.
A giant grey wolf had stepped into my path, its back low and arched in a menacing posture. Its black lips were pulled back from the cruellooking yellow fangs. Again, the wolf growled low in its throat. The murderous intent of this monster could not have been clearer.
To my horror, it was joined by another, and yet another, until there were five of the creatures blocking my path, each more fearsome than the last. I had seen wolves in France, shot by hunters. They had always struck me as fearsome, but these wolves were larger and more terrifying than any European variant. And in their eyes, I could see only the muddy hatred of the human species and a fierce hunger for human flesh.
The wolves advanced slowly, and in terrible unison, maintaining the half-circle around me with the precision of a military phalanx formation, driving me backwards. My eyes never left theirs, nor theirs mine, as they slowly forced me away from the caves.
Praying under my breath, I remembered what I had been told in Trois-Rivières about this exact danger, and the importance of neither showing fear, nor running quickly, lest those actions provoke an attack from the marauding animal in question.
The first wolf lowered its head even farther and from its throat again came a snarl of the purest menace. It moved aggressively forward. I looked around me for a stick that I might use as a weapon, but found none.
Even if I had, while a stick might have been of some use against one of these animals, there were five of them in total and any attempt to charge one of their number would have doubtless provoked an attack by the others in the pack.
I backed away slowly, my eyes on theirs, and theirs on mine. Edging myself onto the trail, I realized that the wolves were “herding” me back onto the path, the path that would obviously take me back to the village, or at the very least, to open ground. They kept advancing forward with every step backwards I took.
I stumbled towards the village, walking tortuously backward, my eyes on my pursuers. I flailed behind me with my arms, trying to anticipate the sharp branches behind me before they jabbed into my neck and back. When I failed, I tried to stifle my groans of pain.
They followed me at a hunting distance, but did not attack. In the one instance where I stopped, however, to get my bearings, they began to growl again. One darted forward and made a feinting snap at my hand. I cried out and jumped back, and when I again began to move, the wolf kept its distance.
Step by torturous step, always looking back over my shoulder, or walking backwards and glancing behind me to stay on the trail, occasionally stumbling painfully while the wolves moved like shadows and smoke among the boulders and low-growing trees and foliage as they stalked and herded me, I inched closer to what I hoped was the safety of the confines of St. Barthélemy. My terror was such that it felt as though it was hours before I saw the village, but obviously it could only have been a fraction of that time.
And still, they did not attack, though they had every opportunity to tear me limb from limb. They did not break their deadly silence, nor was there any lessening in the obvious malignity of their intentions, and yet it was as though they were somehow tethered and held back by some entity I could not see. I doubted that whatever providential force held them at bay was Heavenly-if it had been, the force would have sent them back to whatever sylvan hell they sprang from instead of allowing them to stalk me like wounded animal prey.
And then, finally yielding to my panic, I turned and broke into a run.
In the minutes during which I ran, I had every expectation of feeling the foul weight of their heavy bodies hurling me to the ground, and their foetid, hot breath on my exposed skin, and the death-bite agony of their teeth on my throat. But I felt nothing of the kind, and made my way to safety inside Father de Céligny’s house without once turning my head.
Upon entering, I looked out the window to see if the fiends had returned to their wilderness. My heart sank when I saw that they had not. Instead, they sat, poised like living gargoyles in a semi-circle in front of the entrance. As I watched, they cocked their heads as though listening to some master’s whistle, or to some command only they could hear. The entire tableau resembled a grisly sixteenth-century German woodcut depicting the fell horrors of werewolfery in some dark, forgotten forest.
As the day progressed, the beasts sat, or lay with their paws crossed in front of them. They must have known that I was vulnerable, and doubtless they could smell my terror as I knelt to pray, and yet they did not charge the entrance.
At one point in the late afternoon, I reached out with my hand to touch the door. As my fingers brushed it, a commotion erupted on the other side. A cacophony of howling and snarling greeted me.
Although I knew it was impossible, still it was as though the wolves had somehow known that I had touched the door from the inside, and that I might possibly be contemplating egress from the safety of the house. The fury in their bestial voices left no doubt whatsoever in my mind of the fate that would be mine if I dared step over the threshold.
I stepped backward towards the opposite wall and immediately they ceased their furor, again almost as though they knew my movements without seeing them. I realized that this must be more of the same deviltry that had plagued me since I left Trois-Rivières and it came to me then and there that I would very likely not survive that night. It came to me also that Father de Céligny had fallen to the same forces. If I had not dreamed his appearance by my bedside the previous night, whatever I saw could only have been his shade. I mourned Father de Céligny in that moment, and knelt to pray, for I didn’t doubt that I would soon join him on the other side.
When I roused myself from my prayer, I looked out the window and saw that the sun had nearly set and the shadows were lengthening across the abandoned village. The wolves were no longer sitting or lying by the door. They paced nervously, sniffing the air as though they could smell the sun setting and the entrance of night.
As it grew darker, the wolves become more and more agitated. Two of them began to bark sharply and to whine nervously. Faster and faster the night came, more and more the wolves fretted and paced in circles. And then, in unison, they threw back their heads and began to howl. The plaintive sound, which I had heard before only in the distance, carried with it a quality of reverence, an aspect that was even somehow prayerful.
For several long minutes the wolves lamented. Then, to my amazement, they turned tail and ran, abandoning their guard posts in front of my door for the path that led back to the lake.
I stepped over the threshold in wonderment at what had just occurred. I looked left and right, but there was no trace of them anywhere.
Above the rise of the distant cliffs, a gibbous moon had begun its ascent, not full, but bright enough to illuminate, however dully, the deserted village and the surrounding forests, which I could hear coming alive. In the distance, the chorus of the wolves came again, this time louder, as though more of them had gathered to celebrate the awakening of the night.
Of a sudden, I imagined I saw movement among the huts-shadows flitting and darting. I rubbed my eyes, because the shadows were moving with inhuman, even preternatural, speed. They moved upright, and were human in shape, of medium height, and thin, or so they seemed-they vanished as quickly as the appeared, almost as if they were taunting me, for as soon as I was able to focus my eyes upon them they were gone.
I closed my eyes and said a prayer for my safety in the face of this wickedness and for strength to drive whatever evil had destroyed the village back to the Hell from whence it sprang. And I prayed for courage, for I fear I had none at that moment. I thought of the brave martyrs who had gone to their deaths praying for the souls of the Savages who were cutting their bodies and forcing them to eat their own flesh. If I was to meet my own death at more unearthly, numinous hands, I would strive to die with as much courage as they had shown, and with as blithe and open a heart.
“Come, demons!” I shouted, brandishing my crucifix aloft. “Do your worst! I have no fear of you, for the power of Christ makes my arm a hammer! You are powerless against His holy name, which commands you to be gone from this place!”
I swept the cross in front of me like a scythe. I imagined I felt the shadows leaping back in its advance, but again that could have been in my mind, for what I had seen before I did not see now-the blackness had become impenetrable.
And then, out of that same blackness, came the sound of slow and measured footsteps. My heart leaped in my chest, for the cadence of those footsteps was human. I squinted to see. Again, that flicker of firelike crimson in the gloom, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. As I stared, a figure materialized from the shadows. It was a man wearing a black cassock tied with a cincture. And-O! The joy! I saw that his head was crowned with the flat black hat of our Jesuit priests.
I called out, “Father de Céligny, is that you?” The figure stood motionless in the shadows, not speaking. I called out again, “Father, show yourself. It is I, Father Nyon. You are safe, I mean you no harm!” They were odd phrases to have come to me, for why would Father de Céligny ever have reason to fear me? And yet the figure held back with an aspect that I can only describe as fearful. Again, I called out softly,
“Father?”
And then, he stepped towards me, and I saw that it was indeed the white-haired man I had seen the previous night, not a dream, not a revenant, but real as I was, made of flesh and blood. The joy I felt at that moment was the first joy I had felt in many, many months and the loneliness I felt in that desolate place left me at once. Finally, I thought, whatever fate I was to meet in that Land, I would not have to face it alone. And perhaps we would indeed escape together, Father de Céligny and I! Where yesterday there had been no possible hope for the future, there was now at the very least a glimmer of it.
In his face I saw the aristocratic lineage to which Father de Varennes had alluded in Trois-Rivières. It was the face of a descendant of nobility, the face of a refined man who belonged in the library of a fine country chateau, or presiding over Mass in one of the grand cathedrals of Europe. It was the face of a grand seigneur from an oil portrait of ancient riches. The nose was high-bridged and aquiline, the lips thin and red. His face held the pallor of long illness, and yet it was the face of a virile and healthy man. I opened my arms to embrace him with all the joy in my heart, but his voice stopped me where I stood.
“Father Nyon,” he said. “Come no closer. There is no time to spare! We must quickly seek shelter. There is prodigious danger abroad tonight; we are not safe here in this village. Follow me.”
With that, he began walking away towards the Jesuit house, beckoning me to follow him without turning back. I did follow him, struggling to keep up with him, for his own progress through the village was swift and sure, though the darkness was, to me, impenetrable.
As I think of it now, though I know Your Reverence will doubtless believe the fever guides my pen, he moved like smoke along the ground, appearing even to float. Which is to say, in one instant be appeared to be directly in front of me, then in another he was to the left of the path, then again, to the right of the path. I recalled the movements of the apparitions I had beheld earlier, flickering like wraiths throughout the village, but vanishing when my eyes strained to follow them. While Father de Céligny was plainly visible, the trajectory of his movements seemed likewise variable.
He stopped at the entrance to the Jesuit house and turned slowly towards me. Again, I was assailed by a sense of being on the edge of a precipice and looking abruptly down, for the tableau itself, Father de Céligny, the house, even the moonlight, seemed to sway before my eyes. I reached out by instinct to right myself, but my hands found no purchase and I stumbled and fell. He made no move to help me.
Though I would be hard pressed to explain how I knew, he appeared to take some private amusement from my discomfiture, but hiding it with the sort of slyness I would expect from the Savages, but not a white man, let alone a priest. But in his face, there was nothing to raise an alarum.
His voice was grave when he spoke. “Father Nyon, you must remove your crucifix. Hang it here,” he said pointing to a spot over the window adjacent to the doorway. “I will reveal all to you once we are inside. But you must leave the crucifix outside, for your protection and mine. There are forces afoot tonight that are beyond our power to fight, but which may be kept at bay through the agency of the Blessed Virgin and her Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. The cross will protect us.” Again, he pointed at the spot, looking away from it as he pointed. “Hang it there. It will secure our safety from what is afoot in this village.”
Of course I obeyed immediately, for who was I to doubt the older priest?
I was a very young man, and it seemed clear that Father de Céligny had some greater knowledge of what had brought the mission to doom, and he had obviously survived the onslaught of those forces, whatever they might be. I very much feared I might not survive them without his help, guidance, and protection, for I was lost in an ocean of unanswered questions and half-formed terrors.
Too, I was so enthralled by the notion of being no longer alone in this devilish place, where day and night held equal menace, I would have done anything to keep him close. I removed the crucifix and hung it where he indicated.
Father de Céligny smiled, but it was a vulpine smile, not a reverent one as might befit a gesture involving a holy object. Again I felt the vertigo, and this time a prickle of fear accompanied it, a primal instinct impelling flight, as one might feel upon discovering a snake. And then he slipped like smoke across the threshold into the house.
The building was cold and the fire had almost burned out. I shivered. I took a stick from the small pile I had assembled and stirred the embers. I placed the stick on the small heap of smouldering ash and watched the flickering tongues of flame shoot up from the ash to consume it. I added a few more dry sticks. The fire bloomed, beckoning shadows from all corners.
Across the room, Father de Céligny made no move to step towards the fire; rather, he stood against the farthest wall of the room, save for the whiteness of his face and hair, indistinct from the darkness of the room that wrapped him like a cloak. Again, I felt that haunting sense of dislocation and vertigo.
“Father,” I said, for I could no longer abide my frenzy of terror and ignorance, “please tell me what has happened here. Where are the Indians? Why was the settlement abandoned? I was taught to look for Satan’s work only after every other possibility had been exhausted, but I confess that all possibilities have been exhausted. I am at sea.”
From the shadows, his voice came softly, more akin to a serpent’s sibilant hiss than a sequence of words spoken by a human tongue, and it appeared to issue from nowhere, yet everywhere. My senses swam, and I staggered, righting myself in time not to fall. Again, he made no move towards me to come to my aid.
“Are you cold, Father Nyon?” he said gently. “This country is very cold, is it not? Very cold indeed. Cold and wild, and very dark in the winter. Do you not find it so? Winter approaches, even now, and the hours of daylight have grown so short. Do you see how dark it has become? Can you feel the night enter?”
And indeed I did see how dark it was becoming. The room itself was growing darker. The fire seemed very far away, and the only light in the room seemed to come from his voice. I cannot better describe it than to say that his words themselves seemed to me to shimmer in the growing dark. It was as though I had stared too long at the sun and had gone blind, and the sun had grown black, searing its image behind my eyes, blotting out all else except that burning shower of falling black stars. And yet, there was no sun. There was no light.
My knees buckled, and I fell to the dirt floor.
Father de Céligny’s mocking laughter came as though from a great distance. “Poor little priest,” he said. He sounded almost regretful. “You should never have come to St. Barthélemy. You should have believed the stories you were told about what happened in this place.” I heard the rustle of his robes and the sound of his feet as he walked slowly to where I lay.
Even as I write these memories tonight, I am struck anew at how they appear to be the ravings of a madman, even to me. And yet: I write the truth of the events as they occurred; I swear it upon my soul.
I tried to rise to my feet but my limbs refused to obey the commands of my brain. I was powerless to move. Were it witchcraft or some other dark art, I was trapped in its spell, unable to move, as though I had found myself at the bottom of a vast dark sea, holding my breath and struggling desperately to swim to the surface before my chest exploded and I took in all that cold, black water.
“Can you hear me, little priest?” de Céligny said, leaning close to my face.
I tried to answer, but found that, though my wits were still my own, I could not even speak-though I knew that if he commanded me to speak, the words would come, even if they were not my own words, but his. But I was able to move my eyes. I saw his face with a hellish clarity that had heretofore eluded me, and with that awful sight came another surety: that I had, God help me, found the author of the malefaction that had proved the undoing of the settlement.
O, how can I describe what I saw as I gazed upon the visage of Father de Céligny, the murderer of St. Barthélemy?
Shall I say that his eyes glared with a reddened light unlike any fire of God’s earth, the same burning crimson that I had seen in the eyes of the Savage children two nights ago? That they stood out like beacons in the waxen pallor of his face?
Where I thought I had seen aristocracy I now saw the visage of a devil-a degenerate, ravenous archfiend wearing a well-tailored mask of human flesh. His foul mouth was open, and I could see the dull gleam where his teeth lay against his lower lip, and the smell of rotted meat, and worse, issued from his mouth.
“Do you see?” the beast said. “Do you understand?”
“Monster,” I whispered, my voice suddenly my own again. “Monster. Monster. Monster. What have you wrought here?”
“I carried the seed inside me,” he said. “The gift was in my blood, as it was in the blood of my ancestors. It is my inheritance, an inheritance I have brought with me to this new, unspoiled world. I have shared its light generously with these poor, lost people, to whom I have given a new catechism: mine. And now, they will have two priests. You will stay here with me and we will minister to our new congregation.” He cocked his head mockingly. “Does that please you, little Jesuit?” he said. “That we bring the true light of our darkness to this unspoiled place?”
“I will stop you,” I said. “I will save these people. And I will kill you, and I will do it in God’s name, and to His glory, devil.”
“No,” Father de Céligny said. His voice sounded almost pitying. “You will not.”
Then, by the grace of God, three things happened in quick succession. A slumbering log on the fire exploded behind us, sending up a shower of sparks, the retort as sharp as the crack of a cannon. Father de Céligny hissed, startled by the noise of the fire. And in the moment he turned away from me, the spell was broken. I found I could again move my limbs.
I pushed my body away from where I lay, leaping to my feet. My hands instinctively went to my chest, where the crucifix usually lay. With horror, I remembered that devious creature had tricked me into hanging it outside the hut. I was defenceless, as I had always been intended to be.
De Céligny turned slowly towards me. His smile was one of pure, hellish triumph, for we both knew it was my time to die. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of me.
There was a terrible snap, like a lightning strike, and de Céligny screamed. I opened my eyes to see him flinching away, as though from a terrible, searing heat. I made the sign of the cross again, and again he screamed. As I stared, he fell forward as though to collapse on the ground.
But before his hands even struck the ground, yet another wonderment occurred, though this one was as malign as the other was divine. In the first second, I had beheld the falling human form of Father de Céligny, but what landed on the ground instead was the shape of a colossal, towering black wolf with blazing red eyes and the jagged teeth of a stone-carved gargoyle.
I cried out in shock and stumbled backwards away from this new incarnation of the monster. From its gullet came a roar of rage such as I have never heard from any animal. The wolf crouched before me, as though poised to strike, but instead it turned and leaped easily over my prone body and ran out through the doorway into the night.
I reached for the remaining pile of sticks by the fire, and seized two slender ones. These I crossed, one over the other, in the shape of a makeshift crucifix. Thus armed, I held it in front of me and pursued the creature through the doorway.
In the unearthly brightness of the full moon, I beheld the entire village. But tonight, the village was not empty, not deserted.
Twenty, perhaps thirty Savages, men, women, children, young and old, stood ranked in a motionless perimeter like statues, eyes fixed upon me, fixed upon the makeshift cross I held in front of me, neither moving towards me nor backing away.
In the centre of the crowd stood Father de Céligny. Our eyes met. He stared at me with deep hatred. When finally he spoke, his words echoed only in my mind, for his lips did not move.
We will come for you tomorrow night, little priest, when the sun is down. We will come for you then, and nothing-neither your crosses, nor your prayers-will keep us from you.
A cutting wind sprang up suddenly from the north, carrying with it the knife-edge of winter. One by one, the shapes of the Savages and Father de Céligny shimmered, becoming misty and indistinct, then vanishing entirely as though carried away into the darkness beyond the trees and the rock cliffs by the sudden blast of frigid air.
I stood there till the first fingers of dawn coaxed the tentative morning from the night’s entombment. Some vestiges of my courage returned with the daylight. I let my aching body fall stiffly to my knees in a prayer of thanks, and an invocation for the strength I would need for what would-what must-come next.
I ate the remainder of the dried meat and corn mush that had been left to me by Askuwheteau’s band before deserting me, and I drank some of the water I had drawn the previous day, for my thirst was fierce. Had it only been two days ago that I arrived at the godforsaken ruins of St. Barthélemy? It seemed as though I had been there for an eternity, for time had begun to turn inwards on itself with the progression of this waking nightmare.
Despite my febrile, sleepless state, I remembered as a boy growing up in Beauce, I had heard the legends and tales of these revenant creatures, the morts-vivants who slumbered in their coffins beneath the earth in churchyards and sepulchres and rose from their graves at sundown to nourish themselves on the blood of the living. In the legends I recalled, these creatures would never die unless a shaft of wood was driven through their heart and, afterwards, the head stricken from the body. Even as a child, I had dismissed these stories as peasant folk-tales or, at worst, the blasphemous heresy that the Lord would allow the dead to leave their tombs in order to walk about among the living before the great Day of Judgement. And yet, here was that very abomination in the flesh, and I had seen it with my own eyes.
I knew then as I had not known before what my true, God-ordained mission was to be. I would have to kill this creature that had devilishly disguised itself as a priest, and consign it to whatever Hell its soul was destined.
As well, I was duty-bound to free the souls of the Savages who had died to slake this monster’s unholy thirst. I owed it not only to these poor people, but also to the honour of the Society of Jesus, for we were the ones that provided its blasphemous disguise.
If the stories were true, and if Father de Céligny had brought his plague with him from the Old World to the New, then he and the Savages would have had to find a place to rest during the daylight hours. There were no obvious graves (nor would there have been, in light of the Savages animosity towards the interment of their dead, preferring, as I understood the custom, to raise the departed one’s body on a sort of platform above ground).
A thought came to me then, as a blessing from God. I remembered the diabolical wolves that had stalked me without attacking when I came too close to the cliffs outside the village yesterday morning. The very same wolves that had proved such ruthlessly efficient jailers, which had kept me inside the house until sunset when these creatures would once again walk unencumbered through the night. If control of the wolves through supernatural agency was within de Céligny’s power, than it could only mean that they were protecting him while he slept.
Which meant, simply, that the place where he-where they-slept could only be the place where the cliffs rose up. Perhaps there were caves. Dark places where the light would not reach, wild places where they could sleep undisturbed.
I searched the huts in the village and was in despair of finding what I needed until I came to the last one, which seemed to be a storehouse of some sort. In that hut, beneath a pungent heap of dried animal hides, I found a bundle wrapped tightly beneath the skins. Eagerly, I pulled it open and found a smallish bow and two crude arrows. Even to my untrained eye it seemed old and warped, and more like a child’s toy than an actual weapon. But I took it gladly, adding it to my poor arsenal, along with a candle, and a tinderbox.
I turned my eyes towards the sky. Though it was still morning, there was a silver-grey quality to the light that hinted of shortening days and early dusk. I struck out across the village towards the cliffs with the bow and my faith. My fate was now entirely in God’s hands. If I were to fail in my mission this time, it would be into His hands that I would consign my martyrdom.
By the position of the sun, I reckoned that I had spent three hours, perhaps four, exploring the cliffs that ringed St. Barthélemy. The upward climb had been difficult, but the rock face was dry enough that my feet could find purchase.
It seems strange to think of it tonight, but as I remember the early hours of that bloody day so many years ago, the immediate recollection I have of that long walk to the caves is not only a memory of terror, but also of great beauty.
They say that in the hours before his execution, a condemned man experiences a fatal sort of calmness, one that allows for deep meditation, prayer, and reflection. Since my arrival in New France, I had not allowed myself to see anything but the perilous danger of the unknown, be it the inclemency of the seasons, the barbarous inhospitality of the Savages, and the dangers that seemed to lurk behind every distant, jutting island in every impossible lake. While I had grown accustomed to the foul smells and the casual barbarism that infected even the most mundane interaction in New France, from the crudeness of the filthy voyageurs who came to resemble the Indians in appearance and bearing, to the awful customs of the Savages themselves, I had never been able to see any beauty anywhere, except in my memories of home.
Today, facing certain death, I saw beauty. Wild, cruel, implacable beauty, to be sure, but beauty nonetheless. The world was gold and blue, the trees aflame with fiery colours the likes of which I had never seen. Against them, the sky was an indescribably exquisite lapis. All around me was a sense of silent vastness, as though this land was its own world, a world whose borders were so distant as to be irrelevant. I could easily picture the sun rising on one end of this country whilst simultaneously setting on the other.
And then, I felt yet another chill, this one coming from my soul. For I remembered that to all this beauty had come Father de Céligny, carrying his secret like a plague bacillus from the old world into the new. Did the monster wonder at his good fortune at finding such an exquisite expanse of unspoiled innocence upon which to stake his claim? Had this been his plan, perhaps? Had he intuited that, in France and elsewhere in Europe, there would be those who knew what he was, and, ignorant peasants though they would most likely be, they would also know the means of dispatching him?
Here in New France, the creature would find only innocence upon which to prey. He would only find the childlike, trusting Savages whose own superstitions did not encompass European superstitions that might correctly show him for what he was.
Did de Céligny dream of outwardly spiralling concentric circles of cannibalistic creation-of feeding on these people and making them like him, then sending them to prey on other Savages, first ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, until the entirety of New France was his personal Tartarus, with de Céligny crowned its Lord of Chaos?
Did this demon delight in mocking by his very existence our sworn mission, as Jesuits sworn to bring the light of Christ to the Savages by bringing them darkness? By taking from these poor people their lives and eternal souls instead of saving them? By disguising himself as one of us, turning our priest’s robes into the cerements of the grave, wreaking fiendish machinations while calling himself a holy Father?
The very thought filled me with revulsion and outrage. Ahead, through the trees, loomed the cliffs. I was awed yet again at the uncanny silence all around me, as I had on the first day I’d arrived at St. Barthélemy. No birds sang, nor even wind in the treetops. The only noise was the sound of my feet on the leaves and the fallen twigs on the ground.
The wolf attacked without warning. There was no stalking, nor growling, no herding this time. It was almost as though they had read my mind and understood that my intentions this time were not exploratory, but rather carried a purpose that was deadly to their master. Into the silence came a sudden sound, like thunder or galloping horses. I felt it before I heard it, and then the daylight was momentarily blotted out by a massive, hurtling form that appeared to spring at me from everywhere and nowhere all at once. I was knocked into the air. I fell backwards, my body smashing to the earth.
Pain sang through every joint and fibre of my being, and the bow secured around my shoulder cut into my back like a knife blade.
I barely had time to raise myself on one elbow when the beast launched itself at me again. But I was ready for it this time. I raised my leg at the same moment it leaped and kicked the filthy animal as hard as I could. I heard the sickening sound of the wolf’s ribs cracking against my boot and its own scream of agony. It landed in a heap a short distance away and lay there, writhing in pain.
Scrambling to my feet, I ran for a thick pine tree with low-hanging branches and began to climb it. Like a madman, I strove crazily to remember if a wolf could climb a tree or not. Normal wolves could do no such thing, of course, but in that moment, my imagination was flooded with images of werewolves and sorcery, unsure as I was of the limits of the powers of the creatures that commanded the wolves. Or even whether what had attacked me was a wolf, or merely something in the shape of a wolf.
From the vantage point of the higher branches of the trees, I watched the wolf struggle to raise itself to its feet and limp over to the trunk of the tree. In any other circumstance, I would have felt pity, for it has always distressed me to see an animal in pain. But this creature wanted-nay, needed-my death. It glared upwards balefully, then threw back its head and howled.
The cry was clearly a summons, for another of its kind soon joined the beast. The second wolf was larger and obviously older, though no less powerful for its age. Its muzzle was white, and its coat was flecked with the same. But if anything, its age had merely added layers of strength and cunning and malignity, for it circled the tree with a hellish determination, its jaws snapping when it looked up to where I was perched.
I reached around for the bow tied to my back. It was not broken, thank God. I could only guess my distance in relation to the creature on the ground, no longer pacing, but standing stock-still, waiting for me to fall out of the tree.
Carefully I fitted an arrow into the bow and took aim, remembering Askuwheteau’s lessons from what seemed like an eternity ago. I squinted my eyes and willed the death of my prey. Then I pulled the string back as steadily as I could, and let the arrow fly.
The arrow struck the second wolf in the flank. It fell, lurching to the ground in stunned shock, yelped once, and kicked its legs as though it were running. Then there was silence as the wolf lay on its side, tongue lolling out of its maw.
The first wolf, the injured one, whined pitifully and licked its fellow as though trying to wake it. Ruthlessly, I forced down my pity. Climbing partway down, I took aim at the first wolf with my bow and the one remaining arrow. Snarling defiantly in spite of its broken ribs, it began to back away from the body of the second wolf as though to take shelter, its hate-filled yellow eyes not leaving mine for an instant. In the same moment it turned to run, I pulled back on the string and sent the arrow home.
The arrow transfixed the wolf through the thick of its neck. Its body went rigid and from its throat came a wet, choking sound, as though it were trying to bark, or scream, but could not. Blood gushed from its mouth. Its eyes rolled to one side and it collapsed on the ground near the body of the second wolf.
I exhaled audibly, surprising myself with the sound. I did not even realize I had been holding my breath. What I felt in that moment was more than the sin of pride or vanity, though it encompassed both of those things. I felt as though God Himself was guiding my hand, moving me ever closer to my goal. My robe was soaked with sweat, and it felt cold and damp against my back and chest in the chilling afternoon light.
I cast one last glance at the bodies of the two dead wolves, as though to assure myself that they were truly dead. There was no time to tarry. Squinting, my eyes explored the rock face, searching desperately for some clue.
And then, my heart suddenly felt as though it had ceased beating, and my breath caught again. My eye had been drawn to a patch of recessed shadow between two jutting promontories of rock a short distance above where I now stood. It appeared, even from the distance at which I stood, to be a sort of opening, or cave mouth.
Upon reaching it, I used the tinderbox to light the candle I had brought with me. Shielding the flame with my hand I squeezed myself through the portal of natural rock outcropping and found myself inside a space tall enough for me to stand without encumbrance.
By candlelight, the cavern seemed enormous, though that might have merely been an illusion caused by the twisting shadows. I felt along the cave walls, walking carefully in the near-darkness, for I knew that if I fell here, or was otherwise injured, one of two things would happen: I would either die of some combination of hunger, thirst, or my wounds, or worse still, I would become helpless to defend myself against the devils’ depredations.
And then I made the discovery that has haunted both my nightmares and my waking hours for nearly twenty years. Even writing it now, tonight, I am overcome with the horror of my memory of it.
I cannot have gone any great distance into the cave, though it seemed like I must have, so smothering was the blackness, when I felt something move in the darkness. I say felt rather than heard, for there was no sound, but rather some displacement of the air above me. I raised the candle and looked up.
Hanging upside down, toes bent slightly for impossible purchase on the rock ledge, were the brother and sister I had met in the forest on the last night before my arrival at St. Barthélemy. Their arms folded against their bodies like wings.
The little boy was still naked. His legs wrapped around his sister’s middle-section in a grotesque parody of vile, incestuous carnality. Hers were likewise entwined around his middle-section. Her dress had fallen downwards, and her maidenhead was plainly visible through her brother’s spindly bronze legs.
And then I lowered the candle and looked down.
Strewn all around me lay the bodies of the Indians of St. Barthélemy in similar positions of repose, or death. Their eyes were closed, their arms crossed against their bodies as though for warmth, or comfort. Their chests neither rose nor fell, nor did any sound of breathing issue from their mouths. I put the candle very near the face of one, a woman. Her face was calm, and oddly beautiful. The candle’s light sculpted her high cheekbones with shadow. Her lips were full and voluptuous, and yet there protruded from those lips the sharp points of two white teeth, human in shape but somehow resembling the fangs of an animal.
I counted five, ten, fifteen of them in the immediate vicinity where I stood. There were doubtless more of them beyond the circle of my candlelight.
Holding my crucifix tightly in my hand, I nudged the woman’s body with the tip of my boot. I braced for her to awaken, but again there was nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing to indicate that I was anywhere other than an ordinary tomb, surrounded by the natural dead.
Without thinking, I placed my hands under the woman’s armpits, and tugged. Her body seemed very nearly weightless, certainly unlike any human body I had ever touched. It was as though, along with their souls, the curse that had been visited upon them had taken their physical heft. I glanced upwards at the two obscene children hanging by their toes from the ledge and wondered if this condition was what enabled them to suspend themselves in that manner.
The woman did not stir as I dragged her towards the opening of the cave. I was not sure what I would do with her once I brought her outside, but I had some vague memory of stories about these monsters’ abomination of sunlight and was hoping that there might be some truth to it.
As I approached the entrance with my burden, the darkness of the cavern brightened until I could see the actual rock opening. I felt a shudder move through the woman’s body, though she retained her sleeping posture and made no sound.
And then, as I stepped through the entrance to the cave, into the light, she awoke.
Her eyes flew open and she shrieked as though prodded with redhot iron tongs. Her mouth yawned open, exposing her full arsenal of sharp white teeth. The woman pulled away from me and began clawing at the ground as though to bury herself in the stone. Her screams rent the afternoon air, recalling to me the stories of the terrible witch burnings, and how the condemned women shrieked in the flames to which they had been sentenced.
For indeed, this Savage woman appeared to be burning alive in the sunlight.
In one second, her skin was clear and unblemished; in the next, it was festooned with enormous blisters that blossomed all over her body, seemingly all at once. The air was suddenly full of the smell of burning meat and something darker and fouler. White smoke poured from her body, rising from her limbs, her face, her hair, from any part of her that was exposed to the light. Still screaming, she looked at me with pleading, tortured eyes, and reached for me as though to beg my help, or at least my pity. In the instant our eyes met, I believe I saw her human soul, trapped in that terrible state between life and death and I knew that these creatures were not beyond the grace of God after all.
I crossed myself and gave her absolution, speaking the words “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” Then I stepped back, for the air around her suddenly shimmered and began to burn. And in the next instant, her body exploded into flame. Boiling blood poured from her nose and throat, thick steam rising from it, the stench beyond foul.
The heat of fire that consumed the Savage woman’s earthly flesh was not of this earth. In less than a minute, the flames had reduced the woman’s body to ash, leaving no fragment of bone unconsumed, and the charnel house stink was everywhere.
This gruesome exercise I repeated twenty times or more, dragging each of these creatures to meet their second death, the final death, in the waning sunlight outside the cave. I blessed each one in its final moments as a soul to be saved and sent to its eternal rest in the arms of God. I absolved each one, for whatever their sins in life, this terrible end to which they came was not of their own choosing.
The two children, the brother and sister, I took last.
I carried them into the sunlight together, and they died together there. In their last moments, they seemed to again become children, innocent and trusting and terrified, and something in my soul died as they lay screaming in agony as the sun reduced their small, frail bodies to dust. It was children I saw being burned alive before my eyes, not monsters. The memory of it seared itself into my soul forever. Was I now a murderer of children? Was this the final curse that had been laid upon my head by the monster still inside the caves? Would God forgive me for this, even if I could never forgive myself?
All around me were smoking heaps of ash. My clothing was nearly white with it, and I knew it was in my hair and it burned in my eyes as well. I was grateful not to be able to see myself in a mirror at that moment, for I fear I would have seen a monster in my shape staring back at me through the glass.
The sun was dangerously low in the sky, and a cold wind had sprung up, scattering the smoking ash across the rock face and into the forest in spiralling whirlwinds. Around me, the shadows were beginning to lengthen in the forest, and I still had not found the author of all this grief. Resolutely, I turned back towards the cave, praying it would be for the last time.
I found the monster much farther back from the place where I’d found his flock, in a natural anteroom of sorts formed where the walls of the cave split off from the main section of the cavern. He lay upon a natural rising of rock, his arms folded across his chest in an aspect not unlike that of a stone-carved knight atop a sepulchre. His own noble ancestors in France, centuries dead, might have been buried inside a sarcophagus of that exact kind.
His face, by the light of the guttering candle, was beautiful. I cannot claim otherwise. It was the face of a handsome man in the latter prime of his life, with high cheekbones and well-formed features: a proud brow, and strong nose. It was the face of an aristocrat. Pale as death, he was, save for the redness of his lips. His mouth was half open and I shuddered at the length and sharpness of his terrible teeth.
But whereas the eyes of the others had been closed, his were open, fixed and staring into the darkness above his head.
I started in shock, but realized in an instant that he was no less immobilized by the sunlight than the others had been. I passed my hand in front of his eyes. He neither blinked nor gave any other sign that he was aware of my presence. Like the others, his chest neither rose nor fell, nor did breath issue from his mouth.
I yearned to drag him by his white hair along the cruel rocks of the cavern floor, but I feared, doubtless irrationally, that it might somehow wake him. Instead, I wedged the candle in a crevice, then placed my hands under him as I had the others, and half pulled, half carried him. Like the others, he was very nearly weightless.
The cave mouth was darker than it had been even a few minutes before. With a sinking heart, I realized the reason: the sun was setting. If it had not already set, it would set within minutes. I cried out to God and pulled harder, moving even more quickly through the gloom.
And then I felt a bony hand grasp my ankle, and sharp nails digging into the soft flesh there. It was too late, I thought. The sun had set, and the creature was awake.
I screamed and dropped Father de Céligny’s body, backing away from it until my back was parallel with the cave wall next to the entrance. As I watched, he rose to his feet with a dreadful, majestic, malefic grace. For a moment, he stared at me, his eyes full of hate, then he lunged towards me, arms outstretched, his teeth bared like an animal. I ducked through the opening of the cave into the dark red setting sunlight.
“Come and get me, demon!” I shouted, looking into the cave. “I have killed your congregation and undone your work here. Look at the ashes of your children! If it is your plan to punish me for killing them, I am here, you coward! Do not hide in your hole like a snake! If you were once a man, show it now! Night has fallen; come fight me on your own terms!” It was a gamble, for there were still some streaks of redness in the sky, but I counted on the fact that traces of the monster’s human vanity might have survived into its current state of existence.
De Céligny stepped through the entrance of the cave, into what was left of the sunset. There was a flash of light and the familiar abattoir smell of seared flesh. He shrieked and covered his face with his hands, stumbling backwards into the cave. When he removed his hands from his face, I could see that the skin was charred and blackened and smoking, as though he had fallen into an open fire. I held up my cross and stepped towards him. “Tonight you die, monster!” I cried out. “Tonight, one way or another, you will die! And if not tonight, then I will find you tomorrow wherever you hide and burn you in the sunlight like the beast you are!”
As I watched, from inside the shadows of the cave mouth, de Céligny lowered his head and closed his eyes. I saw his lips move, as though he recited a prayer, or an incantation of some sort. The sound of his voice carried across the space between us, though the words he whispered were unclear.
He opened his hands in the aspect of an invocation, extending his arms towards me, encompassing me, the forest behind me, even the night itself in his blessing.
Then he raised his head and began to laugh, a foul, cruel laugh entirely bereft of warmth, or joy, or indeed any human emotion, and stepped out of the cave into the new-fallen night. His eyes shone like rubies in the charred skull of his face, his teeth even longer and sharper than they had seemed mere moments before.
“We are coming for you, little priest,” the creature said. “We are coming for you now.”
Before I could reply, I heard the familiar hiss of an arrow in flight and felt the wind of it pass by my ear. The arrow struck Father de Céligny full in the chest. His eyes flew open in shock and pain. De Céligny grasped the arrow in his hands at the base in a vain attempt to pull it out of his body. He roared in fresh agony as a second arrow sang through the air, striking him just above the place where the first arrow had found purchase. Black blood streamed from the wound, drenching the front of his robe. His screams had risen in pitch to the point where he sounded more like an animal than something that had once been human.
Behind me I beheld a miracle the likes of which I had never dreamed I would see. It was an angel, or so it seemed, for Askuwheteau stood there in the darkness with his bow and arrow, taking a third from his quiver and aiming it at the monster who writhed in its death throes in front of the cave that had lately been its living grave.
“Askuwheteau!” I cried, running to him. “You came back! My friend, you came back to me! How can I thank you? Praise God!”
I fell into his arms and embraced him, holding more tightly to him than I had ever held to my father, or my brother, or indeed any friend. In that moment, the love I felt for my friend was even more encompassing, I confess, than any other love, including my love of God.
My noble Savage friend gazed at me with something I dared to imagine was pride, and put his arm around my shoulders. He guided me to the place where the creature that had called itself Father de Céligny lay dying. Its body was crumbling before my eyes, passing into some sort of malodorous, smoking foulness.
Askuwheteau drew back his head and spit. The spittle landed on the creature’s face. Askuwheteau said something in Algonquian that sounded like a curse, then averted his face.
But as I stared at the dying creature, a curious thought came to me. Its last words had been, We are coming for you, little priest. We are coming.
And then, all around me, I saw the glimmer of what seemed like hundreds of yellow eyes, and I heard the sound of panting. The wolves were perched on the rocks above us; they circled us at the base of the rock face, and even more of them lay in wait beyond the tree line.
I felt, rather than saw, Father de Céligny die. His-or its spirit surely passed me in the blackness, leaving a trail of hate in its wake. And as if the trail of hate were a signal to the wolves, they sprang as one, it seemed, and surged up the hill to where Askuwheteau, the de facto murderer of their master, stood.
In the face of my Savage friend I saw bafflement, and then, wonder of wonders, I saw terror. At that, my heart sank, for I knew that if brave Askuwheteau was in terror of his life, we were doomed. He backed away slowly from the deadly advance of the wolves.
He reached out with his arm as though to touch me, but I realized he was not seeking out my camaraderie. He was not seeking to die with me. He was seeking, even then, to save my worthless life.
Wordlessly, lest he hasten the inevitable coming assault from the wolves, he was frantically trying to communicate to me that I should run, that I should save myself.
And to my eternal shame, run I did, back to the mouth of the cave where I crouched behind the stinking, smouldering ashes of the monster whose power to ordain our bloody murder seemed to survive even its own apparent death. I knew somehow that the wolves would not dare approach the remains of their master.
My saviour Askuwheteau stood proud before the advancing horde of wolves. Even as he recognized the inevitability of his own horrible, coming death, his face was impassive.
And then he began to sing.
After a short time, the only sound was the ripping of flesh and gristle, and the terrible crunching of Askuwheteau’s bones in the gore-clotted maws of the wolves. They peeled the skin off his face with their teeth and tore his limbs from their sockets the way kitchen dogs might fight over a soup bone. When they had finished their awful work, there was nothing identifiably human in Askuwheteau’s remains.
They licked the bits of flesh still clinging to his bones with a horrible delicateness, as though it were a special treat being passed to them under the table by an indulgent master.
By then, night had fallen to such a degree that Askuwheteau’s blood soaking the ground was black in the rising moonlight, and the wolves themselves looked like ghouls squatting over an open grave devouring a freshly dead corpse.
They raised their heads then, and looked at me, growling low in their throats.
I closed my eyes and fell to my knees, hands clasped in front of me. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin that my death would be pleasing in God’s sight, and that it would be over quickly, and with as little pain as possible. Or, if that were not God’s will, that I be granted as much strength to endure it as He had granted Askuwheteau.
But the wolves did not attack. Instead, they loped over to where the arrow-pierced skeleton of Father de Céligny lay on a bed of rocky soil and fallen leaves. They circled it, tentatively sniffing the pile of smoking bones, but giving it a wide enough berth to suggest they feared that the ossified remains might yet be something alive, something hellishly vivid that could hurt them as no bullet or arrow could.
Then, as though it had burned them, they leaped back from the pile of bones, cowering like mangy curs before a master’s whip. As one, they threw back their heads and howled. My poor words here cannot do justice to the effect of that unearthly, haunting sound as it rose into the night and fell down upon the tableau in which I knelt. Then the wolves turned and bounded into the forest without looking back, not aimlessly, but as if they were being pursued by a hunter and were in search of safety.
Again, I was alone-truly and utterly alone. I mourned my Indian friend Askuwheteau, this man whom I had dismissed as a Judas and a Savage, but who had shown the courage and faithfulness to come back to a place he feared in order to secure my safety. In all truth, he had saved my life, and he had died in my place. The tears I wept that night for Askuwheteau were the bitterest of my life, and none I’ve shed in the long years since that night have been harsher or more absinthial.
I drew the sign of the cross over what remained of his poor mauled face, and bowed my head. “Eternal rest grant unto thy servant Askuwheteau, O Lord,” I prayed. “And let perpetual light shine upon him. Grant him absolution, O Lord. May he rest in peace. Amen.”
Feeling my way through the darkness, I walked back to the village. I knew that there were perhaps more of these demons hiding in the forest watching me, but I cared little of it, so heavy was I with the weight of grief and guilt. If the Devil and his minions had been so able to use a priest as a vessel to serve his will as he had with Father de Céligny, then my life, and my immortal soul, were in God’s hands, as they always had been. But my work that night was far from over.
Inside the Jesuit house, I found a torch of cedar and pitch. I lit the torch, then put a second torch in my bag. There was a shovel leaning against one wall. The heft of it gave me comfort, for I believed I could make a decent weapon of it if it came to that.
The path back to the caves through the trees was easier this time because of the light of the torch. Easier in one sense, for the path was well-lit and I made good progress. Harder in another, for I now knew, beyond any measure of a doubt, what monsters, earthly and unearthly, could hide outside that ring of torch-light.
Upon arriving at the caves, I saw that the two piles of bones were as I had left them. The first pile, the remains of my poor Askuwheteau, I would bury. Though it was against the customs of his people to lay them beneath the earth, Askuwheteau had fought and died as bravely as any Christian, and it was only natural that he be buried as one. I lamented the fact that I had not had the chance to baptize him before he died so horribly. After I had completed my most pressing task, I swore to him that I would attend to his burial with due reverence.
The second pile of bones, the bones of de Céligny, I approached with dread. I pushed the torch close to the charred skeleton. At first I doubted the proof of my own eyes, for it surely seemed as though the creature whose body I had watched crumble and dissolve once pierced by the arrow would have found some way to render itself vivid once again.
And yet, as I said, it was where I’d left it, and as I left it. I wedged the base of the torch between two boulders and, by its guttering light, I surveyed the grotesque thing.
I raised the shovel over my head and brought it down squarely across the neck, severing the skull from the body with a single blow.
In my hubris and vanity, I half-expected to hear a sound, perhaps a scream from beyond the shadow of the Valley, or the trumpets of angels and the beating of their wings as they celebrated my triumph over the forces of Darkness. But there was nothing save the sound of the wind high in the trees that danced in the moonlight.
Using the shovel, I scooped the dreadful mix of bones and ash into my bag. I lit the second torch by the fire of the one wedged between the boulders and by its light I made my way to the mouth of that abhorrent place, carrying my ghastly burden in my other hand. To say that the blackness of the cave was forbidding by daylight is to render the description of it at night, by torchlight, almost beyond possibility.
Deeper and deeper into the cavern’s depths I went, the aureole of torchlight illuminating only the area immediately around it. The silence was the silence of the grave. No sound broke that silence; no sounds save for that of my feet on the rock and, from far away in its recesses, the steady drip of water on stone. The weight of the bag seemed to grow heavier with every step I took into that obsidian blackness.
And then, suddenly, there was a sound. I stopped in my tracks, straining to identify what I heard, or what I only thought I’d heard. My torch sputtered and for one terrible moment, the fire burned low as though some wind had blown it out.
In that moment, as the darkness swam towards me, I heard the sound again. It was the sound of breathing-not my own, but coming from somewhere in the lightless recesses of the cave. And then I felt the horrible dead heft of the bag twitch against my leg as though there were something inside it, trapped, but still alive.
I screamed and dropped the bag on the floor of the cavern. Wildly I swung the dying torch in front of me. The low-burning flame revealed only the walls of the cave, appearing and vanishing like a chimera with every sweep of the torch. And the sound of breathing was no more, if indeed it had ever been.
I brought the torch, which again blazed to life, close to the bag containing the bones of Father de Céligny and bent down to examine it. The sweat soaked my hair and ran down into my eyes, but when I wiped it away with the back of my hand, and squinted to see, the bag was where I had dropped it, and it was still, unmoving.
Had I imagined it? Had the nightmare sensation of carrying a trapped animal that had been merely stunned, but was waking, been nothing more than a phantasm born of my terror? I had no answer but this: that the bag was not moving and my torch would not burn forever. I had to do what I had to do; I had to hide the remains of this monster where they would never be found, where no human hands would soil themselves with the contagion it represented. I crossed myself and pushed farther into the cave.
I have only a blind man’s reckoning of how much farther and deeper into the cave, and then underground, I went before I found what I was looking for-a natural recession in the rock, oblong and shaped like an sarcophagus, surely carved by centuries of natural erosion, a natural coffin for my most unnatural and unwholesome freight. Surely here, in the wildest, darkest part of this wild, dark wilderness, the bones of this monster would remain unmolested till the end of time.
I placed the bag into the recession and covered it with the weight of some of the large stones and boulders I found scattered about. The work was arduous and the rocks were heavy, and by the time I placed the last one on top of the makeshift grave, my hands were bleeding with my exertion. I wiped my hands on the robe, leaving the traces of my stigmata on the coarse fabric.
Then, taking up the torch again, I turned and began to retrace my steps through the blackness. After an eternity, I came to the mouth of the cave. I wept joy when I saw the glimmer of the first torch, the one I’d left outside the cave, wedged between the rocks.
From the position of the moon in the sky, I ascertained that I had been about my mission for the better part of the night, though dawn was still a few hours away. I took up the shovel and began to dig. By the time I had dug a grave deep enough to bury Askuwheteau, the sky had begun to lighten in the distance, pale violet streaks, and dark blue lifting from the blackness like celestial foam on a wave.
I laid his body reverently into the grave. I was surprised to find that I still had tears in me left to shed, but I did, and I shed them there as I covered his body with the dark, flinty soil upon which he had so bravely died. I bowed my head and prayed for the progression of his immortal soul on its journey towards the Light of God.
And then, from overhead, came a sound like the flapping of giant sails in a strong wind.
In the light of the torch, the creature dropped from some unknown height. As it landed, crouching like an animal about to spring, I had a brief, vivid impression of giant, unfolded wings, but the wings seemed to melt away, leaving in their place a pair of thick, muscled arms. Its head was bowed, and long dark hair streamed from its scalp like a black halo.
When it stood, I saw that it was of vast height, taller than any Savage I had encountered, but Savage it was-or, rather, Savage it had been in its original, God-ordained life. Now, reborn, its eyes burned with that familiar crimson fire and its teeth were deadly and terrible. From that mouth issued a high, shrill whistle that was human in neither pitch nor form, but somehow communicated a fierce, inhuman hunger that would, I realized, brook no denial.
Instinctively, I lifted my torch in my own defence as it leaped. The effect upon the creature was instantaneous. To my wonder, the thing retreated, as though terrified by the fire. Emboldened, I advanced on it with the torch. It screamed in rage and continued to recoil. I expected any moment for it to shift its shape, as I had seen these things do. I knew that if it did transform itself, it would effect an escape.
The thought filled me with terrible, righteous rage. In that moment, I saw it as the incarnation of all the pain and fear I had encountered since arriving in that Godforsaken spot. Now, worse still, it had even profaned the site of Askuwheteau’s grave. With an oath, I shoved my torch in the creature’s face.
Its hair exploded into flame. Shrieking in agony, the thing clawed at its face and hair attempting to put out the fire. Alas, for the creature, the fire only burned brighter and hotter, spreading to its face and arms by some supernatural providence.
The demon flung out its arms in an aspect of crucifixion, and before my eyes its body appeared to shimmer, dwindling and yet appearing to stretch, but becoming smaller. The arms elongated, becoming as the wings of a bird, or an enormous bat, beating furiously as it rose into the night, still burning, still transforming as it took flight into the darkness like a fireball streaking towards the village of St. Barthélemy. My eyes followed its upward trajectory for a few seconds, and then watched in awe as it crashed to the earth. Its screams as it fell to its death-or what I prayed was its death-were the pitiable lamentations of a damned thing.
But by then, my only emotion was joy, and I delighted in the foul creature’s death, a death I prayed had been agonizing beyond endurance.
And then, like a benediction, the air was full of snow, falling in heavy flakes as pure white as the wings of any angel, and in the red light of dawn’s advance in the east, winter was upon me with a hunter’s killing stealth.
On the edge of the village, the spectral shapes formed themselves out of the falling snow, moving wraithlike towards me. Exhausted, starving, blind with sweat, drenched in dried blood, I fell to my knees and accepted my death, for I was beyond fighting further, beyond the ability to endure any more of these horrors. When they reached for me, I closed my eyes and commended my spirit into the hands of Almighty God, and waited for the end.
And then I heard the sound of human voices speaking in a language I did not understand. Warm hands touched my face and my own hands. Strong arms lifted me and bore me aloft, carrying me through the deserted village. The snow continued to fall in a heavy sheet of cold, cleansing white. My eyelids fluttered and the light swam.
Before I lost consciousness and yielded to the tide of new darkness rushing towards me, I smelled the awful stink of burning flesh, and something worse. I looked down and saw the smouldering remains of the monster I had burned with my torch.
It had not survived the fire. Perhaps it had died attempting to cast off its shape, attempting to return to its human aspect. Its body was manlike in shape, but where its arms would have been were the webbed wings of a giant bat, ending in human hands with nails that were like the claws of a great Oriental tiger. Its face was a half-human, half-basilisk nightmare.
I turned my head away from the abomination lying on the ground, already beginning to be covered by the falling snow. Around me, I saw that some of the men were setting fire to the village. I heard the crackle of wood and smelled new smoke.
A wave of heat came to me, and my first thought was to stretch towards it. I cannot tell with any certainty as I write this if my impulse was to throw myself on the growing pyre, or merely to warm myself by it. And then, my eyes closed and I yielded to the mercy of complete insensibility.
When I awoke, though I had no bearings, I sensed that I was very far from that haunted place. I was on a sort of sledge, wrapped in furs. Above me the trees were heavy with snow, and we were moving silently through the endless, damnable forest that binds this Godforsaken country like a slave’s chain.
The Indians cared for me with a mercy and a tenderness that put Christian charity to shame. I travelled with them to their winter hunting grounds and lived as their guest and under their protection for the long months of ice and snow. In time, I came to understand that they regarded me as some sort of deliverer, and in exchange for that delivery, they were prepared to extend to me an acceptance that I would, as a Black Robe, never otherwise experience.
I heard the word “Weetigo” many times. It was a word I knew well, though I knew none of the others they spoke. It was the word I had first heard in Trois-Rivières from the drunkard Dumont, and then later from my saviour Askuwheteau, who died that I might live. I understand the word now, as an old man who has spent his life among these people, in a way I could not have understood it as a young man.
To my shame, I believe that the Savages who rescued me believed I had defeated just such a monster in St. Barthélemy, for they saw the remains of the demon creature that had fallen from the sky wreathed in fire. In it, they had seen the incarnation of their most terrifying legend; in a sense, I had made their word flesh.
At that time, I had not the words to explain to them that what they had seen was not what they called a “Weetigo,” but rather something that we ourselves had brought from the Old World to the New. I suspect that the scarcity of those words likely saved my life, for I could not have answered for their rage if they had known the truth of what Father de Céligny, or whatever the monster’s real name was, had wrought there.
That they saw me as a saviour instead of merely an extension of the same corruption that destroyed an entire village of souls-a village of innocent men, women, and children, who died without the blessing of baptism and God’s mercy, suited my cowardly purposes, though I wept with shame and grief and guilt that winter when I was alone.
In my nightmares that winter, I revisited that terrible day when I dragged the sleeping bodies of those poor creatures into the sunlight and listened to their agonized screaming as the sunlight turned them to ash, especially the children. It haunts me that I never discovered if they could have been saved, or returned to their natural state, and if my actions had been a mercy, or merely an extension of the blasphemy.
In the spring, the Indians passed me on to a brigade of voyageurs who, by some miracle, knew of me and my mission to rescue Father de Céligny and return him to Trois-Rivières. Perhaps in anticipation of a reward, or perhaps only out of charity and a sense of fellowship with another white man, the voyageurs returned me to Trois-Rivières and the embrace of our Jesuit headquarters there.
Father de Varennes wept with joy, for he had counted me as dead. Together we praised God and the tender mercies of the Blessed Virgin for my safe return from the perils of the wilderness and the incivility of the Savages. We said a Mass for Father de Céligny, our most recent blessed martyr to the barbarous cruelty of the Savages.
As we said that Mass, Askuwheteau’s face rose up in my mind like an unquiet, reproachful ghost. I added a silent prayer for his forgiveness for all the lies I was about to tell.
I told Father de Varennes that the Indians had left me near the site of St. Barthélemy. I told him that I had made my way to the mission and had found it burned to the ground.
I told him I had a sense that a rival tribe, perhaps even the Hiroquois, had slaughtered everyone in the village and left the carrion for the wild animals. I told him that I had found bodies and that I had buried them. I told him I had not found the body of Father de Céligny. I told him that I had thrown myself at the mercy of the Savages who found me, and that I had paid them with gold I had found buried beneath the remains of the Jesuit house.
Even as I told those lies, I realized that the winter snow and ice would have obliterated any possible evidentiary challenge to my account, even if it were doubted, which it was not. Who would doubt the word of a priest, especially one who had survived such an ordeal?
I covered myself in shame by blaming the Savages for the massacre of the settlement of St. Barthélemy when I knew that what happened to all of those poor people was something that we, the French had brought into their midst, something that corrupted and afflicted them, and eventually killed them.
More than anything, I told the lies to prevent anyone from ever returning to the site of the Mission of St. Barthélemy and discovering the secret that I buried in those caves eighteen years ago.
I am dying now, Your Reverence. I have asked for Father Vimont, who comes shortly to collect this document for your perusal, but also to give me Last Rites and absolve me for my sins, which have been many.
My body burns with fever from the pox. I fear that the very effort of writing to you this last Relation has hastened my inevitable commendation of my soul to Christ. This Relation is my confession of the things I did, but it is also as I said my true Testament of the things I saw with my own eyes, and I swear to it on peril of my Immortal Soul.
I know that some who read it will think it the ravings of a madman in the last deliria of fever. I pray that Your Reverence will not number among them, and that you will be able to see into my heart and know that I speak the truth in this Relation.
Reverend Father, I have lived as a Jesuit, and I die a faithful one. Our way is not the way of ignorance and superstition, but rather of wisdom and learning. And yet, I realize now how much I had yet to learn, and how dangerous was the arrogance I had brought with me from France to this New World. I do not doubt the glory of our work among the Savages, and yet in these final hours of my life, I am plagued by questions and doubts. I realize it is not my place to question.
But I ponder, Reverend Father, and I pray for wisdom. And I pray for your forgiveness, and for God’s, for the burden of these doubts.
I have watched these poor people shrivel and die from mysterious illnesses they have blamed on what they call our sorcery. They claim we brought the pox to them. They claim that it did not exist in their world before we arrived. We have wrapped them in our blankets to comfort them, and watched them die, praying for a conversion before death claimed them, a baptism before they breathed their last. We have given them Christian names, and we have buried them under those names. We teach them to reject their customs and beliefs. We teach them to believe they are ignorant and lost for believing in their world of spirits and oracle, while we hold the belief that the Devil has them in his thrall.
And yet, Reverend Father, may God forgive me, I believe I have seen the Devil walking in the forests of New France. But-O, blasphemy of blasphemies! He wore the same robe I wear, and his mission and legacy was a most wicked one. While I pray that I was somehow, through my sad efforts, able to halt the spread of that ungodly contagion, I am haunted by the words of the drunkard Dumont, words I have heard in my nightmares for eighteen years.
Dumont said: There are worse things now walking in the forests at night than the Savages.
In light of what I have witnessed, I have searched my poor ignorant soul to know, beyond a doubt, that we do God’s work here. Yea, and that we have brought these people Light and not more darkness. But my soul is silent. Around me, the Indians die, either at our hand, or at least beyond our ability to save them.
If I have committed blasphemy here, I beg for God’s mercy and forgiveness, and for Your Reverence’s prayers after I am gone. But the account contained in this Relation is true, and I die as I have lived, as Christ’s most humble servant, and Your Reverence’s.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
Fr. Alphonse Nyon of the Society of Jesus
Montréal, Québec, 1650