The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey Page B

suggestions, Sergeant. You have eyes as well as I. You can observe the poor man’s condition for yourself.”
    “We’ll carry him out. Good God, he can’t weigh more than Will here.”
    “To do so over this terrain could prove fatal.”
    “Walking across the street on a Sunday afternoon could prove fatal, Warthrop. If Will can take my rifle and rucksack, I could carry him.”
    He bent to scoop Chanler from the forest floor and was stopped by Warthrop’s hand against his chest.
    “I amwilling to risk the elements, Sergeant,” the doctor said stiffly.
    “Well, guess what? I’m not. I don’t know what it is about you and this monstrumology business, but it’s like bear shit on your boots—follows you every step and is as hard as hell to get rid of.”
    He jabbed a finger into my master’s chest.
    “I’m getting the hell out of here, Doc. You’re welcome to come with me, or you can try your luck finding the way out yourself.”
    For a moment neither man moved, locked in a test of wills—a test that Warthrop failed. He ran a hand through his thick hair and sighed loudly. He looked at Chanler; he looked at me. He considered the sliver of gray sky sliced off by the canopy.
    “Very well,” he said, “but it is my burden.”
    He slid his arms beneath the fragile form, and rose unsteadily with the wasted body. Chanler’s forehead pressed against the base of Warthrop’s neck.
    “I shall carry him,” the doctor said.

TEN
     
    “It Can Break a Man’s Mind in Half”
     
    Our flight to Rat Portage was painfully slow. Warthrop called for many halts to check Chanler’s vital signs and to attempt getting more water into him. Slowing the pace too was Sergeant Hawk—or rather Sergeant Hawk’s finding his bearings in the fog. It thickened as the day wore on, a colorless miasma that obscured the trail and peopled the forest with looming shadows and flitting apparitions upon which the imagination seized and ascribed portents of doom. In this gray land of muffled sound and borrowed light, our very breath was snatched from our mouths and trammeled underfoot.
    By four o’clock the light had all but vanished. We made camp for the night no more than seven miles from the shores of Sandy Lake and still several miles from the grave of Pierre Larose.The doctor eased his load onto the ground and collapsed against a tree. His respite lasted only a minute or two; soon he was up again fussing over Chanler, wiping his brow, raising his head to force a bit more water down his throat, calling to him in a loud voice—but Chanler would not be roused. I gathered wood for our fire before the last of the light was snuffed out. Hawk inventoried our meager supplies, reckoning we had enough to last another five days. After that, we would have to live off the land.
    “I’d planned on resupplying at Sandy Lake,” he said defensively when the doctor raised an eyebrow at this bit of bad news. “You didn’t tell me there’d be a kidnapping.”
    The sergeant did not seem himself. His eyes would not stay still; they shifted right and left and back again restlessly, and he could not seem to stop wetting his lips.
    “How did you manage to find him?” he asked.
    “Fiddler. I thought if John was alive, Fiddler might check on him, and the odds were he would not risk it while we were awake. And my guess was right. At a little after two he came out of his wigwam, and I followed him. They had put John in a wigwam on the northern edge of the village, far removed from the others, as one might expect. It is common practice among indigenous peoples to construct a ‘sick house’ to isolate infectious members from the rest of the tribe.
    “After that, it was only a matter of time and preparation. No guard was posted. I merely had to wait for Fiddler to go to bed.”
    “What happened, do you think?” Hawk was staring atthe opening of the tent wherein Chanler lay, the white of the blanket barely visible in the firelight.
    “I can only guess,”