The night was late when the stranger stumbled into the tavern, gasping for air and shivering from the cold, arctic blast. They could see that his clothes were ragged and filthy, but still new; evidence that the stranger was not a vagrant, but one of those hapless folks who thought they could brave the frozen Yukon only to find that they had bitten off more than they could chew. His frostbitten hands and ears further cemented this assumption, as did the bags beneath his eyes and the vigorous shaking from the cold. More so than any of these, the mush and snow covering him–whitening his coat, his pants and even his hair–proved to them that this man was one of those fools who so often came north looking for gold and were battered by the deadly Arctic winters.
The bartender hardly looked up as he dried the last glass; he simply ordered the young prospector to make a run for the town doctor. Nor did the prospector so much as glance back, instead taking casual steps as he made his way toward the door. The sight of the stranger was to them a sight as common as a winter snow–too often men like him came lumbering in from the hills, half-dead and frozen solid as the river. The stranger was, in a way, expected.
What wasn’t expected was the stranger’s reaction. As the prospector stepped past him, he seemed to come to life like fire–grabbing the young man’s breast and choking out a plea, begging the young man to tell him if anyone else had come into town.
It was, however, the unbridled dread in the stranger’s eyes caught the attention of the old man in the back. His half-lidded eyes locked onto the poor soul’s own bulging orbs. He stood up from his stool and walked toward the two of them, softly plying away the man’s frozen digits from the prospector’s shirt. “No one else today, as far as I know,” he said. Without turning, he told the prospector, “Better get to the Doc’s house now, boy, and hurry. This man’s hands are starting to turn black.”
As the prospector raced out the door, the stranger’s eyes widened further. He collapsed onto himself as he stared out the door, watching the young man disappear into the blizzard beyond. For a moment, his eyes shifted to the center of town–past that, beyond the still-burning bonfire at the settlement’s edge. “Please,” he said. “Not just today. Any day–any time this week. A young girl, about eight. She’s my daughter–I need to know–I need to know if she’s here.”
The bartender slammed the empty glass down. He leaned over the bar with menacing eyes. “You left her out there?” he exclaimed. “What kind of heartless–”
“Let him speak,” the old man said. “We can judge him later, if there’s need to. If you want to do something now, then fetch some blankets. We can’t know what happened or what’s to be done without his word–and he can’t tell us if he’s dead.”
The bartender shied back for a moment, and then stepped out from his post. He opened a small cabinet door and pulled out two wool blankets, keeping an eye on the old man as he led the stranger to the table closest to the stove.
“I had to….” the stranger said. “I couldn’t let them…. I couldn’t let them get my daughter.”
The bartender froze. “Who?” he asked. The old man waved to him, and he quickly raced across the room to the stranger’s side. “Who was after your daughter?”
“The wolves….”
A strong look of consternation crossed the bartender’s face. He’d heard a few stories about wolf attacks on children–mostly in his youth, when he traveled through Europe, where the wolves were more apt to take men as prey–but these attacks were usually by solitary wolves, ones who had been left behind or driven from their packs.
And they were almost unheard of in the Yukon.
But the old man seemed less surprised than him, and his face now seemed softer in the light of the fire. “Tell me,” he said, “did you happen to cut through Dunham Pass?”
The stranger’s eyes sank back into their lids. Tears began to well into his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “I think we did–we cut through some time ago–I don’t know when, but I we did.”
“Tell me about these wolves,” the bartender asked. “Were their coats brown? Were they mixed with dogs? I’ve never seen a wolf go for a child, not unless they had some mutt in their blood.”
“No,” the stranger muttered, pulling the blanket tighter over his shoulders. “Those wolves… they were wolves, but they weren’t. What you’d call animals, I’d call the hounds of hell.”
The bartender frowned. Was the young man delirious? He was shaking more than ever, but it wasn’t from the cold. “Tell me then,” he said with a cautious air, “what makes you think these animals were the devil’s dogs?”
“We had just reached the pass itself,” he said, “and my wife and daughter were asleep. Right away I saw the lot of them, tearing into the fetid corpse of a musk ox. There were at least fifty of them, and they were fighting each other, viciously snarling and biting at each others throats over the smallest scrap of flesh. Their teeth were hung at angles from their maws, like the ruined gape of a chewer’s jaw, and their paws trails pools of blood but bore now wounds. Their eyes shined in the light of my lamp, but behind that shine they were a blackish-red, and a dark ichor trickled from beneath their lids–and from their teeth and gums as well.
“I should have kept the dogs running. Maybe we could have slipped by unnoticed. But the horror of what I saw took me, and I pulled them to a stop. I must have called out in fright! The beasts turned their gazes toward us and abandoned their meal at once. Their howls cut through the night air–God what a sound! I could swear I heard my wife scream for us to go on. And in no time, they were upon us.
“They went for the dogs first, nipping at their shoulders and sides, throwing them into chaos as they tried to fight back against the beasts. The sled was nearly thrown onto its side, and I swear would have had I not had the presence of mind to grab my rifle and fire into the. For all I know I missed, but it worked for a moment, and the wolves broke off their assault. But when they pulled back, my lead dogs were dead, and the snow bathed in red by the light of my lamp.
“But the wolves–those things–they did not run far. No sooner than I had the dead dogs loose than they had returned. This time they went straight for the sled, tearing apart our provisions and forcing my wife and daughter to flee into the treeline.
“I don’t know exactly what happened next. I grabbed my rifle, but before I could line up a shot my wife had sunk into the snow, and my daughter was nowhere to be seen. I’m sorry to say that I panicked, and I fired blindly into the snowbanks. Of the three shots I managed, one somehow managed to find a wolf’s neck. I saw blood hit the snow–not the blood of a living thing, but old blood, thick and and clotted with lumps of brown. The wolf did not fall. Instead, the it let out a nightmarish howl–a wet, shrieking, hollow cry that seemed to rise not from the throat of an animal but from the darkest depths of the night itself. And then I heard something snap, and then agonized scream, and then at last the sound of meat being torn from bone.
“That’s when I saw my daughter–she must have circled back toward me–climbing back onto the sled, and without thinking I commanded the dogs to go. I watched in dread as the sled shrank in the distance, all the while the wolves continued to rip my wife apart.
“Then they turned toward me, and I ran. I ran as fast I could, and I dared not look back, for I could hear them behind me, yipping and whooping at each other as they hounded me, stopping every so often to let out another of those ghastly cries. The meaning of those calls were suddenly clear to me–they were talking to each other, telling each other where I was, what I was doing, and in what direction I was headed.
“I don’t know how long they chased me–I just ran for as long as my legs could carry me. Even after what seemed like an eternity, when the wolves had suddenly broken off their pursuit, I kept myself going, until at last I had spent my reserves and fell to my knees. I found myself lost on the tundra, without warmth, without provisions, and without any way of gaining a bearing; I sat there for hours, before finally I managed to push myself to my feet. For days I wandered aimlessly, listening to blood-howls of the wolves in the distance–they were still following me, watching me from outside the limits of my sight, waiting for me to fall to bitter cold. I had almost given up when I saw the flash of the bonfire as it lit up this evening. I followed it, mindlessly drawn to it like a moth to candlelight, until finally I found myself at the door to this tavern.”
There was a pained silence. The bartender found that his knees could no longer bear his weight, and quickly took his seat in a nearby chair. The old man was himself shaken, unable to form a thought let alone words. Even the stove’s fire seemed to disquieted by the tale. Whether it was truth or merely the fevered dream of a dying man, they did not know. They only knew that the emotion with which the stranger had recounted his tale seemed genuine, and that could not be ignored.
Something had happened to him out on the pass.
After many long, uncomfortable minutes, the old man placed a shaking hand into his pocket and produced a bottle of bourbon. He’d been out on the tundra a day before, hunting caribou. His trek had taken him just a few miles east of Dunham Pass. He’d found a sled overturned in a ravine, but nothing more. There had been no sign of dogs, or of a child–only some shredded canvas, a hastily-cut lead and a few scattered and ruined trinkets. “I’m thinking,” he said as he handed the bottle to the bartender, “that we could all use a glass about now.” He barely looked up when the door opened. “It seems the boy has returned with the doctor,” he said. “Might as well pour one for them too. None of us will be sleeping tonight.”
Leave a Reply