The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey Read Free Book Online

that ruffled the surface of Lake of the Woods like the invisiblehand of a giant baby splashing its bathwater. Fishing boats bobbed upon the chop, loons dove and splashed in their wake, and I spied a steamboat chugging along the far southern shore, a bald eagle soaring high above its billowing stacks.
    A wiry lad of native descent wearing a buckskin jacket and beaver hat popped out from the milling crowd and offered in broken English to tote our bags to the hotel for twenty-five cents. His offer inaugurated a prolonged negotiation. Like many of substantial means, Warthrop was tighter than a clam. I had witnessed him dicker for an hour to save a penny on a two-day-old loaf of bread. Add to this his native distrust of his fellow man’s honesty—he never could shake the suspicion that he was being cheated—and a simple transaction that should have lasted no more than a minute could stretch out to seventy times that. By the end of their prolonged dickering—offer and counteroffer and counter-counteroffer—both the doctor and our porter seemed dissatisfied with the outcome; each felt a little had by the other.
    My master’s mood did not improve upon our arrival at the Russell House. Our room was small, containing a washstand, a dresser that looked as though it had been cobbled together by a blind man, and a single equally rickety bed. Warthrop was forced to rent a cot from the proprietor for an extra ten cents a night, a fee he likened to highway robbery.
    We tarried only long enough to drop our bags and find something to eat at a smoke-clogged restaurant across the street, where men spat mouthfuls of oily tobacco juice into battered brass spittoons and eyed our eastern clothing with frank suspicion. We then set about to find Muriel’s correspondent, a task that proved more frustrating than the doctor had anticipated.
    From the hotel clerk who checked us in: “Larose? Yes, I know him. He’s a popular guide; few know the backwoods better than Larose. Haven’t seen him in over a month, I’d say. Don’t know where he’s gone to, but let me know if you find him, Dr. Warthrop. He owes me money.”
    From the Rat Portage postmaster: “Yes, I know Larose. Nice enough fellow when he isn’t three sheets to the wind. Can’t remember the last time I saw him. . . .”
    “He posted a letter from here sometime in late July,” the monstrumologist said.
    “Yes, that would be about right. I remember that. Falling down drunk. He’d just come in from the bush, he said. Seemed out of sorts, not his usual self. He wouldn’t say any more about it. If you can’t find him, I’d say he’s back in the woods, maybe up Sandy Lake way, but he’ll be back. He always comes back.”
    “He has a family?”
    “Not that I know of. He comes back for the liquor and the gambling. Which reminds me, if you see him, tell him I haven’t forgotten about the money he owes me.”
    From the storekeepers along Main Street, to the dockworkers on the wharf, from the gambling halls and crowded halfpenny beer dives, from the offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to the deafening interior of sawmills choked in swirling wood chips, it seemed the entire town knew Pierre Larose, or at least knew of him, but no one knew where he might be. All agreed he had not been seen for some time, and he owed all, it seemed, for one debt or another. The consensus was that he either had picked up stakes and returned to his native Quebec or had fled into the wilderness to escape his burgeoning debt. The few who claimed to have seen him around the time he’d posted the letter to Muriel Chanler whispered of a man who had lost his mind, who had stumbled about the streets lost in a besotted fog, “spitting and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog,” slapping at his ears until they bled, whimpering and moaning and muttering on and on about a voice only he seemed able to hear.
    Before that, Chanler had been seen with Larose at the chief outfitting shop on Main Street. (The