tent in a cove of spruce off the beach. Neither of them felt like fishing, though they saw fry darting in the tea-colored shallows of the creek. They read and smoked their pipes. What wind there was died to a breath they could barely feel. The sky was clear and cloudless. The last light slid down to the edges and slipped onto the silvered lake which bore it without a ruffle. Also the reflections of the first stars. The cold came on fast and they knew it would be another night of frost.
They kicked up the fire and added driftwood and sat in the heat. Wynn pulled out the pages he had torn from a book called True Tales of the North: Ghosts, Witches, Spirit Bears, and Windigoes. It was written in 1937 by an amateur anthropologist named Spencer Halberd Knight. Jack had teased Wynn about the name—“If that’s on the sonofabitch’s birth certificate I’ll eat that chapter”—and about Wynn’s habit of tearing books apart for his trips—“You must’ve grown up with a hell of a lot more books than I did. Whyn’t you just let them live out their natural life?”—but he’d asked sheepishly if he could read the pages when Wynn was done. The wood was dry and burned bright and Wynn turned sideways on the log they’d pulled over for a seat and scanned the first page.
“I was telling you, there’s a whole chapter on Wapahk. That’s some dark history up there.”
“Yeah?” Jack feigned nonchalance, but he was sitting up. There was nothing he loved more than a good dark story.
“A whole string of murders in the twenties. This gaunt pale giant spirit haunted the village and possessed people and turned them into cannibals. It was called the Windigo. So what happened is, whenever the elders thought a villager was possessed by the Windigo they shot or strangled him so he couldn’t eat his friends and family. Kind of a preemptive strike.”
“How many?”
Wynn turned farther away from the fire so the light fell on the text. “Nine. In a village of maybe two hundred.”
“Damn.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it was a starving polar bear.”
“Maybe.” Jack sounded to Wynn a little like a kid desperate for an explanation.
“One of those that likes to walk on two legs.”
“Huh.”
“Could’ve been a bad seal year for some reason,” Jack suggested.
“Could’ve been. Says the village felt doubly cursed because warm currents made the fishing bad two years in a row.”
Jack felt goosebumps for the second time that day. “Well, what the hell do you think it was?”
“A hungry ghost.”
“Fuck you.”
The campfire quieted to embers and they could not smell the conflagration in the northwest at all; it was as if it no longer existed. The breeze must have backed around. They didn’t talk about it but now and then each turned his face sideways to the lake and flared nostrils exactly like an elk or deer would, scenting for a predator.
An hour after full dark they turned in and left the door of the tent unzipped and tied back so that they could see the stars, and the northern lights if they sang silently later on. They closed the mesh screen so it would collect the frost. Later Jack moved his pad and bag out onto the cobbles of the beach and slept under the throbbing arch of the Milky Way. He didn’t care about the frost, it would feather on his bag and he could shake it off in the morning. Last night’s freeze had taken care of the mosquitoes. Wynn heard the knock of stone as Jack moved outside, and he also heard the slow creek making the faintest ripple. He thought of the Merwin poem about dusk that he loved so much. Merwin describes the sun going down believing in nothing, and how he hears the stream running after it: It has brought its flute it is a long way.
It killed him. The one and only sun without belief in anything and the little stream believing so hard, believing in music even. What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.
Jack lay awake for a long time and when he slept he dreamed of his mother and the morning on the Encampment. He had the same dream a few times a year. They camped in Horseshoe Park, the meadow beneath