I
The sun went down that evening on a weird northern world. The wind, which had been pressing out of the east all day, had dropped as at some elemental sunset signal; but the great lake, lashed to fury, raced by windrow upon windrow of long, curling “shanty” waves—the terrible seas for which Superior in its wrath is peculiar. Three “mock suns” stood in vertical alignment above the declining orb of day, and the air was filled with a ghostly, brassy light that tinted the wild hills, the forests and the raging sea with its exotic saffron glow.
Nannabijou camp, aglare in the unreal light, its windows flashing like blood-red jewels, stood out against the setting of the sombre mountain ranges like a fantastic painting on the canvas of some mad master. Above the southeastern horizon hung a lowering blackness that presaged the hurricane to come, while up from a hundred lonely bays along the rocky North Shore the flailing waves sent up a thunderous, pounding roar.
From a plateau on Nannabijou Mountain above the beaver dam lake on Solomon Creek, a figure that seemed the genius loci of the fearsome night looked out upon these things. His was a face of evil cunning, dusky almost to blackness except where two red gashes stood out under the black eyes—eyes which alone of all his sinister countenance seemed alive and human. He wore no covering over his long straight black hair save a band of purple which held in place a single eagle’s feather at the back of his head. Round his neck were hung many strings of glistening wolves’ teeth.
Behind the Indian magician were ranged four headmen of the Objibiways, as motionless as he, faces to the setting sun.
For moments they stood thus like statues of bronze, until a lake gull, wheeling with a shrill scream inland, swooped close to their heads. The Medicine Man turned, his gaze sweeping Nannabijou Bay where the great booms of poles lay secure from the assaults of the seas, took in the waterfront where the patrols of police paced back and forward, and travelled to the blackness of the coming storm.
Suddenly he raised his arms aloft and his lips gave utterance to a strange, guttural incantation in which his companions joined—a lugubrious sing-song in the Objibiway tongue. It ended with a leaping, whirling sort of dance. The witch doctor flung out a hand and from it there flew a short cylindrical object that sang through the air like a spent bullet and dropped with a soft “plop” far out in the little lake.
In that cylinder was wrapped the Great Medicine of the North—a charm which once used, the pagan tribes believe, insures the success of any project no matter how beset with difficulties and dangers.
At a low grunting command from the Medicine Man the Indians turned and silently melted into the murk of the forest. And, as they did so, there swept up from the woods a long-drawn, frightful cry that carried far and wide above the surf roar from below.
It was not the call of a timber wolf nor of other beast of the wilderness. In its swiftly rising and falling cadences it was half laughter, half wail; a curious and awesome blending of mockery and lamentations.
The rim of the setting sun flicked out in the gash of the western cloud-banks and starless night dropped over the troubled waters and the sighing woods.