It was our fourth day in the woods. We were camped some five miles below the point where we had reached the stream. A little after noon, the governor, having fished for some time, left us, and wandered into the forest. The middle of the afternoon, then evening, then dusk came—and passed,—and he did not return.
'I cautioned him,' I heard Colonel Francklin say to Doctor Canfield; 'telling him the woods were deceptive, also that there were many beasts of prey.'
He had scarcely spoken, when down over the forest, low but clear, came a long, wailing sound as of a spirit in distress. Instantly I saw Emile and Louis, our Indian guides, who bore the French baptismal names given them by Father Bourg, start, and hastily make the sign of the cross before their foreheads. A great fear overspread their faces; they trembled and went pale. And then there flashed into my mind the tales I had heard from the old inhabitants on the river, of the dread Loup-garou, or Indian devil as many called it. The low, clear, sound; its paralysing effect on the Indians; the time of day—just as evening was shading into night—the rise and fall of the long, fear-filling, distant wail; all these were exactly as described to me more than once by Father Bourg and others who knew the remoter woods of the province.
In the silence that followed the long-drawn cry, a feeling of chill fear crept over me. The Loup-garou, was the one wild beast of all the woods that unnerved the Indian. For him it was more evil spirit than beast. It went, according to the belief, through the tree tops like lightning: it seemed to come and go on the wind; from it there was no escape; the giant moose, the bear, the deer, in one case a farmer and his team of oxen far in the woods—I had heard the story told and retold on the river—all had been fallen upon and eaten in a single hour.
The memory of these tales was far from comforting. The governor was lost in the woods. Colonel Francklin, Doctor Canfield and Duncan Hale were as ignorant of the forest as children. The Indians, my only hope, stood terrified. What was I to do?
At that moment, distant at first, then swelling louder and nearer, down through the trees now swaying in the gentle evening breeze, clear, weird, paralysing, there came again, the long-drawn, dreadful sound. There was no mistaking it; it was the Loup-garou.
Both Indians dropped on their knees, and turned their faces up to the stars. The sound came at intervals seven times; then it grew faint in the east, and we heard it no more.
Far into the night we fired off guns, shouted and kept torches burning on tree tops. But the governor did not come. Had the fierce Loup-garou, that dread, strange blend of panther, wolf, and devil, fallen upon him?
A keen feeling of responsibility pressed heavily upon me. In a sense the governor was my guest. He had come to this particular part of the forest at my suggestion. I knew what it would mean in Britain, I understood the derision that would be provoked in the United States, I felt how our new province would suffer, when it went abroad that our first governor had been eaten by a strange, half-devil fiend of the forest. And yet what was to be done?
The next day Emile and Louis were silent, morose and fearful; they could not be induced to go more than a few rods from the tent. They spent most of the time praying. All our efforts to trace out and bring back our distinguished fellow-sportsman proved unavailing.