The night was still and nipping cold. Big northern stars glittered over the spruce tops. The light of a waning moon wrought its magic on the frozen lake, its beautiful enchantment on the brooding forest. Under its spell every stately tree had an outline of burnished silver; massive rocks became shadowy and unreal; remote things drew near, and over nearer things was drawn a transparent veil, making them seem remote and mysterious. Through every dim avenue of the snowy woods went a luminous mist, working its wondrous transformation till one seemed to live in a world of dreams and illusions.
The howling ceased as I opened the camp door, but not before I had caught its general direction. In hope of hearing it again and of locating the wolves for my next day’s hunting, I headed toward them, following a snowshoe trail deep into the moonlit woods.
Suddenly to the northward a cry broke out, not the many-tongued uproar for which I listened, but a moan, a wail of unimaginable woe. A wolf’s voice, certainly, but a queer one, so unlike any other that I forgot all else in trying to read its meaning. This was no lunatic baying of the moon, such as must bring response from many wolves, each sitting alone with his nose to the sky. It was not the trail-cry that a wolf utters when he jumps big game and wants the pack to close in. It had no resemblance to the thrilling food call, which brings every hungry wolf within hearing to a kill; nor was it like the howl of a she-wolf, leader of the pack, when she calls her cubs to the hunting, and they come with the clamor of hounds unleashed. A single wolf, unanswered, was voicing some wild emotion in a cry for which I had no explanation. He would begin with a falsetto note, a wail like the keen of a banshee; without a break he would slide down to a full-chested roar, a monstrous, earth-filling sound, and taper off in a moan that made the woods shudder.
“If that brute matches his voice, he must be the father of all wolves,” I thought, feeling a chill in my spine that was not of the frosty night. “In the morning I shall run his trail to find out what he is doing, and get him if I can. Perhaps he is the loup-garou himself!”
Thus naturally, to a wailing accompaniment, I fell to thinking of a fearsome beast, the werewolf of Oriental and Western, of medieval and ancient belief. Even such wide limits of space or time are too narrow; the superstition has flourished wherever wolves and men are found. In corners of modern Europe and on fringes of the Canadian wilderness are people who still believe it; yes, and tremble. In all folklore, in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in books of witchcraft and books of werewolves, in judgments of criminal courts and acts of parliaments,—through all human records runs the red trail of the loup-garou, haunting the lonely roads, waylaying belated travelers, laying the spell of unearthly fear on all who hear his voice on a winter night.
Everywhere in these old records, as in tales still told by the Habitant’s fireside, the monster has the same gruesome qualities. He is a man “not of one skin” who assumes the form of a beast to gratify a debased appetite for human flesh. While in this shape he has the ferocity of the brute, the intelligence of a man, the cunning of his master the devil. Fear and pity are alike unknown to him. He is not to be shaken from any trail, nor can he be slain by mortal weapons. Being under an evil spell, only magic can overcome him, or bell, book and candle if you have no magic handy. As Drayton wrote:
About the fields religiously they went
With hallowing charms, the werewolf thence to fray.
Which indicates that as late as Elizabethan times men had no thought of killing the loup-garou, but only of laying such a powerful charm on their outlying fields that he could not break through to approach their villages. With different emphasis the ancients call him “wolf-man,” the moderns “man-wolf”; but both agree that while he runs in a beast’s skin he looks precisely like a huge wolf; all but his eyes, which are human, and which betray him.
Such was the superstition, hoary with the fear of ages, which came moaning over the startled woods; and surely never were place and hour more propitious for its reception. In the region where I camped on a winter holiday the tracks of an enormous wolf had been seen at intervals for years past; the rumor of him was in every lumber camp, the fear of him in every village for fifty miles around. If a man vanished in the woods and was never seen again, what but the beast could have caught him and left no trace? At such a thought the Habitant would cross himself, hitch nearer the fire, and, if you were sympathetic, relate a blood-curdling tale of “mon frère Bawteese” or of “bonhomme Philorum” to prove that the loup-garou was still abroad, and terrible as ever.