Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(3)
I just need to rest for a few minutes. Then I’ll be fine.
Winter’s harshness had come early this year to Canada’s Lake Anjikuni region. It would’ve been reasonably tolerable if the sun shined more than six hours per day, so that Labelle didn’t have to keep trekking through snow mounds as high as his waist in the darkness. But he had visited this area before and he knew it to contain a bustling village perched on the lake, where gentle currents dappled the shoreline. Formed of tents, primitive huts, and ramshackle shanty structures visible under the bright spray of the full moon, sure to be inhabited by friendly locals proud of the fact that theirs was one of the few outposts in the great frontier. Labelle felt a tremor of hope pulse through him, his heart pounding anew, his skin suddenly resilient against the frigid, prickly air.
The hope faded as quickly as it came.
Labelle could see those ramshackle structures silhouetted under the full moon, but he saw no people about, nor barking sled dogs, nor any other signs of life. Labelle also noted with a chill that not a single chimney had smoke coming out of it. Then he spied a fire crackling in the narrowing distance, evidence of some life, anyway.
Labelle, his heart hammering so hard against his rib cage that his chest actually hurt, picked up his pace and headed toward the glowing embers of the dying fire in the distance, eager to find some trace of humanity. The ice crystals lacing the air felt like flecks of sand scratching at his mouth and throat, dissipating the closer the trapper drew to the flames. He was greeted there not by a friendly face but by a charred stew that had bafflingly been left to blacken above the embers.
Labelle had spent his life negotiating shadowy and inaccessible lands, no stranger to the dark legends of lore in places that could steal a man’s mind. Right then and there, he wondered if this whole thing was some illusion, a twisted dream or mirage built out of snow instead of sand. What else could account for a village being abandoned in such a manner?
Maybe I’m dead, he thought as he walked past derelict, wave-battered kayaks, into the heart of the ghost village. Either he was lying in the snow somewhere back a ways, imagining all this, or the village had … had …
Had what?
Labelle methodically pulled back the caribou-skin flaps and checked all of the shacks, hoping to find telltale signs of a mass exodus, but much to his chagrin he discovered that all of the huts were stocked with the kinds of foodstuff and weapons that never would have been abandoned by their owners. In one shelter he found a pot of stewed caribou that had grown moldy, and a child’s half-mended sealskin coat, discarded on a bunk with a bone needle still embedded in it, as if someone had deserted their effort midstitch.
He even inspected the fish storehouse and noticed that its supplies had not been depleted. Nowhere were there any signs of a struggle or pandemonium, and Labelle knew all too well that deserting a perfectly habitable community, without rifles, food, or parkas, would be utterly unthinkable, no matter what circumstances might have forced the tribe to spontaneously flee.
Labelle scanned the borders of the village, hoping to ascertain in which direction the Inuit might’ve gone. Even though the villagers’ exit seemed to have been relatively recent, and hasty enough to leave food on the flames, he could find no trace of a single snowshoe or boot track marking their flight, no matter how hard he searched under the spill of the bright moon.
But then the wind shifted and his nose caught a scent that froze him to the bone, even through the chill he was already feeling. A smoky, carrion stench that reminded him of coming upon the body of a trapper who’d frozen to death in winter and whose body didn’t begin to thaw until spring.
Labelle followed a narrow, choppy path through the thick snow, into an overgrowth of brush and dead trees entombed in white. He saw smoke wafting up from what looked like some sort of natural depression in the ground. The smoke rose straight out of that shallow slice of ground, rooted in smoldering clumps that the fire hadn’t finished with yet.
Smoldering clumps …
Labelle got no farther. His legs gave out and he sank into a bank of snow thick enough to reach his neck. He wasn’t sure he’d ever move again, wasn’t sure he wanted to, until he heard a shuffling sound coming from the thickest part of the grove. Labelle knew the sound of feet crunching over hardpack when he heard it, though the wind and crackling flames disguised just how many sets were coming.
Labelle didn’t wait to find out. He pulled himself through the drifts, finally reclaiming his feet and dragging himself along.
The trapper quickly lost track of how long or how far he walked from there. He knew only that, as he made the trek, he was the whole time fearful of looking back to see what might have been coming in his wake.
He stumbled upon a remote outpost not long after dawn, sure to be rewarded for his persistence with food, warmth, and shelter.
“What are you exactly?” a ranger greeted him after responding to Labelle’s pounding on the door. He ran his eyes up and down the trapper’s ice-encrusted clothes and hair, then his face which was sheathed in a thin layer of it as well. “Please say a man.”
“I am that,” Labelle said, exhausted and picking at the ice frozen to his beard. “But what’s coming might not be.”
“What’s coming?” the ranger repeated, gazing over Labelle’s shoulder. “What say we get you warmed up inside?”
Labelle followed the ranger through the door, the blast of warm air hitting him like a surge from a steam oven. He could feel the ice crystals attached to his skin, hair, and beard turning to water, the flow from his clothes leaving thin puddles in his wake as he made his way to the fire.