“Stories?”
“About the Comanche living on this here reservation. A strange lot, for sure, gone back to living the old ways, since way back before they ever even saw a white man. I heard some of them been alive at least that long, that they got some deal with their gods that lets ’em live forever.”
“Stories,” Steeldust Jack repeated.
“They never leave the reservation, Ranger. Live off whatever they can fish or farm, and make do with the rest of whatever’s around them. At night, when the wind’s right, you can hear ’em performing all these rituals about God knows what.”
“Anything else?”
“They’re a dangerous lot for sure, that’s all.”
Steeldust Jack didn’t look convinced. He lumbered all the way back upright, grimacing until he was standing straight again.
“Tell you what’s dangerous, Sheriff,” he said, his gaze tilted low toward the body of the unidentified man. “Whatever did this. ’Cause I got a feeling it’s not finished yet.”
2
NUNAVUT, CANADA; NOVEMBER 1930
Joe Labelle was dying, the freezing cold having pushed itself through his clothes and skin to numb him right to the bone. He could feel the blood slogging through his veins, turning his movements sluggish to the point that the thick snow waylaid him more with each step. All that kept him going was the certainty that an Inuit village lay ahead amid the ice mist that made him feel as if he were walking through air choked with glass fragments. Seemed much thicker than fog, and trying to breathe hurt all the way down to his lungs. Every time he came close to giving up, though, the image of one of his boys appeared before him, urging Labelle on. Their mother being lost to tuberculosis proved more than enough motivation to make him push through the numbness and avoid the temptation to stop awhile to find his breath.
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.