Devil in the Storm

A warm bar. A frozen tundra. A story too strange to be true.

Photo by Craig Tidball on Unsplash

When I’m up north where stories are currency I tend to frequent bars and taverns, comfortable, stopping-off places where you can get a bite to eat and a tall drink in a short glass. Inevitably you get to swapping stories as there’s not much else to do but drink and talk. We’ll get ‘round and someone will tell a story to one guy and then if he thinks it’s good he’ll have the fellow tell it again for a crowd, but it better be good because they’ll both be judged: the first by the story and its telling and the second by his judgment that the story was worth hearing again.

I was in Winnipeg at the time working as a logger. The bar was half full of patrons, completely full of smoke, and fairly quiet despite the occasional raucous laughter and guffawing from a group down the bar and having just finished my dinner I was sipping whisky and looking around the place.

I caught an ancient gaunt unsavory character looking at me. He looked to be eighty, had a beard, and was dressed in ragged furs. He took my look as an opening and decided to sit next to me. 

“Buy an old-timer a drink for a story?”

“Any good?”

“Best you’ll ever hear. And true, if you care for that sort of thing.”

“What’ll you have?”

“Whisky.”

I motioned to the bartender.

“Leave the bottle,” the old-timer said.

I raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

Clearly an experienced drinker he swallowed two fingers of whisky in one go and refilled his glass.

“That’s better.” He turned to face me, leaning on the bar, a light in his eyes. “Here’s how it was,” he said and began his story.

**********

It was the year two as they used to say. The year two of this century, not the last. I’m not that old. Nineteen hundred and two and I was hunting caribou up north. Not the smartest move in the winter but I knew what I was doing. Or I thought I did.

Arthur and me, Arthur, that was my partner, we were up north of The Pas. If you know The Pas then you know we were way up there. 

Arthur was new. He’d just been with me a couple seasons. I was younger then but he was younger still, inexperienced but reliable and he’d be okay with me taking the lead. 

The Inuit up there hunt their own food but for anyone else, loggers or trappers, they’ll pay a premium for anything they can get especially in winter so hunting caribou was good business.

In The Pas we hired a team of dogs from an Inuit man I knew, name of Hanta, and headed out into the tundra. 

There was grass still then sticking up here and there, the snow being none too deep yet but the dogs managed and the sled did okay on the mix. We made good time north of The Pas, traveling by night and sleeping during the day. 

It doesn’t do to sleep at night in the Arctic. Too cold. Better to stay awake and stay alive, I always used to say, than to freeze in your sleep.

We had kerosene lanterns that we used to see at night but there’s not much to see anyway. The sled was piled high with food for the dogs, ammunition, some food in jars encased in lard, a kind of hard tack that all hunters use, plus other supplies. Oversupplied for a two week trek if you ask me now but no sense in not being prepared. 

Well, we got several days north of The Pas and picked up the caribou trail. Followed it north, up, up we went. 

We stopped and I had Arthur stay with the dogs. No sense in bringing them along for the final few miles to the caribou: I could drag one back myself and the dogs would scare them away anyway.

I took my rifle, a Remington Model 8, good gun, and followed the tracks. The snow was dry and powdery but it showed clear enough where they headed. I walked then I crouched then I crawled until I found them: one giant mass of brown against the yellow-white of the snowy tundra grassland.

You hear them lowing and stamping before you see them, even with the arctic wind. Smell them too if you’re smart enough to come up to leeward of them, that’s old sailor talk for having the wind blowing at you, I spent some time at sea but that’s a story for another time and another bottle of whisky.

Anyway, I was downwind so they didn’t smell me coming though I smelled them. All that space and fresh air and snow and I still smelled them like they were on top of me.

I picked out a big bull near the edge of the herd. Beautiful antlers; antlers mind you, not horns. They fall off each year, horns don’t.

Anyway, I was lying on my belly now, loaded, slammed the bolt home, and sighted down the rifle. Ever hunted caribou? Deer? Well you aim at the chest right behind the shoulder blade, right behind the neck. That’ll put a bullet in the heart and it’ll go down like lead in a well.

I fired and hit the damn thing in the belly. The rest of them took off and my buck went off with them leaving a pink line in the snow. 

That’s when I knew my luck was off and the whole thing was going to turn sour. 

I tracked the buck for miles but in the end I couldn’t find him and I had to turn back.

What? Yes, this is important. Am I telling the story or what? Alright then.

I had to turn around then and get back to Arthur and the sled. Night was falling and I didn’t like my chances out there in the cold and dark and all.

Of course, right then, a blizzard starts blowing from the west. No problem for the caribou but a big problem for me. 

A few flakes at first became, well, a goddam blizzard and I couldn’t see anything.

Anyone in the Arctic knows, you get stuck in a blizzard, you head into it. That way you get through it faster. A blizzard is always faster than you and if you try to outrun it it will tire you out and you’ll never get out of it until it’s done with you.

That was the coldest night of my life and I don’t know how I survived. It was just cold and dry and snow blowing in my face and the wind screaming in my ears and feeling sick from my breath in my scarf, hot and wet melting the snow until there was too much snow. I knew I just had to keep moving. 

All that snow in the dark, you just keep walking into it. I got so tired I thought the wind was talking to me. 

Well at dawn I turned south. I knew I was way off course but I had to try to find Arthur. If he’d had any sense he would have turned west into the storm too.

I was completely covered in snow and I tried to move slow and steady. You move too fast and the sweat freezes on you and then you die.

I used my snowshoes in the fresh powder which continued for miles now, sometimes bits of grass here and there but not much otherwise. 

I was scared but I knew my business and figured since I’d survived the night I might make it back to The Pas alive. 

I went south as best as I could. There were no tracks for me to follow and I had lost not only my way but also my compass in the storm.

The sky was cloudy and the light the sun cast gloomy. I kept the sun on my left in the morning and on my right in the afternoon as I wandered south getting more and more tired. My water was running low and nearly frozen even though I kept it next to my body and I had brought no food. 

Of course you’ll say there was fresh water all around me but there was no way for me to melt the snow so I decided to avoid eating snow until absolutely necessary. The extreme cold of the snow makes your mouth blister, as me how I know, so I didn’t want to eat it unless I had to.  

So there I was wrapped in furs and a heavy cloak, a fur hat pulled down far over my ears and a rough woolen scarf pulled tight over my face and beard. 

I just focused on each step and and thought about Arthur.

Arthur was at least ten years younger than me, I think so anyway, very inexperienced. I hoped he had turned into the storm with the dogs but I didn’t have much hope. 

I must have been falling asleep while I was walking because at one point I was stooped so low the rifle slipped off my shoulder. 

I pulled it back up and tightened the strap, thinking about the weight of the ammunition I’d brought and whether I’d be better off leaving it but a rifle and a handful of bullets are never  really useless out on the tundra. 

That’s when I saw a shadow appear in the distance, just below the horizon. It was just possible that it was the stand of trees where we had camped a few days before and which marked a point just a two-day hike to the settlement at The Pas and salvation; my salvation.

I had to squint to see and the shadow sort of ducked and bobbed in the evening light. That’s when I noticed that a smaller shadow had slipped away and separated itself from the larger. 

So I stopped and just watched it for a bit. 

The dark spot was moving but at such a distance it was difficult to tell whether it was coming or going. 

I slung the rifle off my shoulder and removed the cover. Maybe it was a caribou separated from the herd. I hoped it might be Arthur and the dogs or someone else that might help but you’ll remember before I said this was polar bear country and bears were everywhere you least wanted and most expected them, so it might be a bear as well.

So I kept walking with the rifle on my hip, finger next to the trigger until I realized, at five hundred yards, that I wasn’t looking at a bear or a caribou but a man walking toward me.

I was cheered by that, seeing some life out in the desert that didn’t want to eat me and that I didn’t have to kill.

So I stopped and waited since I was tired and the sun was getting low and the howling wind had died down. 

But, you know what? And I tell you this as an honest man, my eyes must have played tricks on me or my head had gone queer because you know what walked up to me? It was my bull that I’d shot, walking slow, still bleeding all the time but not showing that he was hurt. 

Now I’ve never seen a caribou walk up to a man like that. They’re not dogs. They don’t come when they’re called, not that I called, but there he was just looking at me with those big eyes and his antlers held high.

And he stood there for a minute, I don’t know how long, and his breath white in the air and then he just sort of sank down to his knees and put his head down and died just like that. 

And I just stood there looking at him, all gray-brown and white under his neck and gray-brown and white fur on his antlers and I didn’t know what to make of him. 

I didn’t have the strength to pull him so I just decided to leave him and keep going. I’ve never been sentimental before about killing and dying but I didn’t want to leave him for some reason. 

Now, that was odd. But animals do all kinds of odd things when they’re about to die. Maybe he just didn’t want to die alone and since he’d got separated from the herd he found me. How he found me, well that’s the question. And why did he go south then turn around and go north again so that we’d meet there?

I don’t know why they do what they do, I really don’t know much. 

I do know I kept walking then toward that shadow on the horizon. Sure enough, it was our stand of trees; big pines for the most part. I guess I’d been heading south-south-east to get back on our original route from The Pas. 

It wasn’t much but I was glad for a bit of shelter. 

Huh? Yeah, more happens. You bought the story, right? Now listen ‘til the end.

I got together as much shelter as I could from the pines and fallen boughs, even using pine

cones stuffed in my coat, and I settled down for the night since I was too tired to keep going. 

No food, no fire and it was cold. 

I managed to sleep a little and woke at dawn. The sun was pale and dim in the east. I chewed snow since my water was frozen in the canteen. 

That’s when I heard a shuffling crunching sound and I looked behind my tree where I’d spent the night and there was the Devil himself, Arthur back from the dead walking toward me. 

He was a mass of snow-covered fur, his hood low down to his goggles and a scarf across his face. 

“Arthur!” I said, “I thought you were dead. Where are the dogs?”

“Dogs?”

“Yeah, the sled and everything.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you lose them in the storm?”

“I guess.”

“Got anything to eat?”

He shook his head. “Lost the dogs, lost the sled.”

I thought he sounded odd but he was probably tired just like me. He’d been out walking for day with nothing to eat so I didn’t think too much of it.

“Got your compass? I lost mine.”

He searched around in his pockets for a minute, slowly, almost like he was stunned. I went over to him.

“Let me see.”

I found the compass in the inner pocket of his coat. The needle was spinning round and round, sometimes stopping for a second, then spinning round to the other side, then back again. 

“Must be broken,” I said. “Well, we better start walking if we’re going to make it to The Pas.”

He grabbed my shoulder and looked me right in the eyes. “Need to find the storm.”

“Storm? What are you talking about?”

He looked over my head (he was taller than me) and said it again: “Got to find the storm. Do you think it’s south?”

“What storm? We’re not chasing any storms. Arthur, we got no dogs, no food. All the water we can drink but that won’t do us any good when we get caught out there again.” I shook the compass. “Can’t find our way on this damn thing anyway.”

He went quiet for a minute. “Do you have any food?”

“You know I don’t. I asked you if you had any food.”

He grabbed a hold of me then. I wasn’t expecting that. He was bigger than me and held me fast around my arms in a bear hug. 

His breath was cold.

I kicked out hard and he let me go. 

It took me just a second after I hit the ground to level my rifle at him. 

“You go north, south, I don’t care, Arthur, but I’m not going.”

He just looked at me then, well, kind of past me and got a real ugly grin on his young face and started coming for me.

I put one in his gut but he kept coming so I reloaded quick and put another in his leg. He went down after that.

He made a sound I’ve never heard before from a man, somewhere between a howl and a scream and I don’t know what. Made my bones itch. He screamed ‘til his face turned purple. 

You wouldn’t believe it but his eyes glowed blue like there was a light in them. 

No man likes to admit that he’s ever scared but I was frightened then, more than I was in the middle of the storm or out on the ice with no sled. I ran and kept running ‘til I couldn’t hear him no more. 

I headed south. The compass was working again, figure that, huh? Didn’t work when I was by Arthur. 

I liked him. Didn’t want to kill him but couldn’t very well put up with him killing me. But I didn’t kill him. Something else done that before he found me in those trees. Something in the storm got him, I don’t know what. Devil in the storm.

That was almost thirty years ago. Arthur been dead thirty years.

**********

He trailed off then and finished his glass of whisky. 

“Thanks for the drink.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

He was so serious that I didn’t question his strange story to his face even though I doubted it. 

I paid the bill and I saw the guy heading out the door. I didn’t even get his name so I couldn’t call to him, though why I felt like doing so I wasn’t sure.

He moved fast for such an old guy and I headed out after him into the night. 

I saw a blur of brown fur turn the corner. I was about to run around the corner after him when out from the shadows across the street stepped a tall man in tattered furs. He walked slowly but steadily across the street and around the corner in the same direction as the old man.

I froze for a second, unsure of myself, then ran around the corner. 

I couldn’t see either of them anywhere in the dark street. Away from the lights at the intersection the street disappeared into darkness. 

As I stood there staring after them, listening, waiting for something, it occurred to me that the tall man in tattered furs walked with a limp and a faint blue glow seemed to come from his eyes.

I shook my head. 

“No way. Too much whisky,” I said and walked back to the bar for more.

---

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any perceived resemblance or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No generative AI was used in any way to write or produce ideas for this story.