Wicked Woods (2 page)

“That's true enough,” I said. “But storytelling is knowledge as well. Better to have one side of a story than no story at all.”

He shrugged. “You have a point.”

I thanked him for that acknowledgement.

“I know a few stories,” he said.

“Well, why don't you tell me one?” I asked.

“I don't tell my stories to just anyone,” he said with a sly grin and a wink. “I need to know that you're all you say you are.”

I nodded. It was going to be a test. I'd played this sort of game before.

“So who do you tell your stories to?” he asked.

“I tell them to anyone who'll listen,” I said.

“Well, I'm listening now. Why don't you tell me a few?”

“I believe I'll do just that,” I said.

And with that I leaned back and let out an unearthly whoop–ing yell that startled the old man out of about six years' worth of growth.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“That's to start things up. Or maybe just to see how easily you startle. For now, just give a listen and you'll see,” I said, and this time it was my turn to slide him a wink and a grin and leave him wondering.

“We need marshmallows,” he said. “Campfire talks louder with a bag of marshmallows.”

“Shh,” I said. “Listen closely.”

And that's when I began to tell my first story, while the camp–fire kept talking slow and low.

1
T
HE
D
UNGARVON
W
HOOPER

DUNGARVON RIVER

Folks have been spinning this yarn for as long as the waters of the Dungarvon River have been flowing deep and cold and wide. This is a tale that's best told over the guttering coals of a campfire, when the night sounds are creeping closer to you and the moon is haunting high overhead.

I shouldn't have to remind you not to forget your marshmallows.

Between the winding tracks of the Bartholomew and the Renous rivers snakes the Dungarvon, as it flows down into the salmon-heavy stretches of the Miramichi River. According to famed Canadian botanist, historian, and car–tographer William Francis Ganong, a local boy, Michael Murphy, who hailed from Dungarvan, Ireland, named the Dungarvon River. Murphy swore that when he danced in Dungarvon, New Brunswick, Ireland shook. No one has yet explained how an a became an o between Ireland and New Brunswick. Still, no matter how you spell it, there's an awful lot of beauty hanging breathless in Dungarvon's neck of the woods.

In the mid-1800s, the life of a lumberjack was as hard as any life could be. Lumberjacks headed out into the woods in early fall and didn't set back until spring came rising up from the southland.

You may very well ask why lumberjacks didn't work in the sum–mer. The fact was the trees were easier to fell when the under–brush thinned out as it does in the winter. Frozen wood was easier to cut, and fresh-cut timber skidded nicely over frozen ground. So that's why the winter woods rang with the hard chopping song of steel against pine.

Some versions of this tale call the camp boss Ryan and some say that was the cook's name. Perhaps both men were named Ryan, but for our purposes, we will hang it upon the cook and be done with it. One can't fuss over too many knots and tangles when one is trying to unravel any particular yarn.

Ryan was a young lad, tall and strong and dark of hair, with eyes as clear and blue as a flowing summer stream. He was a bet–ter cook than a lumberjack, so he served his time in the camp kitchen. He was well liked and respected for his fine booming roar of a voice. You see, leather lungs and a strong bellow were prerequisites for a lumberjack in those days.

“I don't have a lick of use for a man who whispers ‘timber,'” the camp boss said. “If a tree is falling my way, I want to hear about it quickly and not two minutes too late.”

The camp boss was a hard man, as most bosses are. He could squeeze a shilling until the king blushed red and turned blue for lack of breath. He measured his days in coin and profit, and suf–fered an idler not. He prized a penny more than he valued any lumberjack and that's where the trouble first began.

“I want to hear those axes ringing,” he would say. “The Dungarvon Woods should never fall quiet. I hear money clinking in the sound of every falling tree.”

He valued the camp cook, though, for it is a man's belly that will carry him into the woods and back again. A lumberjack's legs and the swing of his axe were nothing more than extensions of his growling hunger. He'd work harder and go farther on the promise of a good meal.

You must bear in mind that a lumberjack was expected to awaken at four in the morning for a breakfast of pork and beans, or pancakes, or both. The whole mess was washed down with piping swallows of tea tainted with the taste of the iron sulphate used to purify the water. They would hike miles into the woods looking for the timberland, toting cold lunches, and then hike back at about eight or nine in the evening for dinner —a meal of pork and beans, or pancakes, or both.

The camp cook was expected to be up before any of them, in time to have everything ready when the lumberjacks awoke. He would rise while the crows were still snoring in their trees and cook up both breakfast and dinner. Next he'd awaken the men by banging a broken peavey, a logging tool that looked a little like a spear with a hook on it for moving fallen timber, against a rusty iron wheel rim and singing out in his big booming voice, “Daylight in the swamp! Rise and shine, rise and shine.”

Ryan was a good lad who never wasted his time or money in the far-off town of Renous. He kept his wages tucked safely inside a fine buckskin moneybelt that he buckled tightly about his belly beneath a layer or two of flannel and a pair of red cotton long johns.

The money was meant to be hidden, but secrets are hard to keep in the closeness of camp. Some of the more cynical lumber–jacks referred to Ryan as a “cheap-hearted spend-you-not,” but the majority of the fellows knew him better than that. The truth of the matter was that Ryan was saving enough of a grubstake to marry a young girl in Miramichi. Whatever the reason, the weeks flew by and young Ryan's moneybelt grew fatter and fatter.

Then, one fateful winter morning, the camp boss sent the men out to work.

“Aren't you coming, boss?” the camp's number two man asked. “I have work to be done right around here,” the camp boss answered, and because he was the boss, no one dared to com–plain. They took their share of cold grub and some freshly baked bread and headed off into the New Brunswick woods.

“Head for the far stand of trees,” the camp boss ordered. “I want some tall timbering done today.”

It was a good day for working the woods. The crew felled many a tree and limbed them clean, preparing them for skidding down to the river. It was a day like any other day —only when they returned to camp, Ryan lay dead upon the floor of the kitchen with his skull broken open.

“He took sick,” the camp boss said. “He pitched himself a fit and fell down and died. Wasn't anything I could do, it hap–pened so fast.”

“Where'd the blood come from?” somebody asked.

“He hit the stove when he fell,” the camp boss answered.

“He didn't look sick at breakfast,” one man said.

“Maybe it was something he ate,” the camp boss said with a shrug and a sneaky little grin. “He sure looks sick now. Sick to death.”

It was a bad joke and the camp boss was a bad man. The fact of the matter was the camp boss had murdered Ryan. Pretty nearly everyone in that camp knew it, on account of the fact that Ryan's moneybelt had mysteriously vanished. But because the camp boss was the camp boss, and there wasn't any proof Ryan had been murdered, no one said a thing.

If the truth were told, the camp boss had caught Ryan by sur–prise, coming up behind him with an axe handle and busting his skull wide open.

“We need to bury him,” the camp boss said. The old bugger was all too eager to be rid of the evidence.

“Bury him where?” the number two man asked. “The ground is frozen harder than a banker's heart. There'll be no digging until the spring thaw.”

“Bury him in a snowdrift,” the camp boss commanded. “The snow will keep his body from rotting until the ground thaws. We'll turn him a fresh grave in the spring and bury him good and proper. Just mark the snowdrift well and clear so we can find him come April.”

So that's just what they did. They loaded Ryan's body up onto a sled, dragged him deep into the woods, and heaped him in a snowdrift. They hung Ryan's bright red toque in a nearby tree and marked its location in their memory. That sounds trickier than it was. A lumberjack knows his trees as surely as a father knows his own sons. Yet in the springtime, when they returned to bury Ryan's body, something had happened. The toque was there, but there was no sign of Ryan.

“A bear dragged the body off,” the camp boss decided. “It's the only explanation.”

“Yup,” the number two man wryly noted. “There's a whole lot of bears wandering these here winter woods, aren't there?”

“What are you trying to say?” the camp boss asked.

“What I'm saying is that there aren't that many bears out there who don't know how to sleep through the winter. I'm saying it wasn't any bear that made off with young Ryan's leftovers.”

The camp boss scowled. He didn't much like being disagreed with, especially when he was in the wrong.

“Painter,” he said. “It was a painter that took him.”

By painter, the old camp boss meant panther, of which there were quite a few in New Brunswick in those days. They were big cats, a type of cougar that lived off deer, and cattle, and whatever else they could scavenge up.

At that moment, a terrifying screech shattered the silence of the woods around the lumberjacks. It sounded like a cross between a man, a devil, a squealing barn door, and a tomcat torn inside out.

“Hunh,” the camp boss said with a nasty grin. “There's the proof of it. A painter, if I ever heard one.”

Most of the crew agreed that the camp boss's explanation didn't sound all that convincing.

“Doesn't sound like any panther I've ever heard,” the number two said.

“It sounds more like a devil to me,” another man said. “A devil with a twisted tail.”

They all considered this.

“A screech owl, then,” the camp boss decided.

Only it wasn't any screech owl, no sir and no ma'am. It screeched again and as that second whoop faded away, the boss's hair turned from its usual coal black to snowy white.

Now these were tough, hard men, used to long winters and rough working conditions, yet the sound of the screaming whoop terrified them.

“It's a painter and a screech owl,” the camp boss said, clearly grab–bing at any explanation his imagination could offer. He kept scram–bling around for a reasonable answer, but no one was convinced. The screech sounded a third time, and as that third whoop died, so too did the camp boss. He dropped to the ground stone cold dead. It might have been fear. It might have been guilt. Maybe he just took sick, with the same sort of sickness that Ryan had. Whatever the reason, the camp boss fell to the dirt and moved no more.

And then the screech sounded again —like the sound of a saw blade running over the buried stubbornness of an unforgiving steel nail; like the sound of the wind blowing through a dead man's bones; like the sound of a spirit screaming out for vengeance.

The crew buried the camp boss at what was supposed to have been the cook's gravesite and carved out a handmade cross. Each man said a short prayer as the Dungarvon Whooper howled again and again throughout the entire ceremony.

“All of the praying in a month of hot Sundays won't lay this spirit to rest,” the number two decided. “He's screaming for jus–tice, or his lost moneybelt, or maybe just for his breakfast.”

Later that day, the crew packed up their gear and paddled down the Dungarvon to the town of Renous, deciding that it would be a fine time to take up cod fishing or horseshoeing or anything else besides lumbering. These old boys were scared into retirement and promptly gave up the trade.

A second and third crew made the long trip to the logging camp of Whooper Spring and left before a week was up. In time, there wasn't a lumberjack in all of New Brunswick who would care or dare to spend a night in the Dungarvon camp.

“The camp is cursed,” they said and left it at that.

At the turn of the century, an idealistic young parish priest of Renous decided to do something about the Dungarvon Whooper. The priest's name was Father Murdoch. He was a handsome man by all accounts, but folks say that his journey to the camp, and his attempt to lay the ghost to rest, wore ten long years off the man in ten short minutes. He said the necessary sacred words, sprinkled the ground with holy water, and waved a blessed crucifix about every inch of the camp — all the while the Dungarvon Whooper continued to raise his unholy racket.