Because the wild was where he had truly found his spirit.
He went hunting the next morning and caught a small rabbit. He did not shoot or trap it, but simply sat still beside a fallen tree for a while, making small rabbit noises and imagining himself down there in the grass with the creatures. One of them emerged from the scrub and jumped on the tree, staring at him and wrinkling its nose as it tried to discern his scent. Before it could sniff below the pretense, Jack reached out and grabbed the creature, breaking its neck before it knew what was happening. He experienced a moment of strange dislocation as he shed the rabbit senses—it was as if one of his own lay dead in his lap, and a sadness crept over him—and then he returned to camp, gutting and stripping the rabbit expertly before spitting it over the fire.
As the rabbit cooked, Jack went about tidying the camp. There were shreds of the dead men’s belongings scattered among the grasses, and the detritus of the massacre littered the ground. He wanted the place to be as far back to nature as was possible before he left, both in honor of the men who had died here and as acknowledgment that the Wendigo was no more. It was a part of the history of this place now, and the site of its great feeding also had to move on.
He left the saddle upon which he had scored that grim epitaph atop the pile of collected debris. It seemed a fitting marker, and though it would last no more than a year or two in these harsh climes, in his mind he would read those words forever.
Eating the rabbit seemed to purge the memory of the Wendigo’s flesh from his mind. His hands were greasy with cooked meat, his stomach full of it, and his hunger was sated by the time he collected his goods and set off for Dawson City. He went east and south, determined that the shreds of civilization would be in that direction, and over his shoulders he carried the saddlebags heavy with gold.
The previous day’s brief snowstorm had passed, and though snow still lay on the ground here and there, the sun was quickly melting it away. Autumn had arrived, true, but the harshest weather was still several weeks distant. For the first time in a long while, Jack felt that he was now safe, and that his immediate future was mapped out before him—a return to Dawson, a journey back across the Chilkoot pass to Dyea, then passage south to San Francisco. Once there, he would try to track down Jim’s and Merritt’s families, and the gold he carried over his left shoulder was for them. The gold on his right…that was for his own family. There was enough there to cover the money that Shepard had invested in the journey and, if not to get his mother out of debt, at least to stave off the moneylenders for a time. It would be plenty. Jack had other ideas about how he could benefit from his adventures.
His own terrible tales of the north he could never tell. But there were surely a million others that he could. Stories he had heard. Lessons learned. Glimpses into the heart of the wild, but not into that wild’s shadows.
Around noon of that day he encountered a small group of men and women heading north. He sat and waited by a rock when he saw them, starting to build a small fire in the hope that they’d have food they would share. He kept his guns at the ready, but by the time they drew closer, any worries had evaporated. They were stampeders—their gold pans rattled and swung from their packs—and their ready smiles put him at ease.
“Afternoon, friend,” one of the men called, and Jack suddenly felt his throat burning. These were the first ordinary people he had spoken to since the Wendigo attack on the camp, and that had been…how long ago? He had trouble mapping the time between then and now, but he knew it had been months.
“Afternoon,” Jack replied. “Strange time of year to be heading out from Dawson.”
“We know what we’re doing,” one of the women said. She dropped her pack next to Jack, and he saw the weapons on her belt—knives, and two pistols.
“The winters up here don’t much care whether you know or not,” he said. The woman glared at him, but she soon averted her gaze. What does she see? Jack thought. What stares at her from these eyes?
“Only a short trip, this one,” another man said. “We been out four times from Dawson now and found nothin’. This is our last try before we head on home.”
“Good luck to you,” Jack said.
“You found any luck?” the woman asked. She glanced down at his saddlebags, then back up at his face. He smiled and she looked away again. He felt that he should not be enjoying such power, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Some,” he said. He glanced away from the group, back the way he’d come, and for a moment he pondered on luck and what it meant.
“Then can you point us the right way?” the first man asked.
“No,” Jack said. “Back that way, what little good luck there was found itself outweighed by the bad.”
The six people were quiet for a moment, shrugging their packs off and sinking to the ground. Two of them went about finishing and lighting the fire, and soon a pot of coffee was brewing. Jack handed over his metal coffee mug, and a man placed it on the ground next to their own. Jack nodded his thanks.
“You look like you’ve been out there for a while,” the same woman said. “Seen men like you before. Got a wild look in your eyes, like you’ve seen things that shouldn’t be seen.”
Jack shrugged and looked into the fire.
“Seen men like that who were mad, too,” she continued.
Jack merely shrugged again, but this time he let a smile touch his lips. Who’s to say? he almost replied, but he didn’t want to alarm these people. They seemed good-natured enough, and they were sharing their coffee, but all of them carried guns. And he could see that none of them had any inkling of the true nature of things out in the wild.
They sat together for a couple of hours, drinking coffee and talking about gold, and the wilderness, and the equally wild place that was Dawson. One of the men grabbed Jack’s attention when he talked of crazy people in Dawson spending their time in the bars spouting “rubbish about flesh-eating monsters and dead men.” When Jack asked what they looked like, and whether the man knew their names, the woman asked, “Friends of yours?” That one question weighed on the atmosphere around the campfire, and it never quite recovered.
Jack was the first to rise and wish them well. He sensed eyes upon him as he lifted the heavy saddlebags, but he never once felt any threat from these people. They were like children watching an adult readying to hunt—ironic, considering his own youth—and Jack felt that the least he could do was spare them a word of advice.
“West is best from here,” he said. “Into the low hills.”
“We were told northwest,” the woman said. “Up into the wild forests and the valleys between mountains.”
“No,” Jack said, and he glanced at each one of them to get his message across. “Those places are cursed.” Then, shrugging off the few muttered questions that came after him, Jack turned his back on those naive explorers and went on his way.
He walked far that day, and at dusk he camped by a stream where there were the remains of several other campfires. He shot a duck and ate well, and lying beneath the stars, he listened to the night sounds closing in. None of them frightened him anymore. The cry of a wolf accompanied him into sleep, and in his mind he howled back, adding his own voice to the history of the wild.