And Soon The Setting Sun

Prologue

The last faint glow of the Autumn Sun brushed across the trapper’s face. Two weeks on the frozen Tundra and a hard day’s ride brought him to the outskirts of a small Canadian Inuit village. He had been here before, many times, but never like this. Questions haunted his thoughts, burning questions, and they needed answering. What caused the Eastern sky to light up the nights and disturb his sleep? Why had he not seen other trappers in days? And why, like a candle snuffed out in the wind, did the mysterious light suddenly vanish last night?

Dismounting and standing beside his sled, the trapper felt an uneasy chill creep into his bones; a chill much colder than the frozen Tundra he called home. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or maybe just instinct he’d grown to trust, but something was wrong up ahead. Something just wasn’t quite on the up-and-up in his world, and his years of experience trading with the natives in Nunavut told him so. After a while you lose yourself to the North; you just sort of blend in and forget you’re different. The Inuit have a sort of spiritual bond between them, a bond he’d quickly welcomed and felt a part of since his wife died. So, this uneasiness he felt as he looked toward the village did not come unwarranted. Even the dogs stood oddly stolid as they stared toward the village, catching a much-needed breath as their breath froze in the Canadian air. It was as if they had second thoughts about it. If they could have spoken, perhaps they would have convinced him to turn tail and run. Dogs are smart like that.

It was the sound, or lack thereof, he thought. It was too damned silent this close to a village…But not just that. Even his breath and the snow crunching beneath his feet sounded oddly empty and muted, surreal even. It was as if it was void of life, much the way sounds muffle when you cup your ears, or how your voice sounds in a closet stuffed with clothes.

Yes, he had been here. He had camped here several times before. This was a bustling village populated with hard working fishermen, fishermen who, like the trapper, proudly wore the same cracks and scars of time and hard life that the Tundra had forged upon their aging faces. At this time of the day the village would be teeming with activity; hunters and fishermen tying down the kayaks and securing the dogs for another long winter’s night. Much like a hibernating bear, the Inuit hunted and fished mostly in the long days, storing for the winters. This time of the year would find the women and children building igloos for food storage, while the men fished as long as the day, as short as it was this time of year, would allow. That was Eskimo life. It was hard, but it came honest, and that’s why the trapper endured to them so.

Looking ahead, the only movement the trapper could see was dark smoke rising somewhere beyond the village. The smoke blanketed the Eastern sky with a blood red ominous glow, inflamed by the setting Sun. It wasn’t so much the smoke he saw that had him curious, it was the smoke he didn’t see. His mind raced to questions. Why wasn’t there smoke coming from the village on such a cold day, he thought?

After another few moments staring out toward the village, the trapper looked down at the dogs... “Okay guys, I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m fucking hungry.” The dogs broke their silence and started barking with a purpose. Supplies were running low, the scraps were getting thin, and they sensed a good meal might lie ahead. After checking the harnesses, the fur trapper, infamously known in the Great White North as Captain Joe Labelle, climbed back on his sled. “Mush!” he shouted and they were off.

Trapping fur around Lake Angikuni was a job for a young man and Labelle’s years were starting to show. Long gone was his once beautifully long bleach blonde hair, now replaced with an empty field of dark spots and wrinkles, all blanketing a lifetime of faded memories, the best of which took him back to his youth. Years of outdoor life had now baked his skin, and the once handsome young man that turned heads and hearts now turned nary a glance except in disdain. A long scar across his left cheek reminded him to choose his poker tables carefully. The mangled ear on his right reminded him to sleep upwind of the day’s catch. He was a hard man to look at but that mattered little in the lonely Tundra. His only friends now were his dogs, and they never gave a rat’s ass what he looked like, just as long as the trapping was good…And Labelle was the best.

Closing in on the village, Labelle reminisced. Other than talking to the dogs it was the only form of entertainment a trapper had to lull him off to sleep on cold nights, nights where a warm woman filled his head, but only a cold hand fulfilled his desire. But this was more like a daydream and it took him a long way back, back to where it all began…this hard way of life; as far back as he could recall, perhaps a better time, a time back in his youth.

As a boy back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, young Joseph Labelle learned to trap swamp gators and muskrat with his father. Labelle hated rising before the Sun but it served him well. He learned skills to which a young man in his day could earn quite a comfortable living.

Labelle soon made a name for himself back in Southern Louisiana. When he turned twenty-three he bought a boat, hired a crew, and in less than a year he was quite comfortable. But a few months after his father died, Baton Rouge just got a bit too heavy on his soul. Everybody knew his father and everybody reminded him of it far too often. Labelle’s step-mother found an opportunity to move back East with relatives, and with no family to tie him down, it wasn’t long before he sold his boat, said his goodbyes and hightailed it up the Mississippi to earn an honest living, if such a thing was possible.

Labelle eventually found himself trapping in Canada. It was just about the time the war to end all wars sent those with lesser skills off to trap and kill each other. Labelle wanted nothing to do with that. He felt no ties or loyalty to land; no sense of patriotic pride and certainly no desire to die on a battlefield fighting for some cause about which he cared very little.

But that was over ten years ago now, and old age was creeping up on him like wolves on a winter’s night. Through it all he worked hard and played hard. Drinking became more than just a pastime on cold nights, it became a way of life, ultimately costing him more than just his fortune. Through the last decade he had blown through three wives, the last of which shot dead by his own hand as he was cleaning his rifle. That was the summer of ’26 and it sapped what was left of Labelle’s spirit and drive. Now all that was left was cold and growing old. He was doing the only thing he knew how to do to keep his sanity…hunt and trap. But every year it seemed the Tundra got colder and trapping got harder. The money was good at times, but the loneliness can drive a man mad, especially when there was no one to come home to and no place to call home.

Labelle now found himself mushing through the Tundra as another year was winding down and the days were growing short. All he could hope for up ahead was a warm fire and a bottle of rye whiskey to drown the pain and toast to the next year; hopefully a year turning out to be better than this one. But hadn’t he toasted to that every year? Seems like it now as his team mushed on toward the village. Up ahead lay a familiar site, an Eskimo fishing village he’d frequented many times before, remembering good times with his best buddy in a bottle; a place he could settle down for the night where the Inuit were friendly, the fish was cooked, and the women to his liking. Mushing as quickly as the team could, Labelle drove his dogs into the village just as the Sun disappeared one more time. The long Arctic night had now begun.

Leading his pack into the sled yard, Labelle pulled the reins hard and almost fell off the side when he saw it. “What the fuck!” He yelled out. All around the yard there were huskies, lots of them, but they were all lifeless and lying stretched out on their sides. Labelle’s team suddenly stopped their heavy panting, stepped back, lowered their heads and began to snarl. Had they not been tied together in the team, Labelle would have found himself completely alone, alone among the dead.

Labelle stepped off the sled slowly and cautiously walked over to the nearest dog. He didn’t see any blood or bite marks so he ruled out an attack. The animal was thin and looked as if he hadn’t eaten in days, maybe even weeks. The poor animal’s eyes were wide open in a death stare. Over to another he walked a bit quicker, the same thing, again and again. But something wasn’t adding up. The oddest thing, something that was particularly off and reinforced that uncomfortable feeling he couldn’t shake, was that none of the dogs were frozen cold or even mildly stiff. Not a breath came from one of them. They were undoubtedly dead, no question about it. But rigor mortis had not set in to any of the dogs. Had this just happened, he asked himself? What he was seeing simply wasn’t possible. Did someone poison them? But he saw no signs of that either; noticing no foaming of the mouth or disemboguing whatsoever. Looking around, Labelle didn’t see any trace of the villagers. The only sound came from his dogs, still backing away but now whimpering and panting hard from the day’s drive. But there was something else bothering him. Something else was terribly wrong, he thought. Labelle stood up and finally saw it. He noticed all the dogs, ominous and foreboding as it was, were facing the same direction. It’s as if their last breath spent in a death throw toward the village. It was the last straw and instinct kicked in. Whoever or whatever killed these huskies, he felt, might still be around. Labelle didn’t want to be caught off guard. Slowly he walked back across the yard to his dogs, looking from side to side. That was enough, he thought. He stopped for a second and then bolted the rest of the way back to the sled for a rifle. Reaching the sled, Labelle pulled the rifle from a makeshift holster and loaded the chamber. The sound, much like his feet in the snow, muffled, as though the wind rejected the action and refused to go along with it. Standing perfectly still, the dead wind whispered a faint sound, some word he couldn’t make out over the whimpering dogs. “Hush” he said to the pack and they obliged, but the wind was calm and refused to repeat itself.

Tying the pack to a post, rifle now in hand, and much to the chagrin and complaints of his closest canine friends, Labelle set off into the village without their approval; out to find out what happened to the village dogs, and for that matter, the natives. Where were they, he asked himself? Had there been some sort of attack? He thought that the likely scenario, but that still didn’t explain the dogs. The natives rarely fought, but from time to time there were territorial disputes. Occasionally, disputes got a little bloody, but never so serious it couldn’t be settled over a good trade. And additionally, dogs in the Tundra were always a prized spoil of war, never collateral damage.

To no surprise, the first thing Labelle noticed was obvious to any trapper in the Tundra. There were no tracks in the snow. Lately he’d been trapping close enough to know if there’d been a winter storm. A foot or two of snow might have covered the tracks. But at the most, the village might have gotten a light dusting two or three nights back. With no tracks it was likely he’d find no natives; no live ones anyway.

Inuit huts in this village were tent-like structures covered in caribou skin and sewn by sinew. Sinew is a piece of tough fibrous animal tissue. The natives left no part of the animal to waste. The entrance is through a caribou flap. Among the huts Labelle passed, some of the skin flaps were left open, so he cautiously stepped inside. He was not partial to the business end of a shotgun. But Labelle saw no one. Looking around some more obviously abandoned huts, he was shocked to find plenty of food stores, as well as coats and rifles in some of them. But still no fires alit. He checked the rifles, all fully loaded. Inuit were always prepared for uninvited Polar Bear visits. One or two of the huts still had lit kudliks, a crescent shaped carved out soapstone for burning seal blubber, but that wouldn’t even keep a dog warm. So where were the families? Still, another happy hut home appeared to be in the middle of a meal. Half-eaten ptarmigan scraps and arctic hares left on plates was something he’d never seen before. Natives wasted nothing. Along the banks of the lake, he noticed all of the kayaks still tied up. “What the hell happened?” he asked out loud. But no one was there to answer; no one but the growing wind, now howling between the huts. And now the opened flaps began to snap as they whipped across the huts. Each slap turned Labelle’s head and repeatedly raised his rifle. Listening closely again he could swear the wind was saying something. “Croooooooow”. Was that what it was, he thought to himself?

Entering and exiting one last hut, Labelle called out “Ainngai!” Labelle spoke French and English primarily, but was also fluent in several other languages and knew a little Inuktitut, the native language. It was now almost pitch black outside so he lit a lantern he’d taken from one of the huts. Labelle walked over to a store house just as the clouds gave way to snow. Again he shouted, “Ainngai!,” But not a word, only the wind and the snaps from the huts. “Bonjour!..Hello!” but no response again. The wind howled and began to whistle through the lifeless village. Again he thought he’d heard, ”Croooooooow”. The store house was closed so he took out his knife and cut the flap. As he now expected, there were plenty of supplies here as well. He walked out. “What now?” he mumbled. The snow started falling harder, whisked violently by the increasing wind, and the cold cut through his jacket like there was nothing there. Labelle added the sudden storm to a growing list of reasons he should leave.

Off toward where he had seen the smoke, Labelle now saw the faint light of what he thought must be a fire. He paused a moment to consider leaving but curiosity overcame any common sense a man his age should have had. Labelle turned up the lamp and headed in the light’s direction. Perhaps they’re all there, he thought. “You must be there”, he said as he tried to comfort himself with a little logical reason for what he was seeing. Labelle didn’t scare easily but this was starting to rattle his nerves. Again, he saw no tracks; none in the village, and none leading away.

Years across the Canadian wilderness and the vast Yukon brought Labelle face to face with everything from avalanches, wolves, Polar, and even Alaskan Brown Bear. Frightening legends by the campfires never made a dent in his resolve to trap alone. Even the local legends like that of the mysterious Wendigo, a creature said to turn men into cannibals, didn’t even faze him. Labelle was pragmatic; just one of those men that only believed in what his senses gave him. In his experience, he’d seen nothing he couldn’t eventually explain; no spirits, no specters, no ghosts nor boogie men disguised as giant man-eating bears. These were stories to frighten little children into obedience and not for men with hearts of stone; men with real world monsters to face every day. He was never the spiritual type either and hadn’t darkened the inside of a church since he was a boy. He considered religion to be a waste of his time. Labelle’s mother, on the other hand, was a deeply devout religious woman and could quote the gospel with the best of them. So even with a strong local influence, Labelle was steered away from the Bayou Voodoo and raised Catholic. It didn’t take. He believed that everything unknown in this world just meant the answer hadn’t been found; and every mystery had an answer if you looked hard enough. And what was happening here in this village was indeed a mystery. But it certainly had a logical answer; nothing supernatural to suspend his disbelief in the paranormal. He just hadn’t solved this riddle yet. But answer or no answer, this was a mystery that was growing creepier by the moment, and Labelle’s fight or flight mode kicked into high gear. He gripped his rifle a little harder when the wind howled out again, ”Croooooooow”.

Walking toward the light and against the wind, Labelle walked out of the village and soon came across an open grave at the entrance of a neglected and dilapidated graveyard. Inuit graveyards were rare, and merely a collection of cairns where the earth was dug out only body deep. The stacked rock cairns protected the caribou-wrapped body from wolves and other scavengers, but hunger is a strong motivator, and occasionally the wolves found a way in and left a trail of bare bones in their wake. Not indicative of others Labelle had seen, this graveyard might have needed some attention, but the cairns were well-built, and the wolves were forced to dine elsewhere.

Needing a respite from the wind and snow, Labelle walked over to what appeared to be a rare disturbed gravesite. He found it empty. Turning away to leave, he noticed there were several other close grave sites surrounding this grave, but none seemed as though they had been emptied. Perhaps someone died recently, he thought to himself. Maybe the natives were prepping this site for someone who recently passed. There was no evidence that an animal dug it up. But oddly, it looked as if it had been occupied, and even a caribou skin flapped terribly under some pinned rocks abutting the site. He even noticed what looked like an impression in the soil. The rocks were also strewn about. Odd as it seemed, he added it to his list and knew there had to be a logical answer. Turning away he thought he should table it and continue on toward the light. He wasn’t sure how long the lamp fuel would last and the moon would likely never break the cloud cover.

Labelle left the graveyard and soon entered a rare wooded section in the Tundra. He noticed a worn use trail that led off in the direction of the light; a light glowing brighter as he approached. The light seemed to pulsate between the trees as he trudged through the howling wind-swept snow. Fortunately, a few well-placed non-burial cairns marked the way. The lamp was bright but the trees blocked many of the turns, and with the snow still falling hard it made it difficult to see the trail. Labelle held the lamp lower to see the way. The shadows the trees cast reminded him of the marionette puppets he played with as a boy. But these puppets were not funny wooden caricatures dangling by strings. These puppets were unpropitiously flailing trees hell bent on turning him around. And perhaps they should. The branches swayed back and forth like boney arms and long pointed fingers reaching out toward him. Labelle’s eyes started playing tricks on him as he thought he could see shadowed anthropomorphic faces sporting the sharpest of teeth. Even with his resolve to solve this mystery, he was wearing down from the wind, a roar loud enough to pierce his covered ears, and snow that slapped his frost-bitten face. The wind was clearer now, “Crow…Own…Ann” He thought he heard. Who is Ann, he asked himself? Maybe it was just his mind playing tricks on him. Hallucinations were probably next, he thought. Every step was a chore, exacerbated by a long day without a meal.

The wind and snow slowed Labelle’s walk to a snail’s pace and now there was something new; the trapper’s bane. The lamp bent back toward his chest when he first heard it. Off in the distance a pack of wolves howled. It’s a sound no trapper wants to hear. Labelle could feel his heart racing and another chill crept up his arms. Maybe that’s what he heard, he thought…wolf howls. “Damn it’s cold.” He said to himself. But Labelle knew it was more than just the cold as he finally arrived. He closed in on the light slowly and looked around through the puppet-like trees, hunkering down as best he could and trying not to expose himself in fear of what might lie ahead. Whatever happened here he didn’t want happening to him.

The light was as he thought…a fire. But that was it, just a fire; no one was there that he could tell. The large clearing around the well fueled fire made that obvious. Again, there were no tracks but somehow a strong fire, not even struggling, but strong enough to withstand the harsh wind. Odd as it was, it was large, and a welcome wash of warmth upon his face as the temperature was obviously dropping fast. Temperatures in the Tundra at night always have a negative in front of them. The wolves howled again, louder this time That was too close, he thought. But certainly they would stay away from the flames. They always did.

The crackling of the fire was loud, louder than the wind. It filled the air and drowned out the wolves when it popped. It did little though to drown out his speeding heart. Labelle felt he was being watched…but by what he thought. The wolves were closer, but not that close. Labelle stood frozen as his eyes slowly looked side to side. For the first time since he was a child, he felt fear. For the first time since he was a child he was not in control. For the first time since those days back in Louisiana, Labelle was not the hunter, he was the prey.

Labelle lowered his lamp, slowly stepped into the clearing and reality flew out the window. Instantly, the wind and snow stopped. It was as if he had walked into a bubble of some sort. It was all so surreal and not possible, at least not in the mind of the pragmatic and skeptical Joe Labelle. He paused for a moment, dead in his tracks, and then walked slowly and gingerly around the fire. He watched the wind as it bent the trees around him, but not a hair on his parka moved. He could see the whipping wind but couldn’t hear it. There was absolutely no movement around the fire but the fire itself. The smoke bellowed upward as far as he could see and disappeared into the night sky. After adjusting his eyes, he saw stars above the blaze that twinkled through the smoke and competed with the light of the fire. “What the hell is going on?” he asked himself. He could only liken it to the eye of a hurricane he’d seen back in Louisiana, the night his father lost his boat to a tidal wave at Cameron Parish.

Labelle looked down at the ground and an epiphany washed over him. He had it. There was only one possible explanation. He was dead, he thought. He had to be dead. It made sense. Maybe he’d had a heart attack while fighting the wind; perhaps a deadfall from behind. It was the only explanation he could wrap his mind around and recapture some sort of sanity. It gave him solace and he smiled as he looked back up at the fire. Finally, he released his death grip around the rifle. Death did not hurt, he thought. For just a moment the fear was gone. But only a moment. Reality brought him back.

Suddenly he was taken aback and re-engaged. On the opposite side of the fire he saw something that caught his eye; faint, but something was certainly there; there just beyond whatever this was. Now that he had circumnavigated the fire he could make out an outline of something just beyond the clearing; something oddly shaped, tall and protruding from out of the ground. At first, he thought it had to be a tree. But drawing closer he saw no branches, nor leaves; no flailing branches bending hard against the wind. He thought it might be a totem of some type. But he had never seen one anywhere outside of the Alaska Territory. It peaked his interest and he needed a closer look.

Moving away from the fire and toward his curiosity, Labelle re-lit the lamp. One more step away and his world was rocked again. He was obviously not dead. Instantly the wind and snow slapped his face with a force strong enough to knock a lesser man down. He had certainly left the weird bubble. He also had obviously left any sense of reality well behind at this point. Labelle stood there bent hard against the wind and searched his thoughts for an answer. But answers never came. He looked back at the fire and then forward at the odd shape. It was no tree. That, he now knew for sure. He figured he had come this far. “What the hell.” He said. “Let’s do this.” He decided to find out what it was.

The wolves howled again and it made him stop. They were obviously much closer now and Labelle needed to keep up his guard. His death grip on the rifle returned. He had seen firsthand what a pack of hungry wolves can do to a man. Three years back he was northeast of the river when he came upon the camp of another trapper. The trapper got off a few rounds, one catching a wolf between the eyes, but what was left of the trapper wasn’t enough to bury. The wolves had disemboweled him and quartered his body. They must have been ravenously hungry because none of the trapper appeared to have been carried away. No need for a doggie bag. It was a memory he had repressed until now.

Holding the lamp in front of him and walking slowly against the wind, Labelle finally drew close enough to see it.

“Oh My God!” Labelle blurted out as he instantly froze in his tracks. He dropped the rifle and slowly fell to his knees as he looked up at what had drawn him like a siren’s song to the shore. And like those ships of yore, the siren’s shore is not a place Labelle wanted to be. Hanging above him was the body of a man. He appeared dead, pale, bloody, and stripped of clothing; donned only in a fur around his waist. The man had been nailed to a makeshift cross. The man had been fucking nailed to a wooden cross, he thought in horror. Somebody had gone biblical and crucified this guy. Somebody had hoisted him up and nailed his hands and feet to this thing. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this guy must have really pissed someone off.” He said out loud. He also couldn’t help the knee jerk reaction of his Catholic upbringing. Labelle made the sign of the cross against his chest. The wind howled again…”Crow…Owe…Ann”

Suddenly it dawned on Labelle that none of the natives in this village would have done this. None of the natives were Christian. Bibles had to be rare. He had never seen one in villages this far north, nor did he recall any religious artifacts, activities or talk. The local Inuit were not monotheistic and none of their gods ever died for their sins, let alone died. This would have never meant anything to them. Besides, they were mostly a peaceful people. It would take a sadistic bastard to have done this. And, to do this, it would have taken more than one.

Labelle noticed that above the man’s head, and attached to the top of the cross, was something written on a broken off piece of flat wood. Labelle couldn’t make it out. He rose from the snow and walked over just below the cross. He raised the lamp against the wind and shined the light closer to the body. It was a ghastly sight as the snow beat against the frozen pale body. He could tell the man was a native now but the body was ashen white. It appeared as if every ounce of blood had been drained, some of which left drying on his skin. “Who could do this? And why?” he asked himself. He just could not get over the inhumanity of what he saw. Labelle’s stomach started to turn and had it not been for being empty, it likely would have been empty at this point.

Labelle had never been so frightened in his life and his hands began to shake against the harsh unabated gusts. The wolves howled louder and he almost dropped the lamp. A clearer thinking man would have been making a bee-line out of there at this point. But Labelle was way beyond clear thinking now. As he drew even closer, close enough now to touch the body, he raised the lamp to see what was written on the board above his head. As he raised it he rubbed against the dead man’s leg. The crucified stranger’s head turned and his eyes opened wide, staring directly at him. Labelle jumped, fell back and dropped the lamp in the snow. How it didn’t go out was another mystery, apparently another that wouldn’t get solved. Labelle gathered his wits, stood up and tried to brush off the snow where he had sat. The wind was practically gale force now and it was everything he could do to stand against it. The noise of it was deafening, “Crow…Owe…Ann” it howled across his ears. Grabbing the lamp, he took a moment to slow his heart rate before lifting it back toward the cross. “Get a grip” he mumbled as he looked at the stranger’s face. Again, Labelle took an additional step toward the body. He raised the lamp as high as he could just as the wolves arrived growling and hungry for dinner. And just in that final moment before his lamp ran out of fuel he saw it, the last thing his eyes would ever see, the word that was scribbled on the board, and he knew then what the wind was howling. In blood, it read…

“CROATOAN”