Sacre' bleu, C'est un Loup Garou!

When I was a child, camping out in the deep rural Maine wilderness was nothing short of magical. It always began by stepping off of the bus on the last day of school to see our old station wagon packed to the gills with camping gear and supplies. It seemed like my feet had barely touched the ground before the old Buick's heavy door thunked closed behind me, and we began the long journey to Old Town and beyond.

It was a tight fit in the back of the weathered family wagon. In addition to the precariously arranged stacks of bedding, food, clothing and camping gear, were myself, my four siblings and Teddy, our eighty pound black lab, who somehow managed to step on all five of us simultaneously while slobbering his frothy drool in our hair and adding some volume to the already ubiquitous layer of malodorous canine fur, expertly weaved into the Buick's upholstery.

Right about the time when we were reaching the limits of our adolescent tolerance for cramped up, backseat doggy foulness, including wiping Teddy's slobber on an unfortunate sibling and gagging on his fur that somehow made its way into our mouths, Teddy would further bless our journey with a nauseating dose of doggy flatulence that left my younger sister Gilda dry heaving out the window.

"It's all part of the experience," Dad would stoically proclaim, though his laughing eyes in the rearview mirror betrayed his amusement.

Once past Old Town, we left the notoriously neglected public roads of Maine to continue driving for what seemed like endless miles upon recently dried logging trails and fire roads. Once we reached the point at which the Buick could no longer carry us forward, we had to slog our way through the marshy wilderness to Pushaw pond and our newly purchased camp of our very own.

Now, the word "camp" can evoke a wide variety of images depending on where you're from and what you do to earn a living. Most often, what "outa-staters" refer to as a camp, is what most Mainers would call a second home, but for us, and indeed most Mainers in those days, a camp was any structure with a roof and at least one wall, standing on or near a body of freshwater.

In our case, the walls had been replaced with some old, mildewed, canvas tarps tacked to the original frame that dubiously supported the leaky roof. The tarps were actually an improvement over the original walls that wreaked of damp mustiness, thriving mold and an overpowering stench of rodent urine. While Dad had planned to rebuild the walls later in the summer, for us kids the canvas was good enough, and we proudly referred to the structure as "our camp."

As a child, camping on a lake in Maine was as close to Heaven as you could imagine: swimming, fishing, exploring, looking for crayfish, fleeing giant dock spiders and occasionally a boat ride in Daddy's fourteen foot rowboat. This was the life!

However, as much fun as the wilderness was during the day, as the sun began to set, so too did our sense of carefree safety. For with the night came all of the private scary thoughts of nightmarish beasts and vengeful apparitions who, according to sweet little Nanna Bartlett, hungered for the bodies and souls of naughty children.

It’s then that the lonesome calls of the loons became the terror inducing wails of a banshee and the coyote’s yelps became the howls of the Devil's own, cursed werewolves, or loup garou, as the French called them, who were driven to hunt by an insatiable hunger for human flesh. For some reason, little French Nannas felt the need to educate small children regarding the loup garou, insinuating that they prefer to eat Protestants and only those Catholics who were in a state of mortal sin. Thanks, Nanna!

One evening, after the sacred light of day slowly surrendered its protective watchfulness to the patiently waiting, sinisterly plotting, darkness and amidst chills of foreboding due to one of Nanna's educational talks, we all climbed up onto our tightly clustered, military surplus cots and slid beneath the light, summer sheets, which Nanna dutifully pointed out, offered no real protection against the forces of evil.

Eventually our tired little bodies won out over our terrifying musings, like Bigfoot and the Creature from the Black Lagoon joining forces to trap us between the woods and the lake, and the sanctuary of sleep overtook us.

Suddenly, my eyes shot open, and I felt my body stiffening like a corpse. I wasn't sure what had awoken me from my dreams of frog jumping contests and cattail fights, but I knew it was real enough to warrant my quickly mounting panic as I peeked around and saw that every one of us was awake and peering at each other in the darkness.

With only the light of the full moon illuminating our canvas walled shelter, I saw that even Daddy was awake. Daddy, the true John Wayne, WWII army ranger and combat judo instructor for the first ever Marine Corp Raider company. Daddy, who led recon around the crater at Hiroshima and fought a Japanese officer to the death after barely blocking the officer's Samurai Katana from separating Daddy's head from his shoulders. He was my hero. As strong as Superman and twice as brave, I knew that for him to be concerned about something meant that there was indeed something to be concerned about.

Glancing around, I saw that Donald, technically my uncle though closer to my age than my mother's, was even more terrified than me. His eyes looked like china saucers with a small dark spot in the middle, and I thought he might either faint or wet himself. Under other circumstances I would have bet my sister that he would do both, but this was no time for wagers on my Uncle's potential incontinence; something wicked this way came.

Donald was shaking so badly, I might have laughed out loud if the reason for his terror hadn't then and there made itself known to me, as a low menacing growl pierced the darkness of our canvas walled hovel. The hair on my arms rose straight into the air, and I could all but feel the warm breath of the unseen monster on my neck.

Again, the deep, warbling, snarling sound broke the breathless silence, seemingly to come from everywhere at once. Before I could say, "sasquatch" my Dad, in his skivvies, had yanked Donald, also in his skivvies, up out of his cot and armed him with a hatchet. Daddy picked up a larger axe and silently explained his plan to Donald who, but for his undying admiration of my father, would have been under his cot in the fetal position. Nonetheless, Donald handled himself with admirable courage and nodded his understanding of Daddy's plan.

They were to split up and each circle the camp in opposite directions. As a child, I was a little concerned with my twelve year old Uncle Donald, in a pair of tighty-whities, potentially confronting the loup garou armed only with a hatchet. While I'm not certain what Daddy expected to encounter during this reconnaissance mission, I'm fairly sure he expected Donald to be eaten. In any case, it was a risk that Daddy thought was worth taking.

Slowly the brave hero and Donald exited the camp to begin their perimeter search. Just then, another lower growling sound came from what we considered to be the front of the camp. Mum and Donald gave a surprisingly similar shriek while I quivered, peeking out from under my covers, not wanting to see what was going to happen but unable to look away.

"Wally, you be careful!" admonished Nanna. Despite her less than formidable physique and four foot eleven height, she seemed the least afraid of us all.

Slowly, the two would-be heroes began to stalk around the camp when the snarling growl became even more diabolical for the sound began to warble until it almost sounded like it was speaking to us! As the realization that we were indeed dealing with some kind of cursed, unholy beast, it was as though time slowed and reality began to bend.

While a part of us had believed Nanna's stories, we never truly feared that we would ever encounter a real live creature from the depths of hell. It just wasn't the sort of thing a seven year old prepares for.

I could hear Donald starting to whimper, and even Daddy paused, if but for a moment. What terrified me the most was Nanna. It was like she was being possessed. She just looked towards where the sound seemed to be coming from and cocked her head. Her countenance seemed detached and slowly, little Nanna Bartlett stood with eyes unblinking and began to shuffle across the floor towards the front of the camp and the unknown horror that stood just a thin canvas tarp away.

"Daddy!" I cried. "It's got Nanna!"

 To my even greater horror, Nanna looked at me with the full wrath of the Damned in her gaze and hissed something that sounded like, "I will drag your soul to hell!" or maybe it was, "Shhh, don't yell!" My newly gained experience with the powers of darkness led me to conclude that it was the former. I couldn't move; I couldn't speak! I could only watch as Daddy crept to the corner of the camp nearest the creature while 'Legion' possessed Nanna slowly moved forward towards the creature, now with her hands raised in front of her in true zombie fashion.

My siblings whimpered, my mother's mouth hung open in horrified disbelief and Donald went booking off into the woods as Nanna completed her trance induced pilgrimage to the wall. As I watched, she stopped in front of some strange wooden box upon a small cabinet I hadn't noticed before. I naturally assumed that inside of this box was a hidden demonic altar from which she would summon an underworld horde to tear us apart.

I didn't see her open it, yet the lid of the secret altar arose to reveal a strange and unholy relic made of shining gold! Then her quivering old hands began to move as though casting a spell. Just as the chanting growls grew their loudest, and I knew our time on earth was ending, the monster's voice stopped in mid-sentence, and all the world fell into silence for several heartbeats.

Nanna then began to chant in a strange language, intoning mystical mantras followed by some blood freezing cackling, quite witch-like. I knew that chant; I’d heard it before, but for the life of me, literally, I couldn’t remember where!

After a few moments, Daddy called out, "Maw, you alright?"

  From the woods, we heard Donald scream, "Help! It's clawing me!"

"I've killed it Wally." called Nanna, with a dry, cynical cackle, "Go save my brave grandson and get in here."

 Soon Daddy had collected Donald from the flesh rending claws of the nearby raspberry bushes, and they both came into the camp which was by then glowing warmly from several brightly burning oil lanterns. All eyes turned to Nanna, who was still standing in front of the mysterious golden object that had been hidden inside the nondescript wooden box.

The object had a large cone that curved at one end, ending in a sharp needle resting above a strange black circle. Slowly she began to turn a crank protruding from the side of the box. As we kids looked on in stunned silence, Donald--who was very much occupied with the copious streams of blood leaking from the "wicked bad" scratches he'd received when the raspberry bushes had attacked him, was, regrettably, still clad only in his skivvies. After a few moments Nanna set the needle upon the strange black disk, and a voice much higher than the monster's began to yodel and croon, accompanied by a softly strumming guitar.

 Daddy then began to chant with gusto the same familiar syllables that Nanna had and I suddenly realized that neither he nor Nanna were chanting, but rather they were cursing in poorly bastardized Canadian French. "Sacré bleu!" he concluded. For some reason, appealing to "sacred blue" helped older French people cope with life's little surprises.

"Was it the loup-garou Daddy?" whispered my youngest sister apprehensively.

"Tweren't no loup-garou!" ejaculated Daddy. Then he shook his head ruefully and in a painfully compunctious tone added, "It was gawd-damn Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family!"

"Oh, isn't June Carter just the sweetest thing!" exclaimed my mother, and then began to chitter on enthusiastically about her favorite country music singers.

 Nanna then lifted me up into her arms, and her warm, brown, eyes danced with amusement. She laughed as she showed me that the cause of our horrific ordeal was an old wind up RCA Victor Victrola gramophone, complete with a giant brass horn. "It’s my old Victrola!" she laughed. "One of you kids must have knocked around the crank earlier today, just enough to get it crawling along." A crooked smile crossed her kind, old, face. She winked and said, "Never did like Jimmie Rodgers."