Whispers: An anthology of Fantasy and Horror

THE DAKWA by Manly Wade Wellman

Night had fallen two hours ago in these mountains, but Lee Cobbett remembered the trail up from Markum’s Fork over Dogged Mountain and beyond. Too, he had the full moon and a blazing skyful of stars to help him. Finally he reached the place where Long Soak Hollow had been, where now lay a broad stretch of water among the heights, water struck to quivering radiance by the moonlight.

Shaggy trees made the last of the trail dark and uneasy under his boot soles. He half-groped his way to the grassy brink and looked across to something he recognized. On an island that once had been the top of a broad rise in the hollow stood a square cabin in a tuft of trees. Light from the open door beat upon a raftlike dock and a boat tied up there.

Dropping his pack and bedroll, Cobbett cupped his big hands into a trumpet at his mouth.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Hello, the house, hello, Mr. Luns Lamar, I’m here! Come over and get me!”

A shadow slid into the doorway. A man tramped down to where that dock was visible. He held a lantern high.

“Who’s that a-bellowing?” came back a call across the water.

“Lee Cobbett—come get me!”

“No, sir,” echoed to his ears. “Can’t do it tonight.”

“But—”

“Not tonight!” The words were sharp, they meant that thing. “No way. You wait there for me till sunup.”

The figure plodded back to the doorway and sat down on the threshold with the lantern beside it.

Cobbett cursed to himself, there on the night shore. He was a blocky man in denim jacket and slacks, with a square, seamed face and a mane of dark hair. Scowling, he estimated the distance across. Fifty yards? Not much more than that. If Luns Lamar wouldn’t come, Lee Cobbett would go.

He put the pack and roll together next to a laurel bush and sat on them to drag off his boots and socks. He stripped away slacks, jacket, blue shirt, underwear, and stood up naked. Walking to the edge of the lake, he tested it with his toe. Chill, like most mountain water. He set his whole foot in, found bottom, and waded forward to his knees. Two more steps, and he was waist deep. He shivered as he moved out along the clay bottom until he could wade no longer. He struck out for the light of the cabin door.

The coldness of the water hit him, and he swam more strongly to fight against it. Music seemed to be playing somewhere, a song he had never heard, like a muted woodwind. A hum in his head—no, it came from somewhere away from the cabin and the island, somewhere on the moonbright water. It grew stronger, more audible.

On he swam with powerful strokes. His body glided swiftly, but a current sprang up around him, more of a current than he had thought possible. And the melody heightened in his ears, still nothing he could remember, but tuneful, haunting.

Then a sudden shuddering impact, a blow like a club against his side and shoulder.

He almost whirled under. He kicked at whatever it was, shouting aloud as he did so. Next moment he was at the poles that supported the dock, grabbing at them with both hands. Luns Lamar stooped above him and caught his thick wrists.

“You damned fool,” grumbled Lamar, heaving away.

Cobbett scrambled up on the split slabs, kneeling.

“Whatever in hell made you swim over here?” Lamar scolded him.

“What else was there for me to do?” Cobbett found breath to say. “You said you wouldn’t come and fetch me, even when you’d written that letter wanting me to bring you those books. I don’t know why I should have moped over there until tomorrow, not when I can swim.”

“I wouldn’t go out on this lake tonight, even in the boat.” Lamar helped Cobbett to his feet. “Hey, you’re scraped. Bleeding.”

It was true. Cobbett’s sinewy shoulder looked red and raw.

“There’s a log or snag right out from the dock,” he said, heading for the cabin’s open door.

“No,” said Lamar. “That wasn’t any log or snag.”

They went inside together. The front half of the cabin was a single room, raftered overhead. Cobbett knew its rawhide-seated chairs, the plank table, the oil stove, tall shelves of books, a fireplace with a strew of winking coals and a glowing kerosene lamp on the mantel board. Against the wall, an ancient army cot with brown blankets. In a rear corner, a tool chest, and upon that a scuffed banjo case. Lamar brought him a big, frayed towel. Cobbett winced as he rubbed himself down.

“That’s a real rough raking you got,” said Lamar, peering.

He, too, was known to Cobbett, old and small but sure of movement, with spectacles closely set on his shrewd face. He wore a dark blue pullover, khaki pants, and scuffed house slippers.

“We’d better do something about that,” he said and went to a shelf by the stove. He took down a big, square bottle and worried out the cork, then came back. “Just hold still.”

He filled his palm with dark, oily liquid from the bottle and spread it over the torn skin of Cobbett’s ribs and shoulder.

“What’s in that stuff?” Cobbett asked.

“There’s some sap of three different trees in it,” replied Lamar. “And boiled tea of three different flowers, and some crushed seeds, and the juice of what some folks call a weed, but the Indians used to prize it.”

He brought an old blue bathrobe with GOLDEN GLOVES in faded yellow letters across the back. “Put this on till we can go over tomorrow and get your clothes,” he said.

“Thanks.” Cobbett drew the robe around him and sat down in a chair. “Now,” he said, “if that wasn’t a log or snag, what was it?”

Lamar wiped his spectacles. “You won’t believe it.”

“Not without hearing it.”

“I asked you to fetch me some books,” Lamar reminded.

“Mooney’s study for the Bureau of Anthology, Myths of the Cherokee,” said Cobbett. “And Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. And The Kingdom of Madison. All right, they’re over yonder in my pack. If you hadn’t flooded Long Soak Hollow, I could have brought them right into this cabin without even wetting my feet. If you’d come with the boat, they’d be here now. Why don’t you get to telling me what this is all about?”

Lamar studied him. “Lee, did you ever hear about the Dakwa?”

“Dakwa,” Cobbett said after him. “Sounds like Dracula.”

“It’s not Dracula, but it happens to be terrible in its own way. It’s what rubbed up against you while you were out there swimming.” Lamar scowled. “Look here, let’s have a drink. I reckon maybe we both need one.”

He sought the shelf again and opened a fruit jar of clear, white liquid and poured generous portions into two glasses. “This is good blockade whiskey,” he said, handing a glass to Cobbett. The liquid tingled sharply on Cobbett’s tongue and warmed him all the way down.

Lamar sipped in turn. “It’s hard to explain, even though we’ve known each other nearly all our lives.”

“You’ve known me nearly all my life,” said Cobbett, “but I haven’t known you nearly all yours. I’ve heard that you studied law, then you taught in a country school, then you edited a little weekly paper. After that, I don’t know why, you quit everything and built this cabin. You don’t ever come out of it except to listen to mountain songs and mountain tales, and sometimes you write about them for folklore journals.” Cobbett studied his friend. “Why not start by telling me what you’ve done, drowning Long Soak Hollow like this?”

“It wasn’t my doing,” growled Lamar. “Some resort company did it, to make a lake amongst the summer cottages they’re building for visitors. You remember how this place of mine was set—high above the little creek down in the hollow, safe from any flood. I wouldn’t sell out, but that company bought up all the land round about and put in a dam, and here it is, filled in. I’m like Robinson Crusoe on my island, but I’m not studying to go ashore till tomorrow.”

Cobbett drank again. “Because of what?”

“Because of one of those same old tales that makes a noise like the truth.” Lamar showed his gold-wired teeth. “The Dakwa,” he said again. “It’s in those books I asked you to fetch along with you.”

“And I said they’re across that water that scares you,” said Cobbett. “What,” he asked patiently, “is the Dakwa?”

“Its what tried to grab you just now,” Lamar flung out. “It used to be penned up in the little creek they called Long Soak, penned up there for centuries. And now, by God, it’s out again in this lake they’ve dammed up, a-looking for what it may devour.” His face clamped desperately. “Devour it whole,” he said.

“You say it’s out again,” said Cobbett. “What do you mean by again? How long has this been going on?”

“Centuries, I told you,” said Lamar. “The tale was here with the Cherokee Indians when the first settlers came, before the Revolutionary War. And the Dakwa’s hungry. Two men and a boy—Del Hungant and Steve Biggins and a teenager from somewhere in the lowlands named McIlhenny—they just sort of went out of sight along this new lake. Folks came up from town and dragged for them, and nothing whatever dragged up.”

“Not even the Dakwa,” suggested Cobbett.

“Especially not the Dakwa. It’s too smart to be hooked.”

“And you believe in it,” said Cobbett.

“Sure enough I believe in it. I’ve seen it again and again, just an ugly hunch of it in the water out there. I’ve heard it humming.”

“So that’s what I heard,” said Cobbett.

“Yes, that’s what. And once, the last time I’ve ever been out in the boat at night, it shoved against the boat and damn near turned it over with me. You’d better believe in it yourself, the way it rasped your skin like that.”

Cobbett went over to the bookshelf and studied the titles. He took down Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic and leafed through the index pages.

“You won’t read about it in there,” Lamar told him sourly. “That’s only about old-world witches and devils, with amulets and charms against them, and all the names of God to defeat them. The Dakwa doesn’t believe in God. It’s an Indian thing—Cherokee. Something else has to go to work against it. That’s why I wanted those books, hoping to find something in them. They’re the only published notices of the Dakwa.”

Cobbett slid Thompson’s volume back into place and went to the door and opened it.

“You fixing to do something foolish?” grumbled Lamar.

“No, nothing foolish if I can help it,” Cobbett assured him. “I just thought I’d go and look at the stars before bedtime.”

He stepped across the threshold log into grass. Dew splashed his bare feet. He paced to the dock and gazed up at the moon, a great pallid blotch of radiance. Gazing, he heard something again.

Music, that was all it could be. Perhaps it had words, but words so soft that they were like a faint memory.

Out upon the dock he stepped. Ripples broke against its supporting poles. Something made a dark rush in the water, close up almost to the boat. Whatever it was glinted shinily beneath the surface. Cobbett stared down at it, trying to make out its shape. It vanished. He turned and paced back to the cabin door, that faint sense of the music still around him.

“All right, what did you find out there?” Lamar demanded.

“Nothing to speak of,” said Cobbett. “Now then, I had a long uphill trudge getting here. How about showing me where I’ll sleep?”

“Over yonder, as usual.” Lamar nodded toward the cot.

“And we’ll get up early tomorrow morning and go get my gear and those books of yours.”

“Not until the sun’s up,” insisted Lamar.

“Okay,” grinned Cobbett. “Not until the sun’s up.”

When Cobbett woke, Lamar was at the oil stove, cooking breakfast. Cobbett got into the robe, washed his face and hands and teeth and unclasped the banjo case. He took out Lamar’s old banjo, tuned it briefly and softly began to pick a tune, the tune he had heard the night before.

“You cut that right out!” Lamar yelled at him. “You want to call that thing out of the water, right up to the door?”

Cobbett put the banjo away and came to the table. Breakfast was hearty and good—flapjacks drenched in molasses, eggs and home-cured bacon, and black coffee so strong you’d expect a hatchet to float in it. Cobbett had two helpings of everything. Afterward, he washed the dishes while Lamar wiped.

“And now the sun’s up,” Cobbett said, peering at it through the window. “It’s above those trees on the mountain. What do you say we get me back into my clothes?”

Wearing the GOLDEN GLOVES bathrobe, he walked out to the dock with Lamar. He had his first good look at the boat. It was well made of calked planks, canoe style, pointed fore and aft, with two seats and two paddles. It was painted a deep brown.

“I built that tiling,” said Lamar, “Built it when they started in to fill up the hollow. Can you paddle? Bow or stern?”

“Let me take stern.”

Getting in, they pushed off. Lamar, dipping his paddle, gazed at something far out toward the middle of the lake. Cobbett gazed too. Whatever it was hung there on the water, something dark and domed. It might have been a sort of head. As Cobbett looked, the thing slipped under water. The light of the rising sun twinkled on a bit of foam.

Lamar’s mouth opened as if to speak, but closed again on silence. A score of determined strokes took them across to a shallow place. Cobbett hopped ashore, picked up his clothes and pack and blanket roll, and came back to stow everything in the waist of the boat. Around they swung and headed back toward the island. Out there across the gentle stir of the water’s surface, the dark, domed object was visible again.

“Whatever it is, it’s watching us,” ventured Cobbett. “It doesn’t seem to want to come close.”

“That’s because there’s a couple of us,” grunted Lamar, paddling. “I don’t expect it would tackle two people at a time, by daylight.”

That seemed to put a stop to the conversation. They nosed in against the dock. Tying up, Lamar helped Cobbett carry his things into the cabin. Cobbett rummaged in the pack.

“All right, here are those books of yours,” he said. “Now, I’ll get dressed.”

While he did so, Lamar leafed through Mooney’s book about Cherokee myths.

“Sure enough, here we are,” he said. “Dakwa—it’s a water spirit, and it used to drag Cherokee hunters down and eat them. It’s said to have been in several streams.”

“Including Long Soak,” supplied Cobbett.

“Mooney doesn’t mention Long Soak but, yes, here too.” Lamar turned pages. “It’s still here, and well you know that’s a fact.” He took up two smaller volumes. “Now, look in this number two book of Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Hmmm,” he crooned.

“More Dakwa?” asked Cobbett, picking up the other book he had brought.

“Skinner titles it, ‘The Siren of the French Broad.’ This time it’s not as grotesque as in Mooney. It’s supposed to he a beautiful naked woman rising up to sing to you. So, if you’re a red-blooded American he-man, you stoop close to see and hear better and it quits being beautiful, it suddenly has a skull and two bony arms to drag you down.” He snapped the book shut. “I judge the white settlers prettied the tale up to sound like the Lorelei. But not much in any of these books to tell how to fight it. What are you reading there in The Kingdom of Madison?”

“I’m looking at page thirteen, which I hope isn’t unlucky,” replied Cobbett. “Here’s what it says about a deep place on the French Broad River: ‘There, the Cherokees said, lurked the dakwa, the gigantic fish-monster that caught men at the riverside and dragged them down, swallowed them whole.’ And it has that other account, too: ‘The story would seem to inspire another fable, this time of a lovely water-nymph, who smiled to lure the unwary wanderer, reached up her arms to him, and dragged him down to be seen no more.’ ”

“Not much help, either. That’s about what Mooney and Skinner say, and it’s no fable, no legend.” Lamar studied his guest. “How do you feel today, after that gouging it gave you in the water last night?”

“I feel fine.” Cobbett buttoned up his shirt. “Completely healed. It didn’t hurt me too much for you to cure me.”

‘Maybe if it had been able to get you into its mouth, swallow you up—”

“Didn’t you say that was an old Indian preparation you sloshed on me?”

“It’s something I got from a Cherokee medicine man,” said Lamar. “A valued old friend of mine. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, but he worships his people’s old gods, is afraid of their evil spirits, carries out their old formulas and rituals, and I admire him for it.”

“So do I,” said Cobbett. “But you mentioned certain plants in that mixture.”

“Well, for the most part there were smashed-up seeds of viper’s bugloss and some juice of campion, what the country folks call rattlesnake plant.”

Both of those growths had snake names to them, reflected Cobbett. “I think you might have mentioned to me why you wanted these books,” he said.

“Why mention it?” groaned Lamar, adjusting his spectacles. “You wouldn’t have believed me then. Anyway, I don’t see how this extra information will help. It doesn’t do more than prove things, more or less. Well, I’ve got errands to do.”

He walked out to the dock. Cobbett followed him.

“I’m paddling across and going down the trail to meet old Snave Dalbom,” Lamar announced. “This is his day to drive down to the county seat to wag back a weeks supplies. He lets me go with him to do my shopping.”

He got into the boat and began to cast off.

“Let me paddle you over,” offered Cobbett, but Lamar shook his head violently.

“I’ll paddle myself over and tie up the boat yonder,” he declared. “I’m not a-going to have you out on this lake, maybe getting yourself yanked overboard and down there where they can’t drag for you, like those three others who never came up.”

“How do you know I won’t go swimming?” Cobbett teased him.

“Because I don’t reckon your mother raised any such fool. Listen, just sit around here and take it easy. Snave and I will probably get a bite in town, so fix your own noon dinner and look for me back sometime before sundown. There’s some pretty good canned stuff in the house—help yourself. And maybe you can read the whole tariff on the Dakwa, figure out something to help us. But I’m leaving you here so you’ll stay here.”

He shoved out from the dock and paddled for the shore opposite.

Cobbett strolled back to the cabin, and around it. Clumps of cedar brush stood at the corner, and locusts hung above the old tin roof. The island itself was perhaps an acre in extent, with cleared ground behind the cabin. A well had been dug there. Lamar’s well-kept garden showed two rows of bright green cornstalks, the tops of potatoes and tomatoes and onions. Cobbett inspected the corn. At noon he might pick a couple of ears and boil them to eat with butter and salt and pepper. On the far side of the garden was the shore of the island, dropping abruptly to the water. Kneeling, Cobbett peered. He could see that the bottom was far down there, a depth of many feet. Below the clear surface he saw a shadowy patch, a drowned tree that once had grown there, that had been overwhelmed by the lake.

That crooning music, or the sense of it, seemed to hang over the gentle ripples.

He returned to the cabin and sat down with Mooney’s book. The index gave him several page references to the Dakwa and he looked them up, one by one. The Dakwa had been reported where the creek called Toco, and before that called the Dakwai, flowed into the Little Tennessee River. Again, it was supposed to lurk in a low-churned stretch of the French Broad River, six miles upstream from Hot Springs. There were legends. A hunter, said one, had been swallowed whole by a Dakwa and had fought his way out to safety, but his hair had been scalded from his head. Mooney’s notes referred to Jonah in the Bible, to the swallowing of an Ojibwa hero named Mawabosho. That reminded Cobbett of Longfellow’s poem, where the King of Fishes had swallowed Hiawatha.

But Hiawatha had escaped, and Jonah and Mawabosho had escaped. The devouring monster of the deep, whatever it might be, was not inescapable.

Again he studied the index. He could not find any references to the plants Lamar had mentioned, but there was a section called “Plant Lore.” He read it carefully:

Below that, a printed name jumped to his eye:

And, a paragraph or so beyond:

He shut up the book with a snap and began to take off his clothes.

He searched a pair of bathing trunks out of his pack and put them on. Next, he explored Lamar’s tool chest. Among the things at the bottom he found a great cross-hilted hunting knife and drew it from its riveted sheath. The blade was fully a foot long, whetted sharp on both edges. Then he went out to the woodpile and chose a stafflike length of hickory, about five feet in length. There was plenty of fishing line in the cabin, and he lashed the knife to the end of the pole like a spearhead. From the shelf he took the bottle of ointment that had healed him so well and rubbed palmsful on himself from head to foot. Remembering the Indian warrior who had been swallowed and came out bald, he lathered the mixture into his dark, shaggy hair. He smeared more on the blade and the pole. When he was done, the bottle was two-thirds empty.

Finally he walked out with his makeshift spear. He paused at the corner of the cabin, gazing at what grew there.

Those cedar bushes. The anisgina or malevolent ghosts cannot endure the smell, Mooney had written, and Mooney, the scholarly friend of the Cherokees, must have known. Cobbett found a match and gathered a sheaf of dry twigs to make a fire. Then he plucked bunches of the dark green cedar leaves and heaped them on top of the blaze. Up rose a dull, vapory smoke. He stood in it, eyes and nose tingling from the fumes, until the fire burned down and the smoke thinned away.

Spear in hand, he paced around the cabin and past the garden and to the place where the margin shelved steeply down into the lake.

He gazed at the sunken tree, then across the lake. No motion there. He looked again at the tree. He could see enough of it to remember it, from times before Long Soak was dammed up. It was a squat oak, thick-stemmed, with sprawling roots driven in among rocks, twenty feet below him.

Yet again he looked out over the water. Still no sign upon it. He began to hum the tune he had heard before, the tune Lamar had forbidden him to pick on the banjo.

Humming, he heard the song outside himself, faint as a song in a dream. It made his skin creep.

From the deep shadowy bottom something came floating upward, straight toward where he knelt.

A woman, thought Cobbett at once, certainly a woman, certainly what the myth in Skinner’s book said, not terrible at all. He saw her streaming banner of dark hair, saw her round, lithe arms, her oval, wide-eyed face, and her plump breasts, her skin as smooth and as richly brown as some tropical fruit. Her eyes sought him, her red lips moved as though they sang. Closer she came. Her head with its soaking hair broke clear of the water. Her hand reached to him, both her hands. Those beautiful arms spread wide for him.

He felt light-headed. He almost leaned within the reach of the arms when she drew back and away, still on the surface. His homemade spear had drooped between them. Her short, straight nose twitched as though she would sneeze.

A moment, and then back she came, to the very brink. And changed suddenly. Her eyes spread into shadowed caverns, her mouth opened to show stockades of long, stale teeth. Her arms, round and lithe no longer, drove a taloned clutch at him.

He thrust with the spear, and again she slid swiftly back and away. Off balance, Cobbett fell floundering into the water.

He plunged deep with the force of his fall. In the shimmering blur above him he saw a vast, winnowing shape, far larger than the woman had seemed. It was dark and somehow ribbed, something like a parachute fluttering in a gale. He rose under it, trying to stab and failing again. He could not dart a swift thrust under that impeding water. He clamped the hickory shaft so that it lay tight along his forearm and made a pushing prod with it. The point struck something, seemed to pierce. The broad shape slid away with a flutter that churned the lake all around. Cobbett rose to the surface, gratefully gulping a mighty lungful of breath.

The Dakwa, whatever it was, whatever it truly looked like, had dived out of sight as he came up. Cobbett swam for the shore, one-handed, as another surging wave struck him. He dived deeply, as deeply as he could swim without letting go of his spear.

There it was, stretched overhead again. The dimness of the water, the hampering slowness put upon his movements, seemed like a struggling nightmare. He turned over as he swam. The dark blotch extended itself and came settling down upon him, like a seine dropped to secure a prey. Clamping his spear to his right arm from elbow to wrist, he stabbed, not swiftly but powerfully. Again he felt something at the point. He slid clear and swam upward until his head broke the surface and he could breathe.

He thought no longer of winning to shore. He was here in the lake, he had to fight the Dakwa, do something to it somehow. Underwater was best, where he could see his adversary beneath the surface. Huckleberry Finn had counted on a whole minute to swim without breath under a steamboat. He, Lee Cobbett, ought to do better than that.

But before he went under, ripples and waves. His charging enemy broke into sight, making a veering turn. He saw the slanting spread of it, suddenly rising high, like the murky sail of a scudding catboat. At waterline skimmed the jut of a woman’s semblance, a sort of grotesque figurehead, hair in a whirl, teeth bare and big.

Cobbett dived, as straight down as he could manage. The cavern-eyed head was almost at him as he dipped under. Groping talons touched his leg and he felt the stab of them, but he twitched clear. As he swam strivingly down, headfirst, he saw the shape of the water-whelmed oak there, standing where the lake had swallowed it. Its trunk looked bigger than arms could clasp, its roots clutched crookedly at rocks. He slid toward it and went behind as that sprawling shape descended to engulf him. It did not want him there below, poking and stabbing. Cobbett’s left hand found and seized a stubby branch of the oak. He rose a trifle. As the Dakwa came gliding toward him and just beneath him, he drove down hard with the spear.

The force of the blow would have pushed him upward if he had not held the branch. That solid anchor helped him bring weight and power into his stab as it went home.

All around him the water suddenly rippled and pulsed, as though with an explosion. Darkness flooded out around him, like sepia expelled by a great cuttlefish, but he clung to the branch and forced the spear grindingly into what it had found, and through and beyond into something as hard and tough as wood. As oak wood. He had spiked the Dakwa to the root of the tree.

The spear lodged there as though clamped in a vise. He let go of it and swam upward. It seemed miles to the surface, to air. He knew he was very tired. He came up at the grassy shag that fringed the island’s shore.

With both hands he caught the edge. It began to crumble, but he heaved himself out with almost the last of his strength. Sprawling on the grass, he squirmed dully around and looked down to see what he had done.

No seeing it. Just bubbles and ripples, in water gone poisonously dark, as with some dull infusion. Cobbett panted and moaned for air. At last he got to his hands and knees, and finally stood shakily upright.

His thigh was gashed and the skin on his arm and chest looked rasped, although he could not remember how that last contact had come. He almost fell in as he stooped and tried to see into the lake. If he could not see, he could sense. The Dakwa was down there and it was not coming up. Strength began to return to his muscles. He scowled to himself as he summoned his nerve. Drawing a deep breath into himself, he dived in again. Down he swam, determinedly down.

There it was, writhed around the roots of the oak like a blown tarpaulin. It stirred and trembled. He could make out that forward part, the part shaped with head and arms and breasts to lure its prey. There was where his spear had struck. The knife that had been lashed on for a point was driven in, clear to the cross hilt, at the very region of the spine, if the Dakwa had a spine. It was solidly nailed down there, the Dakwa, like some gigantic, loathsome specimen on a collector’s pin. It could not get away and come after him. He hoped not.

Slowly, laboriously, he swam up again, and dragged himself out as before. Getting to his feet, he half-staggered to the cabin and inside. Blood from his wounded leg dripped to the floor. He found the fruit jar full of blockade whiskey, screwed off the lid, put it to his mouth and drank and drank. After that, he took the bottle of ointment and spread it on the places where the Dakwa had gashed and scraped him.

He felt better by the moment. Picking up the robe Lamar had lent him, he put it on. More strongly he walked out and to the place where he had gone in to fight the Dakwa.

The water was calm now, and clearer. He could even make out what was prisoned down there at the root of the oak; you could see it if you knew what you were looking for. It was still there. It would stay there.

Midway through the afternoon, Lamar tied up at the dock again. He came with heavy steps to the cabin door, loaded down with a huge can of kerosene and a gunnysack crammed with provisions. Cobbett was inside, wearing the GOLDEN GLOVES robe, busy at the stove.

“Welcome back,” he greeted Lamar over his shoulder. “I’ve been fixing a pot of beans for supper. I’ve put in a few smoked spare ribs you had, and some ketchup and sliced onions, and a sprinkle of garlic salt I happened to bring with me.”

Lamar dropped his burden and stared. “What are you a-doing in my bathrobe again? Did you manage to get chopped up the way you did last night, you damned fool?”

“A little, but not as badly chopped up as something else.”

“What are you blathering about? Listen, though. In town, I found out that these resort folks can be made to drain out their lake. If I bring the proper kind of lawsuit in court—”

“Don’t do it,” said Cobbett emphatically. “Without the water in there, something ugly will come in sight. Right at the foot of the steep drop behind the garden.”

“The Dakwa?” quavered Lamar. “You trying to say you killed it?”

“Not exactly. I have a theory it can’t be killed. But I went in all doped over with your sacred Cherokee ointment and smoked up with cedar, and I was able to stand it off. Finally, I spiked it to the roots of the tree down there.”

Lamar crinkled his face. He was beginning to believe, to be aware of implications.

“What about when it comes up again?” he asked.

“I doubt if it can come up until the oak rots away,” said Cobbett. “That will take years. Meanwhile, we can study the matter of how to cope with it. I’d like to talk to your friend, that Cherokee medicine man. He might figure how to build on the Indian knowledge we already have.”

“We might do something with dynamite,” Lamar began to suggest. “The way some people blow fish up.”

Cobbett shook his head. “The Dakwa might not be affected. And a charge let off would break up that tree, tear down some of the bank, even wreck your cabin.”

“We can get scientists,” said Lamar, gesturing eagerly. “I know some marine scientists, a couple of fellows who could go down there with diving gear.”

“No,” said Cobbett, turning from the stove. “You don’t want them to have bad dreams all their lives, do you?”