488 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 29, 1906. 
The Loup Garou of St. Hillaire. 
“I call it disgraceful and a scandal when a 
man as well brought up as you are chooses a 
scamp like Joe Demingues to go to the woods 
with him. If he was the only guide in the country, 
it would be bad enough, but when there’s twenty 
men as good or better to be had for the same 
money, I’m blessed if I can see what you want 
with that thieving, lying, lazy half-breed.” 
Had my landlady been an ordinary individual, 
I should have resented her remarks and told 
her I was competent to manage my own affairs. 
As she and her husband had known me since I 
was a boy, and had furthermore nursed me 
through a severe attack of diphtheria at the risk 
of their lives, I held my peace. 
The subject of this outburst sat on the piazza 
with his gun and pack at his side. The piazza 
was immaculately clean under ordinary condi¬ 
tions, but Mr. Demingues was whittling a 
shingle, and chewing tobacco at the same time, 
and it was easy to see that nothing under a 
scrubbing brush and hot water would efface the 
traces of his visit. I opened my window and 
requested him to go round to the back door; then 
I expressed my sincere regret for the defilement 
of the piazza, and promised my hostess to send 
a colored lady to clean the place up. It was im¬ 
possible for me to explain that Mr. Demingues’ 
presence was due to Satan having been divided 
against Satan, or in other words, that having 
a grievance against some brother poachers, he 
had turned evidence for the Crown, and that 1 
was on my way to the woods to cut the snares 
and destroy the hedges which the gang he had 
quarreled with had spent a week or more in 
building. 
Demingues was a Frenchman from Northern 
Quebec. He was a thief of the first water, and 
as unreliable as any Irishman from Kerry. His 
laziness was proverbial, but he was a good man 
in the woods. Had he only seen fit to act as 
any ordinary man would have done, I could have 
given him employment from the commencement 
of the hunting season to the end. 
We spent three or four days in the woods. 
Joe took me to the line of snares, and I des¬ 
troyed about thirty of the infernal contrivances. 
We then crossed over to the next county, hoping 
to call up a large bull that had been seen by 
several parties, but none had succeeded in getting 
a shot at him. The fates were against us, how¬ 
ever. We got a sight of him. but he was on the 
other side of a wide, open bog, and he had a 
cow with him. It was somewhat late in the 
season, the nights were cold, and we naturally 
preferred an abandoned lumber camp to our 
leanto tent, especially in wet weather. 
If I remember rightly, it was on the evening 
of the tenth of November, 1898, that we found 
ourselves caught in a pelting sleet storm, some 
six or seven miles from the nearest camp, our 
comissariat reduced to a few hard biscuits, seme 
tea, and a porcupine Joe had killed early in the 
day. The caribou we had been following all day 
had apparently gone into the next county, and 
the only thing we could do under the circum¬ 
stances was to camp in the least exposed place 
we could find. We pitched the little tent with 
the open side facing a huge granite boulder and 
the back to the wind, collected all the dry wood 
we could find, boiled our kettle, and cooked the 
porcupine’s hind ouarters. 
I was not at all pleased with Joe Demingues. 
In the first place, he had assured me that we 
should be sure of a shot at the caribou early 
in the afternoon; secondly, he had omitted to put 
any provisions in his haversack; and thirdly, he 
had wasted all our matches and obliged me to 
strike a light with a bit of quartz and the back 
of my knife. This latter process is by no means 
easy of achievement when it is conducted by the 
side of a comfortable fire, to the edification of 
a party of ladies who have never seen such a 
primitive way of procuring fire, but when it is 
done in the lee .of a cotton tent, with the glass 
considerably below freezing point, and the pleas¬ 
ant prospect of passing the night on the open 
barrens without fire or supper if your tinder 
gets damp, it is ten times more difficult. How¬ 
ever, fortune favored me, my tinder took fire 
after a few strokes, I blew it into a flame, and 
ignited the little pile of birchbark and pine shav¬ 
ings, and in half an hour we had a roaring fire. 
We had plenty of tobacco, so we smoked for 
some time after supper, then Joe went to sleep 
and I stayed awake and kept the fire going. As 
the night advanced it grew colder, the sleet 
turned to snow, the wind dropped, and between 
ten and eleven the moon broke through the 
clouds and the storm was at an end. Demingues 
awoke, made up the fire, took a look at the 
night, and reported: 
“Tree, four inch soft snow, good chance track 
dem caribou to-morrow.” 
I made myself as comfortable as I could, and 
in a few minutes I was asleep. I was tired, and 
1 slept like a log. Once or twice I awoke as the 
fire burnt down and the cold roused me, but I 
went to sleep as soon as the blaze began to 
warm the camp again. It was about 3 o’clock 
in the morning when I felt a vigorous shove at 
my side. I rose and cursed Joe for disturbing 
me. 
“You listen, you hear dem same as me, two, 
tree of dem,” was his reply to my inquiry as to 
his reason for waking me. 
I remarked that I had heard both porcupines 
and loons calling at night, and that I had no 
desire to be, awakened to listen to their nocturnal 
serenades. 
“Neither porcupine or loon make noise like I 
hear just ’fore I wake you. I not hear noise 
like him for forty, fifty year, not since I leave 
St. Hillaire ’way up nort of Saguenay. I know 
all noise you hear in woods, all time of year. 
First I tink I dream it, den I hear horn blow, 
just same as you hear him blow to Quebec. 
Tarar, tarar, tarara—Hark: you hear him now?” 
I listened intently, but I could hear nothing. 
I rose and prepared to step out of the tent and 
away from the fire which was crackling briskly. 
Demingues seized me by the arm and begged me 
not to leave the camp. Then it sudenly dawned 
upon me that the man was in a state of abject 
terror, and I not unnaturally thought the owners 
of the snares we had destroyed were after us. 
“Don’t be a fool, Demingues. If those men 
were after us they would lay for us in the woods. 
Not one of them could blow a bugle to save his 
life, and if he could he wouldn’t do so if he was 
out on these barrens. Another thing; if they 
are after us, the best thing we can do is to clear 
out of the camp at once, as the firelight shows 
through it, and it makes an easy target for long 
range rifle fire.” 
I had very little fear of this happening, how¬ 
ever. The Canadian poacher is a peaceable in¬ 
dividual, and does not complicate matters by the 
unlawful use of firearms. I went out of the 
tent and waited in the snow for several minutes. 
Demingues stood be c ide me and shivered. Then 
in the far distance I heard a deep long-drawn 
howl, so faint that it was hardly audible. Demin¬ 
gues clutched my arm. 
“You hear him that time? I hear him just 
same ’fore I wake you up. Den I hear horn blow 
once, twice, same as I tell you, den hear same 
noise again. You wait little while, you hear him 
coming closer.” 
I was beginning to get cold, and I informed 
Mr. Demingues that I would far rather go to 
sleep in the tent than freeze to death on the 
barrens, listening to some vagabond dog chas¬ 
ing a rabbit in the distance. It is true we were 
nearly fifteen miles from the nearest house, and 
as far as I was aware no one living within thirty 
miles of us kept a hound. 
As I turned to go in, I heard the sound again. 
It was closer, and there were obviously two or 
more hounds on the trail. Demingues bolted, 
and when I followed him into the tent I found 
him on his knees pouring out his supplications 
to the whole pantheon of Canadian saints. There 
was no disguising the fact that my companion 
was badly scared. I took up my .303 rifle and 
satisfied myself that the magazine was full, and 
that the lever worked freely. Demingues carried 
a double-barreled smooth bore, loaded with ball. 
Altogether we had some twenty shots at our 
command. 
I waited until he finished his devotions, then 
I took him by the collar and shook him well. 
“If you keep this nonsense up any longer, I’ll 
fire you out of the tent without your gun,” said 
I. “Tell me what you’re afraid of. Those dogs 
ar'nt coming here to eat us, and even if they 
were we have ammunition enough to stand off 
a pack of wolves.” 
Demingues squirmed for a minute, then he sat 
down on the fir branches. 
“Wolves, not dog. not common wolf, loup 
garou, devil wolf,” he gasped. “You hear him 
horn ? Dat Bruno, chasseur du diable, revenant, 
sorciere.” 
As he spoke I heard the howling more dis¬ 
tinctly. It was certainly unlike the baying of 
ordinary dogs; it increased in volume, and the 
chase passed within two hundred yards of our 
camp, then it died away in the distance. 
I must ‘confess that I was glad to feel my rifle 
at hand. I have the disbelief in supernatural or 
occult phenomena, common to the Anglo-Saxon 
race, but the noise we had just heard was unlike 
the cry of any breed of dog I had ever known. 
It was thirty years since a wolf had been killed 
in the province, and I was unable to conjecture 
how any dogs, assuming that they were dogs, 
could be hunting at that hour of night, at such 
a distance from any human habitation. I had a 
pocket flask of over-proof rum with me. I 
poured out a stiff dose for Demingues, diluted 
it with water, and gave it to him. I then took 
a small drink myself. Demingues plucked up 
courage under the influence of the stimulant. He 
was still very nervous, but he ceased to besiege 
his saints with prayers for assistance; the beads 
of perspiration, vanished from his forehead, and 
in answer to my inquiry as to who Bruno and 
the loup garou might be, he told me the following 
story: 
“’Fore ever I come to dis part de worl' we all 
live in St. Hillaire, leetle place twenty-nine mile 
norwest of Nort’ Fork, Saguenay River. Our 
house not mor'n tree, four mile from church, 
good ro.ad in winter, no road ‘tall in summer. 
Gran’ place for trap mink, otter, beaver, all sorts 
fur, dem days. Salmon not come so far we 
were, but trout. Lan’s sake, you peep’ here not 
know what trout mean. My modder, she die 
