Old Dhoh, page 1
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION
OLD DHOH, by Manly Wade Wellman
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.
Introduction copyright © 2022 by Karl Wurf.
Text originally published in Weird Tales, July 1948, under the title “Dhoh.”
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
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INTRODUCTION
Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) was an American writer. While his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown, and Strange Stories, Wellman is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to the legendary Weird Tales, and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as “the dean of fantasy writers.”
A long-time resident of North Carolina, he received many awards over his lifetime, including the World Fantasy Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 2013, the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation inaugurated an award named after him to honor other North Carolina authors of science fiction and fantasy.
Three of Wellman’s most famous recurring protagonists are John the Balladeer (a.k.a. “Silver John”), a wandering backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar; the elderly “occult detective” Judge Pursuivant; and John Thunstone, also an occult investigator.
In addition to fantasy fiction, Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, juvenile fiction, and non-fiction. Much of his best short general fantasy work over the years was collected by Karl Edward Wagner in Worse Things Waiting (1973), which won a World Fantasy Award and revived interest in Wellman’s work. His 1975 novel Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds was collected from a series of Holmes pastiches (co-written with his son Wade Wellman) originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
At age 82, Wellman suffered a serious fall and sustained severe fractures of his left elbow and shoulder which made him an invalid. Due to the onset of gangrene in his legs following double amputation, Wellman’s health failed further and he died at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on April 5, 1986. Before passing on he had been able to finish his historical novel Cahena, about an African warrior princess. Cahena was published in 1986, as was the final John the Balladeer short story “Where Did She Wander.”
—Karl Wurf
Rockville, Maryland
OLD DHOH,
by Manly Wade Wellman
Reuben Pipe Feather was an assured young man with a brown vain face. Eighty years earlier, he would have been one of the most accomplished warriors and hunters of his tribe, and one of the most boastful. He wore movie-rodeo cowboy clothes. The orange shirt had tan collar, cuffs and pocket flaps. His dark gray pants hugged his slim saddle-bowed legs, and were tucked into high-heeled boots of glove leather. Around his neck was a cherry-red scarf, on his wrist a silver bracelet, on his forefinger a turquoise ring. He carried his wide hat in one hand so as to let the hot afternoon sun strike lights from the oiled glory of his long, straight black hair. He had the noble face of a Hiawatha and the manners of a small-time actor.
“Now we’re off the Katonka reservation,” he assured James Randolph as the white tourist stopped his car where a vile dirt road dwindled to a grass-grown trail. “And we’re away from those ignorant blanket bucks and squaws that gloom at you and sell you fake jewelry and pottery made in Germantown. You’re lucky I was home on vacation from Hollywood. Those old fools wouldn’t tell you anything if they knew it, and they don’t know it in the first place.”
The old fools were in reality dignified middle-aged Indians, shabby in blankets and moccasins, but respectable, reserved and mannerly. Among them were Reuben Pipe Feather’s own father and grandfather, and these he probably scorned above the rest. Reuben Pipe Feather had gone for two years to a little Kansas college, and thence to the film capital to do extra and bit work in several western and historical pictures. Now he was back on the Katonka reservation with the air of a tribal hero looking for recognition and deference. At the trading post he had readily begun chatter with James Randolph, who was interested in Katonka folklore.
“You said,” reminded Randolph, getting out of the car, “that here was where the old-timers say that Dhoh—the bear-witch demon—used to be reported.” Randolph was plump, forty-two, mustached and spectacled. He edited a small daily paper in the east, and American myths were his hobby. His two-weeks’ holiday among Indian reservations would garner, he hoped, tags of stories for what might some day be a book.
“Yeah,” agreed Reuben Pipe Feather, fanning his brown face with the hat. “This is free range, government-owned. The folks might graze their ponies here—but they don’t.” He laughed, teeth white as sugar lumps. “They’re afraid of Old Dhoh. He might eat the ponies, they think. And them.”
The country might be haunted, Randolph reflected as he gazed. The reservation land was mostly gently rolling prairie, with tufts of willow or cottonwood scrub, but here the rolls became hills. From lesser rises near at hand lifted more distant heights, crowned with brush and trees and cobbled with boulders. Wild-looking, yes; and, to a superstitious imagination, baleful.
“Dhoh lives here,” said Randolph. “This bear-witch. What’s he supposed to be?”
“He’d scare even American kids,” said Reuben Pipe Feather, grinning more widely. “They say he’s part man and part bear—one side like each, I guess. A couple of old granddads say they saw old Dhoh’s tracks. One foot like a man, one like a bear. You know.” Fluidly, Reuben Pipe Feather’s free hand sketched in the air. “What do you reckon? Too much firewater, or a trick shoe to make scary marks?”
Randolph had a camera slung on a strap over his tweed-clad shoulder. He focused it, snapped the shutter at the hills. “Nice bit of landscape,” he said. “What’s that sparkle in front of us—beyond the high grass next to the cottonwoods?”
“That’s one of the things I mean,” Reuben Pipe Feather shaded his eyes to peer. “Dhoh’s bathtub. When I was a kid, one of the squaws showed me a couple of others. Dhoh’s supposed to wash himself there now and then. I was scared—but plenty.”
They walked toward the brown sparkle. It was a sort of muddy tank-like pool, like a big bathtub at that in size and shape. Nestling among grass-grown rocks, its brown surface stirred as though with a gentle simmer of heat. “There’s a spring in there,” said Randolph.
“Sure, sure. The old folks say the spring oils up your joints or cures your bellyache. But nobody uses it, not if Dhoh’s reported around.” Reuben Pipe Feather laughed again. “I wonder how that yarn started, and how fast and far it’s grown.” producing tobacco-sack and papers, he vindicated his Hollywood cowboy training by rolling a cigarette with one hand.
Randolph squatted and dipped fingers in the pool. It felt faintly warm, perhaps from the sun. Then he studied the scum on his fingers. It was oily, sticky. Still squatting, he peered at the overflow in the waterside grass, then rose and studied a stretch of earth beyond, damp and bare. “You say nobody comes here.”
“Nobody.” Reuben Pipe Feather’s brown lips pursed and blew a smoke ring in the still bright air.
“But I see tracks.” Randolph pointed. “Fresh, they look to be.”
He walked around the edge of the pool. The damp earth held two tracks at the very brink and two more beyond, pointing away.
Behind him Randolph heard the sudden, sharp intake of his companion’s breath. He glanced back. Reuben Pipe Feather’s face was brown and jaunty no longer, but gray and sick. Reuben Pipe Feather’s lips sagged, the cigarette fell from him. His eyes were wide.
“Will you look at that?” he whispered hoarsely, and Randolph looked. A moccasin track, but the other—
Broad, strong, flat, it looked like the impress of a great long axe head. The toes—yes, the toes had, each at its end, a slash-lean mark. Even James Randolph, who was no woodsman, knew what a bear track must look like.
“Mr. Randolph.” Reuben Pipe Feather was badly frightened. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Why?”
“You know what those tracks are, Mr. Randolph.” The young Indian was walking away.
“You said you didn’t believe—”
“I do now. And I’m not going to stay. Come on.” Randolph did not move, and Reuben Pipe Feather was heading for the trail. “Then I’ll foot it back to the post.” And he moved faster than one would think possible in those cowboy boots.
Randolph smiled under his mustache. Undoubtedly the youngster had brought him out here to play a joke. Must have made the tracks himself and pretended… But nobody, Indian or white, could have made his face grow gray like that.
Another study of the tracks. Randolph wished he knew more about animals and their feet. This might be a mockery of a bear track, achieved by a distorted, claw-fringed moccasin. Again, it might not. He focused his camera again and snapped it.
The metallic click was answered by a deep grunt from one side, and Randolph fairly whipped up his head and stared.
No wonder he thought he had been left alone at the pool. Even with a grunt to give him direction, he looked twice before he saw the grunt-maker, squatting crumpled beside and half behind a clump of big dried weeds.
It was a lean figure, swathed in an ancient blanket of a brown that was bleached and weathered to a dead-leaf paleness. Abundant and untidy gr
“Ahi,” Randolph managed an Indian greeting.
“Good afternoon,” replied a deep, gentle voice. “It is hot.”
“You speak American,” said Randolph gratefully,
“I have learned many tongues,” was the rejoinder. “Among them, the American.” The crumpled figure stirred and rose. The blanket fell from chin to earth, covering an ancient leanness like a toga. “Is that what they call a camera?”
“Yes,” said Randolph. “I took a picture of these tracks.”
The old man came forward slowly, stiffly but not shakily. Randolph saw beneath the abundant gray hair a face that matched the toga-blanket, a face dark and Roman, with a firm mouth, great hooked nose, deep steady black eyes, a crisscross and labyrinth of aged lines and wrinkles. “Yuh,” said the gentle voice, deeper still. “Dhoh’s tracks. What will you do with the picture?”
“Publish it. Show it to other people. Find out what it is.”
“Dhoh’s tracks,” repeated the ancient. From inside the blanket crept the left hand, to gesture. It was a lean and withered hand, brown and dry-seeming as a sheaf of twigs, but it had flexibility, even grace. “I heard the young fool talking. Ahi! He lost his doubts in the time it takes to draw one quick breath.”
“You believe in Dhoh?” prompted Randolph hopefully.
A brief nod of affirmation. “Yuh. Because I know. I am older than any, perhaps, of those others.” The thin hand wafted a little gesture toward the reservation. Glancing that way, Randolph saw that Reuben Pipe Feather had gone out of sight around a bend of the road. “They have funny beliefs. Most of them they made up. But I know about Dhoh. American, where are you going?”
“Back to my car.” Randolph pointed with his thumb. “Will you ride with me?”
“You do not want to trail Dhoh by his tracks?”
Randolph shook his head. “The damp earth ends here in the coarse grass. I’m no trailer.”
“Not you. But I, I am a good trailer.” The draped old leanness moved away through the rustling grass, and stooped. Another grunt. “Here are more marks. Will you come?”
Randolph felt excited, mystified. “Wait. Dhoh—isn’t that a name of an evil spirit? Something half man and half bear?”
“So it has been believed.” The brown face peered bade. “But I am not afraid, American. Are you?”
Randolph scoffed away the notion. “Of course not, old man.”
“Then come on. We will follow Dhoh’s trail.”
Side by side they did so. At least Randolph kept pace and tried, without success, to see what the bright old eyes kept finding among the grass. Once or twice Randolph spied a broken stem, a crushed leaf—that was all. He remembered that the old wild Indians could follow a trail across a naked rock. But maybe this old chap was joking, pretending, like Reuben Pipe Feather.
“‘See,” said the ancient, and again his left hand moved free of the blanket-folds. “Dhoh was here.”
A bald splotch of ground among the grass-tufts, full of fine dust—and in it a single track, broad and flat and fringed with claw-slashes. Randolph paused, scolding himself for feeling cold. “How did he make that mark?”
“With his naked foot.”
“He doesn’t wear a trick shoe?”
“American,” said the old man in dignified protest, “even that young idiot tells a true track from a false one.”
“Maybe it’s a real bear track,” offered Randolph. “Not a witch’s track.”
“There have been no real bears here since the Americans took the country from the Indians. I would be more surprised to see signs of a real bear than to see signs of Dhoh.”
He moved ahead, with his stiff but nimble gait, “Ahi,” he said. “Another mark. See, the claw-touch on those broad leaves. Dhoh headed into this little ravine. It will lead to where he lives among the hills.”
So confidently and promptly did the old Indian take his way in the direction of the ravine that Randolph was ashamed to linger. One backward glance showed his car parked on reservation ground, far away and alone. “Come,” his companion urged him.
Randolph decided to come. “Tell me about Dhoh,” he asked.
“Dhoh is Dhoh. There is nothing like him.”
“Apparently not,” agreed Randolph, but his mind was on other bear-demons in tales he had heard. The Lapps had a bear spirit, alternately to be feared and prayed to. The Ainus, those inexplicable white savages with beards on Japan’s northernmost islands, believed that they descended from a bear hero. And only Mudjekeewis, the Chippewa wind-god, dared challenge Miche Mokwa, a monster bear—that was in Hiawatha. What did the Piegans say, the tribe called Blackfeet? Bear is near kin to man. Do not eat it, or kill it without a muttered apology for killing a brother.
“But you said you knew about Dhoh,” persisted Randolph. He hoped that the old Indian would not fall silent. If they did that, there was no talking with them.
The firm mouth was touched with a close smile, like the smile of a patient grandfather. “I will tell you, American. It all happened an old man’s lifetime ago. In those days the Indians worshipped their own way, before the Americans forbade them.”
“The Americans don’t forbid now,” Randolph made haste to remind. They had entered the gully between two bluffs and he had a little difficulty with his footing, for the low point had been washed by recent flows of rainwater until the stones were loose underfoot. He slipped and stumbled, but the old Indian stalked surely along. On either side of them rose boulders and thickets of brush above, shading away the sky and the sunlight. It reminded Randolph of the strange rough country into which Rip Van Winkle strolled to meet the dwarfs with their cask of enchanted liquor. “The Indians are allowed their old beliefs,” elaborated Randolph. “The Indian Bureau has seen to that for more than a dozen years. Ever since Secretary Ickes and Collier—”
“Ahi, that is true, now. But in the meantime,” and the old man spat, “the tribes have forgotten most of their old worship-ways. They forgot the fasting that young men must undergo to find their friends among the animal spirits. I want to tell you about a young man, a boy, whose fast was one of the last held by his tribe.”
“Do tell me,” begged Randolph.
“The boy was growing into a man. His uncles and grandfathers prepared him by singing and telling him things at night. On the chosen morning he left his father’s lodge and came somewhere out here.” Once again the thin old hand made a flourish of indication. “He made a shelter of brush and spread his blanket and lay there. He had water in a clay pot, but no food. He must not eat or sleep or move until he heard the voice he had come to hear.”
Randolph remembered hearing or reading something of that old custom. A youngster waited until hunger and lonely quiet half hypnotized him into what he fancied as a vision, generally of some animal spirit. That became his secret medicine, his focus of personal worship.
“The boy stayed a long time,” the quiet voice continued. “Most fasts in those old years lasted three days or four at most. But the boy watched the sun rise and set six times. Seven times. Eight. He was afraid that he was not wanted by any spirit, but then he remembered that if such a wait happened, the waiter was destined for something big in medicine. At the ninth rise of the sun it was that the spirit of the bear—Naku-ma, came and spoke to him. The bear stood thus.”
The old man stopped and drew himself up, straight and dignified. For all his leanness he suddenly put on an aspect that was ursine. He gazed solemnly at Randolph.
“The bear,” continued the old Indian, “spoke to Dhoh, the boy. It called him brother and son. Naku-ma, the spirit of the bear, saw that Dhoh was weak and faint, and brought him food for them to eat together. Naku-ma said that he had waited long to try Dhoh, to find him worthy of receiving the power of the spirits, that could do almost anything and everything. Naku-ma gave the powers to the boy.”
“What powers?” Randolph was a little tired. He sat down on a projecting gnarled root against one bluff that hemmed in the gully. The car, the trail, the muddy pool were out of sight and worlds away.
“Naku-ma showed him how to cure a wound by breathing on it,” said the old man, standing straight and motionless. “Naku-ma showed him how to heal the sick by chewing medicine plants and breathing on the sick ones. Naku-ma showed him how to mix war paint that would turn the blows of an enemy, and gave him a power in his right hand that would strike a blow of death every time. Naku-ma whispered in his ear, and Dhoh could understand all languages. Naku-ma hugged him in his arms, and Dhoh had strength greater than the strongest warrior.” Again the firm mouth smiled, close-lipped. “Why do you ask me to tell you these old things? You are an American. You laugh at me inside yourself. You do not believe.”
