“Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. White men, with their dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening swamp a hundred miles away.”
Blackwood’s story ensnares the reader through the gradual, slow release of unease. We are drip fed disquiet from early on in the story so we feel slightly aware of ‘something’ yet keep trying to forget what we intuitively ‘know’…that ‘something’ beyond us is waiting just over there, getting nearer. The slow release of uneasy detail unsettles through the careful personification of the approaching weather, suggesting that nature in this wilderness has its own design; its own rules and motivations. So we notice that the wilderness has ‘jaws’ and the cold air ‘pricked’ and that winter releases ‘bleak odors.’ One part of the wilderness seems to call to another. Dream becomes reality and nightmare all at once. So ‘something’ is amiss or is on the move. the word ‘electrical’ is stunning in its incongruity and therefore insinuates the uncanny…
What an imagination! Beware of moss!