“Pamola’s Caribou” (Weird Tales, May 1948) was the last of seven stories by Roger S. Vreeland. Of its author I can find no real information other than his stories in Dorothy McIlwraith’s late-in-the-day Weird Tales. A letter he wrote in 1945 gave almost no information about him other than he stopped by the office in New York. So he may have been a New Yorker. Maybe. The letter is the author’s research on Friday the 13th. So he was a scholarly fellow. That’s it.
“Pamola’s Caribou” is a Northern only by a stretch. The story is set in Maine, which sits just below Canada. The locale is a rugged mountain called Katahdin. Eighty per cent of the story is concerned with mountain climbing or Native American spiritual beliefs. He tells us of the spirit Pamola and his lightning. A party lead by Doc Cavanaugh go up Katahdin where Larry Scott’s father disappeared. Doc explains that in the old days men used to hunt the mountain caribou for meat and for sport until the herds disappeared. So imagine their surprise when they make it to the plateau known as the Klondike (because it reminded the old timers of that place) and see a caribou!
First they find an old rifle that had belonged to Larry’s dad then they see the caribou fawn. They follow the animal, despite lightning falling nearby. The fawn disappears behind some boulders and the party find a stone house, a roofless structure. An old man sits by a fire. Lightning hits and the man disappears. Inside they find a piece of a human skull. They also find Larry’s father’s watch. Larry says: “Doc! I don’t understand!” Doc tells him not to try. “But the spirit of Pamola must have been very, very powerful!”
Not the most brilliant stuff. The preamble is far too long for the pay-off. The Northern stuff is alright, a look at Native American beliefs and the old days of the frontier. I guess what was lurking in the back of my head was H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” (Weird Tales, July 1928). HPL’s story takes place in the Catskills, a bit further South but still in on the Eastern seaboard. His lightning-crazed mountains have flesh-eating creepers and I was hoping Vreeland might go in that direction. He didn’t.
As a piece of horror fiction, “Pamola’s Caribou” is telegraphed, over-long became typical of much of what McIlwraith published toward the end of Weird Tales. It is a “weird” tale but much less interesting than most 1930s stories. This isn’t to say all late 1940s stories were bad. In the same issue was Ray Bradbury’s “The Black Ferris”, the basis of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). There was also August Derleth, David Grubb and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. “Pamola’s Caribou” was Vreeland’s last story and I don’t know that many cared. McIlwraith’s mere shadow of a letter column (how The Eyrie had fallen!) says that the favorite for that issue was the cover story by Allison V. Harding. Not much else. “The Wolf” by Sewell Peaslee Wright (six months earlier in Weird Tales, November 1927) is by far a better strange Northern.
