~ Chapter One ~

“You should not have come.”

Graeme Baird was inclined to agree. The weather, bitterly cold compared to his native Scotland, was beginning to show its teeth. Even though the family had done its best to make the ancient clapboard house cozy, the wind and snow snuck into the home through cracks, continually dusting the wooden floor with white glitter.

“Hush, Grandmother.” The man turned to Graeme. “Please don’t listen to her. She’s never recovered from that night.”

The woman lurked in a corner of the room, tucked into an old recliner like a spider in its web. Her face was crossed with a million lifelines; it was impossible to determine her age. In the dim light, her eyes shone as she glared at him, waiting to see if he heeded her warning.

“She saw it as well?” Graeme was shocked. He’d never before heard of anyone surviving an encounter with this creature, let alone an elderly woman.

Knute inclined his head. “We all did,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Some of us handled it better than others. My sister, she lost her mind. She lives in a home now. I try to visit her whenever I’m town but she—she doesn’t recognize me.”

“Can you tell me what happened that night?” Graeme asked, even though he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know. Whether it was the cold or the woman glaring at him, he’d started to shiver and was unable to stop.

“Tell him, Knute,” the old woman said when the man hesitated. “Tell him, and then perhaps he will think better of this madness. This creature cannot be captured. It is too powerful.”

And yet, you are alive. How?

Knute raised his eyes to meet Graeme’s. “You will pay me?”

“Yes, as we agreed. Three hundred pounds sterling for your story, and an additional eight hundred pounds to take me to the creature. If I should manage to capture it, there will be a nice bonus in it for you.”

“All right.” He drew a deep breath, and Graeme could hear it rasp in the man’s throat. He realized then that Knute was ill. “I only ask because the telling costs me. I am not well, and if I should not survive the night, I want to know my family is taken care of.”

Graeme rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. “You have my word.”

Knute remained silent for a time—so long that the adventurer feared the man had lost his nerve. With all the fearsome creatures he’d collected, he’d yet to encounter one that inspired such loathing and dread.

Finally, the man cleared his throat.

“All right,” he said. “Let us begin.”

~ Chapter Two ~

The winter had been difficult, which wasn’t uncommon. Winters in the Canadian north usually are. But this particular winter had been brutal, Knute explained. The deer herds they depended upon for survival had moved on, leaving only the small rodents and birds, and soon even they were gone. His people were starving. The most vulnerable among them, the old and the very young, began to die. Many families lost their children to the famine and lapsed into a state of perpetual grief.

“It was a very dark time, and it was about to get worse.”

Soon rumors spread among the villagers. Tales of a creature eight or nine feet tall, with long, curved fangs and glowing eyes. Knute dismissed the stories as ravings from the starving, but found he no longer preferred to hunt at night. Once dusk fell, the uneasy feeling that something watched him—something malevolent—beset him.

“Our Elders have warned of this creature for some time. They say it haunts our people, that it will never leave, and always reappears in times of misfortune and death. I’d never taken the stories seriously. I believed they were just that, mere stories told to keep children from misbehaving. Until that night.”

The night Knute had returned from hunting even earlier than before, but this time, he did not come empty-handed. He’d managed to shoot a crow, his arrow still piercing the bird’s heart. The meat would be tough, but his wife would be able to work her magic with it, turn it into some semblance of a meal. Though it was bad luck to kill a crow, he prayed the animal spirits would forgive him. It had been so long since he’d had protein of any kind. Soon his muscles would be too weak for him to hold his bow steady, and when that day came, his family would starve like the others.

It was dusk. The crunch of his moccasins on the snow had a strange echo. Sometimes Knute stopped to listen, and he swore the crunching sound lingered too long. Was someone following him? Perhaps another beast, starving and desperate, had decided he was food?

As he paused, he heard the noise again. Crunch crunch crunch. There was no mistaking it—something was following him. Clutching the arrow that held his dinner, Knute gained speed, but the faster he moved, the more he felt pursued, imagining the thing’s hot breath tickling the back of his neck. He sprinted through the snow until he saw the familiar lights of his house. Running full-tilt to the door, he yanked it open and threw himself inside without once looking behind him.

His family stared at him as he stood there, chest heaving, unable to speak. Finally, he thrust his prize at his wife, who took it—bow and all—into the kitchen without saying a word.

“There was no need to speak. They all knew what had happened. They could see it on my face.”

“You believe it was the creature?” Graeme’s teeth chattered. His fingers had turned blue with cold. He couldn’t imagine how the family survived like this for months each year. One day was proving too much for him.

“I know it was. You’ll understand once you see it. Its presence inspires fear like nothing else, as if Death himself is on your heels.”

Another hunter was not as lucky as Knute, his bloody remains discovered by two children who had gone to pick rosehips the following morning. Their screams woke the village.

“They say the creature was once a warrior, a man who defended our people against settlers who aimed to destroy us. His lust for destruction and death twisted him, turned his noble intentions into evil, until he was more monster than man. That was when the wendigo possessed him.”

As Knute said the creature’s name, his grandmother hissed and made a warding-off gesture.

“No one likes to speak of him, as he represents our darkest natures. But you know the stories.”

Graeme nodded. Going by the traditional folklore, wendigos were once human, people driven to consume the flesh of their own through desperation. The curse of the wendigo meant those unfortunate souls would never find peace or satiety, but would roam the land, monstrous and starving, forced to murder for survival.

“A fortnight passed. Several more villagers were found, mutilated in the snow, until no one dared leave their homes after dusk. We hoped the creature would leave, but we’d only made its survival more difficult.

“We’d only made it angry.”

The night Knute’s family saw the creature had never been spoken of since. His wife and children did not want him to tell the story, no matter how well it paid. They had left to spend the evening at his in-laws.

“I have never seen my wife so furious. I am not at all certain she’ll come back.”

Graeme started to apologize, but Knute held up his hand, cutting him off. “Sometimes a man has to do things for his family, things a woman will not understand.” Staring into the distance, past the adventurer’s shoulder, the man’s voice turned flat, almost robotic. “I haven’t had a moment’s rest since that night. Perhaps sharing my story will help me sleep. And if he agrees to go with you, you will bring my village peace as well.”

Graeme wasn’t certain he still wanted the creature. His collection inspired fear in others, yes, but through no fault of their own. They could not help being monstrous. He had never before willingly sought out evil.

“I was as terrified as everyone else in the village, but I had a different view of the creature itself,” Knute said.

“How so?”

“Our Elders say the warrior was a product of rape, an unwanted child created from violence when his mother was taken by a settler. The warrior’s own mother never wanted him, and he slayed his father to get vengeance for her rape. An immoral shaman saw the warrior’s talent for murder when the boy was still a child, and encouraged his desire for revenge. He trained him to be a ruthless killer, almost from the time he was born.

“The child lived a miserable life, by all accounts, with one foot in our world and the other in the settlers’. He was accepted in neither. How could one not feel pity for such a child? His evil nature was not his doing.”

Knute described how fear and dread had overtaken his village that winter. People rarely dared to leave their homes, even in daylight, but still they died, one by one. That night, he’d decided to risk hunting once more. It had been so long since his family had enjoyed a hot meal, and he saw death in their faces, as if they were already ghosts.

“Once again I left near dusk, and once again I shot a crow.”

He heard something following him as he headed for home, a creature most likely drawn by the scent of the bird’s blood, but this time he didn’t run. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but part of me was tired of the struggle. I wanted the wendigo to destroy me; I wanted it to be over.”

The man’s voice broke, and Graeme resolved to double the sum he’d promised. He’d never experienced that kind of hunger before, couldn’t imagine what it was like to watch, helpless, as your children slowly starved to death.

“When I reached the house, I opened the door and walked inside, even though I knew the beast was right behind me. My children were waiting, hoping I’d brought them something to eat, and they froze when they saw it, too frightened even to scream. When I saw the terror in their eyes, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. As miserable as we were, they still wanted to live.

“I turned, sheltering them with my body, and that’s when I laid eyes on the creature for the first time. It was too tall to get through the doorway upright—it had to crouch and scuttle inside, and when it rose again, it filled the room. It had to have been nine feet tall, maybe even ten.

“The stink of it was tremendous. My wife fainted, but my children only whimpered.”

“What did it look like?” Graeme asked. He leaned forward, forgetting the cold.

“Imagine a wolf standing on two legs with hooves for feet and antlers on its head. Its chest was sunken and emaciated, its fur hanging in tatters so you could see its ribs. Its eyes glowed and as it snarled, all you could see is row upon row of horrid, yellow teeth. To see it is to stare into the depths of your worst nightmares.”

“But I don’t understand—if it was in your home, how did you survive? Why didn’t it kill you like the others?”

“It was my grandmother. She knew who it was—or what it had been—and called it by its true name. The name seemed to have some power over him. She told him to take whatever food we had, but to leave her family alone. Incredibly, it did as she asked.”

Graeme stared at the woman in the recliner with new respect. He couldn’t imagine remaining calm in the presence of such an appalling creature. Even he, the great monster hunter, would have panicked.

“Food is its weakness,” the old woman said. “If you still plan to go ahead with this madness, you’d better be well prepared.”

“But why do you think it will come back? Surely if it meant to kill you, it would have done so that night.”

Knute sighed, rubbing his eyes. “It always comes back. I think it’s waiting for the day when Grandmother will no longer be here to protect us.”

~ Chapter Three ~

The men waited in the darkness, the cache of food between them. The stink of the raw meat was nauseating.

Graeme was thankful for the rifle that rested across his lap, even though Knute had warned him the weapon would do him no good. Its familiar weight provided some comfort, if nothing else.

His eyelids began to droop as the moon rose in the sky. They’d already been waiting for hours. He wondered if he’d been fooled, taken in by a wily man who was frantic to save his family. There was no monster, no creature that haunted these woodlands. It had all been a ruse…

Unable to resist his exhaustion, he closed his eyes and slept.

“Baird! Baird, are you awake?”

His eyes flew open and saw a pair of dull yellow eyes staring back.

Before he could gather his wits, he screamed. The creature snarled, revealing fangs stained with blood and a horrifying stench. Graeme gagged. Strong arms pulled him away from the window.

The door flew open, slamming against the wall of the house with such power it splintered.

“Please don’t hurt my family, I beg of you,” Knute stammered. With shaking hands, he gestured at the pile of meat Graeme had brought. “Look what we have for you. All of it is yours.”

Sizing up the creature, Graeme knew he couldn’t take it by force. It would easily overpower both men, and no mortal weapon could wound it.

“Little Bear, our visitor has come for you,” Knute’s grandmother said in a surprisingly strong voice. “It is he who has brought you this offering.”

The wendigo bared its teeth at her, snarling at the mention of its name, but continued to eat, tearing the meat apart with its clawed hands.

“He promises you a better life at his home in the hills, where you will never be cold again, and will always have enough to eat.”

With the way the creature was making the pile of flesh disappear, Graeme wondered if his entire fortune would be enough to keep it fed.

At the old woman’s words, the wendigo paused, eying the adventurer with a look of curiosity. Graeme shuddered, unnerved to see such a human expression on the creature’s face.

Gathering his nerves, he summoned the courage to speak. “You have my word,” he said. “You will never go hungry again.”

The monster continued to eat, and Graeme drew back, unable to bear the stink any longer. Even if the creature agreed to accompany him to Scotland, how on earth would he stand it?

After the meat was gone, the thing turned to the old lady and snarled. Graeme raised his rifle, but Knute put a hand on his arm, shaking his head. Wait.

“He agrees to go with you, but if you don’t keep your word, he’ll devour you and your entire family,” Grandmother said.

By this time, Graeme was shaking so badly he could barely hold the rifle.

“If he gets out of line, you just call him by his true name—Little Bear, son of Little Dove.”

The creature lunged at her, teeth snapping, but the Elder didn’t so much as flinch. “I’ve had about enough out of you,” she said. “Be gone, and never darken our doorway again.”

Grunting, the creature left the house, lowering its head to fit through the doorway. It waited on the step for him, the steam rising off its shoulders making it appear as though it were on fire.

Trying his best to hide his fear, Graeme paid Knute his fee and then some, ignoring the man’s protests at the increased rate. “You have endured enough suffering for several lifetimes. May you and your family also never go hungry again.”

With reluctance, he left the little house and ventured into the bitter cold, following the wendigo into the night.