Nothing a wendigo swallows stays with it. It is the hungriest animal in the north and has not gained an ounce in any year I have watched it: a nine-foot frame of ribs and sinew under a skull like an elk's, with antlers broken short on the left side. I have followed it through three winters out of Ulvenmark, a timber hamlet of eleven roofs on the Skarra lake, and what follows is the third.
It began with the dogs. Knut Aarvik's team stopped on the Ulvenmark portage at dusk, sat down in the traces, and turned their backs to the spruce. Then the cold changed. A pocket of it, still and damp, settled over the sled and frosted the inside of my collar. Along the portage the treetops were snapped off in a line, each broken end white with rime. From the ice below Isfjellvik, a mile away, a voice called Aarvik by name, in his dead brother's pitch, with the long vowels drawn out like wire.
People at Ulvenmark do not answer a voice from outside after dark until it has called a third time, since the third call is always a neighbor's. Aarvik says the wendigo has never managed a third. I have no way to check this, and nobody has been willing to help me try. He scattered a handful of stove ash over the sled runners, held his dogs by the scruffs, and said nothing. The voice called twice and stopped. By morning the sled stood untouched, the dogs slept in a ring, and the only mark in the yard was a sapling stripped of bark and furred with frost. Stripped saplings are how the trappers track it. The prints are the other way.
They cross the lake ice toward Isfjellvik, long and narrow, melted at the rim and barely pressed into the snow, though the animal stands nine feet. My first winter, the snapped treetops along the portage were fifteen feet up. Last winter they were thirteen. This year they are eleven, and I cannot say whether it is shrinking, stooping, or has learned to reach. With a fifty-foot linen tape and a man at each end, I measured between the two nearest prints. The snow under each was pressed less than an inch, and the stride came to eleven feet four inches, heel to heel.
- Classification
- Hunger spirit, cold-bound predator
- Habitat
- Spruce forest and frozen lake ice
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft tall, stride of 11 ft 4 in
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern spruce forest and frozen lakes
- Binomial
- Cervus inedia glacialis
- Diet
- Anything it is not offered
- Temperament
- Patient, mimicking, never satisfied