Pelle Hovland marks standing timber for the sawmill at Fjellsund, and he reads bark before he reads anything else. A spruce rubbed bare in a band nine feet above the snow, the wood gone gray and the resin glazed hard, goes on his reject list. The glaze dulls saw teeth. It also means a wendigo uses that tree. It returns at dusk every day, the way a cow returns to a fence post, leans its left flank into the trunk and works up and down for most of an hour. Nothing else happens. Pelle has watched from a stump forty yards off. The creature stands ten feet high, ribs printed through skin the color of tallow, chest sunk into a bowl, antlers branching like a dead birch. Its breath freezes into a rope as it exhales. It scratches, grunts once, and goes.
Fjellsund argues about what it wants. Pelle holds that it hunts the hungry. Pernille Aas builds pole larders, a trade the town has only because of the wendigo: peeled spruce posts twelve feet high, a collar of sheet tin, a lid pegged shut. She says it wants stored food and nothing else, and that the people who vanish each winter walked out of empty houses on their own. Both can name a cousin. Pelle still buys his poles from her.
I side with Pernille on the larder and with Pelle on the cold. The creature empties a cache first: hams, rendered fat, flour sacks split along the seam. Then frost climbs the inside of the walls overnight, and a house with nothing in its larder will not hold a fire. The people who leave after that are not taken. They go looking for food in a January that has already decided. Fjellsund keeps one habit against it. From first snow until the ice goes out, a pot of bone broth sits at the back of every stove, topped up before the family eats. Tracks bend a full stride wide of a house with a warm pot. I have followed three.
Across the lake at Ivarsvatn, none of this holds. The wendigo there rubs no trees and has never touched a cache. On the coldest night of each winter it lifts the latch of Pia Strand's kitchen, folds down onto the floor beside the stove and drinks the broth pot dry. In the morning a hare lies on the step. Pelle calls it a different animal. Pernille calls it the same animal with better manners. Pia refills the pot and leaves the latch up.
- Classification
- Winter famine spirit
- Habitat
- Northern spruce forest, deep snow
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 10 ft high, long-limbed and gaunt
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Snowbound northern forests
- Binomial
- Hiemocervus esuriens
- Diet
- Stored meat, fat and household warmth
- Temperament
- Patient, single-minded, indifferent to people