“Wendigo.”
“Ah,” gasped Charlie. He knew the story.
“Who can believe such stuff?”
“Maybe people who don’t have a single person willing to listen to them become Wendigos.”
“That’s some story.”
“We’ll need a drum to tell our story,” Jake said. “Hey bro, we have one!” he exulted and carefully tapped his fingers on the white cardboard. I’ll be careful with it.”
“Maybe, some other stuff, too,” Charlie added.
They went back to the trash heap to take various items and returned to the Meeting Place’s front steps to sit down and prepare for the ritual.
Rather than recite the tale, they decided to act it out. For some reason, the presence of the sign had made the surroundings dissolve. Not that they denied the reality of the objects defining their environment, but rather the hold those objects had on them. It was as if everything around them had become dumb, a dumb show more precisely, a series of gestures at best for which the onlooker had to supply the dialogue.
Toronto smelled of dead Indians.
“The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.“
According to legend, the wendigo brings with it a cold chill; as if it carries the winter wind. Its nails are long and sharp to assist its hunting, as well as its teeth which sit so in its mouth that it tears the skin around it. The wendigo’s eyes are hollow, its face gaunt, the eyes described as a haunting glowing red or white. Its screech is said to make any who hear it lose consciousness from sheer terror. They say the closer you are to one, the colder it gets and you are able to see your breath even in the warmest summer months.
In legend, wendigos could be created two different ways. The most common way is for a regular person, who in a desperate situation, ends up resorting to cannibalism and is overtaken with the manitou of the wendigo, and turns into one themselves. The second way was much less common but it was told that an evil practitioner could curse the person. In one story, this was done by using special words over a small wooden figurine and gifting it to that person.
The wendigo hunts with speed and stealth and is the best hunter of any creature. It devours people and tears them to shreds. The creature’s hunger can never be satisfied, as it is the curse that the wendigo is forever stuck. The curse was created as punishment for breaking the biggest taboo in culture– cannibalism.
These creatures were said to stalk the northern woodlands; mainly around the Great Lakes regions; Michigan, Minnesota, and Ontario.
So the white Christian, even if atheist, social worker smiled. She knew better.
Just a couple drunk savages, the tourist said, walking quickly by.
