The Wind Walker Pt. 1

(Hey guys! So, the Vermont cryptids article will need a few more days of work before it’s ready for publishing. I’m aiming to release it on Halloween. In the meantime, here’s my very first serious attempt at writing a short story from my high school days. Enjoy!)

The following statement was composed by RCMP Sergeant William Wortman based on an interview with junior Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization member Darren Phillips, age 25, one of only two survivors of the incident that occurred in Mount Robson Provincial Park between November 12-18, 2015. The other survivor, Janet Woods, age 23, was too seriously injured to be interviewed, although she is expected to make a full recovery. What follows is Darren’s recounting of the harrowing events of those six days.

Thursday, November 12

So it’s mid-November, and winter is fast approaching us in the Canadian Rockies. The weatherman expects a blizzard in two days, and the temperature could drop as low as -25 degrees Celsius. Most of the other hunting parties in the Rainbow Ridge area were smart enough to douse their campfires, pack their supplies, and head out of the mountains to ride out the storm in the safety of their own homes.

But things were different with our team. We weren’t after mule deer, moose, elk, or caribou. We were hunting a mystery, and we thought we were this close to solving it. You know the name of the group I’m affiliated with, so you probably know what we were after. All six of us either knew someone who’d seen a Squatch or had had an encounter ourselves sometime in the past. We were excited by the wave of sightings reported in Rainbow Ridge the previous two months and wanted to see for ourselves.

Perhaps I should tell you something about the other guys on the team. Calvin Melville was the oldest, at sixty-one, and a big Neanderthal of a man, which, naturally, meant he was the leader. He owned and ran a hunting supplies store in Kelowna, right on the shores of Okanagan Lake. He says he got into the whole cryptozoology profession after he saw Ogopogo during a fishing trip. However, he insisted on calling it Naitaka out of respect for the First Nations people. He was originally from Bozeman, Montana, but he revoked his U.S. citizenship after getting drafted as a Green Beret in ‘Nam. A lifetime of Marlboros finally caught up to him about three years ago, and he developed lung cancer. His last visit to the doctor had given him eighteen months to live, so he was determined to solve the mystery himself before he died.

The other senior member was August Benoit, a First Nations man from the Timiskaming reserve in Quebec. He was about forty-five, kind of superstitious, but definitely not a coward. I remember one time in Denali National Park when Janet and I stumbled upon a pair of fuckin’ grizzly bear cubs, and we damn near shit our pants. Fortunately, we were upwind, so the mom didn’t catch a whiff of us, and August was just no-nonsense throughout the whole thing. I don’t know what we would have done if he wasn’t there to keep us calm.

Our tech guys were these thirty-something identical twins from Saskatoon named Tyler and Bryan Babcock. They loved the outdoors almost as much as they loved tech and computers. They were in charge of the cameras and recording equipment.

Finally, the rookies out of Edmonton, me and Janet Woods, my high school sweetheart. We’d both graduated from the University of Alberta with degrees in biology just that summer, and we were both dedicated to finding Bigfoot because we thought it would convince the powers that be to listen to the environmentalists. I mean, if there were more creatures like Bigfoot and Ogopogo hidden in the wilderness that humanity hasn’t discovered yet, then it makes sense that there should be more eyes on the loggers and the oil companies, you know?

Anyway, on the night of the fifteenth, we intrepid legend trippers were lounging around the campfire, telling jokes and scary stories. It’s nine in the evening, and the sun is long gone. Tyler, being his usual paranoid self, says at one point that hanging around Rainbow Ridge is too dangerous with the storm approaching. Calvin points out the literal mountain of evidence we’d uncovered over the past five days. We found no less than five different footprint paths, heard calls so loud that they rattled your goddamn sternum, and I shit you not, Tyler got a three-hundred-pound boulder thrown at him that morning. Talk about a fuckin’ heart attack, am I right?

The only thing we didn’t have was a photo or video of these things on camera, and Calvin was convinced that we had zeroed in on the central area of the local clan’s activities. It was only a matter of time before we finally gained irrefutable proof of the Sasquatch’s existence.

But all of those worries had been forgotten as we settled into telling scary stories before bedtime. Janet’s a big fan of early 20th-century weird fiction- you know, stuff like H.P. Lovecraft and all that kind of stuff, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany - so she was reading a story by a guy who heavily inspired Lovecraft. The story was “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood. We were all rather enjoying the story, although August had some criticisms over the way Blackwood portrayed the titular monster.

“Moss eater?” he asked in disbelief when one of the story’s characters described the monster as such. “How do you take one of the most infamous man-eaters in mythology and make him a damn moss eater?!”

This remark naturally piqued our curiosity. “Do you know something about this creature that we don’t?” Calvin asked.

“The Wendigo is a truly vile spirit that Algonquin peoples all around the Great Lakes region whisper about. They say you must never resort to cannibalism in the Canadian woods, even if it is to save yourself from death, because if you do, you will be infected with a disease that makes you vomit blood. When the sufferer inevitably dies, they are resurrected as something similar to a human but changed for the worse. Your teeth grow so large and sharp that they shred your lips. Your heart literally turns to ice. The skin grows so tight against the bones that you look like a walking mummified corpse. Your skin goes dry, your head sprouts deer antlers and your mind becomes bent toward only one desire… finding more and more raw human flesh to eat. From then on, you wander the cold north woods for the rest of eternity as a cunning and powerful yet ravenous hunter, forever looking for more innocent victims to eat and never finding enough to satisfy that primal hunger.”

We were silent for a while as we took all that information in. Then Bryan broke the silence by pointing out what we all thought.

“Damn, that sounds way scarier than the monster this Blackwood guy wrote about.”

“Yeah,” Tyler agreed, “that’s one weird-ass zombie.”

“You don’t believe things like that actually exist, do you, August?” Janet asked.

“It’s a big forest, Janet. You never know what might be lurking out there. Hell, there might be a Wendigo looking at us through the trees right now.” He flashed a cheeky smile at Janet as he said this.

“Do you want me to stop reading the story then?” she asked.

“No, no, keep going!” he reassured. “Once you get past all the cultural appropriation, it’s not half bad.”

The group laughed, and Janet continued reading. I couldn’t help but notice that August seemed preoccupied as she read on, as he seemed to constantly side-eye the tree line as if someone was watching him.

Friday, November 13

As it turned out, the next day was a big skunk. We had spent ten hours in the woods southeast of Kinney Lake, where most of the activity we’d recorded had been documented since around six in the morning. Hardly a day had gone by the rest of that week where we hadn’t recorded a significant howl, saw a furtive movement in the trees, and took plaster casts of eighteen-inch tracks. That day, however, it was as if they had received word of the coming blizzard and had packed up and left, just like we probably should have done by now.

Calvin was beside himself. As the sun started to retire in the west around four o’clock, he exclaimed, “I don’t understand this! Where the hell did they all go?! The place was crawling with Squatches yesterday!”

“They obviously left in a hurry,” August explained. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

We had split into the usual three groups of two: August and Calvin, Tyler and Bryan, and me and Janet. No sooner had August disclosed his bad feelings than trouble befell the twins.

“Guys, help! Bryan’s fallen off a cliff.”

“Calm down,” said Calvin. “How high is the cliff?”

“Sixty… seventy feet, maybe. A hemlock broke his fall!”

“Bryan, can you hear me? You all right?”

“Nothing’s broken, but my forehead’s got a nasty cut,” said Bryan. “Did you hear that noise, Tyler?”

“What noise?”

“That siren, or whatever it was,” Bryan answered. “That’s why I went over the cliff. It’s like it made me space out or whatever, and I didn’t know where I was going and… wait, there it is again!”

This time, all of us heard it. Tyler said, “What the… that doesn’t sound like any animal I’ve ever heard.”

“It sounds like an air raid siren,” I said.

“Maybe it’s a howler monkey that escaped from a zoo somewhere,” Janet suggested.

“No,” said Bryan, “no, someone’s out there fucking with us, I know it! Come on out, you bastard! Show yourself!”

He started shooting randomly into the trees with a revolver that he liked to carry with him during these types of expeditions.

“Bryan, for God’s sake, put that damn gun away!” Calvin yelled into the walkie-talkie. But all he got for an answer was a roar that sounded like a cross between a gorilla, a bear, and something from a long-gone prehistoric age, followed by agonized screams and the sounds of a struggle.

“Something’s attacking him! Where’s the 30-06?!” August exclaimed.

“I got it with me right now!” Calvin answered. “Let’s get the hell over there!”

It took us a while since the other teams were each about a mile away from the attack site, but by the time we’d gotten over there, whatever had attacked Bryan was long gone. Tyler had reached the bottom and frantically called out Bryan’s name.

Calvin struggled to catch his breath, what with his respiratory tract being compromised as it was. When he regained his breath, he asked Tyler if he had seen what happened down there.

“No, the tree cover was too thick. I couldn’t see what was attacking him. I…” He broke off, sobbing. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Calvin was trying to think of a considerate way to answer that question when August suddenly staggered backward from behind a hemlock tree with a cry of “Oh my God!”

We rushed over to see what was the matter. Looking up toward the top of the tree, it was apparent this was the one that had broken Bryan’s fall, as all the branches down one side were bent and broken. But they were also covered with far more blood than a simple cut on the forehead might have discharged. The reason was lying at the bottom of the tree- Bryan’s severed head. The left side of his face was horribly mangled, and a raven had just plucked out his left eyeball.

Saturday, November 14

Luckily, the night passed without incident, and both the blizzard and the attack had made it clear that we needed to be out of there by morning’s light. Calvin got us up early, hoping we could beat the blizzard, but the snow had already started falling as we finally pulled out in Calvin’s SUV. We had put Bryan’s head in a cooler full of ice for the authorities to get a good look at. As we traveled across a mountainside road and the storm winds seemed eager to push us over the side, we speculated on what had killed our friend so savagely.

“It definitely wasn’t a wolf,” Janet said. “The tooth marks on the face didn’t match up. Granted, I don’t have any of my skulls with me to check, but…”

“I know you had a knack for identifying teeth marks at the university,” I said. “What do you think it was, as best as memory serves?”

“That’s the weird thing about it. They looked… I don’t know, like they were half canine and half primate if that makes any sense.”

“No, Janet, it doesn’t make any sense!” Tyler snapped. “What are you trying to say? That my brother was killed by a fucking werewolf?!”

“I’ve got an idea,” Calvin said with a bitter tone of sarcasm. “Why don’t we hold off on the theories until we get an expert opinion on what did it?”

“It was a Wendigo,” August said. “It had to be.”

Everyone was silent for a few seconds, staring at August like he had just proclaimed that he could vomit out his insides like a sea cucumber.

Calvin then asked, “August, what the hell kind of bullshit statement is that?”

“My grandfather told me that one of the ways a Wendigo might snatch its victims was to drive them into a frenzy by driving air through its lips to create a siren sound. If the victim is carrying a gun, then they might resort to shooting in all directions before the wendigo closes in. He also said that animals followed them to feast on leftovers- crows to peck the eyes out, bears to extract marrow from the bones…”

“August, you said yourself that this Wendigo creature was just a myth,” Calvin rebuked.

“I think August might be on to something,” Tyler said to the surprise of everyone. “I mean… remember how clean the cut on Bryan’s neck was? His head was cut off, not ripped off. Wolves can’t do that, or bears. I don’t think even Squatches can do that. And that siren noise… I’ve heard howler monkeys before, Janet. That was no howler monkey. Don’t you think…?”

“Enough!” Calvin slammed on the brakes, despite the danger of getting stranded due to the heavy snowfall, and turned to face them.

“Tyler, just calm the hell down, will you? You’re stressed and not thinking straight. Just keep quiet, and you can rest when we get back to civilization! As for you, August, if I hear any more talk about this Wendigo bastard, I’ll…”

“Guys, quiet!” I shouted. “Anyone else hear a rumbling sound?”

Everyone became bug-eyed as rocks and snowballs started raining down around the vehicle.

“Shit! Avalanche!” Calvin slammed on the gas, but it was too late. The wall of snow slammed into us and carried us over the edge.

Author’s Commentary

Hello, beautiful watchers!

This piece is a real blast from the past, as it was the very first actual fiction writing piece I ever composed, all the way back during my senior year of high school.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the main reasons I wrote that story in the first place was because I was fascinated by the wendigo, and it seemed to be obscure enough that a story about it seemed warranted. However, the wendigo appears to have gained a significant boost in popularity in the last decade, probably thanks to the success of the 2015 survival horror video game Until Dawn. Thus, much of the story's novelty when I first wrote it seems to be lost. Indeed, even rereading it recently, it reads like a generic monster movie.

Expect more background info on the story when I upload part two later today.