The Wind Walker Pt. 2

Tuesday, November 17

Amazingly, considering that the avalanche threw us off a hundred-foot cliff, none of us experienced any severe injuries. It could’ve been worse, though. The SUV landed on a ledge overlooking another two-hundred-foot drop.

We spent three days on that godforsaken slope. We had no reception on our cell phones, and the radio wasn’t picking up anything. Calvin found a small cave close to where the SUV came to rest, though, so we at least had some protection from the frigid temperatures. We all did our part to ensure our stay was as comfortable as possible.

Well, except for Tyler. The trauma of the past few days had taken its toll on him. Calvin was worried that he was losing his mind. He didn’t speak at all for the next three days. That is until Calvin’s lung cancer started acting up again.

After one nasty coughing fit Tuesday afternoon, Janet asked him if there was anything she could do to help.

“Not much,” he replied, “unless, of course, you’ve got some sort of makeshift chemotherapy kit handy.” He gave a dry laugh, then coughed into his hand. “Oh my God,” he said as he revealed bloodstains on his glove.

Suddenly, Tyler recoiled and threw himself up against the cave wall. There was this expression on his face that looked like a mixture of anger and pure terror on his face. He locked eyes with a very confused August.

“Tell me, August,” he asked, “how do you kill a Wendigo?”

“Why?” said August, obviously afraid of where he was going with this. “There’s no Wendigo here.”

“Maybe not now, but if we don’t act soon, there will be!”

He pointed an accusing finger at Calvin, much to everyone’s shock and horror. Although I think we all knew in our subconscious that an outburst like this was an inevitability. Calvin was equal parts shocked and offended.

“Tyler, what kind of hair-brained bullshit statement is that?”

“Come on, August, help me out here! Didn’t you say that the first sign of a person turning is blood from the mouth?”

“You know he has lung cancer, you dipshit!” Janet said.

“I said the disease makes you vomit blood, enough to kill you,” said August, desperate to keep Tyler from doing anything rash.

Calvin himself chimed in. “Okay, Tyler, say I am a Wendigo. You need to commit cannibalism to become one, right August?”

August, with no small amount of trepidation, nodded yes.

“So,” he continued, “where would I have gotten the meat?”

Tyler faltered for a minute, considering the question. But then his rage flared up stronger than before, and he slammed Calvin against the wall, screaming, “You son of a bitch! You took it off Bryan’s head! DIDN’T YOU, YOU BACKSTABBING MOTHERFUCKER?!!!”

As August rushed to pull him off, I tried to remind him that we lost the cooler in the avalanche, so there was no way he could have gotten his hands on Bryan’s head. Calvin stood in a defensive position, trying to determine what Tyler’s next move would be.

August tried to get Tyler to calm down as he thrashed in his arms like a rabbit caught in a snare. “Tyler…TYLER! Listen to me! Forget everything I said about the Wendigo! I lied, okay! There’s no such thing! It’s all a myth! A hoax! A con! Baloney with a side of cock and balls!”

“August,” Calvin shouted, “watch your hunting knife!”

But his warning came too late. Tyler had managed to get his hands on August’s hunting knife, who cried out in pain as Tyler sank it into his thigh. He then wrenched himself free of the Indian’s arms and threw the knife at Calvin, who covered himself with his arms. The blade stuck in just below the elbow.

“Help me grab him!” August yelled, and Janet and I tried to help bum-rush him. Tyler simply grabbed a log off the fire and swiped at us with it. That’s how I got this burn on my left cheek.

Calvin tried to throw the knife back at Tyler, but he missed. Tyler bent down to pick it up, and Calvin kicked him between the legs. But the adrenaline was pumping in his veins, so he barely even noticed. He kicked Calvin in the stomach, sending him backward onto the fire. Calvin rolled on his stomach, trying to put out his flaming coat, and Tyler took advantage of the distraction to finally land the killing blow, sinking the knife deep into Calvin’s throat.

Tyler could only look over his conquest with morbid satisfaction for a short second before August lunged at him, trying to wrestle the knife from his grasp. Their struggle took them out of the cave mouth and almost over the ledge. Tyler, doped up as he was with the adrenaline rush, quickly gained the upper hand and had August’s throat under his boot.

“You’re in league with them, aren’t you?” said Tyler. “You’re trying to feed us to them, aren’t you, you redskin cocksucker?! But I found you out! Oh yes, I found you out!”

He bent down, holding the knife in a reverse grip. “And know you’re gonna pay for it!”

While all this was happening, I had run over to the smashed remains of the SUV to get a frying pan and some bungee cords. As I frantically searched, however, I heard the telltale sound of the flare gun going off as Tyler suddenly made a choking sound. As it turned out, Janet, desperate to put a stop to Tyler’s rampage, had found the flare gun and used it on him. Tyler stumbled backward as the flare lodged in his mouth, releasing August from the strangling crunch of his boot. The last we ever saw of Tyler Babcock was the top of his head being blasted apart as the flare exploded, knocking him backward off the 200-foot drop.

Later That Evening

The creature that had been stalking us finally revealed itself later that evening, probably sometime around 7 or 8 o’clock. I distinctly remember the sounds I heard that evening as Janet lay prone in my lap, having cried herself to sleep over what had happened to Tyler. The wind shook the branches of the pine trees that were our only living companions on that ridge. Wolves howled, and caribou whistled miles away from our predicament. The distant hooting of a great-horned owl was the one that probably best reflected my mood at that point. The call was as solemn and predatory as the winter weather that threatened to consume us all if we didn’t get back in touch with civilization.

I could see August sitting outside on the ledge, fiddling with the radio and sending mayday signals into the void, hoping that rescue was within range. Laying only three yards away from him was Calvin’s body, covered in pine branches cut from the nearby trees as a makeshift funeral rite that August had performed after tending to the wound in his leg.

Suddenly, I felt Janet twitch in her sleep. She started moaning and talking in her sleep, saying “No” or “Stop.” I debated whether or not to let the dream run its course, but then she started thrashing and yelling, so I shook her awake. Once she realized she was safe in the real world, she threw her arms around me and started sobbing.

“Oh my God, Darren,” she raved, “I dreamt I was alone in the woods! I screamed your name, but you didn’t answer! Then I started hearing that same siren we heard right before we lost Bryan! And then a whole herd of woodland predators burst out of the trees and started tearing me apart! Bears, wolves, crows, wolverines, mountain lions, all of them were tearing open my stomach, ripping off my limbs, pecking my eyes out! I felt all of it, Darren! Everything was pain! Oh my God, I thought I was gonna die, Darren!”

As she collapsed back into an incoherent blubbering, I noticed August standing over my shoulder, obviously concerned. “Everything okay over here, Darren?”

“Nothing I can’t manage, August,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. At least, not until I heard a voice I didn’t recognize.

“This is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police calling the Bigfoot Field Researchers team in Mount Robson Provincial Park. Can you hear me, over?”

August immediately rushed back over to the radio and grabbed the mouthpiece. “This is August Benoit with the BFRO team, over!”

“Confirm that this is the BFRO team that set out from Valemount on Saturday the 6th, over.”

“Yes, yes, the same!” August said. “We were stranded on a ledge three days ago, and three of our team members are dead, over!”

“What is your position, over?”

“We’re on a ledge on the south face of Mount Robson, northeast of Kinney Lake, two hundred feet above the lake’s surface, over.”

“Roger, we should have a chopper over there inside an hour. We’re coming to get you, over.”

By now, Janet’s tears had turned to tears of joy, and August and I were giving each other a high five like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in Predator. “My God,” I said, “we’re gonna make it.”

But our jubilations were silenced as we realized something was moving through the pines above us. We heard the crack of pine branches high above the forest floor, higher than even a grizzly bear should reach, and an unearthly growl. Whatever it was, it was big, and it was headed right toward us.

August’s eyes were wider than I had ever seen them. “Get back in the cave and put out the fire,” he ordered.

I grabbed a blanket and a pile of snow. August winced at the loud sizzling the fire made as we smothered it.

“August, what’s going on?” a very scared and confused Janet asked.

“Quiet!” he said. “She’ll hear us.”

There was silence for a few moments, followed by the sound of something large landing heavily on the rocky ledge. It strolled over to where Calvin’s body lay, and we heard the sickening sound of bones cracking and flesh tearing. It was eating Calvin’s corpse. I was suddenly overwhelmed with anger at the horrible sounds, and before anyone could stop me, I started shouting at the beast.

“Stop eating my friend, you sick fuck! Get out of here!”

I was answered by an ear-piercing shriek that sounded like a middle-aged woman crossed with the haunting cry of a mountain lion. I looked over to August for reassurance, as he was usually the stoic rock that everyone relied on to keep them firm during times of crisis. But looking at him now, that was gone; only a mix of terror and sadness remained.

“It’s her,” he said. “She came back for me.”

“Who, August?” I asked.

August’s answer made my spine crawl even more than the continued sounds of the monster feasting on Calvin’s flesh: “My mother.”

He described what had happened when he was only eight years old. His parents had been heavily involved in political advocacy for the people of Canada’s First Nations. As such, they tended to travel around a lot. One day, though, their plane went down over a remote area of Northern Ontario while they were on a flight from Montreal to Yellowknife. A bunch of winter storms passing through the area hindered rescue efforts, and by the time rescue teams finally reached the site, two weeks had passed.

By then, Mrs. Benoit was the only survivor. She confessed to having resorted to cutting fingers and toes off the other corpses and roasting them over the fire to stay alive. No one judged her for it, but she started acting strange after returning home. She developed a taste for raw flesh, and August and his grandparents would wake up in the middle of the night to see her standing over them, brandishing a knife. The final straw came one morning when she vomited blood over the kitchen table. August’s grandpa, fully convinced that she was turning into a Wendigo, had his wife take August outside while he dismembered her with an axe. The neighbors called the cops, and they caught him trying to burn the remains in his backyard. He begged them to let him finish his work lest the Wendigo return from the dead to seek revenge upon him and his family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he got life in prison instead.

Grandpa Benoit would claim that he could see his daughter’s corpse looking at him through his cell window at night, and he later died in his cell under mysterious circumstances. Soon after, Grandma Benoit would tell neighbors that she could swear she could hear her daughter’s voice calling her from the woods. One day, against her better judgment, she decided to follow the call. No trace of her has ever been found.

August was a high school graduate by then and decided to get out of Dodge. While he claimed he didn’t believe in Wendigos, he kept his grandpa’s hunting knife and axe with him wherever he went.

“I guess deep down, I knew she’d find me one day,” he concluded. “I wanted to believe it was all just an ancient fairytale to instill good morals in young minds. But those howls from deep in the woods followed me everywhere I went. Predatory animals would stalk me. The weather would change unexpectedly. Sometimes, even reality itself would seem to bend around me as if someone had slipped LSD into my drink. Now I know why. She was trying to take me back.”

“Okay, August,” I asked, knowing there was no more logical explanation for what was happening, “let’s say this thing really is a Wendigo. How do we kill it?”

“Fire and silver,” he said, pulling out the axe and the knife. “Fire to melt the beast’s icy heart, silver to dismember the corpse, and fire again to reduce the corpse to ashes and scatter those ashes to the four winds. My grandfather coated the sides of these blades with molten silver as a teenager, as per his father’s instructions. Grandpa told me always to keep them by my side in case I ever cross paths with a Wendigo. I don’t imagine running away is feasible right now, so we’ll have to stand and fight. Either of you got the flare gun?”

Janet slipped toward her rucksack and pulled the gun out, along with several flares she stuffed into her coat pocket. She was over crying about her situation. Now she was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.

“Alright,” said August, handing me the axe. “Stick close to me. Move out!”

One by one, we stepped out into a clear full moon night. Illuminated in the lunar glow was a hunched humanoid figure covered in tufts of white hair, so gaunt that the skin looked shrink-wrapped over the bones. I noticed the large antlers coming from the skull, and I noticed how truly massive the claws on the fingers were. They were so long that they reminded me of the therizinosaurid dinosaurs of the Cretaceous era. It was still eating Calvin’s corpse, and it did not seem to have noticed that we had joined it out in the open.

August said nothing. He just reared his arm and flung the knife straight into the monster’s back. If the blade hadn’t been covered in silver, the creature probably would’ve barely even noticed. But the silver obviously caused a much more painful wound as the beast roared in anger and spun around to face us, rearing up to its full ten-foot height as it did so.

We recoiled in horror at the monster’s face. Much of the formerly human features were hidden by the half-deer, half-bear skull, which covered the upper part of its head. But the mouth, lipless and full of sharp and decaying teeth, was on full display. The creature’s sagging breasts marked its fallen womanhood, and I noticed that the giant claws were actually icicles as moonlight glinted off them. August tried his best to negotiate with the abomination that had once been his mother.

“Mom, if you can hear me,” he pleaded, “don’t let this suffering go on any longer than it has to. Let me end it.”

At first, the beast seemed to stare at August in recognition. But then, with a movement fast enough to make a praying mantis jealous, the claws flashed and skewered their way through August’s midsection. Janet and I collapsed on the ground in shock as his blood splattered in our faces, and the monster grabbed August’s torso and ripped his body in half. As we watched August’s mother suck on her own son’s blood and internal organs, rage flared inside us, and we charged, screaming like a pair of Viking berserkers.

The beast swatted us aside, throwing me into the cliff face and Janet over the ledge. She managed to grab a pine branch just in time while I was left dazed with a gash on my forehead. Luckily, the Wendigo was too distracted by the pain from the hunting knife to take advantage and desperately tried to claw it out. Janet pulled herself back onto the ledge and, noticing the creature’s distraction, leaped onto its back and ripped the knife out. The sudden extra weight caused the beast to topple forward, and Janet broke her arm. The beast rolled onto its back, scraping Janet off in the process, and stabbed her in the gut with the claw on its index finger. Janet, gritting her teeth in pain, jabbed the knife into the offending hand.

The creature withdrew the hand, howling in pain once again. While all this was going on, I had found the flare gun, which Janet had dropped when the Wendigo had nearly knocked her off the cliff, and rushed back to the SUV to retrieve a canister of kerosene we used to get our campfires going and power our generator. I waited until the beast was facing away from me and rushed over, brandishing the axe in one hand and the flare gun in the other. The beast was slow to react, distracted by the knife. I slid under its legs and slammed the blade into its chest. More silver burned into the Wendigo’s flesh, and the monster screamed. I ripped the axe out and could see the heart through the gash. The beast grabbed me and lifted me so that my face was level with its own. Then it roared one last time, splattering my face with blood, bone fragments, and bits of meat.

I simply jammed the gun into the gash in the chest, said, “That’s right, smile, you cold-hearted bitch,” and pulled the trigger.

Once the thing had stopped twitching, I fixed up Janet’s wound as best as I could. I chopped the beast up with the axe, and I poured kerosene all over it to burn the corpse up as best as I could. And I’m sure you know the rest.

The RCMP can confirm the presence of an unusually tall humanlike corpse at the scene of the rescue. The bones, especially in the arms and legs, seemed unnaturally elongated, and the skull seemed more like an animal skull than a human one. The bones have been sent to several anthropologists in the United States and Canada to determine possible causes for these unusual characteristics.

Author’s Commentary

Welcome to Part Two of the very first short story I ever wrote!

I should warn you that I have modified it somewhat from the draft I wrote in my senior year of high school. First, I changed it into an epistolary format, much like I did with the Melonheads story, to present it as the main character recounting the story’s events to the police after the fact. Other than that, though, the only significant change was to the character of August Benoit. In the original draft, August has no personal connection with the Wendigo stalking them. Indeed, during the climax in the initial draft, he sacrifices himself to the beast so that Darren and Janet can get the drop on it. Upon rereading the story all these years later, the idea of the only nonwhite character laying down his life for his white friends felt a little wrong to me. So I decided to modify his character to make it so that the Wendigo is, in fact, his mother, thus giving his character a depth that I felt he was lacking in the original story.

Other than that, the general plot is the same as the original. I hope you'll enjoy it! Stay tuned for the article on the cryptids of Vermont, which should be coming this Halloween. Thank you! Buh-bye!