Wendigo

At first I couldn't figure out why we'd stopped, and then I followed the beam of her flashlight and saw the bones half-buried in the snow. There wasn't really anything left to tell by, but it must have been Eric. The skeleton was almost spotless, hardly even a stain on it, as though even every drop of blood had been licked away after the rest was gone...

I was losing it again. Shawna was hugging me and then shaking me, then telling me we had to keep moving or we'd die, and I knew she was right. But I also knew it didn't matter, because I heard it again:

The wind was calling my name.

When we looked up there was Paul, waiting for us. Shawna tried to push me behind her but I was rooted to the spot. Paul smiled a little and gestured, and then I was walking forward.

Shawna stood in front of me but I pushed past her. I was at peace inside again, the hypothermia victim lying down to sleep. He was putting his arms out, waiting to hold me, and I wanted to be held, to make up for all the late nights I'd spent alone, crying, thinking about him, praying (to no one at all; I never prayed in my life until Paul disappeared) that he was still alive but knowing that it was impossible.

Shawna was telling me to stop, and then she was screaming at Paul. He told her, "Go on, Shawna. You're still my sister. I don't want you to get hurt."

"Paul, no!" said Shawna. "Paul, come on, stop, just stop!" I took a few more steps. Paul smiled. I knew that whatever was left of him wanted to be with me, just like he used to. Now he'd even make me a part of him, so that we'd never be separated again...

Shawna ran straight into me and finally succeeded in pushing me down. I fell on my back and sank in the snow, just like with the ill-fated snow angel of our childhood, and then Shawna cut the knot tying us together and screamed "Run!" and threw herself at Paul.

She barreled right into him and they fell in a heap, and I saw her raising the knife and bringing it down, and then I saw that huge shape rise up, grappling her, pushing her down, disarming her. And then Shawna was screaming, and I ran.

I ran and ran, feet churning the snow. I ran blindly through forest, and the trees rose up around me, and all of them were monsters, and they shuddered and shook in the wind, and the wind no longer called my name.

Instead the wind just screamed. It screamed and screamed, and I screamed with it. And, in a way, I've never stopped screaming.

***

I should have died. That's what they tell me.

Somehow I got to the main road, and the deputies who fought the storm to answer Shawna's call about Karina found me. I was raving and hysterical, and I spent four days in intensive care before I even fully regained consciousness. They call it a miracle.

There wasn't anything they could do to save my hands, of course. It's all right. I have a nurse now who helps with the little things I can't do, like typing this. The pain will fade eventually. Phantom pain, they call it. They don't know how right they are.

I told the police everything. There was no lie I could imagine that would account for it all, so I told the truth instead. They humored me, of course. Everyone humors the crazy woman.

Two days after I was found, a rancher shot a bear on his porch, the same bear they believed attacked a hiker the night Shawna and Eric and Karina died, and all the deaths were blamed on the animal.

A man-eating bear was a story everyone could be comfortable with. Not like my crazy story about how my ex-boyfriend came back from the dead and killed everyone. So they believed what they wanted

I have a psychiatrist who tells me that it's perfectly normal to invent delusions as a defense mechanism. The trauma of losing so many people close to me in such a short period of time leads the mind to cope through fantasies, she says.

She also explained about the wendigo.

See, certain Algonquin-speaking tribes had stories about people who became monsters after resorting to cannibalism in the winter. The wendigo was half-man, half-spirit, and it was all skin and bones because it was cursed with a hunger that could never be satisfied.

It was a story to enforce the taboo against cannibalism, she explained, so that no one got any crazy ideas during bad winters. She said that I might have heard wendigo stories before (even if I don't remember them) and that my subconscious mind probably adapted them to the trauma I experienced.

It almost makes sense when she says it. But I don't buy it.

The wendigo story gets me to thinking about Paul sometimes, though. And about how four other people got lost in that freak storm with him. And how they found everyone's bones but his.

Bones that had been gnawed on...

Maybe the others were already dead by the time he got to that point. Then again, maybe they weren't.

Not much has changed for me. I've gotten older. I'm cold all the time, no matter what the weather is like, but I'm used to it. I still have nightmares, but they're not so bad. The phantom pain isn't so bad either. Mostly it's the wind that gets to me.

There are still nights—usually winter nights, when I know that it's snowing way up in the mountains—when the wind calls my name.

And some nights, when I stay up late and watch the trees sway back and forth and try to remember if all of those shapes had been there when the sun went down, when the pain in my wrists is the worst, and when I think about Paul, and Shawna, and Eric, and poor Karina...

On nights like that, when the wind calls my name, I call back. And it comforts me.