He, who was once a man.

With a baleful glare, the creature that had once been a man, looked up at the full moon. Its eyes had once been clear and bright, but were now reduced to black holes. And those holes were sunk into a huge antlered-skull that was wrapped in paper-thin, and deceased skin. Strange and unwanted memories rattled around inside that massive skull. Sometimes the memories rose up from the depths of time and from a life-lived, now long gone. Most of the time the unwanted memories burst into the tormented creature’s mind in a sudden burst of excruciating emotional pain. At times like these, the Wendigo, wished that he could cry, so he could, at the very least relieve some of his soul’s pain. But alas, no tears would ever come again from the black orbs sunk into his demonic head.

The memories would arrive, and then linger for as long as day, or as short as a few hours. Even when the memories were overwhelming, the Wendigo could still float in and out of consciousness. And his conscious mind typically thought of only one act; murder. Killing was what he did now. Killing as many of the One’s Children as he could was his only joy in life. And his killing talents were surpassed by no creature that still roamed the wilds of Sacred Mother Earth. This is why, even in the thrall of his past-life’s memories, his senses could still be acutely aware of the presence of prey nearby.

He could smell, even feel the man who had ventured into his forest. The man’s trespass had awakened the hunger, the pain and longing for meat; human flesh. But the sadness that almost always followed when unwanted thoughts intruded into his ravaged mind, had disturbed his purpose. A wild mind, as his now was, could not possibly understand the relation between the sadness and the subsequent disruption of purpose. The hunger was growing stronger, and had become even more pronounced when the creature’s attention was drawn back to its prey. The man was close now. And he was headed his way.

The Wendigo moved deftly, and silently through the woods despite his gangly eight-foot frame. He was, actually, small for his kind. With an agility typically reserved for the big cats that roamed the woods, he slipped unnoticed and unheard through trees and brambles; with every step getting ever closer to his next meal.

His mind, what was left of it, thought back again to the man he had once been. His name had been … Blackbird. He was almost in shock that he remembered his name! It had come unbidden this time. The memory hurt. It was like a physical slap. Though no slap would ever get his notice now. He paused, thinking back to who he had been. Back in the days when he walked amongst the Children. He had been a man jealous of the other warriors in his tribe. But that jealousy was not there because he thought his fellow warriors were better than him. No, his fellow warriors unknowingly, by just being there, had fed his jealousy because they had something he dearly longed to get from the rest of his village; respect. But any hope of that had been destroyed by a previous act, which had brought him not great feelings, but had instead covered his soul with an overwhelming sense of shame. The shame of having been seen, by all, as a coward.

The shame had been the result of a momentary and much-regretted transgression on his part, at a time where he had actually been growing in standing within the tribe. His battle prowess had been getting noticed and even the tribe’s Sachem had taken notice of his skills in combat. But during his final battle alongside his brothers, he had experienced a moment of intense fear and had run away from the struggle. It had not taken him long to regather his wits, and realizing his lapse in valor had rushed back to where the battle had been taking place. When he got back to where the battle had raged, he was greeted by nothing but death. He was the only survivor. His kin had been wiped out.

After the gruesome discovery he had wandered the wilds for many days. Eventually he had found his way back to the village. He had not been greeted with open arms, but he had also not banished. Somehow the tribe had known of his fleeing from the battle. Exactly how they had found out, he was never able to ascertain. Instead, he was cursed to roam at the edges of the village; scavenging like a lowly creature. In fact, even the wild animals that typically followed his nomadic tribe, avoided him. He had been permanently branded a coward. Eventually, as he became more and more isolated, he began to lose understanding of what was real, and what was not.

Before long he began to hear voices. At first those voices only came to him at night, and in his nightmares, but soon the voices whispered to him at all times of the day. The voices in his head told him then, and did so still, that he was no coward. That he was better than all the others. Better by far. That he should rule over them. The rest of the tribe did not understand that he had not run from the battle, but had risked much to go and find help. Yes, he had. At least that is what he now believed. Or more accurately, that is what the voices in his head told him to believe.

One of those voices, louder than the rest, had eventually become the dominant one. The king voice never gave him its name. It sometimes spoke of a Red Crow. But it never told him whether that was its name or the name of another of the voices. One moon-lit night, much like this very night, the king voice, had convinced him to commit an unthinkable act.

 Sounds of footsteps on dried leaves brought him back again to his hunger pangs and his quarry. The memories lost to him, if only for the moment. The Wendigo moved wide to get ahead of his prey. He began to rejoice in the knowledge that soon he would once again feast on human-flesh.

He stopped and in complete silence hunched down on one enormous knee. His hunting instincts took over, and then in the quiet the memories crept back into the foreground of his mind. In his mind’s eye, he was once again a man; a man sneaking up behind another. The warrior, who had become his victim, had never noticed his attacker sneaking up behind him. The Wendigo looked down into his brutally clawed hand, and instead of seeing his obsidian-black claws, saw a human hand holding a long-curved bone-blade. As the ghostly human hand fleeted in and out of reality, he could actually feel the knife as his fingers closed over the handle, and he cringed at the sound it made going into the warrior’s back.

He felt the blade easily penetrating through the man’s thick musculature, and scraping against the spine and then his ribs. He cringed as he recalled the sucking sound the blade made every time he pulled it out of the dying man’s back, and plunged it back in, over, and over again until he had finally let go of his fury and hate and had let the once proud warrior’s body hit the ground with the same thud a deer carcass makes when it is dropped into the village’s communal hunting circle.

The dead man had not been just any other warrior. He had been his people’s revered Sachem; the heart and soul of their tribe. In the foggy land of memory, he saw the warrior collapse as he pulled out the sharpened bone blade. He watched the life leave the dying man’s eyes. But it was what he did next that horrified him and which cursed him for all of eternity. After he had so brutally murdered his Sachem, he bent down slowly, kneeling over the now fast-cooling corpse, and began gnawing on the dead man’s flesh. He was disgusted with himself at first, but he was also twistedly excited at the feeling of overwhelming power his brutal act had given him. He suddenly remembered that his feasting had been interrupted by a woman’s horrific scream. He had turned to look at where the scream had come from and without wanting to had made eye contact with the source of the annoying screech. The woman had once been his wife. Did he feast on her flesh as well? That memory, thankfully, never resurfaced within his blackened mind.

The Wendigo was close to the man now; his victim almost within reach. He readied himself to pounce on the trespassing man, when one final fleeting memory interjected itself. After the woman’s scream, he remembered hearing a man’s voice. The man had been calmly and soothingly chanting. He also remembered the smell of holy smoke in the air. Then the originally chanter’s voice was joined by more and more voices, until the single man’s chant had become a chorus. The voices had wrapped themselves around his blood-soaked body. He felt the words grab hold of him with a surprisingly strong grip. They held him tightly, and then the voices began to tear his body apart. They removed his flesh; they ripped into his rib cage; then, they pulled his heart out and with one final shout the voices threw his dismembered body into a black pit which had materialized out of thin air. He now remembers it as a black pit of despair, where for days un-numbered his form was twisted by maniacally laughing demons. It was after much torment that he remembered clawing out of that abominable black pit. How long had the transformation lasted, he did not know. In his not so often remembered past he had been known as Blackbird, to the Children he was now known by many names, “The murdering shadow”, “He who devours flesh”, “Killer of dreams”, but more regularly simply as “Wendigo”.

Without realizing it, now he found himself, suddenly upon the man he hunted. He looked down upon the warrior who showed desperation an fear in his eyes, all the while uselessly grasping a tomahawk in a death-grip; unable to defend himself. With one violent motion the Wendigo, he who had been Blackbird, grabbed hold of the warrior’s neck and snapped it like a dry twig.

The Wendigo’s instincts erupted forth and he howled a hideous shriek of joy. But something made him pause. An old feeling. Words … words once again, unwanted words, unasked for memories, creeping into his mind. These words were not the King’s words. These new words, like those from his distant past felt physical in nature, but they were not taking control and he was not left powerless to stop them.

When the Wendigo looked up from his feast, to search for the source of the new voice, he saw on the ridge which overlooked the spot where he had made his kill, a pair of warriors. One gave off the aura of a medicine man, the other was just meat.

He could hear the medicine man chanting. He even heard snippets of the conversation which took place during pauses in their chanting.

He heard the medicine man tell the meat “Silence! He Who Watches over all, and has set the Eternal Balance had mandated that a price was to be to paid to the Eagle of the Sun. And that creature’s village paid it bravely. Without question, they, every single one of them, went to join their ancestors in the great beyond.”

The meat mumbled something the Wendigo could not hear. But then the medicine man spoke again “this Wendigo, though he may not yet know it, is now bound to me. He will be a potent weapon in the war that is to come …”

The Wendigo, who was once a man, like the one he was now devouring, went back to his meal; his mind once again focused on nothing else but his kill.

The king voice, which had remained unusually silent while the Wendigo had been deep in reminiscence quietly reasserted itself, and whispered to the beast, perhaps even with a sense of pity … “My Child … This is The Way.”

Nelson Martinez / Eric Goldstein