Wendigo Moon

Terror on a frozen like as an ancient legend is exposed under a winter moon.

The Nehiyawak boy glanced over his shoulder and back at his pursuer, terror in his eyes and dried blood caking his otherwise tear streaked face. The madman was getting closer.

The frozen lake seemed the wiser choice than the forest when trying to escape the big, wide eyed and screaming white man. It was early Spring and the frozen lake was thawing. The boy, shirtless and barefoot ran over the wind crusted icy surface, his heart pounding like a tribal drum in his ears. He could now hear the ice cracking loudly behind him as the two reached the middle of the lake where the ice was thinnest.

The night sky was cloud free and the moon, a bright disc with an ice crystal corona, lit the dramatic scene from above. The madman was upon him.

With a misplaced step and an off-balanced correction, the Nehiyawak boy went down on the ice hard, taking skin from his outstretched palms and breaking his nose on impact. 

The large white man, almost colliding with his quarry, jumped over the boy and landed awkwardly on the other side of the small prone body causing a visible fissure in the ice and making a bone chilling CRACK sound. The blood covered boy raised his head and faced his pursuer without expression. The man lifted a large gore streaked hatchet above his head in readiness for the killing blow when the boy’s face took on a new expression.

The charnel scene of his barn crossed the man's mind. The bodies of his family and his animals littering loft to floor...and the boy, peeking out from his hiding place near the tack wall. 

He would finish this now.

Just as he was about to cleave the boy’s head in two, the kid started wailing. The sound rose to an ear splitting pitch and volume. Covering his ears in pain, the hatchet fell to the ice beside him. 

The figure that had been the blood soaked Indian boy now rose to its feet. The creature that now towered over the man was grotesque. It stood at least eight feet tall with the lower half of a stag and the upper half of a man. It had the gray pallor and sunken face of a deadman and smelled like a corpse. The wailing got louder as the arctic daemon then turned its head up toward the crystal moon. It then ceased suddenly when it noticed the man standing before it with his axe raised high again.

The monster considered the little man for a moment before it let out the braying sound that was it’s laughter.

The man swung the axe with everything he had into the fissured ice between them. Nothing happened at first but then the cacophony of the fracturing lake-cap filled the night and silenced the monster.

The two locked eyes for a split second before the daemon dropped into its watery grave. Both knowing Wendigos can’t swim.