Wendigo

Listen, sweetling. The Mohawk Nation says: “The Wendigo is sick because it’s cut off from its roots. It’s a ghost with a heart of ice. It eats everything in sight. Its hunger knows no bounds. When there is nothing left to eat, it starves to death. When it sees something, it wants to own it. No one else can have anything. This illness feeds on a spiritual void.”

Listen, sweetling. A New England professor says: “Cannibalism represents the most egregious violation of etiquette between host and guest.” He says that, sweetling, but you cannot hear him. He’s muffled, buried in a distended belly. A clawed foot crushes his bloodied glasses.

The Algonquins call it Wìdjigò. Cannibalism — even to save one’s life in extreme hardships of famine — was considered a serious taboo. One should rather resort to suicide or starvation than to eat human flesh. Their fears were not unfounded.

The emaciated spirit preys upon minds in sleep. It finds the savage hunger within its host. It incubates in that red space. The craving curse. The greed virus. Transmitted down the generations. Every morning, the victim wakes up hungrier, more covetous. Those they hate, they want to devour out of spite. Those they love, they want to devour out of lust — to become a locket containing a gory cameo. “After all,” whispers the spirit, “Someone in your belly can never leave you.” The first mouthful of fellow flesh transforms the soul-sick wretch forever.

More sickness than species, their accursed metabolism is a torture: however much they consume, they can never be sated. The black hole can only widen. It is a cycle of feast, famine, and fury. The cycle stretches the beast’s unnaturally long lifespan.

SCANNING… Focusing aperture… New England.

The beasts of gluttony have crawled from the cool darkness of nightmare and bedtime stories. They stalk the forests of Kingsmouth. The ancient spirits fit so nicely into the fleshy folds of a modern mind’s avarice. The Wabanaki recognised the beasts, had been warned through their stories handed down the generations. They know the precautions to take to protect the sleeping minds of their people. But no one knows the way to protect their meat from teeth. And now the night is so very full of teeth.

The Kingsmouth woods are eerily devoid of life. The Wendigo prefer the nuanced contexts they can taste in human flesh. They find your scent heady, sweetling. They can smell your first kiss. They can smell your first fear. They can smell the day you lost your innocence. But when human sweet meats are not available, they will consume all other life. We see them now, starving Wendigo, taking massive bites out of the trees and stones.

The Wendigo seem to have a particular hunger for the places and people important to Gaia. Is this love or loathing? Probably both. Perhaps Gaia, in her infinite programing, cursed the first human who deigned to taste their neighbour.

The Indigenous look about their lands and think the countries, governments, and people there are infected with Wendigo Psychosis — one massive, composite beast plundering the planet, devouring everything — cycles of coveting and eating until all is gone, until it must eat its own limbs. How could Gaia disagree?