Large Fierce Mammal

"Hunter's Moon" by Mother Nature with slight, tolerated interference on my part.

What follows is a character development for the most important role in my present work in progress, Skrælingibók – A Skræling’s Saga. After all, without the Wendigo what would be the point? If you don’t yet know the concept of the story, click here for enlightenment.

Lore holds that the Wendigo is a spirit. While, under the right circumstances,  it can be seen in its spirit state, it has no corporeal form. It feeds upon human flesh but is impotent to do so without first inhabiting a human host that provides it with the physical means to hunt, kill, and devour its prey.

There is no known way to destroy the Wendigo, and the only way to remove it from its host is by rendering its physical being uninhabitable through complete and utter destruction. With the superhuman stealth, strength, and speed imparted to it by the Wendigo, also comes a stop to the ravages of age and an unnaturally powerful ability to heal, so nothing short of decapitation and dismemberment, consumption by flames, or both, will do.

The Wendigo seeks its host from among the morally weak and corrupt, the envious and covetous, the malicious and blindly vengeful. It favours people with dark motives and axes to grind. People that can’t be trusted. Just as no one knows how to destroy a Wendigo, likewise where they came from is lost to human ken, but what is understood is that every moment a Wendigo spends languishing without a host it is unable to feed, and so it grows weaker.

It cannot be starved to anything approaching our understanding of death, but its degree of depletion will decide the quality of the host it can hope to inhabit, for even among the morally weak there are degrees of strength, and a weak host does not promise as swift and sure a hunt as one that offers greater mental and physical resources.

Similarly, the Wendigo gains greater power from the devouring of an upstanding person of the highest character than one of baser sort, and it will abandon a weaker host for a stronger one as its own power grows. In this way it steadily improves its chances of securing nourishment of the highest quality.

The male mink achieves greatest sexual excitement, both for himself and his mate, by a prolonged struggle to catch and restrain her in an act of courtship that more resembles a rape than any mating ritual found elsewhere in Nature. So too is the Wendigo inflamed by a kill that is preceded by the inducement of strong emotion in its intended prey. It prefers abject terror, but it will take anger, lust, or any other strong emotion almost as happily. In some cases even love, delivered through subterfuge to the Wendigo’s host by someone who does not yet know their peril. This trait is said to produce signs of sexual excitement in the host.

The Wendigo is a formidable adversary.

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