Wendigo Wars, Page 3

  "I have something important to talk to you about this afternoon but it can wait. For now we have a date this morning.”

  Seb looked surprised and turned bright red. “What? Erm… we have?”

  “Have you forgotten Seb? I thought you would have been looking forward to today," Mathilde teased knowing that Seb did not want to do what they were about to go through despite having done it every year for the past four years.

  "Oh no! Already? Boy that came around quickly. Damn!" said Seb as he banged his fist on the table, making one of the mugs of milk wobble until Amelie stilled it.

  Amelie and Mathilde shared a look and a smirk. It was the same routine every year. Sometimes Mathilde was sure that Seb was kidding when he pretended to have forgotten but even so he always looked truly exasperated about the one day a year which he dreaded - Career Day. This was the day that Mathilde, Seb and Amelie attended the graduating class of the settlement school to talk to the twelve year olds about the work of Carers and Protectors so as to help the class decide whether to train in the same trade as their families or whether to take the three year training course and apprenticeship to become a Carer or Protector.

  "Ha! I loved Career Day. You were rubbish though Seb. Do you still blush and stutter when you do your speech?" asked Jaya collapsing in laughter. Jaya had not been accepted onto the Protector training course as he had not passed the physical tests and so had to train as a Carer - his family trade. He still desperately hoped to become a Protector one day and idolised Seb.

  "Yeah hilarious," said Seb rolling his eyes and slumping further down in his seat.

  "Time we got going," said Amelie as she kissed Jaya goodbye. "Make sure that you have prepared something for the children to eat when they return"

  "Sure" said Jaya and Mathilde could have sworn that she heard him muttering under his breath, "Would much rather come and watch Seb fluff it again though." Mathilde hid a chuckle.

  Mathilde,Seb and Amelie took the long route to the school which was in the west wing of the settlement. They chatted to people on the way as they passed the stalls and work tables and stopped to feed the gyrfalcons. For a long time the settlements had used snow owls as messengers but they lost the birds regularly as they preferred to travel at night and rest often, making them the perfect prey for wendigo. Gyrfalcons had proved to have more stamina, to be able to travel day or night and to be much more vicious in a fight.

  Eventually Mathilde, Seb and Amelie arrived at the school where the class was waiting for them.

  "Ah and here are our speakers," they heard the teacher, Master Jonas, say as they entered the room.

  "Class I’m sure you have all heard of Mathilde Fidell our Protector Superior and this is her Second-in-Command, Seb. They are here today to tell you a little about the work of Protectors. Then we will hear from Carer Amelie who will tell you a little about the work of the Carers. Over to you Seb"

  Seb made a good start as his huge form strode to the front of the room. He looked very impressive until he stumbled half way and had to quickly right himself before he hit the floor. By the time he reached the front of the room Mathilde could see the blush already starting to crawl up his neck. She gave him a quick thumbs up in encouragement and he began.

  "Well as you know each settlement has a small group of Protectors who all work together under a Protector Superior. Does anyone know what we do?"

  A dozen hands shot up. Seb smiled at a boy in the front row and nodded at him to speak.

  "You fight the wendigo" said the boy, leaning eagerly forwards in his seat.

  Mathilde made a note of his face. She guessed that they would be seeing him at the Protector trials next month.

  "Yes we do sometimes fight wendigo," said Seb, "but that is really only a bit of what we do. Protectors are trained to fight the wendigo if they were ever to breach the settlement walls. It has happened a few times in history, as Master Jonas has probably told you, but thankfully doesn't happen that often. We don’t hunt them or go out of our way to find a fight.”

  The boy looked slightly disappointed.

  “The job of a Protector is much more than just that,” Seb continued. “We keep a constant lookout from the top of the settlement walls in case of an attack or in case a messenger or visitor braves the journey to reach us. The Protectorate also help to tend to the animals in the grounds of the settlement and spend time at the fishing hole or allotments. Almost everything you eat arrives at your table because of the work of the Protectorate"

  There were a few "oh" s and raised eyebrows in the class. It was the same every year. Most children of the tribe had heard the fireside tales of wendigo battles and built an imaginary picture of the Protectorate around them. They never usually stopped to think about what the Protectorate did when they weren't fighting the wendigo.

  "What do the wendigo look like?" asked a girl in the middle of the class in a quiet voice.

  "Erm... well... they are sort of grey and erm..." Seb's face had started to take on the beetroot colour of his neck. Put him in front of a snarling, ravenous wendigo and he would go at it with gusto but put him in front of a bunch of twelve year olds with a tough question and he froze, not wanting to scare them. Mathilde did not have such sentiments. In an ideal world children would remain innocent and carefree into their teenage and adult life but this was not an ideal world. Mathilde had learnt about the wendigo first hand and far too brutally. She did not feel the same guilt as Seb when telling the students the truth. Mathilde gave Seb a small nod and walked to the front of the classroom. Seb gave her a smile of relief and sat down next to Master Jonas to listen to what came next.

  When Mathilde reached the front of the class the students stared at her in awe. This was the first time that many of them had seen their Protector Superior up close and she could see their looks of surprise at her diminutive height, the looks of curiosity at her scars and the looks of fascination at the person about whom they had heard so many tales.

  "Morning everyone," said Mathilde, giving them a warm smile which made most of them relax their faces and smile back. "I am going to tell you whatever you want to know. I think that you deserve to hear the truth of our history and our enemy. Ask me anything."

  Thirty hands shot into the air.

  Chapter Four

  Mathilde pointed to the girl who had asked Seb about wendigo. She looked at Mathilde with apprehension before taking a big breath and asking again "Please... erm... what do the wendigo look like?"

  She looked a lot less confident addressing Mathilde than she had been when talking to Seb. Mathilde was used to having that effect. She just didn't look as approachable as Seb, and of course there were the scars and the whole prophecy thing. That tended to make people a little wary of her.

  "That’s a good question. Wendigo are grey and tall. They can be anything from six feet tall to twelve feet tall. Their skin is leathery and has patches of matted grey fur. They are thin. Some legends tell that they are so thin that if they stood sideways you would not see them, but of course that isn’t true."

  "What are their faces like? Do they look like us?" asked a boy from the back of the classroom.

  "No. Not really. They have a long snout, a lot of teeth, thin and sharp like needles and a long tongue. Their tongues are blue-black and pointed and hang out of their mouths. Their fingers and toes end in long, thick claws which are very sharp."

  "Why are some of them bigger than others?" asked a girl. "Are the smaller ones the babies?"

  Mathilde did not shy away from the truth however there were two questions which she dreaded answering every year and this was one of them. She hated to tell classes the facts which she knew would give some of them nightmares.

  "No. There are no wendigo babies. The wendigo eat all of the time and when they eat they grow very quickly but as they grow their hunger grows too. If they haven’t eaten for a while they begin to lose height until they eat again. This means that they can never be satisfied. They live in a constant state of frenzy
always searching for their next meal but never being full. I’m sure that you all know that they eat humans and that is why we must have a Protectorate at all times to keep settlements safe."

  The class stared at Mathilde, open mouthed once again. There were no tears, it was just a fascinating scary story, but Mathilde knew that there would be tears for some later on, in the middle of the night when the nightmares crept in.

  "Why are there no wendigo babies? Do they eat them or something?" asked the boy who Mathilde had noted earlier as a possible attendee at the Protectorate tests; and there it was, the second question which Mathilde dreaded and the question which she personally felt had a far more chilling answer.

  "Well there is a quick answer to that. Wendigo are not born they are made, but really I need to explain some of our history to you so that you can fully understand."

  Mathilde took a seat at the front of the classroom. Master Jonas had already left a chair for Mathilde. He knew how this talk went every year just as well as Mathilde did and knew that the point always came when the tales of the past had to be told. It was a long tale which was made only slightly more pleasant by being able to sit down to tell it.

  "The wendigo have not always been in our world, not as obviously as they are now. Once Europe was green and warm land and America was hotter still. There were very few wendigo, so few that many people had never even heard the word ‘wendigo’. The Cree Tribe, my tribe, live in Canada. They have always known the cold and have always known of the wendigo. My ancestors hunted and killed the wendigo as far back as the nineteenth century. My great-great-great grandfather Joe Fidell was the Plains Cree tribe's first wendigo hunter."

  "Are you not English then? Or Romanian?" asked a blond girl whose eyes had already begun to sparkle with the tales of the past.

  "No. My mother, Nizhoni, was of the Plains Cree tribe, a healer and the daughter of the tribe's Chief. My father, Jean Louis, was a French Canadian. He travelled to the Cree settlement to learn about the legends of the wendigo and in doing so met and fell in love with my mother. That was many, many years ago when the people of our settlements were still trying to pretend that the wendigo were no more than normal descendants of wolves. The Cree tribe knew better."

  Mathilde snapped herself out of the past and looked around the room. Several of the girls had a look of dreamy romance in their eyes, several of the boys (and some of the girls) had a look of adventure on their faces.

  "Well you don't need to hear the rest of that story" said Mathilde, more out of fear for her own emotions than those of the children. "What I’m trying to tell you is that the wendigo have been around in cold places such as Canada for centuries but, until the White came, they were in such small numbers that they passed unnoticed by most. Then came the White and with it the wendigo burst forwards and increased in numbers. Can anyone tell us about the White?"

  This part was well rehearsed. After several years of experience Mathilde knew how long these talks could go on for and the chance of a break from talking, however small, was welcome. She nodded at the girl whose hand had shot up first. The girl smiled a huge grin at the honour of having been singled out by the Protector Superior. She spoke, parrot fashion, what all children were taught in their history lessons.

  "In 2050 the world grew hot. Humans had used and wasted too much of the world’s resources and ice caps melted. In 2070 the heat was quelled by cool, the humans thought that the world had been saved but then came the White. The world froze overnight. Electricity died and people moved from the towns and villages into settlements to start new communities and share resources.

  Then the wendigo came. At first just a few then eventually there were many. The Protectorate was formed to keep us safe and the Carers to care for the children whose parents were lost to the wendigo. In the hundred years since the White came people have returned to the old ways of their late ancestors, learnt the ways of the tribes who have always lived in the cold and returned to a more spiritual and natural life"

  The girl nodded in satisfaction and smiled with pride at having remembered what she had been taught. Mathilde remained silent for a while as she absorbed, like she did every year, the clean, edited, sterile version of their history that all children were taught. Then she smiled at the girl.

  "Good. Well done. You’ve been taught well." Mathilde sighed and leant back in her chair. "Well that’s part of the story. Do you remember me telling you that the wendigo only lived in the cold?" Several heads nodded."Well the White provided them with many more places to live and hunt than they had previously."

  "But you said that they didn't have babies. So how were they suddenly everywhere?" asked the boy eager to be a Protector. Mathilde inwardly both cursed and admired him for remaining on track in his eagerness for the truth.

  "The wendigo claim their... hosts... in one of two ways. The first is to stalk unwitting victims in their sleep. Here the spirits of dead wendigo can cross the barriers between the spirit world, the place we enter in our dream states, and the real world and can possess the body of the human whose dream state they find. Once they do this they gradually take over control of the human's body over a matter of weeks. The human's spirit slowly dies and the wendigo's spirit takes full control of the body before physically transforming into a wendigo. You have been safe so far but now that you are reaching the end of your childhood and becoming an adult your spirit becomes more stable in the spirit world. This makes you easy prey for the wendigo."

  "How can we stop them getting us?" asked a girl, her face now full of the fear which Mathilde suspected would creep into most of the class before bedtime.

  "We wear moonstones" said Mathilde bringing out her pendant from under her top to show the class the rainbow infused white stone. "You may have noticed your parents or Carers wearing them. Many people throughout history believe that moonstones were made when the moon and stars shone on the ocean and turned the light into stones.

  Moonstones help us to trust in our own intuition, listen to our dreams and take the best road, not necessarily the easiest. They help us to commune with the spirit world in our dreams and on vision quests and most importantly help us to create a barrier when we are in the dream or spirit world.

  The barrier doesn’t keep the wendigo away forever but it temporarily cloaks our spirit to make us harder to find in the dream plains. For those of you who decide to learn more about vision quests and dream talks, the moonstone will help you to tap into your psychic self. As you know there are those among us who are practiced in this area and use dreams as a way to commune with the other settlements around the world.

  You are growing older now and need to know how to protect yourself from the wendigo. You will all be given a moonstone at the end of today's lessons. Wear it always."

  The class stared in wonder at the rainbow moonstone which hung around Mathilde's neck. It glinted in the light filtering through the window and the blues and greens shone for a second.

  "What’s that other one?" asked a brown haired boy as he pointed at the orange stone hanging beside the moonstone.

  "That is called amber. If you become a Protector you will be given amber to wear. You will wear it on a pendant around your neck, your chainmail vest will be studded with it and it will be on the tip of your weapon."

  "What does it do?" the boy asked, eyes alight with mysteries as yet unknown

  "Moonstone protects us from the wendigo in the spirit world. Amber protects us from the physical form of the wendigo. It was once found in copious amounts but is now rarer than moonstone and so is only worn by those who come into contact with the wendigo. Amber is almost the exact opposite of moonstones. Amber is full of heat and energy and is believed to have been formed when chunks of the sun fell into the ocean. It was believed to hold the souls of many tigers and the power of many suns. It is a stone of courage that protects us against fear and danger. The wendigo can only live in the cold for a very good reason. Their heart is made from ice and ice runs through their veins. The quic
kest and easiest way to kill a wendigo is to melt their heart. Amber does this just as quickly as fire and the wendigo know this. They try to avoid touching it. This is the reason that Protectors wear amber and tip and decorate our weapons with it. "

  Mathilde returned her double pendant to its place under her top and the stones clicked reassuringly against each other as she did.

  "You said there were two ways that wendigo were made. What’s the other?" asked the eager boy. Mathilde paused for a second. She knew that this was the point which usually caused the nightmares.

  "The second way in which wendigo are made is also the way in which they first came to be in Europe. To understand it you need to understand what life was like when the White took hold. This happened years before I was born but I’ve heard the tales from a very young age. It seems like I have known them since birth.

  When the White first came there were people living all over Europe. There were cities and towns but there were also many small villages and those villages quickly became cut off from the rest of the world as the communication lines broke down and the roads became blocked by heavy snow and ice. Soon food ran out and there was no way to get more. The elderly and the very young fared less well than the others and soon began to die. Some people survived as best they could on what scraps they could find and eventually died when the scraps ran out but they died with their souls intact. There were others. Others whose grasp on life was a lot tighter, for whom anything was acceptable if it meant they could live. They turned to cannibalism and ate the dead villagers.”

  A few of the boys who were putting on a brave face made gagging noises or wrinkled their noses. Most of the children just sat in silence, words failing them. Mathilde continued.

  “For some it was a matter of survival and some of those did survive and eventually built the strength to make the long journey to the nearest cities. For others it was no longer a matter of survival. They liked the taste of human flesh and the more they ate the more they wanted. The wendigo spirits found kindred spirits in the greed and gluttony that had taken over the cannibals and they took over their human bodies. The cannibals welcomed the wendigo spirits because they gave them a new strength and power. The greed overcame them and the lure of the strength and speed that being wendigo would bring meant that they could find more prey.