Don’t Feed the Hunger

The cameras on the building’s exterior play back the recording of the night before. Four cameras are installed around the cabin, yet the one pointed to the west seems to pick up the image the clearest. The part of the forest that always seems dark, quiet, and eerie. A part I never want to travel. My partner didn’t either. A shared uneasiness about being here that is unspoken yet known between us two.

We have set up here and watched the camera every night to catch a glimpse of this thing, playing it back in the mornings just to confirm our sleep-deprived and hungry minds are actually seeing what we believe we are seeing. The grainy video of last night’s feed shows the being. Skeletal, haggard, only seeming to walk by in the distance, but never coming too close to the cabin. It’s done this enough; however, we know it knows we are in here. Like it’s taunting us. Or possibly, hoping to lure us out. Or even worse, that it understands the winter is so harsh here that eventually one of us rangers will travel further for some food if our greed eats up all the rations, and that’s where it’ll catch us. Neither my partner nor I are entirely sure, but I’m leaning more towards the latter. It’s difficult for supplies to get so far back here, and hunger will make you do things you’d never think of. I know better than to only assume the being is waiting for us after nightfall. Its eyes I feel constantly.

We may be rookies in the wilderness, but we take heed to the legends and myths of what lurks in this dense forest. Where the cold, unforgivingness of winter in the north chases other living beings out to seek more viable shelter, we stay to maintain a watchful eye on the forest. As does that thing out there keeping a watchful eye on us.

But— I’ve grown up around these myths. My family has strong ties with the Algonquin people, having lived in the same area for generations. Absorbing their myths, their rules, their warnings, and passing it off to us.

Ration, ration, ration. I tell my partner. Even if we end our time here with an overstock of food and water, don’t let greed, hunger, or boredom allow you to take more. That gangly creature is not the horned beast merely stalking the forest and all its inhabitants to satiate its hunger, like in the stories we have been told before. No. It’s different than that. Not a malignant forest-being as old as the trees themselves. It has a hunger that cannot be satiated. Growing with each meal it devours. With stretched, decaying skin over its emaciated body, it’s always starved. It was once human too. Like us. A human that took more than it needed to consume, fueled by that greed and winter’s starvation. And when there’s no more food, and the environment is too impossible to find any, when starvation is on the precipice, depravity takes control. A friend turning on the other. Waiting until the evening when they’ve fallen asleep. Taking the long blade hidden under their pillow. Driving it into the other’s throat. Consuming their remains until their belly is full and humanity is gone.

Their heart turns to ice. A vital component serving as the transformational piece that any human compassion has vanished and with it, a heart that is frozen solid takes its place. The metamorphosis begins. Humanity is lost. Greed has won. A being with no empathy, no control, no semblance of care or reason for human emotion any longer. A wendigo is born.

These are not the deer-like, gangly creatures that stalk a forest as the warning behind these myths has been stretched and skewed as they’ve spread. It’s the truth of human deprivation. A warning to take only what you need. Do not succumb to the dangers of a harsh winter.

I explain this to my partner who is stationed here with me for the next few yet long and harsh months. That we are here to replace the previous rangers and maintain control over rations unlike the rangers before us failed to do is imperative. A literal life or death scenario.

I can only guess as to why the previous rangers needed replacing in the first place.

That the unpredictable nature of winter was to them predictable. That the provided supplies were gone through quickly. Exerting themselves in this environment and nourishing themselves too greedily, never understanding a replacement of their dwindling supplies would be near to impossible to replace in these conditions. That is why the creature we see walking around on the camera feed knows we are in here. That it knows which camera to taunt us with. That the camera facing the west will give a more chilling and clearer view. A view where the forest seems too overgrown, too silent, too eerie, too dead. For that gaunt creature keeping a watchful eye on us is one of the rangers.