Thin Ice: Wendigoing Gets Tough

The forest was deep, and dark. I was walking through it, having an adventure. I had my black vest on, and my Mothman shirt. 

Through the trees, someone came. A woman. A woman that I knew.

"I need help," she said. "I need a friend."

And I sat up, breathing, in bed. I was wearing my Yeti pajamas, and it was about two in the morning.

"We need to go to Wal-Mart," Paul said. "I want to buy my valentines early, so I can get something that nobody else has."

"You want unique valentines this year, huh?" I asked.

Paul nodded. "I want something that nobody else in my class is going to get."

Something occurred to me. "Wait a minute....Paul. I work in a print shop."

Paul looked up at me with some anticipation.

I said,"I can get you valentines that we create ourselves."

"Yeah!" said Paul. "I have the coolest dad ever!"

"Missed you the other day," I said to Emily. "You feeling better?"

She nodded. "I'm up and around more. Things are okay. I just wasn't too great earlier."

"Have a favor to ask you. Would you be willing to design Paul's valentines for this year? He wants something that nobody else has. Preferably incorporating his picture. He drew this design for you to work off." I handed Emily a page with hearts sketched on it in marker.

She grinned. "Love to. I'll design something for you."

"You can steal his photo from the school dance off my Facebook."

"Sounds good," she said. "So you guys were designing valentines last night, then? Slow night for you both?"

"Well, I'm looking into a Wendigo," I said.

"I miss one day of work...."

Another day at the print shop. I was working on envelopes, and wearing my rainbow alien sweatshirt. Speaking of cold weather, it was sixteen degrees out, with no end in sight.

"So the thing about Wendigos," I explained,"Is how they reflect the culture. The legend involves a monster that lives in the deep cold, and eat people. This comes from valid fears of the time---The legends always reflect the mindset of the culture. Wendigos are from northern Native American tribes, and they lived in very cold areas. The legend sprung up in an area and time when the fear of having to eat dead relatives so you could survive was very real."

Emily nodded. "I always learn something from you, Lou," she said.

"One of the Swartz Paranormal guys shared a podcast about Wendigos the other day," I said. "A guy was talking about an old book about Pennsylvania, written by a reverend. It mentioned a woman from Clearfield area who was traveling to Great Island back in the 1700s. He said that she was trapped in the snow and had to eat one of her children before she was rescued, and she became a Wendigo. So, you never know, we may have a Wendigo running around down on Great Island. Right across from there is Memorial Park, which was once a burial ground, so we may have her buried around there."

"That's really neat," she said.

Nineteen degrees out. Paul and I stood on the corner among a cluster of kids, waiting for the school bus. I was wearing my cold-weather vest, heavy coat, hood, and gloves. Paul was wearing a sweatshirt, and, at my insistence, the puffy vest I'd given him for Christmas.

"Don't forget, Dad, I have dance practice this weekend," Paul reminded me.

"I think your mother has it on the calendar," I said. "I forgot to tell you, I have a report of a wendigo down on Great Island. Want to run down and investigate it with me sometime soon?"

"Sure," said Paul.

One of his classmates, Willy or something, looked up. "I could go," he said. "I'd look for a wendigo. My mom knows who you are, she'd let me."

"Would she, now?" I said. 

"Yeah! That would be fun!"

"Well, we'll see," I said. "It's going to be cold out. We'll see."

Paul was in school. I wasn't going anywhere. I had the house to myself for a while, so I wrote an article. I checked the food supply---With the weather getting bad, I'd stocked up on canned and frozen foods; I now had enough to last for a month. If ancient people had had access to freezers and canned food, we'd have a lot fewer wendigo legends.

Then I got my cell phone out of my pack and dialed a number I'd had stored for a couple of years now. She picked up immediately.

"Hello, buddy," she said.

"Hi, SaraLee," I said. "How are you doing?"
SaraLee had been in LHPS for a while. I have a low tolerance for the psychic types, but I'd known her a long time, and she was a very good friend.

"Been a bit busy," she said. "How about you?"
"Doing okay. New job. I wanted to check in with you, see if you were okay. I had a dream about you that kind of made me wonder."

"Now, I'd be very interested in hearing about this dream." She was graceful enough to not try to claim she'd sent me a telepathic message, though the thought had crossed my mind.

"I was out in the forest on an adventure," I said. "Exploring around. You kept coming to me, saying you needed a friend."

"And that's about it?"
"That's about it."

She was quiet for a moment. "That's very interesting," she said. "I'm glad you called. I have had some difficulties lately with work and personal life."

"You need to talk?"

"A little. You and me don't talk enough lately."

"Yeah, we really should get together next time you're in Lock Haven. I have a wendigo sighting here."

"Now, that's cool," she said. "Tell me more."

It had dropped to sixteen degrees out, and Paul, unable to go outside and play, had taken to hitting a tennis ball around the house with a racket we'd found on the porch. I had some sympathy for the kid being stuck in the house for days, so I'd just cautioned him to not break anything too important.

"Mom's taking me to dance class, Dad," he said. "What are you doing?"

"Checking into the wendigo sighting. I'm sending an e-mail to my editor, who lives in Clearfield, and may have heard the story. I'm also going to see if I can find a copy of the book that this came from, and study it to see what else I can learn."

He set down the racket. Rosie immediately grabbed the tennis ball and ran from the room with it. He said,"Well, it's time for me to get to dance."

"Wear your coat," I said. "This cold is nothing to mess with."

He rolled his eyes. "Dad, I know."

Paul and Michelle left for dance class. I had the house to myself for a while. I checked on the oil supply downstairs. It was starting to snow out. Twenty-two degrees and dropping.

I was having essentially the same problem I'd had during COVID. There were adventures to be had, things to be explored, but I was basically stuck in the house. It's not easy being a stay-at-home adventurer.

I had a little time. Part of this had to be running down and checking out Great Island and Memorial Park, and I had nothing better to do for the next couple of hours. I looked at my watch.

I was tired of hanging around the house. What the hell.

In the snow, it took about twenty minutes to bike to Memorial Park on the east end. I left my bike in the empty lot, and walked around, taking a few readings. 

Great Island had been a big place for the Native American tribes along the Susquehanna River. What is now Memorial Park had been a burial ground; when they'd built the dike in the nineties, they'd found bodies and had to stop and do an archaeological dig. If the woman in the story had been buried locally, it was likely here.

I walked around a bit. The thermal imager showed nothing but blues and greens---I was the only source of heat in the park. Highs of  nineteen, lows of twelve. The Susquehanna was partially frozen.

I wanted to poke around and do some digging, but there was no way in hell that was going to happen with the ground frozen. So I made a mental note to come back when it was warmer, and walked back to my bike.

And I found that the chain was frozen. The bike was going nowhere.

I could call Michelle to pick me up. No, wait, I couldn't. She was off with Paul at dance. Chris was out of town. Tif didn't drive. I was on my own.

Okay. I was stuck in the snowstorm for a while. Don't panic. I'd been in bad situations before. I'd been trapped by a flood in a cursed park. Lost and almost dehydrated in a haunted forest. I'd even survived a pandemic. I could get through this, too, with minimum risk of hypothermia. It was going to come down to what I knew....And what I'd brought along with me.

I was wearing my heavy coat and my puffy vest, and underneath that, the Yeti sweatshirt. My heavy gloves and black hood. Okay. I'd dressed warmly enough. Now I had to see if I'd prepared my backpack for situations like this.

I had a small survival kit in there, which was a help. It had a foil emergency blanket. No, wait....I had two. I'd worked one into my coat pocket. I unfolded that one and slipped it into my coat, wrapping it around myself to trap in body heat.

There was a picnic pavilion in the park. I went underneath it and sat down at one of the picnic tables. Two rocks anchored the other emergency blanket on top of the picnic table, where it hung down and could form a bit of a windblock. I wheeled my bike underneath the pavilion. So far, so good.

Some searching around the edge of the park turned up a lot of loose sticks and brushy stuff, which I gathered into a pile. I found a beer can thrown away in the brush, and I gathered that up, too. Littering was about to save my life.

I got out my Swiss army knife and used the can opener to cut off the top of the can, leaving it open. I set down the beer can near the picnic table, underneath the cylinder of my bike. One pocket of my coat had a firestarting kit of my own devising---A pill bottle, probably from Rosie, with matches, lint, and a striker inside it. If I were going to quit society and go be a hermit, the one concession I'd make to civilization is a lighter or matches. I put the lint way down in the bottom of the can, and then started placing small sticks and twigs on top of that.

It took me four or five matches before I was able to get it to stay lit, but I got the sticks burning. As it burned, I added progressively bigger sticks until I had a small fire burning in the can. It worked---The heat rose, warming up the bicycle chain. and reflected off the emergency blanket, keeping me from freezing to death.

And then I waited for an hour. You'd think a survival situation would be more thrilling. I warmed myself as best I could with my small, can-contained fire, and waited while the heat hopefully thawed out my bike. I kept feeding sticks to the fire. I wished I'd brought a book to read.

If this didn't work, I was going to have to either walk back, or try to wait it out until morning. In which case I stood a reasonable chance of being in Highland Cemetery within the week. Lou, local paranormal investigator, died on January 19, 2025, pointlessly chasing a wendigo during a snowstorm....

Sixteen degrees. I fed some more sticks in the fire. The sun had gone down entirely, and I was basically sitting in the dark. The snow reflected what light there was, illuminating the park and relieving me of having to turn on a flashlight.

I reached out and touched the bike pedal, giving it a spin. It felt looser. I tried again, and it spun freely. The fire had heated up the chain enough that it could move now, and should get me most of the way home.

I piled a bunch of snow into the can, extinguishing the fire. Then I rolled my bike out to the road---I had to make this as quick as possible, before the thing could re-freeze. I got on and tried it.

The bike worked! I rode down the hill to Water Street. If I just kept it going, I should be okay. I headed down Water Street and got the hell out of there.

"...So I spent the rest of the night wrapped up in a blanket, researching on my laptop and drinking hot chocolate and ordering more emergency blankets," I said.

"God," Emily said. "I'd never know what to do in a situation like that. Probably call my dad."

"Well, that's an option," I agreed. "Actually I thought of calling Michelle, but she was out at Paul's dance class."

"So did you find your wendigo?"

"Kind of," I said. "I found a copy of the book online and studied it. There's a fair amount of racism to some of these books; this one is about Native American tribes and published in 1881. So the writer pretty much wrote it to make them sound uncivilized; he inserted this story in a chapter about food."

Emily made a face. "Oh my god."

"So the whole wendigo thing was a legend, but it came about mainly because the writer, a white missionary, was trying to cast the tribe in a bad light. Of course, that didn't stop me from nearly getting myself killed down at Memorial Park."
"Well, I'm glad you made it," said Emily. "I wouldn't even know how to start researching something like that."

"I can teach you sometime, if you'd like," I said. "Sometimes I'm not sure, either, so I just check everything."

"By the way," she said,"I have something for you."

I walked into the house and dropped my pack on the chair. Rosie and Butters came running into the kitchen, and a moment later, and marginally more calmly, Paul showed up.

"Hi, buddy," I said. "How was your day?"
"Good."

"By the way---Got something for you."

I handed him a stack of valentines, based on his own design, with his photo on them.

Paul grinned and giggled. "This is great! How many are there?"
"About a hundred. And now, you have valentines that nobody else is going to have."

"Yay!" said Paul.