Nahanni could hear the wind whistling outside her lodge when she awoke the next morning. She smiled to herself. Blowing snow would mask her tracks as well as fresh fallen snow. She got out of their bed, dressed, and started to prepare the morning meal for her and Ashiwut. The parts of his clothing facing away from the fire were still damp so she rearranged how they were hanging. He was awake and sitting up in their bed by the time she was finished. She told him about her encounter with the wendigo on her way back to the village while they ate.
Rezekash came to tell them that Moguago had called for a gathering of the entire village in the great longhouse. Ashiwut got dressed in his damp clothing—his body heat would have to finish the job of drying them—and he and Nahanni joined the rest of the village.
Nearly everyone was already gathered and talking in hushed tones, retelling one another the tales they had heard of wendigo. The tale of the attack by the river had grown even more overnight. Ashiwut found himself surrounded by people who wanted to hear about what happened to him in the river. He found that people were less interested in the story of his struggle against drowning than the one they had made up about him fighting the wendigo.
Moguago entered with Tokopaw following close behind. They were talking quietly with each other. Moguago looked around, and beckoned for Rezekash to come over to him. He spoke quietly to the girl, and she quickly left the longhouse. She came back a few minutes later with Grandmother. A hush fell over the people of the village as she entered. The old woman leaned against Rezekash as the girl helped her move to her place by the fire.
Moguago took his place beside Grandmother and called the gathering to order. Everyone took their positions around the central fire pit. "Great evil has come upon us," said Moguago. "The wendigo have returned to our lands. Not even the eldest among us remember the last time this happened. Grandmother tells me that her grandfather spoke of the wendigo attacking during his youth.
"But know this: the wendigo have come to these lands before and they were driven away. We will drive them away again. The wendigo are strong, but they are not invincible. Six wendigo attacked six men of our village. Our men all survived, and four wendigo are dead. We can defeat them."
There were smiles and nods all around the fire. The were interrupted by Pamaswek. "But we didn't defeat the wendigo. We were rescued by some invisible spirit."
"A spirit skilled with a bow," said Ashiwut. "We have many hunters who are also skilled. This spirit was also quite visible, and substantial when it pulled me from the river."
"And you are sure you did not recognise anything about this man?" asked Moguago.
"It was no man I had ever seen before," said Ashiwut. He felt rather pleased with the way he answered the question without lying.
"There has been much nonsense spoken about the wendigo overnight," said Moguago. "It is time to hear the truth. Grandmother has told us the stories in the past. Today I want you to listen to them again."
Moguago sat down, and Grandmother took over. She told the old stories that everyone knew, and she told some of the stories that the shamans usually only told each other. She told of the ways to kill a wendigo: wood through the heart, beheading, fire and sunlight. She told of the wendigo's ability to appear to be a friend or loved one. She told that the wendigo could only enter a dwelling if invited by someone who lived there. "Mandokee tricked an invitation into this longhouse from his brother, and he still lives, so he can enter, but no other wendigo can enter any of our other dwellings."
"So we are safe during the day?" asked Kishegaequa, the wife of Moguago.
"Not entirely," said Ashiwut. "Winter furs and leggings will protect the wendigo from the worst effects of the sun, but they will be reluctant to venture from their hiding places in daylight. In the day we have many of the advantages they have in the night. We can see, and move freely in the daylight. Wendigo will try to stick to the shadows."
"They can't enter our homes, but can they burn us out?" asked one of the men. "Set fire to our lodges at night, and kill us when we come running out?"
"That is possible, and we must guard against it," said Ashiwut, "Moguago set sentries last night, and we must keep watch until the threat has passed, but wendigo are themselves more vulnerable to fire than we are. They fear it almost as much as the sun. A man whose clothes have been set on fire can save himself by rolling in the snow. A wendigo will be consumed by the flames almost instantly."
"We will double the sentries tonight," said Moguago. This produced groans from several of the men who had had their sleep curtailed the night before. "In spite of the guard we had posted, someone, or something, entered the village last night. We never would have known if Tokopaw hadn't found their tracks in the snow."
This caused a sudden babble of worried talk around the fire. Everyone was afraid of what their nighttime intruder may have wanted. Nahanni stayed quiet and kept the smile off her face. The blowing snow must have obscured her tracks enough so that even a skilled hunter like Tokopaw had been unable to tell that the tracks were of someone leaving the village and then coming back, and he had assumed that it was the other way around. She was worried by Moguago's planned guards though. She thought she might have been able to slip past the ones he had posted last night, but with them doubled getting out and in again undetected seemed hopeless. She wondered why Ashiwut seemed unconcerned.
Moguago called an end to the meeting. There was still the daily work that needed to get done in the village. People started to disperse. Rezekash went to Grandmother to assist her, but the old woman waved her away and called for Nahanni to come help her. She also asked for Moguago and Ashiwut to accompany them back to her lodge.
They all sat around Grandmother's fire. "There are some things that you need to know Moguago, that it is best not to tell the entire village," said the old woman. "Foremost among them is that it was Nahanni who killed the wendigo last night, and pulled Ashiwut from the river."
To say that Moguago was surprised would have been an understatement. "But you said that you didn't recognise who pulled you from the river," he accused Ashiwut.
"No, I said it was no man that I recognised," said Ashiwut.
"But Nahanni is just a girl!"
"Nahanni is the Protector," said Grandmother. "She has been Chosen to protect us from the wendigo."
"How long have you known this?" asked Moguago.
"Since before the first snow," said Grandmother.
"And you waited until now to tell me?"
"The Protector's identity must remain a secret," said Grandmother. "If not for one event last night, I still would not tell you, but circumstances have changed."
"Now that the wendigo are here?" asked Moguago. "I should have been warned. We should have been warned."
"And you were warned," said Grandmother. "I have told the stories of the wendigo more times to more people in the last couple of moons than I think I'd told them in my entire life before this."
"So what has changed?" asked Moguago.
"Last night, when she was coming back to the village, Nahanni met another wendigo, and this one recognised her, both as Nahanni, and as the Protector, and it escaped. The main reason to keep the Protector's name a secret is to keep that knowledge from the wendigo, but now they know. It would still be best to keep this knowledge from most of the village.
"It was Nahanni's tracks that Tokopaw found in the snow, and if it makes you feel better, she made them before you posted your guards. No one was lax last night."
"I think I could have gotten past them anyway," said Nahanni.
Grandmother shot Nahanni a quelling look. "Now it will be necessary for a few people to be told of Nahanni," she said. "Not many, just enough that there will be guards on duty who will know to let her pass when she leaves and enters the village at night."
"How are the guards to know that the wendigo have not made her one of their own, if she returns after a long absence?" asked Moguago.
"A wendigo casts no reflection," said Grandmother. "A bowl of water or…" She turned and rummaged through her shaman's tools. "…this." She pulled out a mirror made from a sheet of mica. "Give this to the guard on duty at the gate. If they can see someone's reflection in it, they are not a wendigo."
They discussed who should be told. Grandmother wanted to keep the number down to an absolute minimum, only one or two. Moguago wanted at least half a dozen. They settled on the names of four men.
Nahanni and Ashiwut returned to their lodge to collect their snowshoes and parkas. Nahanni wanted to go back to where she had met her father and examine the area in daylight, find some sign of where he had gone. Grandmother said that it was very rare for a wendigo to have the power to fly, or to travel by other magical means. Only a few of the most powerful, in the most ancient tales, could do such things and her son Makee had never shown any aptitude for magic in life. It was unlikely that he'd had the time to learn such powerful magics since his death. Nahanni hoped that the area of the woods where she had fought him was sufficiently sheltered from the winds for the tracks he must have made to have survived.
Nahanni and Ashiwut approached the small clearing in the trees carefully, following the trail Nahanni had left when she had returned to the village, so they wouldn't destroy any traces of the wendigo's tracks with their own. The traces of the fight were still clear in the snow. A jumble of footprints, and depressions where Nahanni and the wendigo had rolled together in the snow.
Nahanni had tried to follow the tracks the wendigo made when it left last night, and they had vanished. She took another look in the daylight. The tracks still lead a little way into the woods, and ended. She knew that the wendigo couldn't have stayed on the ground without leaving any sign, so she looked up. There was a branch of a tree not too far overhead. It was out of her reach, without jumping, but the taller wendigo could have reached it easily. She released the bindings of her snowshoes and went around to the other side of the tree so she could climb it without disturbing any sign the wendigo may have left on the branch.
Once she was in the tree Nahanni could clearly see she was not the first person to have been up there since the last snowfall. The snow on the top of the branch had been disturbed by someone who had climbed up onto it. She saw signs of someone climbing through the tree on several other branches. They had moved up the tree to a place where it was possible to cross into the branches of another tree. Nahanni followed the trail.
She could see where the wendigo had jumped back down to the ground, into a hollow that would conceal its tracks from the clearing. She went back to collect her snowshoes.
Ashiwut was nowhere to be seen. Nahanni could see his tracks disappear around the tree that the wendigo had first appeared by. She knew that he was trying to backtrack the path it had taken to get to the clearing. She put her snowshoes back on and went to follow the tracks she had found in the hollow.
The wendigo's tracks lead her in a circle around the clearing. Moving through such deep snow couldn't have been easy, even for something with the wendigo's strength, so Nahanni suspected that it was circling around to where it had left its snowshoes when it had first arrived there. She wasn't wrong.
Ashiwut was waiting for her. His backtracking had brought him to the same place. The wendigo had left its snowshoes there before moving on into the clearing. They could see the trail it had made both coming and going leading back toward the river. They followed it to the trail along the riverbank, where it was lost amid the tracks of several people who had used it before and since.
Nahanni and Ashiwut followed the trail up the riverbank as far as the narrow place the wendigo had attacked last night. They paused there to examine the tracks made by the wendigo. It was plain that they had come to the spot along the same trail, from farther up river. They found another of Nahanni's arrows while they searched for more sign.
They weren't the first people from the village to be there that day. Moguago had taken a small band of hunters, and they had been there too. They had continued up the trail following the tracks of the wendigo themselves.
Nahanni decided to leave that trail to Moguago. She and Ashiwut went back to examining the riverbank, looking for the place where Mandokee would have come out. They searched down one side of the river, and up the other without finding any sign of him.
The afternoon shadows were lengthening. Dark came early this time of the year. Nahanni and Ashiwut returned to the village. They arrived at the same time as Moguago and his band of hunters. They were hauling a couple of toboggans, loaded with dressed venison and deer skins.
"Mandokee wasn't lying when he said that they'd had a good hunt," said Tokopaw. "We found this not too far upstream from where we were attacked last night. The wendigo just left it there."
Ashiwut smiled sourly. "They don't want us to starve. Our blood is sweeter if we're well fed." He joined the men hauling the lead toboggan. "Let's get this to the smokehouse. It will be night soon."