Hunter s Moon - By Lori Handeland Page 0,25

picked up his glasses from the floor.

He took them without looking at or thanking her, set them on his nose, and kept muttering, shuffling, and tapping.

"Aha!" he cried, then tapped some more.

A half an hour later, he sighed, lifted his glasses back onto the top of his head, then turned to us.

"Weendigo," he said. "The Great Cannibal."

"Another manitou?" Jessie asked.

"Yeah."

"Someone better explain, in English, for us i-juts."

Jessie spread her hands. "All yours, Professor."

"Better have a seat." Will gestured to one of the kitchen chairs.

"Only if I get some of that coffee Jessie keeps taunting me with."

He laughed. "Sure. I have a fresh pot set to go. Can you pour the water through, Jess?"

"I guess. I've heard your spiel before. But don't go any further than Matchi-auwishuk."

She disappeared into the kitchen, and I returned my attention to Will. "Matchi-auwishuk?"

"The Evil Ones."

Well, this just kept getting better and better.

"You heard about the wolf god?" he asked.

"Some."

"It was raised in an Ojibwe ceremony. A totem with the markings of the Matchi-auwishuk was used in combination with... other things."

"What things?"

"Blood, death, fire."

"You people sure know how to throw a party."

"Always have."

"Where's this totem now?"

"Dr. Hanover has it. She thought she might be able to..." He trailed off, frowned. "I'm not sure what."

"You and me both." I wasn't sure what Elise was up to half the time, and that was just fine with me.

"At any rate, the Matchi-auwishuk and the Weendigo are the two evil manitous of the Ojibwe people."

"And a manitou is?"

"An all-encompassing spirit. Legend has it that Kitchi-Manitou, the great mystery, created everything.

Manitous are guardians over humans, and everyone has mani-toulike attributes."

"There's a little bit of God in us all?"

"Exactly."

"What about the evil manitous?"

"I like to think they aren't within us all, but sometimes I wonder."

After what I'd seen, what I'd done, I had to wonder, too.

"So the Evil Ones helped to raise the wolf god in Miniwa?"

"Yes."

"And the Weendigo?"

"Hold that thought!" Jessie shouted from the kitchen.

Seconds later she entered with three mugs. I could tell just from the smell of the steam that something wonderful was on the way.

"Sugar or cream?" she asked.

I shook my head, took a sip, swallowed, groaned.

Jessie winked. "Told you his coffee was almost as good as him."

"Can he cook, too?" I asked.

Will just smiled and sipped. I wished I were as at home in my own skin, as at ease with my differences, as he was. But I doubted I ever could be.

"Get on with it, Slick," Jessie ordered. "What are we up against this time?"

"I'm not sure." Will set his cup on the coffee table, far away from his precious papers. "Legend has it the first Weendigo was a fierce warrior who, after a particularly harrowing battle against mortal enemies, hacked off a piece of flesh from a fallen foe and ate it to show they were vanquished."

"That'll do it," I murmured.

"Except the warrior grew to like the taste of humans and, despite warnings from the elders, he began to prey on people for his food."

I remembered the brown werewolf. Had he eaten one - make that nine - of his own? The memory gave me food for thought. Ha-ha.

"After a time the great mystery ordained that any human behaving like a beast should appear as one, and the warrior became Weendigo. Cursed to haunt the forests and the wasteland of the north, forever hunting, forever starving, because no amount of flesh is ever enough."

Will rooted through the papers scattered across the kitchen table, pulled one free, and gave it to Jessie.

Her eyebrows lifted. She handed the sheet to me.

Weendigo, read the caption. Lucky it did. Because I could swear the thing was a werewolf.
Chapter 11
Well, maybe not exactly a werewolf. The drawing appeared both human and lupine and very, very thin. I suppose that was what happened when the great mystery cursed you to be forever hungry.

I handed the paper back to Will. "So what does this mean to us?"

"The legend is about a human-eating human that turns into a beast. We've got a werewolf-eating werewolf that turns into a human. Coincidence?"

"I don't think so," Jessie and I said at the same time.

Will glanced back and forth between us. "Me, neither."

"But what does it mean?" I repeated.

"I'll have to do more research." He grabbed a notepad, reached behind his ear for a pencil, then frowned when he encountered nothing but hair. Jessie scooped up one from the floor and handed it to him without comment.

They'd be cute, if I were into that sort of