Hungry

He awoke to the scent of smoke. Saliva beaded at the corners of his mouth. His head rose from the branch and dislodged a blanket of snow. A thin black line rose above the treetops into the pale winter sky. After a quick stretch he leaped from his perch, landed on his feet, and broke into an effortless trot. He followed the smoke by scent until he reached a familiar clearing and discovered a campsite. A boy and a girl sat beside a fire.

He hunched his back and hugged himself before approaching them, as if bracing against the cold. He stumbled into the clearing. Both pairs of eyes turned in unison. The girl lowered hers with a blush. The boy rose from his seat by the campfire.

"Holy crap, what happened to you man?"

"Hungry."

The boy disappeared into the tent and came back with a pair of pants and a jacket. He put them on to humor him even though they offered no feeling of warmth. The girl handed him her plate of breakfast.

"What's your name?" she asked as he shoveled the food into his mouth. "What happened to you?"

"I am Wendigo," he said simply between bites of bacon.

"Wayne Digo? That doesn't sound very French."

He stopped eating to tilt his head to the side and stare at her.

"I'm sorry. It's just, your accent is so... never mind. What can we do for you?"

"More."

He handed his plate back and she refilled it until it held everything they had cooked that morning. The boy took a thin hand-sized black object out of his pocket, put it to his ear, and began talking to himself. "Yeah, hi. My girlfriend and I are out camping and we just found this guy and he's really messed up. Like, he looks starved. He looks like he's about to die."

He ignored the boy. He tossed his now empty plate aside and searched out the scent of yet more food.

"Yeah, we had a slab of bacon and some biscuits when he showed up a few minutes ago. We gave it to him and... uh... now he's eating the raw bacon we had left over..."

The boy's face twisted in disgust and he stopped talking. A few moments later he lowered the device from his ear and spoke in a raised voice. "Hey, you gotta stop that! The lady at the hospital say you'll get sick if you eat too much too fast!"

That got his attention. He raised his eyes to fix the boy with an icy stare. "Get sick from eating? Who says so?"

"The woman at the hospital. We'll take you right away, no problem for us."

The boy continued speaking to the invisible woman. He turned to the girl, who looked uncomfortable but was less distracted. "Take me to hospital. I teach woman sense. Where is she? Small in black thing?"

The girl's face dropped in a blank stare. She fumbled for a few moments before finding her voice. "Are you sure you should have eaten that raw bacon?"

A growl of frustration rumbled from his throat.

"Uh, it'll be a long walk to where we left the car and then we can drive you there," she said.

"Drive?"

"Duh! How do you think we got here? You think we just walked all the way out here from the city?"

"City," he said quietly to himself. His voice rose as an exciting thought dawned on him. "Many people in city. Much food! How do you drive?"

The girl groaned and buried her face in her palm. She pulled a key ring from her pocket. "Uh, with a key?"

He studied the keys. "Key makes car drive. Car drives to city. Much food in city."

A satisfied smile split his face and the girl's expression changed from annoyance to concern. Her rosy cheeks blanched a shade paler as her gaze focused on the sharp teeth exposed by widely peeled lips. He pounced and broke her neck.

He scooped the keys out of a depression made in the snow inches from her lifeless hand. Looking up, he saw the boy drop the talk-to-people-in-the-city object and stare in confusion. He grasped the keys in his mouth and stalked toward him on all fours, relishing in the scent of fear excreted by his prey. He could hear the boy's heart beating, faintly, over the sound of his claws sinking into the snow. The boy would not run. Disappointed, he covered the distance between them in a few loping bounds and disabled him with a neck twist as he had done the girl.

Before he could eat a faint sound caught his attention and digging revealed the talking object. He could hear the hospital woman's voice coming from it, frantic and confused, small and distant. He growled and bit the object. It crunched like a turtle shell, but there was no gooey centre to enjoy. He spat it out and turned to better meals, to food that could ease the craving that plagued him.

When there was no more he followed the scent trail left by the two until he found a creature he could only guess was the car the girl had spoken of. It reminded him of the creatures he began seeing many winters ago, noisy artificial beings that only came to life while ridden by a human. A smile crossed his face as he remembered the first he encountered, which had run headlong into a tree and killed itself when he pulled the rider off.

The car was larger than those creatures, and he didn't understand where he was supposed to sit while riding it. He leapt on top of it, digging his claws into its metal skin in anticipation of sudden movement. Nothing happened. He remembered the keys. He took them from the pocket of his new jacket and waved them in front of the car's large, expressionless eye. "Take me to city."

Nothing happened. He hit the car with the keys. "Take me to city!"

The car maintained its corpse-like stillness. He poked and prodded, sniffed and tasted, but nothing offered any clues as to how one was supposed to drive a car to the city. Patience reached its end and he grabbed at the creature's face, shaking it. "Merde! Damnez vous!"

A piece of the creature's metal shell came off in his hands. Grinning, he tossed it aside and tore into the car. The strength stolen from his recent meal bubbled to the surface and he reveled in the destruction his seemingly weak body was capable of.

When the euphoria subsided all he had left to show for his efforts was some ripped clothing and keys belonging to a dead car. He clawed his way out of the clothing and threw the keys onto the car's remains.

Next time he must remember to get the people to take him to the city before he ate them.