Wind, razor-sharp and just as cruel, cut across her cheek as she turned to the troglodyte welcoming committee. A wall of parka-puffed backs greeted her.

Robin’s voice cut through the whistling silence: “Holy smoke!” She spoke in the hollow whisper of a celluloid citizen seeing the mother ship. Anna toddled to the end of the wall of flesh and goose feathers. Through the dense night of trees on the ragged shore, a huge dark shape moved erratically.

“A windigo,” Robin breathed.

The Algernon Blackwood story of the Ojibwa legend that rangers told around the campfire to scare the pants off park visitors flooded Anna’s mind. The windigo was a voracious and monstrous cannibal that feasted on human flesh and souls on the shores of northern lakes, where no one could hear the crying of its tortured victims.

Anna was not given to superstition, but the summer she worked on the island the story had given her the creeps for a few nights. Robin’s pale, pinched face and hollow voice brought them back.

The creature in the trees was immense, larger than a horse, and moved in painful lurches. It appeared to shrink and expand in an unnatural way, and it took Anna a tense moment to realize the animal was not drifting in and out of supernatural realms but falling to its knees and fighting its way up again. It stumbled clear of the masking trees and onto the lake ice, hooves ringing loud against the rimed stones.

“Watch out,” one of the bearded men said. “Not all moose are Bullwinkle.”

Anna shaded her eyes against the glare. Where the moose’s antlers should have been were freakishly twisted horns with gobbets of diseased-looking flesh, pustules the size of hens’ eggs, six or more inches long, and dependent from a bony structure grown wild as coral, cancerous and out of control.

Head swaying in wide, low arcs, as if the deformed antlers tugged at its sanity and drove spikes deep into its brain, the animal lurched toward them. In the harsh light reflecting from the ice, the grotesque growths looked pink and alive. Sixty yards from where they stood, the moose went to its knees. Dark eyes, full of anguish; it raised its massive head and cried, a tiny bleat like that of a newborn lamb. Then its chin fell to the ice and it didn’t move again.