| Once in a while my family gets together and when they do the most popular subject is my deceased great uncle which by many points of view was crazy. Even the ones who come to his defense admit he was a little odd but his two closest friends in the world, his two younger brothers, say he never lied. I never met the man so I cannot offer my opinion other than to say I very much respect and believe what his two brothers say. The story I want to share today is about when crazy great uncle Evan went to Canada to avoid the draft. Ironically he probably would never have seen any sort of active duty but that is debatable. In any case uncle Evan’s friend received his draft notice and so Evan thought he surely was to be next because he and his friend were so close in so many ways including their birth dates. Evan was just a month younger. He figured his draft notice was coming next so he began to plan to go to Canada before his draft notice arrived, thus he would be innocent by means of ignorance of any sort of notice of being drafted. What made this all even more ironic was that Evan was a big prepper. He had all sorts of survival gear. He was proficient at hand to hand combat and could throw a knife, shoot most guns and was generally not the guy you wanted to get into a fight. To hear the story told nobody was surprised when one day Evan was gone and so were most of his survival toys and weapons. We lived in the northern part of Iowa. There isn’t a lot of traffic on the backroads. Evan took a mini-bike and road it, according to him having told his sister, all the way to the Canadian border. There he ditched it to walk up the border seeking a place he could cross over safely. Apparently he found a way across the border and was working his way through the forest somewhere west of Niagra Falls. He was just on the north side of the border when he noticed the area had become unusually quiet. He said there were all kinds of birds chirping and other assorted animal noises but they had all stopped. He came upon a creature which he said looked like it was starving to death, and smelled like it had already died. He said its ribs were sticking way out of its skin and he thought that it was a man wearing the head of a dead deer, but that the head seemed to have life because its antlers were moving in a way that reminded him of that old Greek tale about the woman with the snakes for hair. Only he said they were definitely antlers not snakes. He said the thing was naked except for the deer head. It or rather he was a male that had long skinny arms that were attached to a broad pair of shoulders that had thin skin stretched tightly over them and then coming down to a small waist that as mentioned had ribs sticking out making it look completely emancipated. He guessed that the man’s head was inside the deer’s neck. The deer head itself was spooky beyond belief. Sharpened teeth were exposed by shriveled and torn lips that couldn’t have hid those ugly teeth even if they had wanted it. Combined with those evil looking antlers it was a terrifying sight. It was obvious to him this thing was up to no good. Evan said he drew his bowie knife and threw it and hit the creature in its shoulder and a dark, dark red, or perhaps it was black, fluid came oozing out of it but that the creature showed no sign of injury and then it began to laugh. He said he darted to the side and kept running through the brush until he just was completely exhausted and couldn’t go another step. He said he could hear it behind him though some ways. It was enough motivation to keep moving until he reached a road and was able to hitch hike to the next town. That’s pretty much the story. Evan came back home a few years later and shared his stories before leaving for points unknown in the southern part of the world, below the border in Mexico. He still didn’t know if they were looking for him about the draft even after he came back but it turned out he was never actually drafted. At least this time he didn’t have to sneak past the border. He might even still be alive. Nobody knows but none of us have heard from him and now he’d be really old if he was alive. All his siblings have passed but one. The one thing crazy uncle Evan was never accused was being a liar. A lot of the family attribute his wilder stories to being exaggerated but as I said his two brothers and sister who knew him best said they believed his stories. For that reason I believe them. I cannot say what it was but I believe what he encountered was a Wendigo. There are drawings which look like his description if you were to assume the head of the drawings was a deer’s head stuck on a man’s body which is entirely possible that others didn’t get as good a look as he did. Thus they thought it actually did have a deer’s head. Another reason I suspect that is when he said he threw his knife at it and the thing oozed a dark red or black looking substance. You could attribute that to the fact that they say Wendigos were once a man that ate the flesh of other men for whatever reason; condemning them to an immortal life of always craving the taste of other men’s flesh. Perhaps when a man turns into a Wendigo his blood turns to that dark or black colored ooze that Evan spoke about. |   |