April 16, 2025

Ravenous
by Jennifer Weigel

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.



Silence.  I shift my weight.  A scant twig trapped between my foot and the earth snaps, alerting the deer to my presence.  The silence is broken.  The lone doe’s huge bowl-like ears prick forward, honing in on the transgression.  Her deep black eyes stare into the underbrush, pleading as they meet my own.  Nostrils flare, body quivers, and she bounds away reluctantly.  Her footfalls grow further from this place and, as they disappear to distance, the silence returns in their stead.  I sigh.

Hazy sunlight shimmers through snowcapped trees, their woody surfaces stripped of bark.  I am again alone in these scant woods.  The first and last deer I have seen in well over a month, both one and the same, has escaped.  For now.  But she is thin, scarcely able to hold herself up – not much meat left upon those bones.  I have to admit, I’m not faring so well myself these days.  At this point any meal would be a welcome change, and long overdue.  Won’t be long now, before I catch up with my quarry.  But which of us will succumb to starvation first?  Now there’s the ultimate question.

The warm glow glistens off of the deer’s tracks, receding down the path towards the valley.  She knows as well as I do that there’s nothing left to eat down below.  The creek bed is frozen solid.  But then again, there’s nothing left to eat up here either.  Not really.  I pry a bit of bark from a nearby pine tree and pursue my prey.  I strip the inner lining of the gnarled husk with my front teeth as I walk along the path, following in her footsteps.  The dry snack is both woody and bitter but it gives me something to gnaw upon other than the gaunt interior of my own scabbed-over cheek, unwilling to be further bloodied by my chipped, razor-sharp teeth scraping at its meager surface from within.  The trees in the valley have long since been stripped bare, best to take advantage of what little nourishment I can get before I leave this place to trail along after my prey.

Despite the frigid cold, the sun burns hot on the nape of my neck.  My thinning hair leaves much of my head and scalp exposed to the elements.  The torn leather of my coat lays across my shoulders, tattered and worn thin at the edges from whence I had stolen my last repast, chewing what scraps I could afford to lose to make a meager meal.  I had previously used the fur trim from my hood to patch my boots, but that was a while ago now and the holes are wearing through once more, the icy dampness encroaching on my nearly forgotten toes.  There is hardly enough left of my garments to call these remains clothing, let alone coat or boots or whatnot – anymore the whole of me is but a hodgepodge of fragmented cloth and cloak, fur and hair, skin and bone.  And I am chilled to the core, my heart as black as my frostbitten fingers.

My mind reels.  I can still see my husband’s face, clear as day.  His amber eyes offering some solace from the raging storm until they grow too distant.  Eventually their light dims completely, lost forever within the sunken recesses of his skull.  Our old farmstead is another world away, somewhere where hope once resided.  It is not of this life.  Its warmth is no longer familiar or welcoming, it is just another hollow void like my heart.  Lost and unfulfilled.

My husband and I made an unspoken agreement before his passing, that whichever of us survived these lean times would find sustenance in the other.  We felt no need to speak of the inevitable, and I simply did what needed to be done.  I outlived him, and I thusly upheld my end of the bargain.  I wasn’t proud of this at the time, but I have come to see things differently the longer the wind roars at my back and the thinner and wearier I become.  By consuming what I could of his flesh, I am still here.  He gave me the strength to face another day… another couple of weeks honestly.  I would have wanted, rather demanded, that the opposite hold true had we traded places.  It would have been the least I could do, and the most that I could offer.

So I acknowledge that I should actually find some refuge there, from drawing him into my body to nourish and sustain me.  This was the last connection that we had, my way of keeping him with me even after his slow death.  I know that I should treasure this gift and that I should miss him, but yet I feel nothing.  Except for the awareness that I am him and he is me in some meaningful way.  For his body dwells within me, and we are interwoven into one entity now, surviving these desperate times together in one form.  But although I sense that I should find some solace in that, feel some connection in spirit, my hunger only worsens and my heart grows more and more hollow.  He is gone.  I am here.  That is all.  There is nothing more.

The afternoon drags on, the sun still passing its judgment from its perch high above this wasteland.  This weather should have broken by now, but it remains unseasonably cold.  And bitter.  Like the cambium of the inner bark mixed with spit and acid reflux that I swirl around in my mouth to maintain my awareness of the here and now.  The silence is my song, stoic and mournful.  It is my ever-present shadow, trailing as I follow in the doe’s weary footsteps.

The deer stays her course, too weak to run.  Her body rigid, waiting.  Her eyes darkening, receding even deeper into her skull like those of my husband in another lifetime, far from here.  Whatever respite or forgiveness his soul had offered was left forsaken in the windows of the farmhouse I abandoned when the hunger overtook me.  The doe leans against a small tree, her dark, brooding gaze stripped as bare as the trees that surround us are bereft of bark, no longer able to provide nourishment to those outside of their own form.  She stares at me in disdain.  Neither of us relishes the inevitable movement, this journey which we embark on together.  Now and again.  Predator and prey.

I half hope she will stay still and wait to die, that she will collapse where she stands welcoming the inevitable so that I may feed unhindered, conserving my energy so that I can carry on a bit longer.  And yet I half hope she will not – neither of us ready or willing to give up, not yet.  Both of us hungry.  A part of me wants for her to put up a fight and wishes that I will be the one to fall, succumbing to my weakness and letting go of my own will to triumph.  Life.  Death.  Becoming.  Unbecoming.  There is a beautiful and harmonious inevitability in both.  They are intertwined, two sides of the same.

Our eyes meet, the voids within forming an unspoken understanding between the doe and myself.  We are one, connected in spirit and sacrifice.  We eat or we are eaten.  It is this that consumes us.  As our bodies lurch towards one another, we dwell wholly within this knowledge.  It speaks through the silence, within the biting cold, gnawing its way both in and out of our respective being.  I already exist within her, and she within myself – here and now and furthermore.  Even before anything else happens; even before the inevitable fight for life or death.

Her hoof, pointed like a hatchet, strikes me in my left shin as I close.  I feel the warmth of my blood pooling as it rises to the surface.  This sensation, slight though it is, enlivens me.  I lunge and grab her thin velvet ear within my teeth, gnawing upon its soft recesses.  We fall to the barren earth, inextricably tangled.  I claw at her face and at her flared nostril, my raw and jagged fingernails securing their hold on the fragile folds of flesh where her lip meets her nose.  Her teeth grind into the bones of the back of my hand, working their way upwards towards my wrist.  I feel each painful crack as the brittle bones give way to a snapping of twigs, one by one each breaking the silence.  The search for quietude is no longer necessary as the scream for survival wells up from within this moment, hunger itself made manifest.  There is no escaping it now.
​
Both the deer and I lock together in this eternal struggle.  We succumb to the winter, to its wrath, to our anger and resentment at this dire situation.  We are both stripped bare of bark, but we are not barren.  All of my numbness - my blackened heart and frostbitten extremities – unite in pain and fire.  I am engulfed by their all-consuming rage, my sensations rediscovered.  Eat or be eaten.  This unspoken agreement transcends both predator and prey, past and present.  The deer and I arise, reformed and reawakened.  We are one.  We are here.  We are the wendigo.  And we will be, now and forevermore... hungry.

                                                              💀💀💀

Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist.  Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing.  Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique.  She lives in Kansas, USA with her husband and is an avid art collector who enjoys playing board and role-playing games, junk store thrifting, and mail art. Her spirit animal is the deer. Her favorite foods are unagi don or broiled calamari steak and frosting with or without cake.You can read more of Weigel’s writing on her website here.  https://jenniferweigelwords.wordpress.com/