The Wendigo, Algernon Blackwood
[The following is part of the introduction to the 1910 horror novella, The Wendigo, by the English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, Algernon Henry Blackwood. The story was first published in The Lost Valley and Other Stories (Eveleigh Nash, 1910). Members of Priestley's Tales of the Unexpected are able to download a generic ePub version of this novella, made available by Free Spirit Books]
A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the bull moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was interested in other things besides moose—amongst them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole...
