Anthropologist David Gilmore has proposed the idea that, in most cultures, monsters assist people in “awakening…to their own values and moral traditions.” If so, then in a communal society, perhaps the wendigo is the embodiment of hunger’s selfishness. It does not run in packs or pair off to mate and raise offspring; rather, the wendigo stalks the wilderness alone, attuned only to the black hole of its gullet.

But monsters leave the liminal space of one culture’s nightmares and enter the rest of the world where they are appropriated and changed to suit other fears and fancies. For those of us raised on the tender vampires of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyers, there’s also a strange romance in untrammeled hunger. After all, ravenousness is metaphoric as well as literal. We conflate physical hunger with romantic desire in ten thousand pop songs, and who among us has not looked at a beloved and wanted to consume them?

In a different mirror, the wendigo’s insatiableness might be a manifestation of loneliness, a kind of desire for connection that has metastasized.