I checked the spoiler box to err on the side of caution, even though what I mention is not "the entire story." I'm sure many of you have had occasions in your lives when one or more movies, TV programs, music, book titles or story titles, etc. have eluded you at the time you initially discovered them, sometimes for decades. So it has been for me with my initial encounter with what proved to have its origin with Algernon Blackwood's haunting tale The Wendigo. I long thought (erroneously) that the TV program that aired the story was Masterpiece Theater. That was wrong, as you see; that honor goes to the TV series Great Ghost Tales. Perhaps I can be forgiven, because as it turns out the show aired in 1961, not the mid-1960's as I'd "remembered." The hauntingly eerie lines "Oh! Oh! My feet, my burning feet of fire," coupled with what had gone just before regarding certain tracks in the snow (and what happened TO those tracks) as observed by the protagonist were such that the mysterious, frightening tale was seared (no pun intended) into my mind as if with a branding iron. I did not discover Algernon Blackwoods tale The Wendigo until 1970, when I ordered a copy of the DAW paperback book Monster Mix; that book is quite possibly one of the best horror short story collections I've ever read, and if you can rustle up a copy of this long out of print horror gem, do so. Blackwood's The Wendigo is one of those rare tales that you can savor repeatedly and still feel that unsettling sense of cold, cosmic horror that is no less disturbing today than it was when written. Interestingly, Blackwood's The Wendigo was essentially a precursor to another author I "backed into" a bit later by the name of H.P. Lovecraft, and The Wendigo easily fits within Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos genre.
