The clouds swallowed the sun and soon would release the moon as I bore my kill back to my cabin. The November wind went through my skin like a spectre from the old world. I did not fear for myself, as it was widely known in my village that the ghosts had died out many years ago, so said the stories.

We feasted on the doe I stuck that evening, but the air was too windy, and the forests too noisy. It was as if the deer bucks had been fighting for mates no farther than a mile from our village, and in droves. Few slept that night, but fewer spoke of what they'd heard. Crushing. Booming. Howling.

The entire day was off. My kin did not play with their toys. My brother did not leave his cabin. We all feared what we had heard, but had no courage to face the possibilities. Work drowned away the ideas passing through our heads. It had been decades since the last sighting, it could not be them. It couldn't have been the monsters, we all thought.

As I returned to my hunting ground, the air was still. Twigs and leaves crunched beneath my bare feet as I trudged through the brush and the woods. There was an oddity to the hunting grounds, beyond its stillness, beyond its desolate, lifeless appearance. It was the debris of oaks, pines, and birch trees, toppled the night before by an unseen force. I walked towards a downed tree that I recognized as a landmark for the hunting ground, it had a knothole that was half the size of a man. Beneath the tree lay the innards of a fawn, its front half on the other side of the mighty trunk. It was decaying beneath the large tree, and it appeared to have had its rear side taken from under it and pulled off without struggle. The smell was unbearable, and the scene had left the leaves and splinters around the site of it covered in blood and bodily toxins. Looking further on, I saw a clear line of trees that had been knocked down, and several more animal carcasses.

They had come here, and they were not far.

I returned to my village, the air as still and quiet as the hunting grounds. Cabins were in ruins, the longhouse was crushed in the center, folded in on itself. The watering hole trailed wet footprints the size of three men. There were no sounds but my own ringing ears from the hammering confusion and rage in my head. There were no survivors. There was only the chilling wind, and it carried me with it.