Ithaqua does not sleep. He walks. He has been walking for as long as there have been polar wastes to walk in, and he has never stopped, and the people who live in those regions have known about him for as long as they have lived in those regions. They have very specific rules about what to do and what not to do when the wind starts behaving like a person. The rules work most of the time. Most.

The Bureau's files on Ithaqua are thinner than the threat assessment warrants, and the reason is operational rather than evidentiary. Cases accumulate in the regions where no case officer wants to spend the winter. The cases that do get written up are written up by locals — Hudson's Bay Company factors, RCMP constables, missionary clergy — and the locals agree on the essentials with a consistency that is its own form of evidence.

The Form

A massive humanoid silhouette. Observed at distances ranging from a kilometer to a few meters, never with full clarity. The defining features recur in every credible account: a vaguely human shape, eyes that burn red against snow and darkness, and feet that do not entirely touch the ground. He strides. The strides cover impossible distances. Witnesses describe him as visible at the horizon, then visible at fifty paces, then visible at five paces, with no time having passed in between.

The Bureau's consolidated sighting report uses the phrase "discontinuous approach." The phrase is clinical. The experience, per the three surviving first-person accounts, is not.

The Inuit Records

Documented in oral tradition across the entire circumpolar Inuit world long before European contact. The names vary — Wendigo in some lineages, Wechuge in others, the Wind-Walker in English transliteration — and the Bureau is satisfied that the entity described in all of them is the same one.

The traditions agree on the essential operational points. Do not whistle in the cold months. Do not speak his name aloud after dark. Do not look at the sky on nights when the wind is moving in patterns that wind should not be capable of. Do not follow tracks that appear from nowhere and lead nowhere. Do not answer a voice that calls your name from the ice when you are alone, even — especially — if the voice belongs to someone you know.

These are not superstitions. They are operational protocols refined over approximately four thousand years of continuous field testing in the only laboratory where the testing matters.

The Taking

Documented victims from at least the seventeenth century onward. The pattern does not vary meaningfully across the intervening centuries. A human alone in arctic conditions disappears, with no physical trace beyond the immediate disturbance at the point of departure, and no body. The body — sometimes — turns up months or years later, hundreds or thousands of miles from the disappearance site, frozen, occasionally still alive at the moment of recovery, always changed.

The survivors do not describe what happened to them. The Bureau's working hypothesis is that they cannot. The experience does not translate into the terms human cognition maintains for spatial and temporal continuity, and the attempt to force the translation produces the characteristic symptoms the recovery teams have learned to recognize: the thousand-yard stare, the silent weeping, the refusal to enter enclosed spaces, the eventual walk back toward the horizon.

The 1947 Yukon Incident

The most recent well-documented case. A trapper named Halloran disappeared from his cabin near Dawson City in February. His body was recovered from a Patagonian glacier in November. The intervening distance is approximately eleven thousand kilometers. The intervening time is nine months.

The body was frozen but not dead. Halloran's heart was still beating when the recovery team reached him, and continued beating for nine hours after extraction, at a rate of approximately one beat per minute. He never regained consciousness. The autopsy, performed by a pathologist who subsequently declined to sign his own report, revealed lung tissue consistent with sustained exposure to atmospheric pressures found only at the upper edge of the troposphere and frost damage to internal organs in patterns that do not occur in any recognized mode of freezing.

The pathologist's unsigned notes include one sentence the Bureau has quoted, in other documents, more than once: ĠE̢͋̊ꙮȖ̈́𓆗P̄K͛V̮͗͌J̎́F̴͂Ṡ̃̍.

Threat Profile

Extreme. Containment is impossible. Ithaqua moves between locations faster than any monitoring apparatus can follow, and the polar regions where he is most active are the regions least amenable to surveillance. Satellites see weather. Ground stations see nothing. The only reliable reporting network is the one the Inuit have been running, without budget or oversight, for four millennia.

Mitigation is local. The traditional protocols work, in the statistical sense that following them produces significantly lower disappearance rates in populations that observe them compared to populations that do not. The Bureau treats the protocols as operational doctrine and recommends them, without explanation, to any personnel deployed in Ithaqua's range. The personnel who ask why are given the protocols anyway. The personnel who follow them come back more often than the personnel who don't.