There's a Wendigo up on the old farm, and it dwells in the in between spaces, tired from long absence from whatever spawned it. Daytime has it holed up like all good spirits, mumbling incoherently back from the pit where they dump the sheep corpses. Sometimes, maybe, the forest back there, or what's left, stirs, mumbles, turns over a bit, shadows getting deeper and murmuring across the land. The fairies the white men brought with are nervous of those places, and don't stir much from the trickle that used to be a river.
Winter is better than summer: it's a wind spirit, an ice spirit, a harsh, angry force that scrapes the roof of the barn and the prefabricated house. The enchantments of the witchwomen who live there and their warrior - (aware enough to offer him blood, though sometimes he will take more) - are slower in winter, more glacial. The fiery one is prone to shuddering inside, the slow, aging warrior is still more often than not, and only the seerress comes out.
He likes her. A bit. Not much. She's the one who leaves him blood and doesn't mind the strangled sheep.
The sheep are stupid animals, and not what he'd like to take if he were not forbidden and bound. He makes a game of the smaller lambs: he does not wait for the sacrificial knife and the offering of blood on dirt. He chases them, delighting in their bleats, all the way to where the cold iron of the old fence they haven't quite rooted out is, all the way to the black metal the fairies disdain and he does not.
They twist, caught by fear, strangling in the wire, bleating and gasping, and it is there that he takes them, sucking away their breath. It lasts for minutes, sometimes: other times, when the seerress is deep asleep, he takes it hour by hour, exhausting the creature until it is thin and worn before he eats the spirit whole.
He is not a spirit with form enough to lick his lips, but he lolls in the forest, content, his shadows spreading like ink-stains between the trees.
Then at dusk, sometimes, there will be a younger one than the witchwomen and their warrior, and they will wander into the Boneyard, curious and arrogant both, until he sends them running out with the merest prick of his teeth, the merest hint of his breath. Sometimes a hunter will come, looking for deer. He is forbidden these, but he trails them, dogs their path, scares the deer. The cats, treading in their wake, he does not touch: the dogs they sometimes bring, he rarely incites to rage. He is waiting, you see, waiting for the hunters to trip and fall.
Somewhere out in the boneyard where the ribbon-bound sheep skulls from the offerings grin, somewhere beneath the leg bones in the grasp of roots and the dream-catchers made from ribs, there are other hunters, other white men who came to his land. They tripped, and they screamed, and they gasped their last in hollows where there were not and never will be hollows.
They were not witches, and not mindful of his teeth or the nightmares. They were meat, and their breath lasted for days, glutted on terror from months upon months of poor luck, and whispering winds, of the land growing fallow and cold.
He is no longer that which took him, and he is spun, even as a thread, on the spindle of the seerress, as the sheep are, as the plants are, as the very soil and the blood is, winding down under the watchful gaze of the bony flock and the fire-witch's shrine and the old warrior.
For now, he is the cold pricking at the throat of the unwary when the sun sets, the lurking presence in the boneyard, the bane of the sheep. And the seerress has a few more shadows in her eyes, and the warrior's eyes are sunken, and the fire-witch shivers with each gust and gale, what's it to do with him?