It was the end of Winter, the Hungry Time.
Food was starting to run short, but Sugaring hadn't started up yet. So a hunter went out to see what he could track down.
He didn't come back and, although people went out to look for him, they mostly didn't have the strength to look very far.
Well, lots of things can happen in the woods in Winter, people said.
Next a young girl disappeared.
She'd gone down to the lake to get some water. They found the waterskin, empty, out on the ice near the hole that they always keep chopped open to draw their water from. (You always want to draw your water from where it's deep; it's cleaner there.) But the girl herself they never found.
What they did find were a set of tracks in the snow heading North, and those tracks were backward tracks.
So they knew they had a wendigo to deal with.
(Call them trolls or etins if you like; same difference.)
The elders sat down in council to try to figure out what to do next, but they talked around and around and couldn't come up with a workable plan. Finally young Weasel speaks up.
“I have an idea,” he says.