joins the garrison, a frostbitten stranger named Colqhoun arrives and shares a hellish tale about how his wagon train became lost in the mountain because a Colonel Ives had promised the party a shorter route to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he led them on a more circuitous route resulting in the party getting trapped by snow for three months. Wracked by starvation, Colqhoun and his fellow travellers were reduced to cannibalism, while he alleges that Ives resorted to murder. A rescue party is assembled to retrieve any survivors and capture Ives. George warns those who are leaving about the Wendigo myth: anyone who consumes the flesh of their enemies takes their strength but becomes a demon cursed by an insatiable hunger for more human flesh. When the soldiers reach Ives' cave, Boyd and Reich investigate. They discover the bloody remains of five skeletons, and realise that Colqhoun is Ives and he murdered everyone. Colqhoun's plan is now to kill and eat the soldiers. Colqhoun quickly kills George, Toffler and Colonel Hart, and, after a brief struggle, Reich. Boyd escapes the massacre by jumping off a cliff but breaks his leg. He hides in a pit next to the body of Reich whom he eventually eats to stay alive. When a delirious and severely traumatized Boyd finally limps back to the fort, he returns to find it has been reinforced by General Slauson and a detachment of cavalry. Cleaves and Martha (who were on a supply mission and had not met Colqhoun) do not believe his wild tale, while the hung-over Knox cannot recall and refuses to back Boyd up. A second expedition to the cave finds no bodies or any trace of Colqhoun. A temporary commander is assigned to the fort but to Boyd's horror, it is Colqhoun, who is now calling himself Colonel Ives again. The men still refuse to believe Boyd because Colqhoun bears no sign of the wounds inflicted on him during the fight at the cave. Secretly, Colqhoun tells Boyd that he used to suffer from tuberculosis but when a Native scout told him the Wendigo myth, then he "just had to try" by murdering him and eating his flesh, a process that cured his disease. Colqhoun now plans to use the fort as a base to cannibalize passing travellers because, like the notion of manifest destiny, the migrants had a calling just like himself. Boyd