Marie/ Day 1 of the scouting mission

I don't know what I expected to happen on day one of our adventure. For Karla to unite us all with sea shanties? For Ron to open the breifcase he insisted on bringing to show us his collection of stolen lottery tickets? For Blain to remember some survival trick about cooking leaves? For Mute to talk?

None of that happened. What did happen involved my brother's voice calling to me from the woods.

It seemed so real. It knew things only he would have known. He talked about this place as if it were a scientific breakthrough. He called me by my childhood nickname.

It said, "MayMay, hurry! The fish are flying! Breathing air! It's a marvel. Hurry before you miss it."

I'm ashamed to say I fell for it. I was in tears the moment I heard his voice, and I ran screaming into the jungle after shadows. The others tried to stop me, but I ran with drive. I ran straight into a clearing surrounded by a dozen tall, lanky, pale figures.

Their mouths hung open too wide. Their teeth too long and crooked. They stood ten feet tall from head to toe, but the antlers added several feet. Their empty eye sockets bore into me from every angle as I stumbled backward over a blood-stained slab of stone and several baskets filled with bones.

I closed my eyes and threw my arms over my face as I waited for them to tear me apart with their claws. To pull the muscle from my bones and eat me alive.

The pain never came.

I lay still on the wet stone until my heart quit pounding in my ears. Everyone gathered around me slowly, eyes on the creatures. They did seem terrified, but no one was in a hurry as i would have been.

Karla helped me up, and we walked out of the ritual circle. We walked right up to two of the wendigos, only to find that they were just statues.

Statues made from bone. A dozen piles of bone stacked ten feet high and shaped into elongated humanoids.

Smaller humanoid bones seemed to be the building blocks. Short bones strung together to make arms and legs longer than mine. Four sets of toddler sized rib cages fitted together to make one long torso.

Each eye socket was four tiny jawbones fitted into a skull molded from a bone dust mixture similar to concrete. I could tell from the texture and the fact that the skulls were solid (aside from the eyes and jawbones). The jawbones were wired together peices of skulls and femurs with broken fingerbones for teeth. If it had come to life, it could have taken my head off at the neck with one bite.

Someone, or thing, took the time to make a dozen of these statues and filled this clearing so they would stare at the stone slab in the center. At us.

Our feet and the base of the stone slab were surrounded by hand woven baskets and buckets full of bones. Fresh bones.

Part of me was hoping the tribe was some long dead civilization that we could learn from at a distance, but it's confirmed. Someone is on this island with us, and we are long past meeting them. Blain insists on pressing forward, on hunting something soon. He seems to have traded his superstitious panic for an eagerness to fight this evil. There were few words before we left the clearing.

"Are these... children's bones?" Ron whispered as he stood frozen before one of the statues.

"I dont think so. The tapestries in the temple made the tribal people seem shorter," I reassured him.

"So, we are looking for cannibal pygmies? Why does that bother me more than taller people?" Karla asked, but no one had a good answer.