Synopsis
'Wandering' is an American Frontier Skinwalker tale set in 1865 during a conflict between the American settlers and the native Sioux tribe, taking loose inspiration from Wendigo folklore. We follow a disillusioned, bitter, crippled former soldier as he joins a rag tag reconnaissance team, consisting of an over-zealous Marshall and a reserved, enigmatic native Tracker, roaming the barren desert in order to locate the Sioux. Drama comes both visceral and contemplative as the characters interact and they stumble on various unsavory sights, until one of them suddenly...changes, during the night. From this point, our point-of-view character is forced to adapt so an incomprehensible reality and confront his own prejudices. This is a story I have written a couple years ago and has aspects that could still do with much work with fresher, wiser eyes, which includes the dialect inflections in the dialogue, which is admittedly amateur, as well as handling the subject matter in a more mature and sophisticated way. Thus, all constructive feedback is welcome and very much wanted. WARNING: Not only is this story brutal and gory, there are also numerous moments of extreme profanity and racial slurs, befitting common attitudes of people at the time. This relates to one of the core themes of the story, being prejudice and misunderstanding. It is deliberately ambiguous as to whether the lead character overcomes his own deep-rooted prejudice - him possessing this quality as a point-of-view character is not condoning it.