Standing Corpse

The first Stenza hunting party to encounter the Basket Horns knew right away that something was wrong. It staggered, as if struggling to stay upright, and it was so emaciated at least one thought it had already died, and the body was just shambling about for unknown, and unknowable, reasons. It wandered aimlessly, and its drool dripped into the snow. The wisest among the hunters knew they had no business killing it, and so the sick animal was left alone to die.
Rumors were rampant, and very quickly two prevailing theories emerged. The first was that one or more of the Stenza clans had angered Hunter in some way, although the religious experts swiftly ruled this out. The second was that the animal truly had died, and was being animated by the goddess Lan'tha for inscrutable purposes.
It would take almost a decade for scientists to obtain and examine enough corpses to determine the true cause: a prion disease infecting the central nervous system, producing the symptoms observed by the first witnesses. However, by then the story had breached containment, spreading far and wide as a tale of a rotting corpse, kept going by divine intervention. The story had spread so thoroughly, in fact, that each clan had their own name for the phenomenon.
Nowadays, the causes and effects of the prion diseases of prey animals are widely known, leaving the old stories and names as symbolic of the ability of some to look death in the eye and say, "No."