Writing about Wendigos

I have to write this now before spring's reign is total. Today, the river is open but the bay remains frozen, and the shadows of hill and forest still protect miniature glaciers of dirty ice and speckled snow. The Algonkins¹ believe that their stories should only be told in the winter, when the fatal environment outside makes every tent into a strange womb - filled with multiple humans of many ages - where stories are told. So the time where I can speak about wendgios is short - soon I must be silent until the chill once again descends from the north.

I have spent three winters now wrestling with wendigos - and I have the scars to prove. There is something about this subject that turns my keyboard into a blender. Perhaps a 'time-delayed blender' is more accurate because the injuries often occurred just after I have taken a break from research or writing.

The first year left a near invisible line down my thumb from a knife slice that gave me my first adult experience of physiological shock: cold sweat, dimming vision, a sense of doom.  A rush of sensations completely disproportion to the minor injury, it was like my mind depressurized when the envelope of my skin was opened after decades of intactness. I even recall shadowy shapes beginning to loom above me before the rationality resumed control.    

Year two left a disfiguring ravine down the tip of my middle finger from a tool bursting in my hand. It might have benefited from stitches in hindsight.   This winter left my forearm looking like that of an inexpert suicide or a teenager with a penchant for self-harm, after I succumbed to one of our Lothario cats and let him sit in my lap while typing, where he remained in sleepy spring-loaded bliss until the bark of a dog

How about the train that suddenly burst through a snowy night to trap Steph, I and the dogs against a rock face for a few deafening, terrifying minutes. The rumble of the train had been muffled by waterfall beneath us and if I hadn't had a sudden premonition that a train was coming less than a minute before it arrived, it might have been far worse. By 'premonition' of course I mean my semi-conscious detection of the approaching train's deep bass or a barely perceptible glint of its' headlight. There is also a long-held Algonkin belief that a person's 'guardian spirit' always preceding them, relaying back information about what potential game animals and potential dangers lie ahead.

What does a train have to do with a wendigos? Everything, because I first decided to research wendigoes after reading the reminisces of an Ojibwa elder whose mother told him that the whistle of CNR train was the scream of passing wendigos. The gash in my knee from slamming myself against the rock-face tunnel that trapped us with the train has now healed nicely. If I'm killed by a train, don't be fooled, it was a wendigo.

These injuries have made me reluctant to research wendigos but they monir in the face of my larger worry that by writing about wendgios I'm worsening the winters in Ontario. We have suffered through two severe winters now - while the rest of northern hemisphere was had the warmest winters ever. [Here is the satellite data prove it]

These severe winters have brought two year of strange 'frost-quakes' producing loud seismic booms that confused and frightened a number of Ontarians. The appearance of a wendigo is often accompanied by similar mysterious explosions.  Sometime tales of wendigos make they more like incoming artillery shells than cannibal ogres.

The last two winters have also coincided with two years of unexpected snowy owl ' irruptions' as the eerie owls have come down south in record numbers . Owls are often an agent of 'bad medicine' or a transformed evil shaman in Algonkin myths and last month I tracked down a Laurentian thesis that showed how prevalent this belief remains among many Anishinaabe. There are a many stories where the owl is a wendigo's familiar, often bringing snow and starvation to any village it is sent to haunt.  The Cree tale 'Owl-famine wendigo' begins: "This is a story when an owl was blamed for causing a famine. It was a bad time. Each day for many days, the Snowy Owl arrived and sat at the edge of the village...."

Record cold, strange frosty explosions, epidemics of snowy owls - these have been 'wendigo winters' to me.

I'm a deeply skeptical, materialist person; I struggle to maintain a more humanistic agnosticism against a deep internal atheism.  Yet to be true to the material I'm researching I must at least consider a perspective where causation travels through underground channels that no materialist can see. I'm not claiming I can adopt a pre-modern Algonkian perspective, rather it is simply a conscious loosening of my hardcore skepticism and a lessening of its' rapid dismissal of so many thoughts and observation. I really just wanted to know if I could place my materialism bias into neutral when walking outside and see it from other eyes.

There is an irreducible (and much criticized) Romanticism to this approach but it is not  a comforting Romanticism. It asks you to make yourself more vulnerable to the world, not an easy request, you must surrender the dull certainty that nothing lurks in the dark because the world that contains wendigos is a fearful one, where predators lurk, prey pads quietly and every encounter with an animal is a tense one. Often you are unsure what you are looking at and it is only in retrospect you realize you whether you encountered a simple squirrel, an ancestor, a 'master' animal (head of their species), a shaman, or a spirit or a god - and those gods are all capricious, helping and harming as amuses them.

Materialism helps us leave the fears of childhood. I stopped being scared of the dark when I realized that the world was boring to be populated by spirits or monsters. I became more confident when I could clearly demarcate the limits of my self-hood from my environment and others. To even slightly doubt these is not easy.

It took months of trying to see the world in a different way but occasionally I would happen. Suddenly the stare of a squirrel would stop me dead in my tracks, or the snapping and cracking the comes from the forest on a long frozen night would spook me as it kept circling me, rushing forward and retreating.

It was difficult work to allow myself to be scared. So I reminded myself everyday that to break a leg or fall asleep in winter meant death. I also tried to recall the threat of constant starvation - but it near impossible in this modern world to understand a life where every calorie is a loan toward the energy that must be burned to catch more calories in an endless cycle. A ice-hard loop that has no sympathy for old age, sickness, injury or despair.  To survive you must catch those few hardy creatures that remain with in you in this frozen land when all others have fled, creatures that experience pain like yourself and are just as dedicated to living as you are.

As I said, it is near impossible for modern Canadians to feel this, put the attempt does drag you closer to the world where hunting sat at the core. The world of mammals.

A fox spent the winter with me this year. After every snowfall I followed its' trial, adopting its' gait, trotting, lopping, and pouncing; my head would dip when I saw a hole left by the fox's muzzle piercing the snow after a rodent, formerly invisible yellow dots on the few evergreen sapling that emerged from the snow became obvious (one Algonkin tale I read said that fox urine smelt like a skunk - and I can confirm this). My sense of self would sometime blur as I did this, imitation would become something more.  The uncanny power of tracks & trails is openly acknowledged in the Algonkin taboo against crossing over or stepping in tracks as they as still connected to the track-maker and will reveal you presence or worse. The 'Swallows Track Wendgio' could make humans and animals disappear into their own tracks causing both murder and famine.

I saw the fox only once, it was from an upstairs window and the elevated view and bareness of trees allowed me to watch it for nearly five minutes. It had dark haunches and cautious determination, and a darting alien stare.

There are only a hearty few that remain active in winter: blue-jays, chickadees, red squirrels, flying squirrels, deer, fox, short-tailed weasels², grouse...

One afternoon I stood up to stretch from a period of typing and a startled a grouse at our feeder. They are often visitors at dusk but this grouse was brave enough to appear near noon. Spooked, it burst into the explosive take-offs that are that birds' specialty - only to fly directly toward me and slam into the patio door between us. I watched in shock as it desperately tried to right itself, to re-assert normalcy, but its' neck was all wrong, vigorously scratching legs could not find purchase and a single flapping wing began to slow. In horror we looked at each other, as its' breast took shallower and shallower inhales. Time distorted but I believe the grouse was dead within a minute. I went outside in case it was in shock needed a warm, dark place to recuperate but the grouse was still. Within a minute. Alive then dead. I closed its' still staring eyes.

The grouse had beautiful and thick plumage with only two thick reptilian legs to remind me of the toughness that allowed it to survive these winters. I carried it to an place behind a small hill where I suspected the fox's daily patrol would discover it. It was my offering to the fox and my penance to the grouse. The next day, my guess was confirmed and I saw the fox's tracks head directly for that spot - and then carefully circle around to avoid it. Animals have their own ways and customs - even amidst the austerity of a brutal winter. By spring the grouse's body was gone, that is all I know.

One last fox story...

In late February a friend and I where outside at night when a crazy series of barked honks came from the forest. He was genuinely spooked and looked back at me with a mixture of concern and confusion. Cricket dutifully but slowly went to investigate (Cricket had been on my daily patrols and if I pointed at a track in the snow she would come over smell it and begin following it, she knew the fox as well as I did).  

"It's the fox," I re-assured him. I knew foxes could make strange territorial yelps from many experiences, but he didn't believe me, the noise was too strange to be mammalian. I had never heard this type of yelp before yet I knew without doubt it was the fox, it was like hearing the voice of a old friend. Still, my friend's skepticism was enough to keep me from speaking the next thought that came into my head, "This winter has been hard, the fox is impatient, so he's making a goose-call so the geese will come sooner and bring spring with them." In typing this up now, I realize that I still sort of believe that's what the fox was doing - or more accurately, I'm just not inclined dismiss it because my materialism does.³

I too longed for the geese to return as this year's wendigo winter dragged on. If snowy owls are wendigos' familiars, Canadian geese are their opposites for they represent the arrival of spring and an abundance of calories to be caught. The Swampy Cree tale 'The Thaw-Duck Wendigo' make this connection explicit when a goose lands on a wendigo's chest and melts its' heart.

The geese are spring and spring means thunder. Both geese and thunder return together. So the geese are connected to Thunderbirds. The very concept of Thunderbirds (who are amoral but generally benevolent to human) comes from the springtime correspondence between 'avian-induced claustrophobia' and thunder.

Last Friday morning I was awoke to the sounds of thunder, it was the first I have heard since last fall. For a mystical hour of that gray April morning, the geese made Vermillion river echo with their honks as the deep thunder rolled in support. That night when I opened the window to hear another noisy goose 'jamboree', Cricket immediately broke into a shiver that had her teeth literally clattering. Steph was confused by Cricket's phobic outburst so I explained, "I think Cricket has made a Pavlovian association between the geese and thunder from this morning." What I really meant to say is "Cricket knows the Thunderbirds have returned."

Enough tales for now. I can see that this is a cool, cloudy day, the fingernails of ice and snow still clinging onto this land will last another day. I can still tell wendigo tales for a few days longer. Actually, early spring is boon-time for wendgios. Food reserves are at there lowest and the slushy ice makes rivers impassable and treacherous. Tribes that have separated into small family units to survive winter now re-unite and cast suspicious eyes on any sole survivors.  And if you are willing to look for it, the flashing eyes of birds and animals still have that alien depth that could hide a mischievous, amoral god inside.


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¹ One of the biggest hurdles to researching Canadian First Nations is the confusing terminology. I am using the term Algonkin to refer to those First Nation that speak languages in the Algonkin family - this should not be confused with the Algonquian tribe whose name is now used to refer to the language family. Here is a mapshowing the incredibly wide-range of Algonkin-speakers (the Beothuk are generally assumed to have spoken Algonkin).

More specifically I'll be referring to the body of myth shared by the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) and Cree that live in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba.

² Perhaps no animal is so hostile to wendigo as the short-tailed weasel. The origin story of why the winter-coat of the weasel is white except for a black-tipped tail is oft-told. When the Algonkian trickster-hero is just about to be eaten by a wendigo, the weasel arrives, and entering the Wendigo's rectum, eats through him until it finds and devours the heart, re-emerging covered in 'filth'. The trickster-hero thanks the weasel and cleanses it off except for a black bit of blood/dirt at the end of its' tail.  

We were gifted with the appearance of just such a weasel this year when Mike and his kids came out to burn a pine tree in celebration/defiance of the longest night of the year. To be honest, after writing this, I'm beginning to doubt that was just a normal weasel... It appeared the very morning after solstice night when we performed our ritual yule tree burning, it kept running back and forth on our deck almost putting on a show that allowed everyone to gather around and see it, and it seemed to be peering at us as much as we looked at it... Well,  it was a magical moment from any perspective.

³  The sheer mimic/memetic power of animals should not be discounted. Early this spring I discovered that starlings are capable of imitating hawk shrieks, more recently one starlings seem to be imitating one of our cats whose constant cries are part of any walk he takes with my around the property! I'm not sure a fox can truly imitate a goose, but until a few days ago I would have doubted that any local birds could imitate a cat.