Wechuge: Horror of the Northern Woods

According to the oral traditions of Canada’s Cree and Anishinaabe nations, an evil spirit haunts the boreal forests. Known as the Wendigo, Windigo, or Witiko, this malevolent entity is driven by a mindless compulsion to consume human flesh – a desire which it instills into luckless humans who make themselves vulnerable to its pernicious influence. In physical form, the Wendigo is described as a gaunt corpse-like human, often of immense stature, with ragged lips long chewed to ribbons in its perpetual bid for satiation, and a heart of ice which renders it almost impossible to kill.

Just north of the western frontier of Cree territory, in the watershed of the Peace River, which sprawls across the border of northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta, lies the traditional territory of the Dunne-za, also known as the Dane-zaa or Beaver Indians – a Dene people closely related to the Sekani of northern B.C. Despite their former antagonism with the southerly Woodland Cree, which is said to have ended around the turn of the 19^th Century on the banks of what would thereafter be known as the Peace River, the Beaver shared the Cree’s belief that an evil man-eating entity lurked in the surrounding woods. The Beaver called this monster the Wechuge or Wehcuge. Their conception of this creature and its relationship with human beings, however, differed fundamentally from that of their Cree neighbours, appearing to be a facet of a complex philosophy by which the Beaver perceived mankind’s interplay with the invisible world. This belief, and its differences with that of Cree and Algonquian interpretations of the Wendigo, was brought to the attention of Western academia in the 1970s by America anthropologist Robin Ridington, who outlined it in a 1976 article for the journal Anthropologica, and elaborated on it in his 1986 contribution to Volume 6 of the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians.

Ancient Man-Eating Monsters

Although Ridington did not articulate this idea his articles, the Dunne-za belief in the Wechuge, and the wider belief system of which it is a part, seems to be a coalescence of three different folkloric motifs common to many First Nations across Canada. The first is the notion that enormous monsters once roamed the northern wilderness in ancient times, devouring any human beings they came across. These monsters were eventually either killed or transformed into their present forms by a pair of legendary twins or a lone cultural hero – in Dunne-za tradition, a figure named Saya.

“The idea of giant man-eating monsters,” Ridington wrote in his 1976 article, “is deeply engrained in Dunne-za mythology as it is in that of the Algonkians. Dunne-za myth cycles tell of a time when giant animals hunted and ate people. These animals behaved like people, and the people were compelled to be their game. They are referred to as Wolverine Person, Spider Person, Beaver Person, Frog Person, etc. Although they were all overcome and transformed into their present form by the culture hero, their power is still in existence.” Other monsters which belong to this prehistoric menagerie include the Thunderbird – a giant eagle from whose beating wings issue claps of thunder, and from whose eyes flash bolts of lightning; a colossal frog; a giant wolf with shining teeth; an enormous snake; and a huge fish.

Vision Quests and Medicine Taboos

The second idea of which this multifaceted legend appears to be an amalgam is the concept of the vision quest – a practice common to many First Nations across the Great White North. Traditionally, young native men or women desirous of obtaining preternatural assistance went into the wilderness alone, praying and fasting, in the hope that a non-human spirit would confer its power upon them. Unlike other nations, which believed that preternatural power could be bestowed by all manner of animal and elemental spirits, the Beaver maintained that ‘medicine power,’ as Ridington’s informants called it, derived exclusively from the giant man-eating monsters of prehistory.

Each preternatural gift given by these ancient spirits came with certain taboos related to the unique nature of the spirit that bestowed it. If the recipients or their fellow tribesmen violated one of these ‘medicine taboos,’ their spirit helpers would become so powerful that they could hijack the psyches of their mortal hosts, enabling them to vicariously kill and devour human beings as they once did in the ancient past. As Ridington put it, “For every power, there is a myth, and within each of these stories is the information relevant to the personal taboos demanded of the person who has encountered that power in a vision quest. To act in a way that evokes the behavior of the mythic monster associated with a person’s medicine is to activate the myth and bring it into reality.”

Awakening of the Thunderbird Spirit

One example which Ridington included to illustrate this belief involved a white woman from the Peace River area who spent time among the Beaver Indians. One day, the woman visited the camp of an old man named Jumbie. Unbeknownst to the visitor, Jumbie had obtained the guardianship of the Thunderbird spirit during a vision quest in his youth, and was thus burdened with the medicine taboos associated with that legendary raptor. During her visit, the white woman, without asking permission or issuing any warning, suddenly raised her camera and prepared to take a photo of the elder. Several young men in the camp immediately urged her to refrain from taking the snapshot, telling her that the old man didn’t like having his picture taken.

“Although Dunne-za do not like to have their pictures taken without having been given the opportunity to give their consent,” Ridington wrote, “the issue in this case was more serious. It was the flash that the old man ‘did not like…’” – a flash evocative of the lighting produced by his guardian spirit, the Thunderbird.

“The white woman persisted in attempting to take the picture,” the anthropologist continued,” and Jumbie, seeing that she would not respect his personal space, dove beneath a sleeping robe in the back of the tent. To the white woman, this was an act of fear and reinforced her belief that Indians are child-like and superstitious. To every Dunne-za present, however, Jumbie’s action demonstrated his power, not weakness, and bravery rather than fear. To have been exposed to the flash would have made him ‘too strong’. It would have risked bringing down to earth the power of Giant Eagle whose flashing eyes still penetrate from heaven to earth in time of storm. The power would have compelled the man to become the Person-eating monster, and the man would have lost his own will and judgement to that of the all-consuming monster inherent within himself by virtue of his encounter with it during the experience of visionary transformation as a child.”

Awakening of the Spider Person Spirit

Ridington went on to relate another incident in which he himself accidentally committed a similar transgression. One day, the anthropologist found himself driving with several Beaver Indians, one of whom was an elder named Charlie Yahey, whom the Dunne-za venerated as a powerful prophet and ‘dreamer’. Unbeknownst to Ridington, Yahey’s personal daemon was Spider Person – one of the ancient man-eating monsters that once prowled the wilderness in search of human flesh.

Legend has it that, in the mists of prehistory, Spider Person lured human beings to its nest on a high mountain by whirling around a piece of wood attached to a length of spider silk – a sort of bullroarer which produced an alluring hum. The creature pounced on those who succumbed to its spidery music and killed them by sucking out their bodily fluids. Due to the method by which it attracted its prey, vision questers who harnessed the spirit of this ancient arachnid were forbidden from listening to music produced by stringed instruments. “To make sound in a similar way,” Ridington wrote, “would bring the mythic monster back from then and there to here and now. The Spider Man within the human would become too strong, and all the people would be in danger.”

Ridington was blissfully unaware of Yahey’s medicine taboo as he trundled down a Peace River byway with his native passengers, and thought nothing of turning the radio to a country music station as he drove. A young man who was riding with him immediately reached over and turned the radio off, simply stating that the old medicine man didn’t like such music. Ridington later learned that Charley Yahey’s personal medicine taboo was listening to any sound made by a stringed instrument, including the guitars, banjos, and fiddles which give country music its unique flavour. “Indeed,” the anthropologist wrote, “once in town he had been in a cafe when the [jukebox] began playing guitar music and he had begun to get ‘too strong.’ He was hustled out of town and into the bush where another person sang his medicine song to overcome the emerging monster within the old man.”

The anthropologist went on to relate another story in which a frail elderly man with ‘frog power’ began madly hopping up and down after accidentally eating meat pervaded with fly eggs; and a case in which a lame man with ‘wolf power’ began attacking children with a sharpened nail when his medicine bundle was stolen. Both of these men were subdued by the medicine powers of other band members before they could become too strong and inflict more serious damage.

The Wechuge

If left unchecked, people whose guardian spirits were awakened through the violation of their medicine taboos would transmogrify into a powerful man-eating entity called a Wechuge – a nigh-invincible monster with a heart of ice, sharply reminiscent of the Wendigo of Cree and Algonquin tradition, and the third element of which our tripartite legend is composed. Like the Wendigo, the Wechuge evokes a man-eating, often-giant humanoid common to native traditions across the country, which anthropologists typically refer to as the ‘Cannibal’. Despite that this creature is frequently included among the ranks of the giant anthropophagic predators that roamed the wilderness when the world was young, and is regarded as a potential guardian spirit in many First Nations traditions, Ridington made it clear that the Wechuge of Beaver lore was not simply one of the many ancient man-eaters whose powers vision questers could harness, but rather an entity into which all man-eating spirits would transform through the medium of their human hosts.

As mentioned, the transformation of a human into a Wechuge was said to be triggered by a violation of the person’s medicine taboo. The person afflicted would then begin to exhibit behaviors associated with the guardian spirit whose powers had been given free rein to amplify. People imbued with the frog spirit, for example, might begin jumping up and down like the old man aforementioned, and those possessing the wolf spirit might begin filing objects into incisor-like weapons like the lame man previously described. At this stage, it was still possible to mitigate the power of the guardian spirit and bring the victim back from the brink of total metamorphosis. “To do this,” Ridington wrote in his 1986 piece, “another person used his medicines to overcome the strength of the monster. He faced Wehcuge and sang his own songs. He might even wrestle with him and then cover him with his own medicine robe.”

If these remedies were not adopted, the afflicted person would begin to bite off his own lips, initiating the final stage of his metamorphosis into a Wechuge. “The flesh thus eaten turned to ice within him,” Ridington wrote. Once fully transformed, the Wechuge would begin hunting down and devouring other people like the giant man-eating monsters of old. The creature could only be killed by being burned alive in a fire for seven days, until all the ice within it had melted.

The Beaver Indians have several traditional stories about fully-transformed Wechuge who terrorized their ancestors throughout history. In one story, which Ridington reproduced in his 1976 article, a Wechuge once lured a Dunne-za hunter outside of his lodge one night by calling his name. The creature snatched its unfortunate victim, strangled him, and carried him off into the woods to eat.

When they discovered what had transpired, the man’s kinsmen formed a rescue party and followed the creature’s tracks into the forest. They found the Wechuge roasting the hunter’s gutted carcass on a spit over an open fire. In the ensuing battle, in which one rash young Beaver brave was killed, the Dunne-za warriors managed to push the monster onto his own campfire. They held him there for seven days, feeding the fire all the while, until his icy corpse was reduced to ashes.

In his 1976 piece, Ridington briefly alluded to a full Wechuge transformation which was said to have occurred in the late 1800s to a man named Tsegute or Tsekute, who killed and ate his fellow tribesmen before retreating to the bush. Some of this monster’s victims were the parents of Ridington’s oldest informants, and memories of the tragedy were still fresh in their minds when the anthropologist recorded their stories in the 1970s.

As is the case with other universal folktales, in which different folkloric traditions ascribe different causal agents to the same mysterious phenomena, the differences between the Beaver legend of the Wechuge and the Cree and Algonquian legends of the Wendigo only serve to bolster the disturbing notion that a man-eating demon haunts the woods of northern Canada.

 

Sources

“Beaver,” by Robin Ridington, in Volume 6 of the Handbook of North American Indians: The Subarctic (1986)

“Wechuge and Windigo: A Comparison of Cannibal Belief Among Boreal Forest Athapaskans and Algonquins,” by Robin Ridington, in Volume 18 of Anthropologica (1976)