Of all the eerie legends endemic to the Great White North, few are more disturbing than the tale of the Wendigo or Witiko, a corporeal demon said to roam the northern wilderness in the form of a giant skeletal cadaver, which invades the dreams of the vulnerable to instill an unquenchable hunger for human meat. This old native legend, sufficiently chilling on its face, is rendered doubly alarming by the long catalogue of historic executions of suspected Wendigo demoniacs in Canada’s boreal forest, and a handful of gruesome killing sprees explicitly attributed to the influence of the evil spirit whose name the natives once feared to pronounce. This author has covered several such stories in previous pieces: the appalling case of Swift Runner, a Cree trapper who butchered and ate his family in the winter of 1879; the tale of Moostoos, who displayed unearthly signs of Wendigo possession prior to his execution in 1895; the old record of an 18th Century Ojibwa cannibal whose hideous crimes were discovered in the woods south of Lake Superior; and the horrific murder of an elderly Cree woman at the height of the North-West Rebellion. These sensational true events naturally lend themselves to retelling, and with some exceptions, recur in the writings of both historical chroniclers and anthropologists. With the focus of Wendigo study narrowing on these real-life cases, older native legends which seared the image of the Wendigo into cultural consciousness – dusky tales once bandied about smoky fires in Cree lodges and Ojibwa wigwams, told and retold throughout the generations – have largely fallen into obscurity. In this piece, we will resurrect some of these old Wendigo legends from Canada’s boreal forest.
The Weasel and the Wendigo
Our first tale is a Swampy Cree story collected by American writer Howard Alan Norman and published in his 1990 anthology Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples. In this strange legend, a young Cree man renowned for his exceptionally quiet nature was engaged to be married. In the days leading up to the wedding, the man proposed to play a game of hide and seek with his friends, promising to hide somewhere in the village when his friends were not looking. The game commenced, but no matter where they looked, the young men of the village were unable to find their taciturn tribesman.
Suddenly, someone in the village heard a strange noise issuing from one of the kettles in which meat was boiled. Knowing that their hidden friend would never be so clumsy as to make such a revealing noise, the seekers nevertheless decided to investigate. Inside the kettle was a thin layer of freshly fallen snow which bore the unmistakeable marks of weasel tracks.
Shortly thereafter, a similar noise emanated from another kettle in the village. Inspection revealed another set of weasel prints. Some of the friends began to speculate that their hidden compatriot had transformed himself into a weasel, and was burrowing beneath the village, surfacing unseen in the cooking pots. Others who knew the man well insisted that he was far to careful to give himself away so easily, even in weasel form.
The villagers decided to gather all the kettles and place them together in the middle of the village so that they could more easily be watched. They then set a vigil, hoping that the mysterious weasel would appear. On the insistance of his concerned betrothed, the villagers abstained from using any of the kettles for cooking lest they accidentally boil the weasel alive. The young men watched the kettles for several days, but no signs of the weasel appeared. Soon, the villagers began to grow hungry.
After pondering the uncanny situation, a Cree elder shocked the village with the pronouncement that the mischief was the work of the Wendigo, which would have to be killed before the kettles could be used again. On the old man’s advice, a party of hunters set out into the wilderness to accomplish this task, bringing one of the kettles with them.
At dusk, the hunters made camp, lighting a fire and placing the kettle overtop of it. As darkness began to fall, one of the hunters observed a towering, lanky figure looming in the gloom of the forest. A Wendigo had arrived at their camp.
Some of the veteran hunters, recalling the elder’s advice, shouted into the kettle. “We know you’re in there!” they said. “Help us now.”
In response, a weasel shot out of the kettle, bounded across the forest floor, and leapt down the Wendigo’s throat. “It bit the Windigo’s heart,” Norman’s informant said, “which killed it.”
The victorious hunters returned in triumph to their village. There, they found the man who was engaged to be married sitting in his own lodge. The quiet man explained that he had been hiding in his tent the whole time, oblivious to the unusual happenings, ostensibly through the magic of the Wendigo.
The Winter Demon
Later in his book, Norman included another Swampy Cree story from the forests of northern Manitoba. This tale tells of a Cree hunter named Teal Duck, whose village was wracked one winter by starvation and associated illness. He set out into the forest in early spring, praying that the fresh meltwater might harbour ducks whose rich meat would bring succor to his hungry people.
Teal Duck heard the sound of running water several times during his sylvan sojourn. By the time he arrived at the spots from which the sounds had issued, however, he found nothing but solid ice. It soon became apparent to the hungry hunter that the meltwater, naturally thawed by the warmth of spring, was being refrozen by a certain owl, which wove its wintry magic through the agency and at the behest of a more powerful entity.
Through sheer force of will, fueled by the suffering of his starving kinsmen, Teal Duck coerced the owl into attacking its master, which proved to be a Wendigo. The owl sank its talons into the chest of that hibernal demon, melting its frozen heart. “The windigo was dying,” the storyteller said. “It howled loud in a tremendously fearful way. Then it died.”
The Wendigo’s cry carried all the way to Teal Duck’s village. Hoping that it signified an end to their suffering, the starving Cree made their way towards the haunting sound. They were overjoyed to find fresh meltwater teeming with waterfowl, thanks to Teal Duck and the owl he had compelled.
The Wendigo Father and Son
Norman’s next Wendigo story is another Cree tale set on the shores of James Bay, the southern appendage of Hudson’s Bay, which straddles the border of Northern Ontario and Quebec. Rather than revolving around the Witiko demon itself, this story tells of a murderous father and son stricken by the Wendigo’s insatiable craving for human flesh, who prowled the northern wilderness in search of human prey.
One day in later winter, the Witiko son came upon ten birch bark canoes cached at the edge of the lake. When he informed his father of his discovery, the old man correctly deduced that the owners of the vessels would arrive at the lake to retrieve their property in the spring. The pair made a secret camp in the woods and waited for the men’s arrival.
Sure enough, the father and son soon witnessed the arrival of ten Cree families who travelled across the lake ice and erected two large tents on a nearby shore. “We will not touch them until toward morning, when they are sound asleep,” the cannibal father instructed his son.
That night, the murders each entered a respective tent and set about dispatching the heedless sleepers inside. In the midst of this grisly task, one of the occupants of the tent that the father had entered woke up, and began grappling with the old man, nearly overcoming him. At last, however, the father put an end to his formidable opponent and finished the remainder of his bloody work.
When the killing was finished, the father asked his son to bring a torch into the tent so that he could lay eyes on the strong warrior who had nearly bested him. To his dismay, the old man found that the muscular corpse lying at his feet was his long-lost eldest son, who had managed to free himself of the Wendigo life years before and rejoin civilized company. His grief, however, was short-lived. “What good is it for us to cry like this?” he asked his living son, whom he apprised of the corpse’s identity. “He is the first one we will eat.”
Later that summer, when their supply of human meat was exhausted, the father and son decided to live for a time as normal Indians, hunting and fishing regular game. They soon fell in with another Cree family, whose sagacious patriarch recognized them for what they were. The old man resolved to kill the father and son at the earliest opportunity, but could not determine how to do it, knowing that Wendigos possessed superhuman strength and that he was not sufficiently powerful to slay the human monsters on his own. The man’s two sons perceived their father’s design and took matters into their own hands, encouraging the Wendigo son to marry their sister so that she might gain the family’s trust and learn their wretched ways.
The couple wed as planned, and the girl accompanied the cannibals into the wilderness. That winter, the father and son resumed their wicked lifestyle, killing and eating any unfortunates whom they managed to catch unawares. The woman accompanied the men without protest, but refrained from participating in their odious crimes.
In the summer, the girl returned to her father’s village with her cannibal husband and father-in-law, where the trio resumed a regular lifestyle. The girl informed her father and brothers of the Wendigos’ heinous deeds. Then when winter came, she retreated to the woods with the cannibals once again, resuming a cycle that would last several years.
One winter, the girl and the cannibals came upon a starving family. Rather than eat them immediately, the cannibals decided to hunt for them, providing them with moose on the pretext of charity, with the true aim of fattening them for slaughter. One day, while the cannibal son was out hunting, the girl clandestinely made it known to the starvelings that her husband and father-in-law were Wendigos, and that they would soon eat them.
In light of this alarming intelligence, the man of the lodge devised an escape plan. One day, he announced to the cannibals that he would move camp in order to clean the smoke stains from his teepee and settle in a place with better firewood. Rather than move to the appointed spot, however, he took his family to the edge of a frozen lake well known to him. After leaving a false track across the ice, he backtracked and dug a hole in the snowbank. The starvelings climbed into the snow cave and allowed the blowing snow to seal the entrance, effectively concealing them from the outside.
When the family failed to arrive at the new campsite, the elder Wendigo went looking for them and found the false trail across the ice. When this clue proved fruitless, the Wendigo howled at the sky, his voice reverberating across the ice like thunder and rising up beyond the trees. The storyteller implies that the cannibal besought preternatural assistance from some unseen entity in the sky, echoing a motif inherent to other native traditions proposing a connection between the Wendigo and the legendary Thunderbird. When this assistance proved ineffective, the old man returned to camp and retrieved his son. The Wendigos probed the snow in the hope of uncovering the starvelings’ tracks, now blown over with snow, but were unable to find their hiding place. They left the lake, allowing the family to make their escape.
As had become their custom, the Wendigos went to live with the girl’s family in the summer. Since he had been denied human meat that winter, the Wendigo son began eyeing his wife. Every so often, he sliced open her arm to see whether she was fat enough to eat, but was repeatedly disappointed by her steadfastly delicate constitution. His ravenous gaze eventually fell on his two brothers-in-law – large, strong men whose robust bodies would make for substantial meals. One day, when they were out hunting beaver, he resolved to kill them.
While one of the brothers was crouched over a beaver lodge with his hand inside the entrance, the Wendigo son brandished an ice chisel and made to plunge it into the back of his neck. The other brother deflected the blow just in time and began grappling with the cannibal. Soon, the three men were locked in deadly combat, wrestling on the ice of the lake. During the scuffle, the brothers shoved the Wendigo through a hole in the ice and held him beneath the water. “The man was alive under the ice for a long time, and he was singing,” the storyteller said. “That is why the ice now makes a humming noise.”
When they were sure that the Wendigo son was dead, the brothers returned to camp. There, they found the Wendigo father in the tent with their family bragging of his misdeeds, apparently expecting his son to return and slaughter the family once and for all. The brothers dragged the cannibal outside the tent and split open his legs with their ice chisels. In a brutal act of frontier justice, they dug some marrow from the old man’s bones and shoved it into his mouth, asking him how it tasted. Defiant even in defeat, the Wendigo boasted that his marrow tasted rich – a testament to the legion of human victims he had consumed throughout his life. With that, one of the brothers plunged his ice chisel into the old man’s skull, putting an end to his existence.
The Rock Cree Conception of the Wihtikow
Another writer to immortalize old Cree Wendigo legends in print was American anthropologist Robert A. Brightman. In his 1989 book Acaoohkiwina and Acimowina, Brightman recorded the traditional tales of the Rock Cree – a branch of the Woodland Cree from Manitoba’s Churchill River Country. Chief among the stories which his informants related were tales of the Wendigo, which the Rock Cree referred to as the ‘Wihtikow’ (alternately spelled as ‘Witikow’).
“The term ‘witikow’,” he wrote, “refers to a cannibalistic monster that was previously a human being; Rock Crees did not recognize a nonhuman ‘witikow-spirit’ or any kind of witikow lacking human antecedency. In initial stages, witikowak may conceal their condition, but they inevitably degenerate into disfigured and mentally impaired creatures with torn and dirty clothing, long ungroomed hair, and lips and fingers stripped bare of flesh from autocannibalism…” As one of Brightman’s informants put it, “They don’t look like a living thing. They look like they’re dead.”
Brightman went on to explain how the Rock Cree recognized four methods by which people could become witikow. The first was to resort to cannibalism during times of famine – the most dreaded taboo of the Cree. “Secondly,” he wrote, “transformation could follow possession by ‘some kind of spirit’ associated with the north,” possible candidates being the spirits of ice and the north wind. Thirdly, warriors who acquired the guardianship of the witikow during a vision quest, and who made use of the accompanying gifts, could transform into witikowak in later life. “Finally,” Brightman concluded, “people who freeze to death in winter are said to become witikowak. It is said that persons ‘get cold air in their mind’ when they freeze, and that their brains continue to function although the rest of their body dies. With the warmth of spring, they become reanimated in a demented condition and seek human victims…”
“The most salient characteristic of the witikow,” the anthropologist continued, “is its voracious anthropophagy, and it is said that they usually consume their victims raw after first exerting a hypnotic or melancholic influence which immobilizes them. Witikowak are understood as being nocturnal and as perceiving human beings as game animals.” One of Brightman’s informants explained how the witikowak rejected conventional food, saying, “If you feed him good food, he won’t take it. Never mind if you put food out, he won’t touch it. It just wants to eat people. That’s what it’s hungry for.”
Mistapew the Giant
The first of Brightman’s Wihtikow stories – clearly a Rock Cree variation of Norman’s Swampy Cree weasel story – follows the exploits of Wisahkicahk, a legendary Cree hero and trickster figure. Three of Brightman’s informants told different variations of this same tale. According to one version, Wisahkicahk, while walking in the woods one day, came upon a pair of large tracks on the forest floor. Within one of the impressions was a pile of excrement containing fragments of what could only be human bones. The hero looked about to see what made the tracks and spotted a cannibal giant, whom the storyteller called Mistapew.
In another version of the story, Wisahkicahk came upon the cannibal, referred to only as a ‘Wihtikow’, by following the smoke of his campfire under the mistaken impression that its maker might treat him with hospitality.
The giant informed the hero that he would eat him shortly, and ordered him to collect roasting sticks for the task. Realizing that resistance was futile, Wisahkicahk did as requested and went to gather roasting sticks, accepting his fate as inevitable.
As he went about his gloomy task, the hero spotted Sihkos, the Weasel. “Come here, little brother, come here!” he urged. “You see that door that’s open there?” Wisahkicahk pointed to the giant’s anus. “… You go inside that hole… You’ll see, it’ll be dark inside… but keep on going… Run in there and go up inside to the heart. When you’re inside, bite his heart and he’ll die. Chew it up and you’ll kill him…” The weasel did as instructed, and Mistapew, the man-eating giant, fell dead.
Wisahkicahk cut the cannibal open and found the weasel dead, drowned in the monster’s blood. He revived the creature, washed it in a creek, and turned its fur white. As a reward for his service, the hero decorated the animal with a black nose and a black spot at the end of its tail.
The Witikow Woman
Another of Brightman’s Wendigo tales, told by elder Angelique Linklater, tells of a pair of sisters who married a pair of brothers. The two couples and their children lived together in the deep woods, enjoying a harmonious relationship.
One day, for reasons unexplained, the elder of the two sisters turned Witikow and developed a ravenous appetite for human meat that banished all traces of familial affection from her heart. While her husband and brother-in-law were out hunting, she killed and ate the children of her younger sister, the latter being powerless to stop her. When the two men returned home, she killed and devoured them as well, only half-cooking their remains before eating them.
Then, with her younger sister in her thrall, compelled to do her bidding either through fear or hypnotic coercion, she travelled to the village of her father, where she made excuses for the absence of her other family members. With the help of her younger sister, she lured her younger brothers into the forest on the pretext of hunting partridges. One by one, she killed and ate them half-cooked.
When a suspicious Cree hunter followed her into the woods and caught her feasting on the remains of one of her younger brothers, he returned to the village and spread word of her transgressions. A dozen hunters immediately set out into the forest to bring her to justice.
The villagers found the Witikow woman crouched in the same place that the hunter had spotted her, completely engrossed in her ghastly meal, and decided to kill her on the spot. To their horror, they discovered that their spears and arrows seemed to have no effect on her, bouncing off her body as if it was made of solid ice. At first, the Witikow woman ignored the assault, ravenously gnawing at her brother’s remains until every last strip of flesh had been torn from the bone. When no more meat was to be had, she rounded on the hunters and slew them all.
After gorging herself on the bodies of the slain, the Witikow woman returned to her father’s village. Something about the deserted camp, so desolate in contrast to the lively village of her childhood, stirred something in the cannibal’s icy heart, and for a moment, she regained some semblance of her humanity. Suddenly, the Witikow woman was overcome with horror and remorse for her sins. She searched the empty camp and found a boy cowering in a lonely teepee. Instead of killing him, she begged the boy to kill her, instructing him to use an axe to cut off her little finger, where her shrivelled heart, shrunken as a consequence of her disease, had come to rest. The terrified child did as requested and killed the Witikow woman.
Brightman went on to relate other briefer tales which shed further light on the Rock Cree conception of the Wendigo, including a sensational story, told by Cree elder Catherine Merasty, describing a trio of Witikowak who dwelled in a barren tundra in a world underground, who had a penchant for stealing women. Scattered amid these mythological tales involving talking animals and legendary heroes are a handful of second-hand reports – ostensibly recollections of real run-ins with the Witiko. We will examine these real-life Wendigo reports, all of them set in the wilderness of northern Manitoba, in a future piece.
Sources
Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples (1990), by Howard Alan Norman
Acaoohkiwina and Acimowina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians (1989), by Robert A. Brightman
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