On February 8th, 1913, a northern Canadian prospector, trapper, and fur trader named Poole Field sat down in his cabin on Yukon’s Ross River to typewrite a letter to his friend, John “Jack” Moran, a former Inspector of the Northwest Territories and Yukon for Canada’s Department of the Interior. Field corresponded with Moran with casual irregularity, sending him occasional letters throughout the first half of the 20th Century, some of them separated by decades. These missives were filled with tales of Field’s adventures travelling with the so-called ‘Mountain Indians’, a mysterious Dene people who roamed throughout the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, subsisting almost entirely on moose, mountain sheep, caribou, and black bear. Amid tales of hunting accidents, bloody intertribal feuds, and chilling accounts of medicine man sorcery, Field included descriptions of some of the strange creatures the Mountain Indians believed haunted their alpine abode. In his February 8th, 1913 letter, he wrote:
https://youtu.be/Ovzp-Mthi-o
“They have tales of enormous animals such as the mammoth, and spiders as large as a full-sized grizzly bear, and long worms that are supposed to be alive today and nobody can save them from these animals but their doctors. Some of the Indians will tell you they have seen these animals.”
As we have explored in previous pieces, traditional native belief in living woolly mammoths is surprisingly common across Canada, stretching from the frozen forests of the northern territories to the rocky woods of the Canadian Shield. More disturbing and less well known is the fact that the Mountain Indians are not the only First Nations with stories of enormous spiders and giant worms.
The Giant Spider of Dunne-za Myth
The alarming concept of giant predatory spiders also appears in the legends of the Dunne-za or Beaver Indians, a Dene people whose historic domain stretches along the northern banks of Peace River in northwestern Alberta. In a 1976 article for the journal Anthropologica, American anthropologist Robin Ridington wrote that the Dunne-za believed that giant man-eating spiders once roamed the wilderness of North America in ancient times, luring luckless humans to their mountaintop lairs by making an alluring whirring sound, which they produced by whirling around a piece of wood attached to a length of spider silk. The creature pounced on those who succumbed to its spidery music and killed them by sucking out their bodily fluids.
The Rainbow Spider of Gwich’in Mythology
Another Dene people with a traditional belief in giant prehistoric spiders are the Gwich’in, whose ancestral domain lies in northern Yukon Territory. In his 1886 French-language book Indian Traditions of Northwest Canada, French Oblate missionary Father Emile Petitot included a story told to him by a Gwich’in shaman named Lizette Khatchoti in January 1870, about an immense spider called Kokkale, who made his home in the heavens. The Gwich’in believed that the rainbow was his celestial web, spun with the intention of snaring the Morning Star, or the planet Venus.
The Sky Spiders of Flathead Legend
Interestingly, the notion of a monstrous aerial spider also appears in the folklore of the Flathead Indians, an Interior Salish people who lived far to the south, in northwestern Montana, and in the Boundary Country of southeastern British Columbia. In his 1865 report on the native tribes inhabiting the U.S.-Canada border between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Captain Charles William Wilson, a British Army officer who would become a Major-General in the Royal Engineers, included a traditional Flathead story about anthropomorphic spiders who lived in the sky, whom he described as “large grim old fellows with grizzled hair and beard, and long horny nails crooked like the owls.” These monsters hunted wolves, deer, enormous dragonflies, and other prey by ensnaring them in their webs and dispatching them with darts.
The Great Worm of the Western Inuit
Although tales of giant spiders are relatively scarce in Canadian folklore, stories of colossal worms are unnervingly prevalent and widespread. In an 1899 book, American ethnologist William Edward Nelson wrote that the western Inuit believed in something called the Ti-sikh-puk, which term he translated as the “great worm”. “This animal,” he wrote, “which figures in numerous tales, was shaped like an enormous worm or caterpillar. It lived in the days when animals were supposed to have the power of changing their form at will to that of human beings, and in the tales it is indifferently a worm or a man. Among the carvings in ivory representing this creature were several having the body shaped like a worm with a human face on the head.”
The Creeping Snake of Gwich’in Legend
Father Emile Petitot included a similar legend in his 1886 book, told to him by a Gwich’in elder, which features a creature called the Nah-duwi, or the “Creeping Snake”. In this story, two Dene sisters set out on foot along the shores of Yukon’s Arctic Ocean, following in the trail of their band, which had left before them. At dusk, they decided to make camp. The elder sister asked her younger sister to spend the night with her in her tent, but the younger sister declined the offer and pitched her own tent some distance away.
That night, the elder sister was awoken by a long whistling sound. “She got up,” Petitot wrote in French, “and in the moonlight, inspecting the surroundings of the tent, over in the portage leading down to the sea, she saw, lying on the water, a being similar to a large living worm. You could hear it eating and crushing the limbs of a human being.”
Realizing that she could do nothing for her sister, the victim of this crawling abomination, the girl quietly slipped away and ran through the night. She finally caught up to her band’s caravan before dawn and informed her fellow tribesmen of her sister’s gruesome fate.
“Men rushed to the scene,” Petitot wrote. “After a long search, they reached a large tree in whose branches the snake was hiding; but they were unable to kill it.
“Then an old woman got up, and, throwing the small stick with which she twisted the skins she was tanning at the snake, she killed it… He swallowed it, and the stick stopped at the monster’s anus, so he died. That’s how she got rid of it.”
Petitot’s informant went on to relate another story about two brothers, who set out on a hunting trip one summer. One night, in the middle of the wilderness, the brothers heard a whistling sound. Suspecting that the noise was the call of a great bear feasting on its prey, of which they might avail themselves, they decided to investigate. They left their tent and headed down a game trail in the direction of the strange sound, their path illuminated by the light of the moon.
After walking some distance, the brothers came upon something large and long, which sprawled across the game trail. “It was beautiful,” Petitot wrote, “so beautiful that once you saw it, you couldn’t take your eyes off it. They threw him a large bone, the rump of a ruminant. The crawling Nah swallowed it; the bone entered his anus, stopped there, and the monster died.”
In a footnote, Petitot marvelled at this unusual legend, which he apparently interpreted as a cultural memory of a time when giant serpents must have inhabited the northern wilderness, writing, “To think that these Hyperboreans have such vivid memories of the great snakes of the python and boa genera, and that they are even aware of the [hypnotism] that these ophidians exert on their victims, when there is not the smallest [legless lizard] in the whole of North America beyond 54o latitude!”
The Great Worm of Great Bear Lake
Legends of giant worms endured further to the east, on the shores of the Northwest Territories’ Great Bear Lake. In his 1931 treatise on the ethnography of the Sahtu Dene, a branch of the North Slavey or Hare tribe which lived along the western shores of this colossal body of water, American anthropologist Cornelius B. Osgood described a horrific animal that was said to haunt an island in the lake. “Myths about fabulous monsters hold a considerable place among the stories of the Satudene,” he wrote. “A big eddy below Good Hope is said to be caused by the mouthings of a whale-like monster whose tail forms part of the hills to the east of that place.
“There are several groups of islands on Great Bear Lake which the natives fear. One is said to contain burning sulphur and large natural caves of limestone. A Satudene informant said that there once lived on this island a great ‘worm’ which devoured people passing by. The customary Indian canoe route to the McVicar Bay portage lies behind this island, but one year a group of Indians decided to pass in front. Suddenly, all the canoes except one, which had been unable to keep up, were engulfed in a whirlpool and disappeared. This was assumed to be the action of the ‘worm.’”
The Great Worm of Iroquois Legend
Far to the southeast, in the forests of southern Ontario, Quebec, and upstate New York, the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy have traditional stories about a great worm that haunted the Northwoods. In their 1918 book Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths, American folklorist Jeremiah Curtin and Tuscarora ethnographer John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt included a story about a boy who encountered such a creature while hunting in the forest.
“While he was looking around for birds,” they wrote, “he noticed on the limb of a tree a large, many-colored worm. He thought it very beautiful, and he watched it for some time. The next day, he went into the woods again, thinking all the time of the worm and wondering whether it still would be there.
“When he came to the tree, he saw the worm on the branch, but in another place. The boy had a string of birds which he had killed that morning. Tearing off a small bit of flesh of one and fastening it to a stick, he tried to feed the worm. It ate a little and the boy was greatly amused. The following day, the boy again found the worm and fed it. The worm always remained near the place where he had first discovered it. Each day, the worm ate a little more and larger proportions. After a while, the boy gave it a whole bird at a time; then soon two birds, feathers and all. The worm had now become very large, too heavy for the limb of the tree on which it had been staying, so it fell to the ground. It never looked for food, but seemed to wait for the boy to bring it.”
The folklorists went on to explain how the boy took his friends to see the worm one day, and entertained them by feeding it birds. “At every turn,” they wrote, “it seemed to change color and grow more beautiful. The boys were delighted to throw birds at the worm that they might see it snatch and eat them.”
The boys then made a regular practice of bringing the worm birds and rabbits to eat.
“The worm grew very rapidly,” the folklorists wrote, “became very long and thick – a huge monster. The boys never told their parents or relations about the worm, for they were afraid of losing their sport. They would go early every morning to see the worm. The creature swallowed everything that came within its reach.
“One day, while the boys were throwing the worm food, they began to wrestle, and in the excitement, the youngest boy was thrown near the creature. In an instant, the boy was swallowed. At this, the rest of the boys were terribly frightened.” Fearful of the repercussions, the boys pleaded ignorance when the parents of the missing child inquired into their friend’s whereabouts, claiming they had no idea what had happened to him.
“After this,” Curtin and Hewitt continued, “the boys pushed two or three others of their number near the worm, which devoured them, too. It had become very large and ferocious, and ruled the boys by a spell. One day, they found that the worm had killed and eaten a deer. Thereupon, they were seized with great fear, for the creature had grown so immense, and they ran away without having their usual sport.”
The following morning, the folklorists explained, the boys awoke with the rest of their band to find that their palisaded village on a hill was completely encircled by the immense worm. In an effort to escape the monster, a number of villagers headed into what seemed to be an opening, inadvertently walking directly into the monster’s mouth, whereupon they were swallowed. The terrified survivors began burning tobacco and praying to Hinon, the Iroquois god of thunder, asking him to deliver them from their monstrous besieger. In response, a black storm cloud glided overtop of the village, issuing bolts of lightning. Several of the bolts struck the worm, rending it to pieces. The monster’s smoking remains rolled down a hillside and into a valley below, where they dissolved into water and formed a lake.
The Weewillmekq of New Brunswick
Further to the east, in the forests of New Brunswick, the Passamaquoddy Wabanaki have stories about a monster called the Weewillmekq, which seems to be a Maritime variation of Canada’s giant worm, and which has an obvious connection with a Pan-American native legend about a giant horned water snake. Similar to the monster of Seneca tradition, the Weewillmekq begins its life as a tiny worm with a length of about two or three inches, which inhabits the forest, and burrows into dry wood. Its greatest enemy is the lightning, which often strives to strike it in the trees. Over time, and if sufficiently fed, the creature can grow larger than a horse. When it becomes too large to remain in the trees, it sprouts horns on its head and takes to water. While ‘worm’ is the term which most Passamaquoddy informants used to describe the creature’s appearance, several identified the animal as a sort of alligator, “or some kind of horrible water-goblin.”
American folklorist Charles Godrey Leland included several stories featuring this legendary monster in his 1884 book Algonquin Legends. In one such story, a man and his wife capsized their canoe in the Saint John River while relocating to their fall camp, losing everything they had, including their gun. As they lamented their loss on the riverbank, they were approached by two Indians, who inquired into the source of their melancholy. Upon learning that the man had lost his gun, one of the travellers, who happened to be a medicine man, asked him if he would be able to recognize the weapon if he saw it. The woman impertinently spoke on her husband’s behalf, declaring that she could recognize the firearm. Taken aback by her heedless confidence, the medicine man then sternly warned her that it would take great courage to retrieve the weapon. The woman replied that she was not afraid, and would boldly tackle any challenge that was required of her.
On the medicine man’s instructions, the woman sat on the edge of a seventy-five-foot ledge overhanging a series of frothing rapids known as the Reversing Falls, located at present-day Saint John, New Brunswick. “As she sat there, trembling and half dead with fright,” Leland wrote, “she saw Something come up out of the eddy – even out of the worst of it. It rose; it was an awful sight – a kind of monstrous head, with great forked horns and terrible eyes. She was stiff as a stone with fear. The lost gun lay crosswise on the prongs of its horns. It moved slowly on through the eddy, glaring at her. It came nearer and nearer; the gun was within her reach, but she was too frightened to touch it. Then the monster passed by and sank into the water, and was seen no more, nor was the gun.”
In another of Leland’s Passamaquoddy stories, told to him on New Brunswick’s Campobello Island, a courageous young hunter attracted the interest of a beautiful sorceress, who asked him to marry her. When the young man scorned her proposal, being too preoccupied with preparations for the upcoming autumn hunt to have any time for domestic life, the girl put a curse on him.
That autumn, the young man and his older brother headed deep into the forest on a hunting trip. There, in midwinter, the younger brother lost his mind, stricken by the hex of the woman he had spurned. “He, not being able to do aught else,” Leland wrote of the older brother, “did the most desperate thing a Wabanaki Indian can do. He went down to the river, and sang the song which calls the Weewillmekq…
“‘I call on the Wee-will-l’mick!
“‘I call on the Terrible One!
“‘On the One with the Horns!
“‘I dare him to appear!’
“It came to him in all its terrors. Its eyes were like fire; its horns rose. It asked him what he wanted. He said that he wished his brother to be in his right mind again.
“‘I will give you what you want,’ said the Wee-willmek, ‘if you are not afraid.’
“‘I am not afraid of anything,’ said the Indian.
“‘Not of me?’”
“‘Not of you, nor of Mitche-hant, the devil himself.’
“‘If you dare take me by my horns and scrape somewhat from one of them with your knife,’ said the monster, ‘you may have your wish.’
“Now, this Indian was indeed as savage and brave as the devil; and he had need to be so to do this, for the Weewillmekq’ looked his very worst. But the man drew his knife and scraped from the horn till he was told that he had enough.
“‘Go to your camp,’ said the Worm. ‘Put half the scrapings into a cup of water. Make your brother drink it.’
“‘And the other half?’ asked the Indian.
“‘Give it to the girl who made all this trouble. She needs medicine, too.’”
The elder brother carried out the first part of the monster’s instructions, feeding half of the noxious potion to his crazy sibling. At once, the young brother came to his senses. The brothers concluded their hunt and struck out for home.
“They arrived at night,” Leland wrote. “There was an immense lodge in the town, and a dance was going on. The younger brother had prepared a cool drink – sweet with maple sugar, fragrant with herbs – and in it was the powder of the horn of the Weewillmekq. The witch, warm and very thirsty from dancing, came to the door. He offered her the cup. Without heeding who gave it, she drank it dry, and, turning to her partner, went on in the dance.
“And then a strange thing happened. For at every turn of the dance, she grew a year older. She began as a young girl; when at the end of the room she was fifty years of age; and when she got back to the door whence she started, she fell dead on the floor, at the feet of him who gave her the drink, a little wrinkled, wizened-up old squaw of a hundred years.”
The Blue Worm of the Pacific Ocean
Although there does not seem to be anything uncanny or gigantic about it, it might be worth mentioning here that, in the early years of nautical discovery in the North Pacific, explorers consistently mentioned coming across a strange swimming worm in the vast stretch of ocean between Hawaii and North America’s Pacific Coast, with photochromic properties eerily evocative of the monster of Iroquois myth. Amid reams of mind-numbing minutia which could only arouse interest in the most pedantic seaman, from navigational observations to reports on the strength and direction of the wind, pioneers of North Pacific exploration regularly made room in their logs for descriptions of this weird aquatic lifeform which they found floating in the hazy junction between the warm waters of Polynesia and the colder seas off North America. These worms invariably accompanied, and were sometimes attached to, larger gelatinous creatures which were consistently identified as a Medusa velella – a blue blob also known as a ‘by-the-wind sailor,’ which literally sailed the seas by the aid of a sort of living sail on its back.
The first explorer to document these marine animals was the celebrated navigator Captain James Cook, the British Royal Navy officer credited with the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands. In the spring of 1778, during his third and final voyage of discovery, Cook and his crew came upon an unusual sight in the waters beyond the Pacific Northwest. “During a calm,” he wrote, “on the morning of the 2nd [of March], some parts of the sea seemed covered with a kind of slime; and some small sea animals were swimming about. The most conspicuous of which were gelatinous, or medusa kind, almost globular; and the other sort smaller, that had a white, or shining appearance, and were very numerous. Some of these last were taken up, and put into a glass cup, with some salt water, in which they appeared like small scales, or bits of silver, when at rest, in a prone situation. When they began to swim about, which they did, with equal ease, upon their back, sides, or belly, they emitted the brightest colours of the most precious gems, according to their position with respect to the light. Sometimes they appeared quite pellucid, at other times assuming various tints of blue, from a pale sapphirine, to a deep violet colour; which were frequently mixed with a ruby, or opaline redness; and glowed with a strength sufficient to illuminate the vessel and water. These colours appeared most vivid when the glass was held to a strong light; and mostly vanished, on the subsiding of the animals to the bottom, when they had a brownish cast. But with candlelight, the colour was chiefly a beautiful, pale green, tinged with a burnished gloss; and, in the dark, it had a faint appearance of glowing fire.”
Captain Cook went on to explain how Scottish naturalist William Anderson, who accompanied him on his third voyage, identified these creatures as a new species of oniscus, or woodlice, which he dubbed Oniscus fulgens.
Fourteen years later, British Royal Navy officer Captain George Vancouver was dispatched to the West Coast of North America, tasked with expanding upon Cook’s discoveries, and with negotiating a settlement with Spanish authorities in the North Pacific in the aftermath of a contentious international dispute known as the Nootka Crisis. On April 8th, 1792, somewhere between Hawaii and British Columbia’s Strait of Juan de Fuca, Vancouver and his crew came upon the same strange creatures that had bedazzled Cook and his sailors.
“We found ourselves in the midst of immense numbers of the sea blubber of the species of the Medusa villilia,” he wrote, “so that the surface of the ocean as far as the eye could reach, was covered with these animals in such abundance, that even a pea could hardly be dropped clear of them. The largest did not exceed four inches in circumference; and adhering to them was found a worm of a beautiful blue colour, much resembling a caterpillar. This worm is found an inch and a half long, thickest toward the head, forming a three-sided figure, its back being the broadest; its belly, or under part, was provided with a festooned membrane, with which it attached itself to the Medusa villilia. Along the ridge connecting the sides and back from the shoulders to the tail, on each side, are numberless small fibres, about the eighth of an inch in length, like the downy hair of insects, but much more substantial; probably intended to assist the animal in its progress through the water. This worm or caterpillar Mr. Menzies considered to be a new genus.”
The Mr. Menzies to whom Vancouver referred was Scottish naturalist Archibald Menzies, a veteran of the Royal British Navy who served in the capacity of surgeon. Menzies elaborated on the creature’s physical appearance and behavior in his own journal. He reiterated the scene that Captain Vancouver described, in which the sea was covered with gelatinous blobs as far as the eye could see, and related dipping a bucket into the ocean and bringing up some of these ‘sea blubbers,’ as he called them.
“In the same bucket,” he wrote, “I found a most beautiful species of Oniscus which I immediately put into a glass of salt water for examination, wherein it swam very quickly about in different directions, and according to its position respecting the light, it emitted various colours of the brightest hue. As this little insect has not yet been described, the following short character may serve to distinguish its place in the Systema Nature.
“Its whole body is about a quarter of an inch long, oval, compressed and transparent, consisting of eight segments besides the head part, which is of an obtuse form; each segment is closely joined near the middle, but a little separated towards the edges; the antennae and feet are small and short; the tail consists of two diverging bristles about one fifth the length of the body.”
Menzies considered the creature to be the same animal that Dr. Anderson described during Cook’s third voyage, and deferred to his fellow countryman and professional peer by classifying it Oniscus fulgens.
It is interesting to note that a third Scottish naturalist, Dr. John Scouler, also encountered an abundance of what he called ‘Medusa valella’ on September 2nd, 1824, during his own voyage to the Pacific Northwest, but did not observe any photochromic worms attached to them. His encounter, however, took place in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil.
The name Oniscus fulgens, which William Anderson gave to the worm, is not currently recognized by the scientific community. What, then, is the nature of these blue, translucent, finely-haired marine caterpillars that change colour with the light? This author, having a negligible knowledge of marine biology, asked several different AI programs to identify the creature based on Cook, Vancouver, and Menzies’ descriptions. The robots variously identified the animal as a sort of parasitic crustacean called a Hyperiid amphipod, or a sea slug of the order Nudibranchia, neither of which bear much resemblance to the sea caterpillar described by the mariners.
Giant Spiders of the High Arctic
There is something uncanny about the prospect of impossibly giant bugs – a hair-raising notion which, for many of us, triggers a sense of primitive revulsion, and which, for some, is literally the stuff of nightmares. In previous pieces, we explored native Canadian legends about enormous spiders and worms once said to prowl the wilds of the Great White North. One tradition which this author neglected in those pieces is the lore of the Inuit, who have tales of colossal man-eating arachnids which once spun their deadly webs in the northern tundra, and in the barren mountains of the Arctic Archipelago. Folklorist Neil Christopher and artist Mike Austin showcased two such legends in their beautifully-illustrated 2014 book The Hidden: A Compendium of Arctic Giants, Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, Faeries, and Other Strange Beings from Inuit Oral History.
The first of these is the legend of the Aasivak, a female shapeshifter whose true form is said to be a giant spider. An Inuit hunter told Christopher that he had personally encountered this abomination while hunting caribou on the lonely shores of Cumberland Sound, which furrows the southeastern coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut. Christopher’s brief description of this encounter, drawn from his research notes, seems to imply that the hunter came upon the creature’s house and peered through the window. Inside sat an enormous woman cleaning a caribou skin. Perhaps in response to an invitation, or drawn by curiosity or necessity, the hunter entered the dwelling.
“Aasivak came close up to him,” Christopher wrote, “but he, out of fear, cut off her head. She fell down, and he saw her body gradually dwindle until she became a spider. He was very much afraid, and left the house as quickly as he could. When he was outside, he looked in the window again, and saw her the same way as before, cleaning the caribou skin. He went away. Then Aasivak ran out of her house and shouted to him to come back; but he returned home and told of his adventures.”
Another legendary creature which Christopher included in his book, whose name seems to be etymologically related to the shapeshifter above described, is a monster called the Aasivarluut. This atrocity was described as an enormous aquatic spider that lurks in the Arctic Ocean, bobbing just below the surface of the water, ambushing any seals, walruses, and Inuit kayakers unfortunate enough to pass within reach of its arms.
A Greenlandic Inuit told Christopher that he nearly fell victim to this predator while kayaking in the Arctic Ocean. “At a place where no shoal was known to exist,” Christopher wrote, “[he] noticed the bottom quite close to him. He then suddenly recalled having heard old people talking of the ocean-spider, a most dangerous animal to the kayakers. Presently, the kayaker discovered a monstrous eye, and at the distance of about a kayak-paddle’s length from it, a similar one, and on tearing away from the spot, a terrible gap made its appearance. Indeed, if he had been a less skilled kayaker, he would never have gotten away alive.”
The Origin of Mosquitoes
Man-eating spiders are not the only bug-like monsters to haunt indigenous Canadian folklore. All across southern British Columbia, from the longhouses of the West Coast to the lodges of the Rocky Mountains, native peoples tell traditional tales about either a monstrous ogress or a giant owl that once kidnapped and ate children in ancient times. Ages ago, one of her would-be victims, often described as a child of exceptional cunning, burned this monster alive in the flames of its own cookfire. The embers that rose from the creature’s corpse transformed into small animals – sometimes birds, sometimes lice, but more often mosquitoes, whose blood-sucking proclivities mirrored the man-eating compulsion of their monstrous progenitor.
Although these stories seem to be most common in Coast and Interior Salish lore, one variation of them appears in the legends of the Wuikinuxv, a people native to a stretch of British Columbian coastline roughly halfway between Bella Bella and the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In 1982, Wuikinuxv Chief Simon Walkus Sr. told this story in his ancestral tongue to folklorist Susanne Storie Hilton. A translated transcript of the interview later appeared in the 84th publication of the Canadian Ethnology Service.
According to Chief Walkus, “there was once an Indian village on the [Neechantz] River near the First Narrows in Owikeno Lake. Downriver from this place was a spot where blood red smoke issued from the riverbank. This place was said to be home to a cannibal spirit called Baxvbakvalanusiwa.” This entity is undoubtedly an Wuikinuxv variation of the Baxbakwalanuksiwe of Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, a terrifying spirit described as a bear-like monster whose body is covered with ravenous gaping mouths, whose name translates to ‘The Man-Eater at the North End of the World’. In a footnote, editors Susanne Hilton and John C. Rath explained that the cannibal spirit of the Wuikinuxv was said to thrive on human blood.
Chief Walkus went on to explain how a party of young brothers travelled to the haunted spot at the mouth of the Neechanz River where red smoke billowed from the riverbank and, heedless of the danger, entered the home of the cannibal spirit. There, they were greeted by the demon’s son, whose gluttonous father was out hunting. Instead of treating the visitors with hospitality, the creature noticed that one of the youths had scraped his shin and demanded that he be allowed to lick up the blood. Recognizing that they had made a grave mistake, they young men escaped the lair through trickery and retreated to their village.
Upon learning of the incident from his son, the cannibal spirit followed the teenagers upriver and entered the house in which they were hiding. There, it was greeted by the brothers’ father, who offered to prepare a meal for it. The father, who was a master woodcarver, proceeded to shape pieces of cedar wood into arms and legs, which he feigned were the limbs of his children. He then threw the wood into a pit of hot water on the pretext of cooking it. While they waited for the ‘meat’ to boil, the father began to tell the monster one of the ancient tales of his people, which lulled the creature to sleep. As soon as the spirit dozed off, the father rolled it into the pit of boiling water and killed it.
As an extra precaution, the father proceeded to dismember the monster’s carcass. Each of the pieces that he chopped off the body transformed into mosquitoes, which the storyteller called “the small ones that bite.”
The First Mosquito
In the Wuikinuxv tale of the Baxvbakvalanusiwa and other related stories, the mosquitoes that issue from the monster’s corpse resemble their vile forebear only in their bloodthirsty nature. There is one old native tale from the southern Canadian Rockies, however, in which the ancestor of modern mosquitoes appears to be painted as a monstrous winged bloodsucker – another giant bug which appears in at least one other Canadian folkloric tradition.
In his 1893 contribution to the Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, English symbologist Charles Staniland Wake included a Kootenay Indian story told to him in the Upper Kootenay dialect by a native named Paul in Tobacco Plains, Montana, on September 12th, 1891.
“The first mosquito,” Paul said, “was travelling and saw at a distance a number of lodges. A voice said: ‘Come, eat chokecherries!’ But the mosquito said: ‘I don’t want to eat them.’ So the mosquito left and travelled on.
“By and by, he came to another village. A voice said: ‘Come, you shall eat serviceberries.’ The mosquito said: ‘I don’t want to eat them.’ So he leaves and sets out again.
“By and by, he sees another village. A voice says: ‘Come, you shall eat blood!’ This time, the mosquito goes up to the village. He eats very much blood. His belly swells so much that at last when it strikes against a stick it bursts, and the mosquito does. From his belly come forth a myriad of mosquitoes, who all fly away.”
Giant Prehistoric Mosquitoes
The presumably massive mother of all mosquitoes which Paul described evokes another native legend told by the Huron and Petun – related Iroquoian tribes who amalgamated in the 17th Century to form the Wyandot Nation. In his 1888 article for the Journal of American Folk-Lore, American-Canadian ethnologist Horatio Hale included a Huron-Petun Creation myth in which giant mosquitoes are briefly mentioned.
According to this story, when the world was an endless sea peopled by aquatic animals and birds, a holy pregnant woman plummeted to earth from the heavens, having been pushed by her husband through a hole in the sky. The woman was rescued by the animals, who dove to the bottom of the sea and retrieved earth for her to live on, which was spread on the shell of an enormous turtle.
In time, the woman gave birth to twins, one good, and the other evil. Together, these supernatural siblings set out to prepare the world for human habitation. Being incompatible, they parted ways and went about their work separately. While the good brother made useful animals from which humans might obtain their necessities, the bad brother, as Hale put it, “made fierce and monstrous creatures, proper to terrify and destroy mankind – serpents, panthers, wolves, bears, all of enormous size, and huge mosquitoes, ‘as large as turkeys’.”
The good brother quickly discovered the fruit of his evil twin’s labour, encountering, as Hale put it, “the snakes, ferocious brutes, and enormous insects which his brother had made, and overcame them… He did not destroy the evil animals – perhaps had not the power to do so – but he reduced them in size, so that men would be able to master them.”
Frontier Torture
Although it does not describe mosquitoes of monstrous size, this author would be remiss if he did not include a historic passage detailing a monstrous manner in which mosquitoes were once employed by native warriors of the Northern Plains. In his 1860 narrative of his 1857 and 1858 surveying expeditions along the Red, Assiniboine, and Saskatchewan Rivers, Canadian geologist Dr. Henry Youle Hind described a horrific method of execution to which Sioux warriors sometimes subjected their enemies on the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
“The barbarous and cruel treatment of prisoners so often described in narratives of Indian warfare,” Hind wrote, “is common even now in the prairies south of the Qu’appelle and the Assiniboine…
“Not a year passes without the loss of several Red River half-breeds by the scalping knife of the Sioux; and, as was the case in the autumn of 1858, quite close to the settlement of the St. Joseph, near the boundary line, about thirty miles west of Red River. When a prisoner is taken, the Sioux sometimes adopt a terrible mode of death during the summer season. They have been known to strip a half-breed, tie him to a stake on the borders of a marsh in the prairies, and leave him exposed to the attacks of millions of mosquitoes, without being able to move any part of his body. When the agony of fever and the torment of thirst come upon him, they leave him to die a dreadful, lingering death with water at his feet, and buzzards hovering and circling around him in greedy expectation.”
Two frontiersmen who nearly suffered this horrific fate were a half-Sioux interpreter named Joe Martin and an Irishman named John Brown, nicknamed ‘Kootenai Brown’ in later life for making his home on Alberta’s Waterton Lakes, which were known at the time as the Kootenai Lakes. In the autumn of 1867, while running mail for the U.S. Army out of Dakota Territory’s Fort Stevenson, Martin and Brown were captured by Sioux warriors under the command of Chief Sitting Bull, a full decade prior to his famous victory over the U.S. Army. Brown described the experience in his journal, excerpts of which were published by Albertan historian William Rodney in his 1996 book Kootenai Brown: Canada’s Unknown Frontiersman.
“Sitting Bull ordered us to get off our horses,” Brown wrote, “and when we did, he had us stripped as naked as the day we were born. They took everything, dispatches, mail, guns, horses, clothes… Some of the young bucks began yelling ‘Kash-ga, Kash-ga,’ meaning kill them, kill them. Sitting Bull raised his hand and shouted, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, we’ll make a fire and have some fun with them.’ We understood every word they said, of course, and we knew that Sitting Bull meant some playful mode of torture that the Sioux often inflicted on their captives…”
Brown went on to describe how the chief himself took him and Martin aside to the edge of a coulee, presumably in order to glean more information about them and their business. Martin berated the chief for displaying such unbecoming conduct towards fellow kinsmen, calling attention to his own maternal heritage and falsely claiming that Brown was a Sioux halfbreed as well. Sitting Bull doubted the false claim, noting Brown’s blue eyes and Caucasian countenance, but acknowledged that he spoke good Sioux, and observed that he wore his hair long, or ‘frontier-style,’ in the manner of the halfbreeds. He asked the captives why they helped the hated ‘Long Knives,’ or sabre-wearing American cavalrymen, to which the couriers replied that they had accepted a one-time job on account of their poverty.
During the interrogation, a dispute arose among the braves as to who would take the express riders’ horses. The captives used the opportunity to inconspicuously roll down the coulee into a neighboring body of water, which Brown identified as Strawberry Lake, North Dakota. They hid among the reeds as Sitting Bull’s braves blindly fired pot shots into the water. The warriors left the lake when darkness fell, allowing Brown and Martin to steal away in the direction of Fort Stevenson.
“The sun shone on us next day,” Brown continued, “and millions of mosquitoes seemed to find out that two naked human beings were available for food. They fairly swarmed upon us and there was not a spot on our bodies as large as a pinhead that they had not bitten.”
The two men arrived at Fort Stevenson later that day, narrowly avoiding being eaten alive.
World’s Largest Mosquito Sculpture
Today, a metal monument of a giant mosquito graces the community of Komarno, Manitoba – a rural settlement whose Ukrainian name means “lots of mosquitoes”. Built in the mid-1980s by Manitoban artist Marlene Magnusson Hourd, this statue, touted the World’s Largest Mosquito, eerily evokes the country’s native legends of giant insects, and the terrible torture once inflicted upon forgotten victims of the Northern Plains.
Sources
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“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)
Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (1886), by Father Emile Petitot
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The Eskimo About Bering Strait (1899), Edward William Nelson
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The Hidden: A Compendium of Arctic Giants, Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, Faeries, and Other Strange Beings from Inuit Oral History (2014), by Neil Christopher and Mike Austin
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Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology (1893), by Charles Staniland Wake
“Huron Folk-Lore,” by Horatio Hale in the October-December 1888 issue of the Journal of American Folk-Lore
Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858 (1860), by Henry Youle Hind
Kootenai Brown: Canada’s Unknown Frontiersman (1996), by William Rodney
https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/komarnomosquito.shtml
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