Alone Against the North (17 page)

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NAMELESS RIVER

The unknown is generally taken to be terrible, not as the proverb would infer,
from the inherent superstition of man, but because it so often is terrible.
He who would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a victim to them.

—H. Rider Haggard,
She
, 1887

T
HE FOREST HUMMED
with the beating wings of millions of mosquitoes. I had never seen such an eerie landscape—a wilderness of crooked spruce and tamaracks, contorted and twisted by the unforgiving winds, their branches draped with cobwebs of hanging lichens, and the forest floor cloaked in green moss. The grey skies and drizzling rain added to the general gloom. Most of the stunted trees stood little taller than me—though here and there were comparative giants, centuries-old black spruce that rose like ghostly sentinels above the land. The uneven ground was laced with foul pools of black water, breeding grounds for legions of mosquitoes. It was undisturbed, ancient forest with no signs of humanity.

Having journeyed some ways up the Aquatuk, I made my lonely camp on a slight prominence, beneath some spruces. As I moved through the woods, it was with a vague feeling of
uneasiness, as if I shouldn't disturb this primeval place. Perilous as my journey up the Sutton had been, it had an air of familiarity about it, and I had the work of past explorers to guide me. In contrast, the Aquatuk looked and felt like virgin territory, a place untouched by the outside world. Its waters were swift, surprisingly deep, and guarded by rapids larger than anything I had encountered on the Sutton. In some places, the shoreline was thickly treed with palisades of black spruce. They seemed to frown upon me as I fought my solitary way upriver. In other stretches, sandbanks rose high above the river, crowned with scraggly trees. Though I saw many birds—eagles, sandpipers, waterfowl—I saw neither caribou nor moose, and, as a consequence, was left with an intense feeling of isolation. Nowhere did I find any trace of a human predecessor—not a chopped stump, ashes from a long-ago campfire, or so much as a hatchet blaze. Old Terry O'Neil, if he could have seen me now, would doubtless have shaken his head and deemed it all “God's country.”

I found myself glancing over my shoulder every so often, as if I half-expected some supernatural thing to be stalking my steps. For the first time, the silence began to weigh on me. I tried to break it by talking to myself, but that didn't help. The sound of my own voice echoing against the immutable silence of the wilderness seemed like a violation of an unwritten law. So I kept quiet and trod lightly, feeling almost as if I had entered the confines of some ancient temple, where to disturb anything was to awaken an unnatural power.

That evening, I made a smoky fire from wet wood, since the forest was sodden from the rains. Sitting by my sputtering fire in the fading light, I could well imagine the unholy terrors
aboriginal people believed inhabited the northern forest. A “thing” scarcely spoken of, and only then in hushed tones, was said to prey upon solitary wanderers who dared venture into these remote lands. I had heard whispers of it on my travels and read about it in old explorers' journals—a hideous, giant manlike creature, called the
Witiko
, or wendigo. It could, so it was said, possess the minds of lonely travellers, making them slowly turn mad, and finally overwhelm them with an insatiable craving for human flesh. For centuries, explorers and fur traders had noted their native counterparts' fear of this grim monster. In 1790, Edward Umfreville, a Hudson's Bay Company trader, confided in his journal that “there is an evil Being” that natives call the “Whit-ti co.… They frequently persuade themselves that they see his track in the moss or snow, and he is generally described in the most hideous forms.” In the 1930s, the woodsman Grey Owl had warned that “The Windigo, a half-human, flesh-eating creature, scours the lake shores looking for those who sleep carelessly without a fire, and makes sleeping out in some sections a thing of horror.”

As I watched the shadows cast by the flickering light of the fire, the memory of my first “encounter” with a wendigo years earlier came to mind. Wes and I were canoeing the remote and challenging Otoskwin River, some 400 kilometres north of Lake Superior. After a fortnight in the wilderness, we reached the isolated Ojibwa reserve of Neskantaga, population 265—a place accessible to the outside world only by airplane or a long and perilous canoe journey. As it was, our journey had been plagued by singularly adverse weather—incessant rain, unseasonably cold temperatures, lightning, and hail storms. Our appearance on the
remote reserve created something of a stir—visitors of any kind were rare, and for two youths to have canoed there alone was unheard of.

The long-suffering community was beset by alcoholism and astonishingly high rates of suicide. Despite the grim conditions, we received a warm welcome. One individual, a man in his thirties named Randy, took a particular interest in us. He invited us to accompany him into the woods one night to howl for wolves.

The pale glow of a half-moon illuminated the old trail we followed that night through the forest, casting eerie shadows against the moss-cloaked ground as we trudged onward. Randy led the way over several thickly forested hills and down into a sort of level plain filled with pine, poplar, spruce, and birch trees.

“This is where the pack usually hunts,” he whispered to us as we neared an ancient pine that had toppled over. The three of us halted beside the pine, while Randy glanced around. “We'll try howling,” he whispered. “Usually they respond to the howls pretty good.”

Wes and I watched as he cupped his hands around his mouth, pointed his head toward the moon, and howled loudly.

“You guys howl too,” Randy whispered, motioning to us to do the same.

Wes and I had howled for wolves before, so we readily tossed our heads back, cupped our hands to our mouths, and howled at the half-moon. For the next minute, we all howled together, then paused to await a reply.

Just when it seemed that no wolves would be heard on that night, a chorus of wild cries that sent shivers down our spines
echoed from out of the darkness. Randy smiled and said, “The pack has arrived.”

When the wolves' howling abruptly ceased, we responded with more of our own, which encouraged the unseen animals to venture closer. They responded with yaps and more howls. This exchange continued for several minutes before the pack apparently lost interest in us and moved on through the woods.

As we turned to leave, Randy, who had taken a keen interest in our journey, asked something peculiar. “Did you …” he began, before hesitating a moment, “see anything strange on your journey here?”

“We had some unusual weather. Hail storms, lots of thunder and lightning,” I replied.

Wes, sensing that Randy had something else in mind, added, “We found a dead bald eagle.”

In the silver glint of the moonlight, I could see Randy's face react to this revelation as if it had some special significance. “Did you do anything with it?” he asked gravely.

“No,” we answered in unison.

Randy nodded grimly. “That eagle was put in your path for a reason.”

Wes and I, rather bewildered by this comment, made no reply. Neither of us at the time had thought much of a mouldy carcass of a dead eagle washed up on a lakeshore. After some remarks about eagles and omens, Randy delved into what was evidently weighing upon his mind.

“The reason I asked if you saw anything strange,” he said in the sort of hushed whisper that comes naturally when speaking in the gloom of a night-time forest, “is that I saw something
very strange
out here recently.” His words were uttered with such seriousness that there was no doubting his sincerity. After a pause he continued, “I was walking along this trail, and when I came up over that ridge there, I saw something moving slowly down below in the trees. It was dark and at first I wasn't sure what it was. It looked like a big man or something. But as I watched, I saw it was no human … it was huge, seven-feet tall, all black and hairy, and walked from there to there,” he motioned to the spot in question. “I was terrified,” he whispered, and by the light of the moon, I could see the fear in his eyes was real, “I froze, scared half to death. People around here tell stories about such things, but I never believed them … till now.”

Wes, not easily frightened, turned as white as a ghost. He had always harboured a healthy respect for native lore and mysterious terrors. On the other hand, I was practically salivating with fascination. I didn't believe in such creatures per se, but they were real enough as cultural constructs, and figuring out the origins of such legends intrigued me.

“What do you think it was?” I blurted out.

“I don't know … it wasn't human.”

As we hiked back along the trail, I badgered Randy with questions. Later that night, back at the reserve, I asked Wes what he thought of the story.

Wes shook his head. “If I had heard that story beforehand, I'd never have come here.”

“What? Are you kidding me? Didn't it just make you want to come all the more?” I said excitedly.

“No,” Wes said shaking his head again. “It makes me wonder about some of those noises we heard in the night. What do you think Randy saw?”

I shrugged. “Probably he had too much to drink and saw a black bear on its hind legs, or somebody wandering around in a dark coat.”

Wes scoffed at these explanations. He slept little that night.

LATER I SCOURED
the archives, digging up everything ever written about the subject, and found that Randy's tale matched stories that dated back centuries. There were, as the anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell noted in 1951, two distinct wendigo traditions: “The first comprises actual persons who have turned into cannibals…. The second consists of mythical cannibal giants.” In the historical records, I found ample references to both variations on the legend. As the Cree elder Louis Bird explained:

Wihtigo. It was something that happened among humans. It means an other-than-human was created from an ordinary human—and sometimes maybe not. There is a question there. There were many kinds. There is a wihtigo that was created by starvation—humans starved, went crazy, and ate human flesh…. Other wihtigos are not understood—it is not known where they came from.

Presumably, this meant the giant kind, which Randy claimed to have seen in the forest that night.

The French encountered wendigo stories among northern tribes when they arrived in the New World in the seventeenth century. Father Jérôme Lalemant, a Jesuit missionary, witnessed “the deaths of some Indians” who were killed “by the other
savages, because they were seized by a mental disease which rendered them ravenous for human flesh.” Rather than dismiss such tales as mere superstition, the French explorers were inclined to take them seriously—as they had their own traditions back in France of humans transforming into violent beasts. As Lalemant explained, “It is a sort of werewolf tale.”

Over a hundred known cases exist in the historical record of “wendigo possession,” in which aboriginal persons were said to be transformed into wendigos and driven insane with a murderous urge to eat human flesh. The act of cannibalism supposedly gave these deranged persons superhuman strength and turned their hearts to ice. Such individuals could only be killed by special means—they had to be decapitated and their bodies cut into small bits, lest they should rise from the grave. Some tribes even appointed a “wendigo slayer,” usually a shaman, whose task it was to kill such psychotic individuals—not unlike werewolf hunters in medieval Europe. Well into the late nineteenth century there were wendigo trials in Canada, in which individuals accused of murder defended themselves by claiming that what they had killed was not human but instead a wendigo.

The most detailed description ever furnished of the other sort of wendigo—the less human, more monstrous variation of the legend—was offered by Joseph Guinard, a missionary among the Atikamekw natives in northern Quebec in the 1920s. The anthropologist Richard Preston summarized Guinard's depiction of the wendigo, which was based on Atikamekw elders' accounts:

The Witiko … are solitary, aggressive cannibals, naked but impervious to cold, with black skin covered by resin-glued sand. They have no lips, large crooked teeth, hissing breath, and big bloodshot eyes, something like owls' eyes. Their feet are more than two feet long, with long, pointed heels, and have only one big toe: “This is the way his tracks appear on sand and snow.” Fingers and fingernails are “like the claws of the great mountain bears.” The voice is strident, reverberating, and drawn-out into howls, and “his food was rotten wood, swamp moss, mushrooms, corpses, and human flesh.” Witiko has extraordinary strength and is invulnerable. He is a nocturnal hunter of men; when he is close, his heart beats twice as quickly with joy, sounding like the drumming of a grouse. They can fly and also swim under water, making large waves to capsize canoes. They have foreknowledge of their victims' location.