David Yale Ardanuy
“Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is ‘The Wendigo’, where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship.”
Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” is one of the first western uses of the northern Native American legend, and a truly frightening tale of possession and subtle transformations. While I agree with Lovecraft on the quality of the work, it is worth pointing out that Algernon Blackwood uses the least grotesque aspects of the legend’s attributes, leaving out the most notorious elements of the myth: the cannibalism, bloodlust, and sorcery of the windigo. Lovecraft rightfully praises Blackwood’s tale, but fails to realize the actual scope of the mythology or the extreme terror the Native Americans’ held for both the spirit and the transformation of the windigo. Lovecraft describes the tale as “amazingly potent,” but disarms that statement by describing the myth as some ghost story that lumbermen swap around the dinner table. This description by Lovecraft is woefully slight when compared to the former mass belief among Algonquin, Ojibwa, and Cree Native populations, as well as its historical realization many times over. So, amazingly potent, yes, but poison and desserts can both be potent. The windigo myth is concentrated terror, and firmly rooted in the North American historic record.
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February 22, 1799: Iron Knife trading post, twelve miles north of Lake Superior.
♦
The day started as every other had for the past few weeks, dark and freezing. The old pine boards of the wall, dryer than any Jesuit tract, concealed the cabin’s outer logs and the merciless cold beyond. Placing another log in the iron stove to warm the room, I recall I cut my hand on an especially jagged piece of wood. Yes, I remember it, not the pain, but the taste. Oh, and what a taste it was… or rather, what it became later in my memory, at least. I remember the events perfectly, lest you doubt my mind, it is the memory of… other things that has changed. The taste of beef, venison, fowl, is as ash, now, and they bring on a great sickness if consumed. Human blood is unspeakably delicious to me now, and it is difficult to resist the urge to drink from my own arm. I digress, forgive me, I will return to these matters later.
As I was explaining, that wound marks the beginning of the destruction of my life, and my soul. A moment later my boss, the trading post manager Sabian Ruelle, came in from his chambers.
“Morning Andre,” Sabian said. “Colder than a witch’s tit, it is. How about you making us some coffee?”
I asked him how he slept, I recall. A few moments later we were drinking coffee and discussing the burn of our tobacco pipes, enjoying one of the few pleasures available in the region.
The main door resounded with a series of loud bangs, which startled me into spilling my coffee all over my hand. I remember again tasting the splinter wound as I put my burnt finger in my mouth. How delectable the memory is… pray, pray, forgive me… But yes, Sabian opened the door and a snow covered Indian burst in.
That Indian was an Algonquin called George Red Foot, a good trapper and well liked in the region for his fairness in dealings amongst the other tribes. He carried a solemn and fearful expression along with his load of furs and bags.
“Sabian, I am here to trade my furs, I am leaving,” he blurted out, clearly in a great hurry to start the exchange.
“Why are you here so soon?” Sabian asked. “The season’s not over, and those furs will hardly fetch more than your current debt to this post.”
To this his expression hardened, and George said, “I will do just fine. When I leave here I will be alive to work again somewhere else.”
“What is threatening you, George?” Sabian raised an eye at me, as though I might shed some light on this Indian’s panic. “Other Indians? Early bears?”
“My partner Francois has frozen inside.” This George said with such severity that even though I did not understand his meaning, not then, a chill ran down my spine.
His queer phrasing stirred up a deep worry in my breast, and I asked, “How did he catch his death? Falling through the river?”
At this George’s expression changed into a mask of stark terror. “He is not dead, his… his heart has frozen.” His voice dropping to a whisper, he said, “He has joined with the Ice and become windigo.”
“Windigo?” I said, and George hissed at me:
“Do not speak it out loud, ever, or it will know you. It will come for its due.”
“Andre, start weighing out this fur,” Sabian said as he directed George over to the stove. Offering some tobacco, he said softly but still loud enough for me to hear. “What’s really going on, George? You can’t seriously mean to take off in the dead of winter!”
“Francois is gone now,” George said softly. “I am moving on as soon as you pay me for my furs. My wife Moon Bird is waiting for me outside right now.”
“All weighed out, sir,” I called over.
Sabian gave George his shrewdest stare, one he often gave me when bluffing at cards, and said, “Francois owes this post a great debt of furs, George. If you would collect them for me before leaving the area, I would pay you one-third of their value.”
George’s already unhappy expression soured considerably. “You would pay me to kill myself? How generous the white man becomes when he requires the death of the Indian.”
“What are you on about?” Sabian asked, taken aback. “I have only been fair with you, and every other Indian in the region. If you really believe your partner is a mortal danger to you, why don’t Andre and I take you back to his cabin, so we can all settle this matter together? Surely the three of us would be the equal of one demented old man!”
“I wouldn’t go back if you had three hundred men.” He stated this flatly, with resigned conviction, and moved to the front desk where I worked. He received his trade value in tobacco, corn meal, black powder and shot, then walked to the door. He paused there, and, looking back at me over his bundle of supplies, said, “Do not go there for the furs, Andre. They are lost now, as lost as Francois and his debt to this post. It is better that you leave, too, before death finds you. Or worse. You may have forgotten your people and ways, but the spirits have not.”
With that he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
“What do you think?” I asked Sabian.
He sighed. “We must at least attempt to get Francois’ furs. If he has gone soft in the skull, well… then we may have to do him violence, if he tries to visit it upon us first. But he’s no spring chicken, between the two of us I’m sure we can catch him alive. After that, well, we can turn him in to the Jesuits near the lake mission, see if they can’t help him. They’ve reformed worse than a dotty white man, eh?”
Sabian did not sound as though he relished this course, but we both knew that as post captain he must acquire all debts by contract or lose his own profit, and possibly position as well. There was no way around it: we would be going, at least for the furs. Had I known then the horror that awaited us, all the money in the world would not have lured me there.
As we readied our gear, I recall asking Sabian, “What was that windigo business he was talking about? He seemed terrified by the mere mention of the name?”
“Oh, it’s just some old Indian myth,” said Sabian dismissively. “Folks who spend so much time alone in the wilds, they start acting like beasts themselves. The Indians think they are possessed… you know, like a werewolf or something.”
“Windigo.” The strange word felt cool on my pipe-bitten tongue. “Huh.”
“Shouldn’t you be the one telling me about it, anyway?” He said in that imperious way he got, when he felt like putting the spurs to me. “Being part savage yourself, I’d have thought your head was filled with tall tales of witches and windigos and wolf spirits, all that rot. Or did your heathen daddy only teach you how to cheat at cards and guzzle firewater?”
“Father Orleans told me plenty of stories about spirits and witches, but only those from the Gospels,” I said, refusing to rise to his bait. I’d told him twice before it was my mother who had been Indian, which was once more than I felt I needed to. Orphaned at an early age, I had been dealing with folk like Sabian almost all my life. “And growing up with the Jesuits, most of the card sharps and drunks I met were white men who came begging at the mission. I won’t remind you again, Sabian: I’m a Christian, not an Indian.”
“You’re red as old George’s feet, my boy,” he said in his superior way. “Doesn’t your Bible say something about accepting that what we cannot change?”
I glared at him and sipped my coffee, now quite cold.
“Half-breed, whole Christian, what’s the difference?” Sabian said, happy to play the peacemaker now that he had gotten my goat. “Hell, Andre, it don’t matter to me. Only thing I care about right now is going out there to get those furs. Probably old Francois’ just gone crazy — that codger’s been out here a sight longer than me, and I’ve been out here a sight longer than you. Alone in the wilderness with nobody but the beasts and the Indians for company will do that to a man.”
“Two of the same thing, isn’t it?” I said sarcastically, but, as usual, my comment went right over Sabian’s head.
“If he is mad, we need to get him to the mission before he chews up those furs, or something equally deranged. It also occurs to me that that damned Indian George Red Foot might’ve killed his partner, and told us a whopper to put us off the scent. If that’s the case, then we need to know so we can send word for his arrest before he gets too far. We had best hurry up and get out there.”
“Windigos and werewolves,” I grumbled, stowing a bottle of whiskey in my bag so we would have something with which to tempt Francois into letting us into his cabin. I recall how safe we were then. We should have left with George Red Foot and his wife. Instead, I shouldered my pack for the trip and contemplated whether all Indians were insane to some degree, or only George Red Foot.
We started out at mid-morning and traveled north about six miles, where we stopped at the Eight Stones River crossing to rest and eat. Francois’ home was located about three miles away from that point, due east along the river. I recall the weather was pleasant along the way; a warm sun had miraculously appeared for most of our trip and the duration of our rest. I remember the air had a deliciously crisp taste, heavily scented with spruce and pine. I was considering how fortunate we were to have had such splendid weather after months of brutal winter, when Sabian reminded me of the grim task at hand. We continued on in hopes of reaching Francois’ cabin before nightfall.
As we walked along the river, I remember noting an abundance of trees snapped in half at mid-trunk, some fifty feet from the ground in some cases. Following my gaze, Sabian said, “It’s the ice and the wind that does it. The tops freeze up with ice and snow, then the wind comes through and snaps off the tops. Just like you or I would tear the drumstick off an overcooked chicken.”
He said this easily enough, but the remark disquieted me. As we walked I imagined some monstrous hand reaching down from the sky and tearing treetops off to stick in its mouth, chewing the bark and ice as a man might relish the crispy skin of a roasted hen. With these and other dark thoughts did I wile away our march.
Looking back on it now, it seems that as we drew closer to the damned place a pallor of cruel wickedness settled on to both my thoughts and the landscape. All around, the broken trees increased in number, and large formations of ice hung from the pine boughs and clung to the trunks, or reared up from the ground. It was almost as if they had frozen in specific places in a vaguely organized way. It struck me as… unnatural.
Francois’ cabin appeared as we rounded a large patch of granite boulders. It was a small shack, perched quaintly atop a rise, at the edge of a steep, tree-covered embankment, overlooking the frozen Eight Stones River below. No smoke rose from the cabin, a truly ominous sign as few veterans of the northern winters would be foolish enough to allow their fire to go out before the first thaw of spring.
“What a wretched little place,” Sabian remarked. “Hopefully it’s dry inside.”
I briefly imagined old Francois inside, raving mad in the dark. A thought that startled me with its clarity, a thought I quickly shut out.
As we approached the cabin, a distinct quiet fell over the area. Only our breathing and crunching footsteps in the snow made any sound. The snow around the cabin was deep and undisturbed, which struck me as odd — no one had come or gone from the cabin in some time, so when had George Red Foot last checked in on his partner?
Then I noticed something else — the lack of birds. Most animals were silent for the winter, the exception being the ravens and magpies that hang about settlements to rob scraps of food. At the trading post, they were ever present and sometimes quite loud… yet it seemed that there were no living creatures within a mile of Francois’ cabin, save Sabian and me. As we stopped halfway across the clearing to peer at the dark structure, the silence enveloping us was absolute — we could not even hear the wind, which had harried us all along our hike.
“The door is open.” Sabian’s whisper sounded like a yell in the unnatural stillness, and I hushed him, startling myself with my own volume. We un-shouldered our muskets as we approached the cabin’s face, making our way in total silence. I was reminded momentarily of a tomb or mausoleum as I looked at the cabin’s open door and the black interior beyond.
Sabian lit a lantern as I stood watch over the doorway, expecting at any moment to see Francois charge forth. Nothing stirred, and, under the soft glow of the lantern, we entered the cabin. Inside was a sight that defied logic, that inspired true horror. The cabin itself was unremarkable in its design, a single room with a hearth at one corner, having the usual trinkets and gewgaws that Indians and mountain men hold dear hanging about the room. The horror lay on the floor, and the image has been seared into my mind ever since.
A corpse of an Indian woman, Francois’ wife perhaps, lay sprawled in the middle of the cabin. She was… encased in ice, from the waist up, but, to our extreme revulsion, her legs, where exposed from the frost, were stripped of all flesh. The bones themselves were gnawed and ragged as if some predator had chewed the flesh directly off. An expression of mortal terror was quite literally frozen onto the dead woman’s face.
I looked away in shock as Sabian staggered past me, heading back outside. I moved for the door, fearing to be in the half-eaten corpse’s presence a moment longer. As I stumbled away, I began to hear the sound of rushing wind and cracking trees, accompanied by a shrill howling that chilled me to the bone. I followed Sabian outside into the clearing immediately in front of the cabin, shivering even before the wind and unspeakable cold hit us. Sabian stood in the snow as the howling wind hit us, looking like a man on the verge of total panic. I was nearly stricken as well.
The shrill howl evolved into a ghastly scream, a sound utterly alien from any wind I had ever heard. The trees surrounding the cabin first bent to an impossible degree in the gale and then began to snap apart, blasting like gunshots as their trunks split. Then, above us, from the wind-thrashed and shattered treetops, Francois appeared, descending like a monstrous bird. He shrieked as he was borne through the air on the ferocious wind.
Francois landed in the snow next to Sabian. I told myself it had been a trick of the wind and the fading light, that the deranged trapper had merely been hiding up one of the pines and now jumped down upon us… but I could not convince myself, not even for an instant. I could not even believe this was still Francois.
I remembered Francois as aged but hardy; a somewhat stocky, short, black-haired Frenchman; what I saw now looked nothing like this memory. The thing that I saw was a horrible parody of the once rugged trapper, having more in likeness to a frostbitten corpse than any man still living. He… no, it, was at least eight feet tall, but dreadfully thin, as if it had existed in a state of starvation for months upon hungry months. Broken and jagged teeth were plainly visible; the thing appeared to have chewed its own lips off. The color of its skin, having the texture of the frozen dead, ranged from a light greenish blue along the length of the limbs and torso to a dark bruised purple that was reminiscent of deep internal trauma at the neck and abdomen. Stark naked and still howling that wracked, chilling wail, Francois, or what remained of the man, glared with a demonic mania at Sabian. It brandished a length of jagged bone.
Sabian, realizing his doom was at hand, raised his musket in a belated attempt to shoot the horror. Before he could, the fiend stabbed him in the neck with what I now saw was a broken section of elk antler. The prongs of the antler pierced Sabian’s neck in two places, causing him to choke and gurgle. The blood spray from the wounds hit me directly in the face, burning my eyes and creating a ruddy haze that stole the clarity of my sight.
Sabian’s awful death rattle and the howling of the monster seemed to come from all around me. In a panic I raised my musket and fired in the direction I perceived the sound of its madness. As soon as I took the shot, all sound faded, and, as I wiped the blood from my eyes, I prayed that I had struck Francois… Then the monster leapt upon me, screaming anew and clawing at my face with its foul, ragged hands. Blinded and hysterical, I grappled with it, staggering backwards in the snow.
In a new revelation of despair, the ground disappeared, and I rolled down the embankment beside the cabin, the monster riding me all the way. Bouncing against trees and off of rocks as we tumbled down the slope only seemed to excite the wretched thing, my own body singing from the cruel bludgeoning of the fall. Its unholy mouth came at my throat, its lipless maw giggling as its teeth brushed my neck…
By sheer providence, I landed a blow squarely to the bottom of its chin as we rolled, and it fell off of me as we skidded to a stop on the frozen river. The ice bruising my already battered back caused me to cry out in pain, and the monster laughed as though in true revelry. Frantically wiping the blood and snow from my eyes, I could perceive its unnatural shape rise up from the ice. Thoughtless as some hunted beast, I scrambled up and fled from that terrible shape, that grotesque laughter. Over the sound of my boots reverberating against the frozen river, I heard it chant in a hissing croak, some unspeakable phrase that cooled my strained, burning heart. The utter wickedness of the phrase was… imparted to me, even though I understood it not. Then the ice beneath my feet broke, as if in response to the blasphemous voice… or in revulsion from it.
The cracking ice sounded like the scream of a swine under a butcher’s knife, and I fell through, into the lightless, deadly cold of the river. I felt the cut of a thousand razors as the black water enveloped me, stabbing into my very brain. I began to thrash in my heavy garments, once so warm yet now prohibiting any movement that might save me as I was pulled down by the iron-heavy wool and leather.
A rock battered my scalp, stunning the fight clear out of me. As if in a dream, I drifted back up on the sluggish current, facing the ice above me as the river carried me ever closer to death. What I saw shocked me back into the full horror of the situation. Staring back through the transparent, snow-dusted ice was the grotesque face of Francois, following my progress downstream as I endured my ignoble death. I recalled that, from above, the ice was clouded and difficult to see through, but the thing that was Francois appeared to mark exactly where I was, having no trouble seeing through it. Its horrible shape and scratching claws, silhouetted against the last light of the setting sun, made me thank God in those final moments that I would be drowned and lost to its incomprehensible, evil plans. A numbness came over me, so comforting as to feel almost like warmth, but then I was thrust out of the water, to be again battered against stones and ice.
By some miracle, or curse, I was cast down a series of small waterfalls where the river coursed down a sheer slope. Even as I realized what was happening, I became lodged in a crevice of stone and ice. I began to panic again, my heart beating frantically, from both the returning cold and from the terror of imagining the beast attacking me while I was pinned. Wrestling my way free of the cracked ice and jagged stones, I pulled myself out of the river and onto the sheer bank. Then the cold came in earnest, stealing all use from my limbs and causing me to shake so violently that I began to chip my teeth against one another.
I gave up, God forgive me, I resigned myself to death, and waited for the monster to come and kill me, to have its reward after so long a chase. It never came, however, though even from such an impossible distance I could hear it feasting on Sabian, howling and screaming with cannibalistic, manic joy at the night-shrouded forest.
I regained my senses to some small measure, and tried to drag my freezing body to some place where I could hide, and find some relief from the merciless cold, but all ability had departed me. My frozen hands could not even close around the roots that hung down beside me, let alone drag my weight. So I lay waiting for death in whatever form it would take.
Death never came, despite my wounds, despite being sheathed in ice-stiffened, waterlogged wool, and I passed the night in a state of madness. I could hear animals bleating and scratching all around me throughout the night, and other, stranger noises that had no explanation in either reality or dream. This deep in the Northern winter, the animals must be sleeping or else stalk silent as ghosts through the forests, but the tumult they made around me had the wanton air of a revel.
Then I heard a voice whisper my name. In all my many years of devout prayer, never had I heard an answer from my Savior or his saints, but, now, in my most desperate hour, I swear I heard an outer voice with perfect clarity… but this was not the voice of my Lord, or any of his servants. This was not even the voice of Lucifer, questing after my soul. No, I knew as soon as I heard that loathsome, wicked voice murmur my name that it came from someplace far, far closer than Heaven or Hell, and yet infinitely more remote…
It spoke to me not of sin or salvation, but of boundless, frozen gulfs. Gulfs of ice at the top of the world, from which every herculean glacier and humble icicle originates. The voice told of ancient hungers and unspeakable rites. Rituals where I might live forever, with limitless power over both man and nature. I had no choice, it whispered, only a choice to die as prey or haunt the frozen forests as it required.
The light of day eventually came, revealing a great abundance of animal tracks all around the area I had passed the night. They seemed to range through the entire natural animal kingdom, and yet further still. Humanoid footprints having only three toes and vague slithering as if great serpents had passed just beside where I lay. I marveled over the tracks as dawn came in earnest, creeping over the cursed and frozen forest.
Rather than putting my miseries to an end, daybreak brought with it fresh agonies. The sun shone down through the screen of icy branches, breaking upon me and creating an uncomfortable warmth that brought with it debilitating nausea. In time I clambered up and attempted to retreat into what shadows remained, away from the scalding light. My strength had returned sufficiently to stand and walk, but the oppressive heat of the dawn caused a new weakness in my muscles. I fled in to the darker areas of the forest and shed my frost-rimed coat. I ignored the fact that deep snow was all around me as I panted from the ever-rising temperature.
By midday the blazing of that sun caused me to collapse, in a state near death despite the blankets of snow I pulled over myself. As the day waned on and the sun crossed the sky, the heat gradually decreased. By late afternoon I was able to emerge from the sheltering snow and stand again without swooning. As the stars came out, I began the long walk back to the river, and from there retraced my way back to the post.
During the interminable hike, a hunger began to grow in the core of my body. It was a sharp and gnawing sensation, and, as I pushed myself onward, I dimly recognized that I had never before known true hunger. The ache of the need had reached a maddening and torturous state by the time I reach the pickets of the fort; a deep clawing agony nearly crippled me as cramping pains began to throb from my abdomen.
As I broke in the door of the cabin in my haste to enter, I marveled at my strength. The door had resisted me no more than a dried twig might. Forgetting this I all but ran to the larder. Within, a rank smell assailed me as I flung the contents around, too desperate to wonder how cured meats might have spoiled so quickly, intent only on the quest for anything palatable. Everything in the cabin sickened me with their noxious smells, but I was so hungry I forced some pemmican in my mouth. I chewed it voraciously, but, before I even swallowed my first mouthful, I vomited forth vile bluish-black phlegm and lay shaking violently on the floor.
After a time the sickness passed, and I noticed a smell so delicious I nearly wept. I realized the smell was coming from my own arm, which I had sliced open in my thrashings around the cabin. It was a shallow cut, barely more than a scrape, but I silently rejoiced as I gnawed at the wound, tasting the very essence of my soul…
I came back to myself, then. I realized what I was about for the first time since coming to the cabin of Francois, and a terrible horror came over me. What was happening, I wondered, then I thought of the warning of George Red Foot…
I had noticed how much smaller the cabin seemed, but only now saw that it was I who had grown. No fire burned in the hearth, but the heat in the room was sweltering. I knew then that I had become doomed by whatever curse had afflicted Francois. I despaired momentarily on my lost future, on my lost humanity… and then became resolved. An abiding hatred began to rise up within me, for myself, for Francois, and for that unhallowed voice that spoke to me of the frozen abysses in the north.
I knew then that I must end my own life before I killed an innocent or, worse yet, caused another to follow me into this icy hell. I resolved to put a lead ball in my head, but first I must complete this record… It is a warning for those who might find my body, yes, and also a testament as to why a true Christian would commit such a sin. I have no choice. This is not my fault.
So here I am at the end of my tale, and my hunger has only increased with each word. I can smell a scent in the air as I write these final words. I hear the jingling bell of one of the Jesuits’ ponies coming through the yard — Brother Dunn, perhaps, capitalizing on the unseasonably good weather to acquire some new furs for the mission.
The pistol is beside the inkwell on the desk, waiting to end my life… but I am so hungry.
Now his feet are tramping through the snow, approaching the cabin. His voice quavers as he calls through the ruined door, “Is anyone there? Sabian? Andre?”
The pistol looks so heavy, and my arm is so tired from writing all this down. I will eat just once from this visitor, so I will have the strength to kill myself. One last meal and then oblivion, I am sure whoever has arrived will understand. I could never end my life with a hunger so great, and this visitor smells so appetizing. A scent that causes my teeth to ache and my mouth to water with anticipation.
Yes, one last meal for the condemned, and then the end.