The Wendigo

Every Christmas we get the kids new calendars for their rooms. Typically we pick national parks or historic sites, but last year we thought the boys would enjoy a worldwide cryptids calendar—Bigfoot, Nessie, the Kraken, the Chupacabra, and the like. The boys greatly enjoyed it until this summer, when we turned to a new month and a new image: the Wendigo, giant, antlered, and skull-faced, lumbering through a dark forest on warped legs. One of the twins hated it so much we ended up turning to the next month weeks ahead of time (Fairies, for some reason assigned to Germany), meaning they had almost two months of August.

A silly thing, but it piqued my interest in the monster and I sought out the story that introduced this fixture of some Indian folklore to a mass audience, Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo.

Set among the dense forests and mazes of rivers and lakes in northwestern Ontario, The Wendigo is related secondhand, the unnamed narrator retelling a story told him by Dr Cathcart. A Scottish expert in the still-new field of psychology, Dr Cathcart has taken his nephew Simpson to Canada on a hunting trip. With two Canadian guides and an Indian cook the Scots work their way deep into the wilderness hunting moose only to be disappointed. The hunting is bad that year, and after considering their options, Dr Cathcart and Simpson decide to split up for a few days.

Leaving Punk, the Indian cook, at the camp, Dr Cathcart heads off in one direction with one of their guides. Simpson, fresh out of seminary and visiting Canada for the first time, travels with the other, the French Canadian Défago, an “imaginative and melancholy” man who knows the area, its hunting, and its lore well. They cross long lakes by canoe and travel inland through dense forest for days. Simpson is a novice woodsman and relies entirely on Défago, and so when they make camp one night and Défago, who senses and intuits far more than Simpson can perceive, catches a strange, foul scent on the breeze, his reaction terrifies Simpson.

Défago turns sullen and silent, refusing to discuss what the smell means or indicates to him. After the two bed down in their tent for the night, Simpson awakes to find Défago in a panic, trembling and muttering. Something is outside the tent, something enormous, something with an indescribable “singular odour,” something that bellows out a long, loud, terrible sound before calling Défago’s name.

Défago flees the tent. Simpson, barely resisting his panic, follows his tracks until the oppressive darkness and the gigantic, unidentifiable tracks alongside Défago’s send him back to the tent in terror. Unfortunately for him, the night and his trials have just begun.

I don’t want to describe any more of the story, but it involves voices in the sky, deformed feet, a long vigil by the campfire, and a visit from someone who looks like a friend. Only when Simpson, using what little knowledge of camping and trailblazing Défago had imparted to him, returns to the group’s camp after trekking alone for days does Défago’s fate become clear.

Or does it? The Wendigo exploits to the fullest the ambiguity of both Simpson’s experiences and his uncle’s narration. Dr Cathcart, remember, is a psychologist, and the narrator pointedly mentions that he wrote a book on shared hallucinations. But Dr Cathcart, who saw fit to tell this story to our narrator, also left this story out of his book and confesses near the end, when Simpson is pressing him to explain what had happened to him, that smells are less commonly hallucinated than sights and sounds. What to make of that?

“I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself,” Dr Cathcart says, which our narrator follows with “He was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations.” As in so many weird stories and gothic tales, the man of science rushes to the limit of his knowledge and is forced to stop.

This ambiguity and the frame tale—another gothic staple—are a key part of the story’s effect, but the real power of the story is in its atmosphere. Blackwood, who spent years in Canada before returning to Britain, evokes the loneliness and potential terror of a night in the remote northern woods exceptionally well. The sensory detail—that “singular odour” on a cold light wind, the sunlight on the vast lakes, the snow, the crashing of something huge through the branches of the trees and the thumping of its feet as it approaches through the night—build into a suffocating sense of danger made all the worse by the fact that, whatever is out there, Simpson never sees it. It’s wonderfully done, one of the creepiest stories I’ve read in a long while.

But this being the age of Themes, I have to refute something I saw on Wikipedia. The article on the wendigo cites a literary scholar’s argument that The Wendigo, through Blackwood’s “subtly-demonizing rhetoric[,] transforms the Wendigo from a native myth into a descriptive template for the Indian savage.” That is, The Wendigo is about the inferiority of Native Americans, and guilty of cultural appropriation to boot. This is stupid for three reasons: first, because the concept of cultural appropriation is ideological brainrot and inimical to all art and culture. Second, because Punk, the only Indian character in the story, is steady, capable, and also the only character with the good sense to leave when it becomes clear the Wendigo is nearby.

But finally and most importantly, the point of the story is to get a spook. It’s scary entertainment rooted in real places and folklore, and is “about” an ill-fated hunting trip. Expertly crafted and beautifully written, with a clear feel for the woods and how unsettling they can be, the story leaves the reader with enough questions to remain unsettled. Blackwood meant to entertain the reader and succeeded. Check your seminar table theory at the door—this story is for enjoyment.

The Wendigo is an enjoyable novella that offers creepy atmosphere, a weighty sense of dread—always a more powerful emotion to me than horror or the gross-out—and an imaginative, surprising story. It’s a worthwhile Halloween read and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. I hope y’all will check it out. Our kids won’t be anytime soon.

The Long Traverse

This year’s John Buchan June enters the homestretch with another curiosity. When I wrote about The Magic Walking Stick two weeks I go I was careful to note that it was Buchan’s only children’s book published during his lifetime. That’s because, at his untimely death in February 1940, in addition to having just completed his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door and his final novel, Sick Heart River, he was working on a new children’s book: The Long Traverse.

The young hero of this novel, Donald, is the son of a Canadian mining engineer. When the story begins, he has just left school on holiday and is excited to reach his family’s cabin in the forests of Quebec. His parents have given him permission to go a week early to prepare for their stay, which means a week of riding, hunting, fishing, playing in the woods and streams with his friends Simone and Aristide, local Indian children, and hearing stories from their uncle, Father Laflamme.

Donald is especially excited because he hates school. He resents his Latin lessons and finds history confusing and boring. He prefers the outdoors or, failing that, the movies.

When Father Laflamme learns about Donald’s lack of interest—especially his indifference to history—he discusses it with the family’s beloved Indian hunting and fishing guide, Negog. Descended from the priestly caste of the Cree, Negog thinks Donald should be open to learning from his ancestors and knows a secret method for commanding attention and teaching the stories of the past.

Every evening, after the day’s adventures, Negog ensures that Donald is near a body of water. As the sun sets, the fish rest, and the waters still to a mirror the cloudless golden sky, Donald experiences La Longue Traverse—visions of past events.

Day by day Donald meets the heroes of early Canadian history. He sees Jacques Cartier on his expedition to explore the St Lawrence River, Adam Dollard and his companions holding out against the Iroquois at the Battle of the Long Sault, voyageur Jean Cadieux and his last-stand against Indian attack, forgotten trappers, explorers, missionary priests, prospectors and miners, and ordinary people. My two favorite chapters concerned—unsurprisingly—the Norse exploration of the Canadian coast, in which Donald witness the long, hard expeditions of the fictitious Hallward, and a chapter set in the plains far from European settlement, where an Indian tribe, faced with enemies newly armed with the horse, trade for a yet deadlier weapon: the gun.

In The Long Traverse, Buchan combines the magic of his earlier children’s book with the story-made-of-stories setup of The Path of the King. Each story is engaging and exciting, and in the frame story that structures them Donald slowly learns more—and takes more and more pride and ownership—of his and his country’s past. Though he forgets the visions as soon as they end, the stories stay with him. In flash-forwards, his parents are astonished by the things he knows.

The subject matter is the stuff of adventure, but the true star of the book is the Canadian landscape. As with the best of his adventure fiction, Buchan conjures vivid settings and realistically describes them. The forested hills and lakes of Quebec are the most frequent locations, but the canyons and whitewater rapids of the Canadian Rockies, the endless plains, and the frozen coasts of Arctic islands also feature. Buchan describes all of this beautifully but does not leave out the unpleasant: heat, avalanche, dangerous rapids, and clouds of biting black flies. (The cover of the first edition, above, shows Donald sheltering by a lakeside fire built by Negog to keep the flies at bay.) The wildness and scale of the country, the hardships of daily life, and the hazards of travel—on foot, by horse, by canoe, by longship—demanded heroism of the people who lived there, and Buchan makes both feel real.

The Long Traverse ends suddenly after the story of a missionary priest’s eerie encounter with the Toonit, a population of relict prehistoric people not unlike the Picts of Buchan’s early short story “No-Man’s-Land.” Buchan was almost finished with the book when he died, and though the individual stories are wonderfully absorbing and readable—I read the book in two days—Donald’s story is left unresolved. A note by Buchan’s widow, Lady Tweedsmuir, explains the original conception and purpose of the book and a little of what Buchan left in outline at his death.

During his time as Governor-General of Canada Buchan came to love the country, not only its vast and varied landscapes but the peoples who lived there. (This comes across quite clearly in this 1937 New Years’ greeting.) He found its history fascinating, full of romance and figures worthy of emulation, and Canadian schools’ methods of teaching that history abominable. The textbooks, as he saw it, were more likely to kill than to encourage interest in the past. One sympathizes.

Donald is Buchan’s imaginary typical Canadian schoolboy, full of talent and potential but lacking direction and already let down by the schools. Negog and Father Laflamme sense that Donald is vulnerable, that, on the verge of manhood, his character is at a crucial moment in its growth, and that the cities and movies strive against the rootedness in the past that Donald and all of us need. Negog, as a Cree a figure of the past and as a Christian Canadian a figure of the present, puts him directly in touch with that past. Understanding one’s history, Buchan forcefully shows, is not only a duty but an important step in moral formation.

It is also interesting and fun. The stories Donald sees in The Long Traverse are all exciting, and Buchan envisioned them as a way to awaken the imaginations of young students. Thus awakened, they would be open to instruction. (It certainly worked on me; I learned a lot either reading or reading about the subjects of these stories.) He rightly understood that telling interesting stories about the people of past beats any state-approved textbook. The imagination must come first—a lesson still worth learning and remembering.