The Whisper on the Night Wind by Adam Shoalts

Author:Adam Shoalts [Shoalts, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

— 14 —

HORROR IN THE WOODS

The wind through the trees is the windigo, the sigh of restless souls.

—Richard Morenus, Crazy-White-Man (Sha-ga-na-she Wa-du-kee), 1952

Lying in my tent in the pitch dark, my mind drifted to still darker places. I thought of some of the things I’d read about windigos. Northern Indigenous oral histories as well as the diaries and letters of fur traders are replete with references to this mysterious monster. No two descriptions agree exactly on the nature of the windigo, and even the word itself has been spelled dozens of different ways. Most historical accounts describe it as an “evil spirit” that could possess human beings, but some say that it could also take a physical form of its own.

Based on reports given by Atikamekw elders in northern Quebec in the 1920s, the anthropologist Richard Preston provided one of the most detailed descriptions:

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 swim under water…

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