by Anna Maxymiw
“What’s wrong, man?” Aidan presses him.
Wade shakes his head. “I don’t—” That’s when we all study him, because if Wade, strong Wade, doesn’t want to talk about something, it could be something bad.
“Spit it out,” Jack barks, a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth.
Wade shifts his jaw, and I can hear his teeth creak. He doesn’t want to speak about it, but he’s so sleep-deprived that his better judgment takes a back seat, and he starts talking. He tells us that he woke up damp and confused last night, needing to take a piss. It was about 3 a.m., he says. Hot as hell, the air thick, the moon a weak scrap. He was too lazy to walk to the bathhouse to use the urinals, so he opened the door of the cabin and decided to relieve himself against the outdoor wall. Nothing really out of the ordinary there, I think. Even the women do this on some nights, if we’re too sleepy to walk to the motel bathrooms, though it’s a little more precarious for us to piss against a wall in the dark.
“Okay, whatever,” Connor says, shoving a piece of bread in his mouth and chasing it with a slug of weak coffee.
“Yeah, but in the middle of it, I looked up and there was a fucking…a fucking wolf, man,” Wade stutters.
A week or so ago, during the lull before dinner, when the housekeepers were waiting around in the dining room, a tipsy guest showed me some pictures he took a few years ago, photos of a huge, white animal. I assessed the parts I understood: thick fur, a canine head held at an insouciant angle, lantern eyes flicking back over a shoulder to cast a disinterested look at the annoying mammals gawking from the boat. There were only a few shots, the guest told me as I thumbed through his pride-and-glory photos, because he disappeared so damn quickly.
I smiled to be polite, and handed the photos back. The truth is, the men up here are always trying to impress the housekeepers with something. I got bit by a pike, didn’t even wince; I saw a bear swimming alongside our boat and tried to touch him; I got a fishing lure stuck in my cheek when I tried to cast; I fell into the water drunk and only just got missed by the motor. Every single day, we have to resist rolling our eyes at some form of long-cocking, some tall tale, some harebrained excuse to talk to us and slow down our chores. This story, those photos—they both might fall into that category. None of us has actually seen a wolf, so we don’t think about them too much. We’re more concerned with the creatures that seek us out on purpose, like bears, like blackflies.
“Go on! Get outta town!” As if Wade’s turning into one of those guests, telling a tall tale to freak us out. We’re into July now. We’ve sweated out our naïveté; we’re more hardened, like our legs and biceps have become from the weeks of work. This must be a mirage, caused by the hazy late days of summer.
Wade shakes his head. “No, I’m telling you,” he says, putting his face in his hands for a moment. We laugh uneasily as he rubs his eyes with his thumbs. “I’m telling you…”
And then he tells us the real story, the real reason that his eyes are ringed with dark circles and his voice is hoarse. I listen, gob open, as he tells us that he dropped his hands and stopped his piss midway through. That he moved away as slowly as he could, and fell backward into the cabin. Slammed the door behind him. That after he locked his door, he heard what sounded like fingernails dragging along the wood of the cabin. Heard what he thought was human sobbing from the other side of the door, even though he was sure that he was alone, that he was the only one awake in the entire camp. Even though it wasn’t a human he saw.
Wade looks up, his eyes bleary. “It was fucked, man.”
Pranks and ghost stories are currency. Someone is always trying to scare someone else, whether it’s a dockhand locking a housekeeper in the laundry room, or a housekeeper hiding under the covers in a fishing guide’s bunk. Gus, the housekeepers tell me, has the best ghost stories out of all the staff members; when I ask him, however, he refuses to spill. “You’ll get too scared,” he says without smiling. I let the subject drop because there’s something about his tone that warns me off. Later, the guides and dockhands tell me that Gus was just trying to freak me out, and I try to laugh the whole interaction off, not quite convinced.
But this doesn’t seem like a prank.
“Shit—”
There’s nothing to say, no more jokes to be made. This is something we haven’t yet experienced. The otherworldly has mostly left us alone, despite the ghost stories, burial grounds, things that happened in the past in the motel, which the veteran girls swear is haunted. We’ve managed to skirt most of the spirits we’ve heard talk about. But maybe not anymore.
“It was fucked,” he repeats, his head in his hands.
* * *
Before I came to this place, I had never heard silence and symphony at the same time. Now I can hear a thick vein of quiet that throbs below the day and night life. The nights sound like nothing and a thousand things at once, a cacophony: wings and chitin, tongues on fur, clacking of keratin, thrums from the tree branches and the huge platter of the water. There’s also the hum of the fishing lodge’s generator, the burble of drunken fishermen. And underneath it all—or on top of it all, maybe—there’s something else, something patient, silent, something that exists beyond the reach of my words. During the day, we fill the air with our whoops and shrieks and stupid hollers. We thrive in the light, pretending we’re the kings and queens of the castle. But once the sun sets, the balance of power shifts. When the day fades into indigo, when the darkness crawls in from sky and shoreline, toward our cabins, something changes.
When darkness falls, the land’s psychology shifts; there’s an undertone of quiet menace. In the dark, we can’t see more than a few feet ahead of us, don’t know what’s waiting for us at the edge of the forest or farther down the paths. In the dark, we go to sleep, useless to do much else. And in the dark, other beings wake up, stretch, speak, and fill the night with their sounds.
But there’s one sound I’ve been waiting to hear. It’s the sound that tears out of that mysterious animal that lives cloaked, slinky and secretive, and captivates my imagination like no other. It’s the sound of calling out to a clan.
The wolf is an interesting study in contrasts. They’re not as large and therefore not as visually intimidating as bears—in the taiga, the timber wolf can weigh anywhere from 66 to 154 pounds—but they’re prolific predators nonetheless. Timber wolves travel in packs of a dozen or fewer, and these large numbers allow them to target and take down big prey, the big mammals: caribou, moose. They also kill their canine relatives, coyotes and foxes, without remorse. And their territory is large: wolves in Ontario can live on anywhere from 1,000 to 1,100 square kilometres of land.
So it seems cocky, I know, to think that of all the acreage a wolf could choose from, it would choose our lodge and our forests, would decide to be our neighbour for the summer. Would let us see it, hear it. Before coming up here, I’d imagined glamorous, mournful sounds on the wind that I would be able to turn into boastful memories later. I figured I’d be able to step outside of a cabin and cock my head and listen for that famous sound. But so far, nothing. It’s as if the North is teasing me: You want this? It’s not going to happen. You thought you’d get something? Not a chance.
There’s such a widely held fascination with wolves, maybe even more than with bears or eagles or fish. You can see it in the way people try to align themselves with lupines: humans wear lurid illustrations of howling wolves on T-shirts, maybe ironically, maybe not; gift shops across the country are filled with wolf trinkets like jewellery, magnets, shot glasses, beach towels; if we’re “running with the wolves” or “howling at the moon,” we’re exploring wild archetypes. It seems as if the big bad wolf has been transformed into something of an idol instead of a villain. In fact, I’m asked about wolves three times as much as I’m asked about any other local animal; guests are drawn to the idea of them. A big part of it must be that wolves look like dogs, that they have that pearlescent, thousand-yard stare and the aloofness that holds them apar
t and perhaps above other animals, but still resemble man’s best friend. And it must be because wolves, too, have so much mythology hitched to them: the wolf was said to be sacred to the god Apollo; Norse mythology holds that Skoll and Hati, two wolves, chased the sun and the moon across the sky; that the giant wolf Fenrir, son of Loki, had a mouth that was so big that when he opened it, one jaw touched heaven and one touched the earth.
And then there’s that howling.
It’s a popular sound effect used in movies and on Halloween tapes; we’ve all heard a variant of it. That howl stokes odd gut reactions: it fascinates, frightens, makes our hair stand up in a way that’s pleasurable, unpleasant, and satisfying all at once. A wolf’s howl is said to travel distances of fifteen kilometres or more; it teases, never betraying its hidden owner, and that makes us antsy, melancholy. It says where are you, where are you, and then the answer comes, broken and hitched in the most beautiful way: I’m here, I’m here—a dialogue that prickles at the base of our brain. Loneliness, uncertainty, eeriness: the howl brings all of those feelings out. Mournful and eddying, it dances on the edge between our everyday world and a world that exists beyond the veil.
There’s something nameless that exists up here, something with strength and tenacity, something tied to the land and the lake. It’s always present. I feel it when I walk the back pathway, when I take a few steps into the thicket of spruce and I’m clasped by silence. I feel it in the urge to lock the cabin door at night, in my reluctance to go swimming in the lake on my own. It’s not necessarily a danger, because there are real threats. Instead, the feeling is like a pressure: a force that is always present but not always insistent. It might be said that there’s an electricity to the land, that it’s all about being pinned in between some magical longitude and latitude, but that’s not quite right; it’s too easy of a solution and too tired of a trope.
Some of the staff members are blithe about this presence to the point of intentional disrespect. They hike far back into the bush, hacking down trees for firewood, complaining about the bugs and the heat and the work and the land. Fuck this, they snarl. Hate this place.
Some of us are wary. We refuse to travel into the forest by ourselves, demand a buddy system for hanging the linens in the isolated laundry field. We link arms when we have to slip into the woods to travel to the dump. We sing when we walk alone on the paths, raising our voices to the canopy and refusing to look up or to the side or anywhere we might see something staring back at us.
And some of us have silent reverence. We tip our heads to the crows, mumbling reassurances so softly that no one else can hear us and make fun. We steal cigarettes from the guest rooms and burn them as offerings while out on the lake in a canoe, looking to see if there are eyes somewhere deep in the trees.
* * *
Kesagami Lake has many islands: there’s Big Island, which is close to the lodge; Manidoo Island, with a spit of sand reaching out into the lake and an eagles’ nest in a tree near the shoreline; Fossil Island, where there’s an active Indigenous burial ground and where no boat is to dock, ever. And then there’s Windigo Island, which we’re not to point at, because it supposedly brings bad weather. I’ve heard stories that, many years ago, a local woman was left there to die, but, like many of the stories at Kesagami, that could be hearsay.
Windigo has many names: Weetigo, Weeghtako, Wehtigo, Weendigo, Witiko, Whit te co—there are dozens of ways to spell it, and all of them imbue the same fear in those who know it: the man-eater. I can’t know Windigo; it’s not my heritage and therefore it’s not my spirit. I don’t have the right or intellect to fully put it into words. Windigo comes from Algonquian culture, a grouping that is composed of peoples who speak the Algonquian languages. This includes, but is not limited to: Ojibwe/Chippewa; a variety of Cree groups; Algonkin; Mi’kmaq; Naskapi; and possibly the Beothuk people of Newfoundland.
Nowadays, Windigo has become a thing of pop culture. It’s been turned into a whitewashed, grotesque bogeyman in shows like Supernatural and Charmed; it’s been made into the villain of video games and is a creature in Dungeons & Dragons, where it’s described as “a strange, savage fey spirit”; people think it’s appropriate to cosplay as Windigo at comic cons. In 1973, Windigo even fought the Incredible Hulk and Wolverine in a Marvel comic book. In my undergrad psychology textbooks, Windigo psychosis is explained as a “dramatic” mental illness in which people have a craving to eat human flesh.
In an unofficial-looking comb-bound stack of papers called Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction that I find wedged into a library shelf, nearly all the writing seems to be by white men. According to this publication, in 1636, Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary living and working in French Canada, wrote to his superiors about a “Demon” who ate some “Tribes that live north of the River which is called the tree Rivers.” Le Jeune uses the term “Atchen,” but this still may be the first written reference to Windigo from a settler—Windigo as a werewolf-like figure terrorizing the Attikamegouekhin people. The earliest English documentation of the word Windigo comes from James Isham, in 1743. Isham was a trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and interacted with the Cree people who came to trade at York Factory on the west coast of Hudson Bay.
“Whit te co,” he writes. “The devil.”
So I’ve been exposed to Windigo as settlers have imagined it—brawny and brash, pulpy and popular, as an undiscerning monster that tears people from tip to tail—but in order to learn about Windigo, truly, without the colonial gloss, there’s deeper digging to do. It’s easy to find writing from white people on Windigo; settlers have always had better access to platforms on which to share their points of view. It’s harder to find Indigenous writers who have been vaunted the same way, who have been afforded the same opportunities. This is the paradox of researching Windigo: the main information I’m able to find isn’t the information I really want or value.
Here’s what I can glean: Windigo is a cannibal. Windigo is a demon that stalks the boreal woods at night. Windigo has a taste for human flesh, feeds on it. It’s both a thing of myth and a reality, as seen in the documented cases of people “becoming” Windigo and eating—or wanting to eat—human flesh. Windigo is a personification of spiritual and physical famine. Basil Johnston, Anishinaabe scholar, believes that the term Weendigo may come from Ojibway words: ween dagoh (“solely for self”) or weenin n’d’igooh (“fat,” “excess”). Other sources say that the name comes from the Cree word wihtikowiw (“she or he eats greedily”).
I can’t help but think of Windigo when I look out to that island, when nighttime falls and the camp changes. It’s easy to pin all fears on one figure—a ghost, a demon, something that becomes a scapegoat. Human beings think we want to know what is staring back from the unfathomable darkness of the depthless woods. We think we already know what it might be, based on settler “knowledge.”
But who is carving the logging roads through the green velvet of the forest around Cochrane? Who is trawling the lake for its biggest fish? Who is trapping the groundhogs, chasing away the bears, pestering and attempting to get photos of the wolves and the moose? Who is trying so stubbornly to keep a fishing lodge running in an environment that is clearly inhospitable? Windigo is not just one thing; there are many, many Windigos. We—the settlers who think we know about this land, we use it and abuse it and like to forget that it’s not ours and never will be—are not as good as we think we are.
Windigo is as tall as the pine trees it stalks through. Windigo is everybody. Windigo is naked and lanky; it’s impervious to the boreal cold. Windigo is your neighbour. Windigo is so powerful and swift that it can stride across a lake, and nobody can outrun it. Windigo is my cabinmate, my co-worker, my boss. Windigo has a black hole of a mouth, lips eaten away from its own hunger, hollow, dark holes for eyes. Windigo has red hair and wears a green shirt. Windigo is always hungry, always searching. Windigo wants more.
* * *
One night, I wake up with a full bl
adder. So far, I’ve avoided this situation by being prudent about water consumed before bed. Nobody wants to have to wriggle out of a sleeping bag and tumble out of a cabin into the witching hour. But this need is insistent. It won’t go away, even when I turn from side to side, crossing my legs at the ankles. Beside me, my three cabin-mates loll, soundless, far into the pleasures of sleep.
There’s a choice to be made. Do I walk through a portion of the woods to get to the flushing toilets? Or do I prop myself against the cabin and let it rip? The toilet paper and running water sound great, but I’m not brave enough to shine my flashlight into the dark. I tell myself that it’s because of the bears; that I’m too tired to walk that far; that this is easier. And then I unlatch the cabin door.
I know Kesagami well enough at dusk, when I admire the sunsets before I flitter into my cabin and lock the door. But this, the lodge in the middle of the deep night, is different. It feels and looks as though I’ve stepped onto another planet. I even move slower than I normally would. My feet don’t make a sound on the forest floor and my skin stays silent when my legs rub against each other with every step. Above me, the moon is green, the stars shining a strange lime, and it feels as if the light and the foliage and the warm, moist breath of the nighttime wind are all interacting with one another in that symphony. The trees are using the motionless night to react and extend and glow. The leaves are still, yet somehow also rustle in the breeze—an exhalation, a sigh at having been disturbed by my opening the door.
