It is not often that cosmic horror and Northerns meet. Three examples would include “The Wendigo” (1910) by Algernon Blackwood, “The Thing From – Outside” (Science and Invention, April 1923) by George Allan England and “The Thing That Walked On the Wind” (Strange Tales, January 1933) by August Derleth. These three form a part of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The ideas of the wind-blown tale of adventure and the dark, claustrophobic terror of a horror tale seem antithetical. I know from my own experience of writing a Christmas ghost story, “What Child Is This?” (Northern Fusion #3, Spring 1999) for my father, one about his father, a trapper in the 1920s, that featured a vampire child, the two are a hard sell. My dad’s response was: “I liked it until the monster showed up.” What can you do?
Perhaps the best of all the creepy Northerns is “The Thing From the Barrens”, Jim Kjelgaard’s first story for Weird Tales, September 1945. George Malory dwells in North City so he can stay close to the woman he loves, Marcia Davenport. Marcia’s father, Pug, is trapper who has come back from the Barrens, haunted by a strange creature. The monster is invisible (because it is a color human eyes can’t see) but as Pug tells George there are two signs it is near, a stick and a duckprint. George sees these for real when the creature comes to the city. Those who touch the stick seem to float into the air as if they were being drawn up by a giant invisible hand. In the snow there are footprints, shaped like a duck’s but hugely out of proportion.
When the thing from the barrens takes Marcia, George and Pug go after the thing that George realizes is a monstrous parody of the all-too-common trapper. (There is a great scene where George finds a gruesome surprise. “The skins of Matt Brazeal, Joe Urshcal, Lorna Thomas, stretched out in the snow as we would stretch bear skins!”) It is only Pug’s disability, color blindness, that allows him to see and destroy the monster, driving it into a roaring river. Kjelgaard’s tale outdoes Blackwood, England and Derleth by being set in the North but also looks a major activity of the North, trapping.
“The Thing From the Barrens” wasn’t the last story Kjelgaard wrote for Weird Tales, but it was the only one set in the North. This story also wasn’t all Kjelgaard wrote about the Arctic. He wrote two dog books: Snow Dog (1948), Kalak of the Ice (1949) as well as “Blood on the Ice” (Boys’ Life, March 1947) and “Meeting on the Ice” (Adventure, May 1949), two stories about polar bears.
“The Blood on the Ice” begins with a polar bear hunting for seals. He is being followed by an Arctic Fox that scavenges the bear’s kills. The bear tries to kill the fox out of annoyance but it is too fast. The bear ignores the fox and continues hunting, having found a new smell. What he smells is Agtuk, an Eskimo man who is wandering back from the barrens. He had come with an European explorer named Larsen. The explorer had died and now Agtuk carried his gun and made his way back to his village. He collapses and the bear pounces. Agtuk shoots the bear through the head. With the bear meat he can now make it home. The fox smiles, knowing he would get a meal if he followed long enough. Kjelgaard’s tale is simple but elegant. The raw realities are a little surprising in a boys’ magazine. He speaks of blood-spattered dugs and describes the bear’s skull blown open by the bullet. 1947 was a different time.
“A Meeting on the Ice” has two prospectors John Donnelly and Walters, and their Eskimo guide, Nactoo out to find a motherlode of uranium. Tragedy strikes and Walters and Nactoo are killed. Donnelly is struggling along without food, looking for a cache he left at Cape Moon. A starving polar bear that can’t catch seals gets wind of Donnelly’s scent. Donnelly grows weaker and despairs he won’t find the cache when he sees the bear. He fires his rifle but the shot misses. The bear dodges behind a mound of snow. Donnelly pursues over the mound but the bear rears up while he shoots from the hip. Man and bear both drop dead on the hill that is the snow-covered Cape Moon cache. Unlike the Boys’ Life story, “A Meeting on the Ice” has a downer ending, tinged with irony, more suited to an adult audience.
The confrontation with a polar bear is a classic Northern scenario. Dan Simmons penned perhaps the greatest Arctic horror story and managed to keep the polar bear in The Terror (2007). Filmed in 2018, the tale follows the survivors of the Franklin Expedition and what really killed them out on the ice….
