I’ve been collecting together any story set in the North that features supernatural elements, or the supposed supernatural, from magazines, books, comics. For me this is the true Canadian literature: ghosts and snow.
But this search has me looking at both ends of the timeline. What is the most recent example? That X-Files episode with the worms from the Arctic? I’m sure I can find something newer, and I will keep looking. But what of the other end of the spectrum? Who did it first? Jack London? Rex Beach? Robert W. Service? I have yet to find such a story. Service, who is best remembered for his Sour Dough ditties, later wrote a false werewolf story called The House of Fear (1927) but it isn’t a Northern. Elia W. Peattie and Susan Carleton Jones wrote earlier, but the one that I think qualifies as the first true “Strange Northern” is “Valley of the Windigo” by George Marsh. This is one that is going to set the pattern for all those that come later.
George Tracy Marsh (1876-1945) is famous for several Northerns including Toilers of the Trail (1920), Whelps of the Wolf (1922) and other sled dog books. He made Canadian literary history when he wrote “The Canoe Song” and other poems about the Voyageurs. But the story we are concerned with here is “The Valley of the Windigo” from Scribner’s Magazine, June 1917. It was later collected in Toilers of the Trail with paintings by Frank E. Schoonover.
The story concerns a trapper named Francois Hertel who is running from the law. He killed a man who tried to take his wife, Marie. Hertel and his lady flee north. The fur trader Campbell recognizes him and confronts him. Hertel admits his crime, asking if it was your woman what would you do? The Company has issued a notice that Hertel is in good for $300 dollars and factors are to show support.
Hertel is looking for a trapping area. Campbell warns him unnecessarily about trapping in Cree territory. The factor then suggests, if he isn’t afraid of “Injun-devils”, a valley on “The Devil’s River”, prime untouched woods that are supposedly haunted by a Windigo. Hertel sees his opportunity to disappear. No one goes to the haunted valley so he can hide and make money at the same time.
The Hertels move into Windigo Valley, building a cabin and trapping furs once the snows come. One night, while feeding the dogs, his lead husky’s fur rises and he growls at an unseen visitor. The creature screams in the night. Francois remembers the warnings he heard about the Windigo stealing his furs and killing and eating the humans. The next day he finds the tracks of the Windigo, larger than a bear’s with long claw marks. He notices that the tracks aren’t deep, so the creature is not that heavy. He wants to track it down and kill it but it is evening so he doesn’t. When he gets home Marie is terrified, having heard the cries of the monster.
Worrying for Marie’s safety, Francois takes up the trail the next day but fails to find the creature. His traps begin to be robbed of their catch. One night the Windigo visits their cabin. Francois leaves Marie with a shotgun and a husky for a guard, then follows. He shoots at the vanishing figure three times but no blood marks its trail. He loses his quarry when it doubles back, mixing many tracks together. Francois smiles anyway. He now knows for sure that whatever this thing is, it is frightened of a well-aimed bullet.
Hertel’s next move is to set traps for the cunning creature. Trap after trap is sprung. He begins to wonder if the thing is in fact a devil. He has only one deadfall left. He hurries to see if that one has worked. He approaches slowly for something is crushed between the logs. Marsh uses the final line for his reveal (just short of Lovecraftian italics):
“With a wrench he turned the heavy trap and its victim over — to stare into the swart face, hideous in its grimace of death, of a Cree Indian. “
Typical of 1917, this story doesn’t ask any questions about the rights of First Nations people. It also suffers from the sexism of the time. Marie the wife is never identified as native but in one paragraph Marsh mentions her “dark face”. As a character she is oddly absent from the story except as a thing that Francois must protect. He was willing to kill a man for her. Still, she never is never developed as a character.
Despite these defects, Marsh supplies all kinds of wonderful detail in this story. Like in the opening paragraphs, when Hertel is getting out of his canoe. The man gives Marie a whip to keep the trading post dogs away from his animals. It is this kind of unimportant and true facts that show Marsh knew the North and wasn’t writing about it from a New York apartment.
All these stories and comics come after Marsh. Some, like Jane and Paul Annixter’s Windigo owe an obvious debt, while others have washed through the culture sieve so long their creators probably never heard of George Marsh, but followed in his footsteps none the less.
A shout-out to Brian Alan Burhoe and his wonderful Northern-themed website Civilized Bears.
