Large Fierce Mammal

I broached the subject of the Wendigo on Dark Sentiments – Day 17, and though that article provided an introduction to the nasty thing, what I wrote that day was intended as an introduction to a tale supplied by the good James A. Keating. But the Wendigo is deserving of deeper exploration, particularly because a cannibalistic murder committed as recently as 2008 could have been taken straight out of Wendigo lore.

It was through interactions between remote bands of Algonquian people and white fur traders, missionairies, and so called “civilized” officials that the Wendigo and its ways first came into the ken of Europeans. It came to be known that among the tribal bands involved, the failure of someone to return from a winter hunt or other endeavour that took them away from the community in that time was commonly attributed to their having been eaten by a Wendigo. Conversely, it was also understood that sometimes the person who left was not the same thing that returned.

In the time since, a small number of cases have been documented, mostly from court records coming out of dealings both with those who have killed someone they believed to be the host of a Wendigo spirit, as well as with actual perpetrators of killings that were of the sort characteristic of the Wendigo.

The Wendigo hunts in the dead of winter when travel through deep snow is taxing, food is scarce, the nights are long, and time is hard. It selects as its host from among the most vulnerable, taking those with weaknesses that are not of the physical kind. It is drawn to greed, ravenous envy, blind hatred, moral decrepitude, and the kind of desperation some would do anything to alleviate.

Wendigo possession initially presents with delirium, often so violent that the one possessed must be physically restrained. The hunting phase does not, therefore, manifest spontaneously, but the spirit cannot be removed so Algonquian law is decisive in such matters. It falls either to an experienced Shaman or to tribal elders to evaluate the case and decide if, beyond reasonable doubt, there is a Wendigo involved. Sometimes, the decision is aided by the pleas of the victim who, in some cases, has been known to recognize what is happening and beg to be destroyed before the Wendigo asserts its control and all human reason is subdued forever.

There are varying descriptions of the measures to be taken if it’s decided that there is a Wendigo to be gotten rid of, but all agree that there is no time to waste because, once the feeding frenzy begins the Wendigo’s ravenous strength is at its peak, and many lives will be lost or put needlessly at risk in an attempt to stop it then. Some say to strangle the host and burn the remains, others call for decapitation after strangulation, and burying the head and torso in separate locations. Either way, the Wendigo can no longer make use of the host and must move on. Obviously, it behooves the tribal group to ensure that its members are as morally upright as possible, so in this sense the Wendigo can be said to be the boogy man that threatens the unrighteous with a terrible doom. A community of solid citizens will send the Wendigo to hunt elsewhere.

Swift Runner

In 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner took his wife and children with him on a hunting trip. Afterward, only Swift Runner could be accounted for, and his wife’s relatives reported their daughter’s disappearance to the North West Mounted Police. Swift Runner’s camp was located in a remote area north of Edmonton, Alberta, and when an NWMP patrol arrived there in response to the complaint, evidence was discovered that pointed to every member of his family having been killed, butchered, and eaten.

Swift Runner was arrested and stood trial for murder in August of 1879. He confessed, explaining that he had been visited by spirits while out on a moose hunt, and the spirits had told him to become a Wendigo. He further said that, on returning to camp where his family awaited his return, all he heard was, “… young moose. Nothing but moose.” Before the hunt, he reported having suffered from nightmares that caused him to wake screaming.

I often remind people who insist on acting like idiots, even though they may not be idiots by definition of textbook parameters, that how you behave, regardless of other circumstances, is going to dictate the way you are regarded by the rest of society. In short, if you act like an idiot, then to the rest of us you are an idiot, and we will treat you accordingly. A lot of human behaviours fit into this template, and whether insane or possessed by an evil spirit, Swift Runner was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead; a result he completely endorsed. He gave a speech from the gallows shortly before the trap door opened, confirming that he was, in fact, guilty as charged, and thanking his jailers for taking care of him during his stay. Swift Runner, to his last breath, believed he had become a Wendigo and was relieved that he was being removed from the world.

The allure of supernaturally motivated cannibalism notwithstanding, the hunting and killing of people believed to be possessed by the Wendigo has attracted far more official attention over the years because reported cases of cannibalism that fit the Wendigo MO are much more rare. Considering its reputation as an efficient killer, this is not surprising. Nobody reports if nobody survives, but the killing of the Wendigo host leaves successful hunters to talk about it, and when people who believe they have justly exterminated a plague on their community in complete conformance with their own cultural laws meet people who insist on pressing the incident and its outcome through the sieve of European legal sensibility, the kind of injustice that can only come from cultural conflict is bound to ensue. One such case resulted in the setting of an 1897 legal precedent that still exists in Canadian law.

In these times of trials that last months, if not years, it’s hard to grasp the days when a trial for murder or manslaughter would be over in a day, but in a trial heard in Ontario on 3 December 1896, the court heard the story of the shooting death of a person believed by the man who fired the fatal shot to be the host of a Wendigo that had been haunting his community for months. He wasn’t alone in this belief because on the day in question, Ojibwa hunter Machekequonabe was part of a guard detail that had been put in place. According to testimony, the guards saw a “… tall Indian with a blanket over him ….” When challenged, the blanketed figure ran, Machekequonabe pursued, and shot him with his rifle. Accounts are that Machekequonabe wept when he discovered he had killed his foster father. He was sentenced to six months incarceration and much of the case is muddied by a combination of justified distrust of Canadian bureaucracy by native people, and intimidation of witnesses. The full truth will never be known.

The most documented case of a successful Wendigo intervention occurred in 1906, and came to light after North West Mounted Police heard rumours that a Wendigo host had been killed in northeastern Manitoba. The entire tale is very ably told in an article on the Providentia website titled Hunting theWendigo (Part 2), and both can and should be read by clicking here.

As time has gone by, all references to traditionally defined encounters with the Wendigo have faded into obscurity. With all the conceit of modernity this is attributed to the “civilization” of native North American cultures and the Christian enlightenment that comes to strip away the nasty things that only have life if the label of “paganism” is successfully applied. Student of human nature that I am, I know that lack of reporting by any person of offenses, to any power that has proven itself to be clearly impotent in its pretense of being able to protect that person, is more indicative of confidence lost than in the veracity of any belief. No news is not necessarily good news.

Vincent Weiguang Li

On a typically dark and unpopulated stretch of Trans Canada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on the night of 30 July 2008, a Greyhound bus came to an emergency stop to a crescendo of screams. In the ensuing evacuation, Vincent Weiguang Li continued the work of stabbing to death, dissecting, and eating parts of sleeping Tim McLean, a man he had never previously met. Witnesses report observing Li decapitating his kill, and slicing from the head its nose, ears, and lips, placing them in a plastic bag. Confronted by passengers and a truck driver who entered the bus, Li charged at them causing them to retreat and hold the door shut against him. A witness reports, “He calmly walks up to the front with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us. There was no rage in him…it was just like he was a robot or something.”

Li was arrested by police when he suddenly attempted to escape through a window, but reports are that on appearing in court he asked those around him, “Please kill me.” As of today, Vincent Li is in custody, considered unfit to stand trial. Before these events he delivered newspapers, and among those papers was the Edmonton Sun. Ten days before he “went Wendigo” as it’s come to be called, Li delivered an edition of that publication containing an article on Wendigo lore drawn from an interview with Nathan Carlson, described as an ethno-historian and expert on Wendigo phenomena.

Crazed copycat after reading the article? Wendigo for real? Connected in some demented way as described in this canada.com article? The answer doesn’t really matter to Tim McLean. Evil is recognized by its outcome.

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