The Wendigo
A moose-hunting party camps deep in the Canadian forest. Their guide, Défago, smells something strange on the wind, and in the night something calls his name. One of the greatest stories of wilderness terror. By Algernon Blackwood (1910). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the bull moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was interested in other things besides moose—amongst them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole....Besides himself and his guide, Hank Davis, there was young Simpson, his nephew, a divinity student destined for the "Wee Kirk" (then on his first visit to Canadian backwoods), and the latter's guide, Défago. Joseph Défago was a French "Canuck," who had strayed from his native Province of Quebec years before, and had got caught in Rat Portage when the Canadian Pacific Railway was a-building; a man who, in addition to his unparalleled knowledge of wood-craft and bush-lore, could also sing the old voyageur songs and tell a capital hunting yarn into the bargain. He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries. Keep reading →About this story
A moose-hunting party camps deep in the Canadian forest. Their guide, Défago, smells something strange on the wind, and in the night something calls his name. The others in the party, a doctor, his nephew and a divinity student, have to decide what they believe.
Algernon Blackwood, an English writer who had spent time in the Canadian wilderness, published it in 1910. It is based on the Algonquian legend of the Wendigo, a spirit of the northern woods, and is widely seen as one of the best wilderness horror stories, with a strong sense of how small people are in such a place.
- Themes
- Wilderness terror, a spirit of the forest, belief
- Good for
- Readers who like slow-building horror in a wild setting
- Worth noticing
- How much of the fear comes from what the characters do not see.