I’m Indigenous and I’m actually more afraid of other people in a populated place … you never know what these damned humans will do next.
I have a cabin in the woods with no internet, phone or communications … it’s even out of cell phone range and I feel safer there than anywhere else.
I grew up with stories of Windigo … my parents used to freak us out with campfire stories in the dark and then pat us on the head and tell us to go to bed staring into the dark. My grandmother used to warn us not to make such dirty smoky fires because Windigo might see it from far away and find us.
I spent many nights alone out there and never had a problem … or maybe that is just want Windigo would like you to think.
The stories go hand in hand with stories of cannibalism in my culture. Many of the stories suggest that during times of famine, which regularly occurred before our modern era back about a hundred years ago, people would go mad with hunger. You have to realize that families of about five to ten people lived alone out there alone for months at a time or even years. And when famines occurred, the families would disappear and there would only be one lone survivor and everyone would quickly realize what happened. The legends suggest that over time, those people who had tasted human flesh eventually just started seeing others as prey to be eaten and consumed … they had been taken over by the spirit of Windigo.
And the stories get better because there is no one description of Windigo because it’s a legend that any one who has ever seen very few ever live to tell. One description we were taught as kids is that it is covered in mounds of animal furs and layers of human skin to misshape its human body into a giant monster. The other feature was the teeth and mouth … before it gets to the point of eating actual people, the famished person first starts eating themselves. They start ripping off portions of their lips and mouth to eat. It exposes their teeth and they can no longer close their mouth properly. So now you have this big hulking thing wandering around in the bush and when it looks at you, all you see is human teeth.
This is the Ojibway-Cree version of Windigo in the mushkeg and northern lake lands of Ontario. The descriptions vary from tribe to tribe throughout North America but this is the one I grew up with.
After many years of being in the bush … I’ve yet to see one … but late at night next to my camp fire in the wilderness, I always think of these stories.
Internet isn’t negotiable because I do have to be able to work from home. The skulldog is cute and would be nice but not an absolute necessity like the internet.
Well that’s good, doesn’t need to be fiber good, just enough to do a bit of work with documents and files.
The wendigo is non-negotiable and will show up when you least expect it.
I see, so he just comes and goes whenever he wants? I was kind of hoping he would hang around more, but if he wants to do his own thing that’s fine. I’d just hope he comes back when it’s cold outside, I’d be worried for him if he was stuck out in the snow.
I was surprised by how nervous some of the people who visited me from the city were when I lived in a slightly rural area. It wasn’t even that remote - I had a neighbor across the street! Telling people that there were no bears and a lot less crime didn’t convince them to relax.
A moonless night away from any artificial light is dark. Can’t-see-your-own-feet dark, and also so quiet that you start hearing a lot of noises that you aren’t used to hearing. It’s really unsettling. But of course I just carried a flashlight.
Believe me, I miss it too. I actually grew up in a big city, moved to a rural area for work, and then had to move back to that same big city. Crowding, noise, smells, terrible commutes - all the bad stuff about city living that I just took for granted before bothers me constantly now. I fantasize about being back on my own land with my own house, my own pickup truck, my own trees, and no strangers. All the people I care about are in the big city, they refuse to leave, and ultimately being close to them is more important to me, but I really wish they were country folk.
It’s not that dark once your eyes adjust. Use a ranger trick and keep one eye closed as you enter and exit light pollution and your closed eye will stay light adjusted.
I live in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. After living in over 20 cities in 4 countries, over 13 years - I am very done with city life. We started out here with a patch of untouched forest and lived the first 14ish months fully off-grid. I’m talking like - getting water from the creek in buckets and chopping down enough trees to make room for our trailer to live in off-grid.
We have mains power and starlink now, but remote is definitely the right word for our situation. The nearest human is about 5km away most of the year, with the occasional hunter in the fall and camper in the summer.
Now all I need to do is build another shed so that we can buy two big freezers and take the town trip frequency down to quarterly instead of monthly :)
lol … this is a great thread for this kind of stuff for me. I’m Indigenous Ojibway-Cree from northern Ontario and I grew up with these stories.
My uncle was born the raised in the bush for about the first 20 years of his life without much. This would be about a hundred years ago now. He said he learned to hunt and trap before his family could use firearms so he knew how to live out there.
He used to tell us stories of how our people used to have a ceremony called the ‘shaking tent’. It’s a small little shelter about four or five feet high where an Elder, spirit leader or shaman would go in, go into a trance and be able to communicate with the spirits or other shamans far away or even see family, friends or enemies. When we told my uncle about the internet, he wasn’t surprised, he used to say, our people were already doing that a long time ago.
I remember one story he repeated often when we were kids. It was about how a young man upset a leading shaman who was too proud and boastful and the young man called him out. The shaman told him he was wrong to do that and that he was being warned that the young man was no in danger. The young man went away from them all with his family and days away and hundreds of miles away he went about his life. Late one night as they sat around his teepee resting … a sudden flash appeared and a spear appeared out of thin air … the young man was swift, caught the spear mid air and threw it back into the light. They said that mitchi-mindoo, the evil spirits were playing tricks again.
Months later, they learned that the shaman that had threatened him had suddenly died. They were told that he was found in his shaking tent one day with a spear in his chest.
I always just ignored this story as a kid … but a few years before my uncle died, he repeated the story to me. He said the young man was his father, my grandfather and that he claimed that he remembered as a little child seeing that flash of light.
I was never able to really believe or disbelieve what he said or what he claimed. It was my uncle who was full of stories like this and we could never really ever tell if what he said was truth, legend, historical fact or just embellishment.
Fun Fact: the reason the West Was Won was because after the American Civil War America had a whole bunch of army dudes standing around not necessarily ready to go home but not being “useful.”
Including William Tecumseh “Kill All The Buffalo” Sherman.
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