Transcription
There is something uncanny about the prospect of impossibly giant bugs – a hair-raising notion which, for many of us, triggers a sense of primitive revulsion, and which, for some, is literally the stuff of nightmares.
In previous pieces, we explored native Canadian legends about enormous spiders and worms once said to prowl the wilds of the Great White North. One tradition which this author neglected in those pieces is the lore of the Inuit, who have tales of colossal man-eating arachnids which once spun their deadly webs in the northern tundra, and in the barren mountains of the Arctic Archipelago.
Folklorist Neil Christopher and artist Mike Austin showcased two such legends in their beautifully-illustrated 2014 book The Hidden: A Compendium of Arctic Giants, Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, Faeries, and Other Strange Beings from Inuit Oral History. The first of these is the legend of the Aasivak, a female shapeshifter whose true form is said to be a giant spider.
An Inuit hunter told Christopher that he had personally encountered this abomination while hunting caribou on the lonely shores of Cumberland Sound, which furrows the southeastern coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut. Christopher’s brief description of this encounter, drawn from his research notes, seems to imply that the hunter came upon the creature’s house and peered through the window. Inside sat an enormous woman cleaning a caribou skin. Perhaps in response to an invitation, or drawn by curiosity or necessity, the hunter entered the dwelling.
“Aasivak came close up to him,” Christopher wrote, “but he, out of fear, cut off her head. She fell down, and he saw her body gradually dwindle until she became a spider. He was very much afraid, and left the house as quickly as he could. When he was outside, he looked in the window again, and saw her the same way as before, cleaning the caribou skin. He went away. Then Aasivak ran out of her house and shouted to him to come back; but he returned home and told of his adventures.”
Another legendary creature which Christopher included in his book, whose name seems to be etymologically related to the shapeshifter above described, is a monster called the Aasivarluut. This atrocity was described as an enormous aquatic spider that lurks in the Arctic Ocean, bobbing just below the surface of the water, ambushing any seals, walruses, and Inuit kayakers unfortunate enough to pass within reach of its arms.
A Greenlandic Inuit told Christopher that he nearly fell victim to this predator while kayaking in the Arctic Ocean. “At a place where no shoal was known to exist,” Christopher wrote, “[he] noticed the bottom quite close to him. He then suddenly recalled having heard old people talking of the ocean-spider, a most dangerous animal to the kayakers. Presently, the kayaker discovered a monstrous eye, and at the distance of about a kayak-paddle’s length from it, a similar one, and on tearing away from the spot, a terrible gap made its appearance. Indeed, if he had been a less skilled kayaker, he would never have gotten away alive.”
Man-eating spiders are not the only bug-like monsters to haunt indigenous Canadian folklore. All across southern British Columbia, from the longhouses of the West Coast to the lodges of the Rocky Mountains, native peoples tell traditional tales about either a monstrous ogress or a giant owl that once kidnapped and ate children in ancient times. Ages ago, one of her would-be victims, often described as a child of exceptional cunning, burned this monster alive in the flames of its own cookfire. The embers that rose from the creature’s corpse transformed into small animals – sometimes birds, sometimes lice, but more often mosquitoes, whose blood-sucking proclivities mirrored the man-eating compulsion of their monstrous progenitor.
Although these stories seem to be most common in Coast and Interior Salish lore, one variation of them appears in the legends of the Wuikinuxv, a people native to a stretch of British Columbian coastline roughly halfway between Bella Bella and the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In 1982, Wuikinuxv Chief Simon Walkus Sr. told this story in his ancestral tongue to folklorist Susanne Storie Hilton. A translated transcript of the interview later appeared in the 84th publication of the Canadian Ethnology Service.
According to Chief Walkus, “there was once an Indian village on the [Neechantz] River near the First Narrows in Owikeno Lake. Downriver from this place was a spot where blood red smoke issued from the riverbank. This place was said to be home to a cannibal spirit called Baxvbakvalanusiwa.” This entity is undoubtedly an Wuikinuxv variation of the Baxbakwalanuksiwe of Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, a terrifying spirit described as a bear-like monster whose body is covered with ravenous gaping mouths, whose name translates to ‘The Man-Eater at the North End of the World’.
In a footnote, editors Susanne Hilton and John C. Rath explained that the cannibal spirit of the Wuikinuxv was said to thrive on human blood. Chief Walkus went on to explain how a party of young brothers travelled to the haunted spot at the mouth of the Neechanz River where red smoke billowed from the riverbank and, heedless of the danger, entered the home of the cannibal spirit. There, they were greeted by the demon’s son, whose gluttonous father was out hunting. Instead of treating the visitors with hospitality, the creature noticed that one of the youths had scraped his shin and demanded that he be allowed to lick up the blood. Recognizing that they had made a grave mistake, they young men escaped the lair through trickery and retreated to their village.
Upon learning of the incident from his son, the cannibal spirit followed the teenagers upriver and entered the house in which they were hiding. There, it was greeted by the brothers’ father, who offered to prepare a meal for it. The father, who was a master woodcarver, proceeded to shape pieces of cedar wood into arms and legs, which he feigned were the limbs of his children. He then threw the wood into a pit of hot water on the pretext of cooking it. While they waited for the ‘meat’ to boil, the father began to tell the monster one of the ancient tales of his people, which lulled the creature to sleep. As soon as the spirit dozed off, the father rolled it into the pit of boiling water and killed it. As an extra precaution, the father proceeded to dismember the monster’s carcass. Each of the pieces that he chopped off the body transformed into mosquitoes, which the storyteller called “the small ones that bite.”
In the Wuikinuxv tale of the Baxvbakvalanusiwa and other related stories, the mosquitoes that issue from the monster’s corpse resemble their vile forebear only in their bloodthirsty nature. There is one old native tale from the southern Canadian Rockies, however, in which the ancestor of modern mosquitoes appears to be painted as a monstrous winged bloodsucker – another giant bug which appears in at least one other Canadian folkloric tradition.
In his 1893 contribution to the Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, English symbologist Charles Staniland Wake included a Kootenay Indian story told to him in the Upper Kootenay dialect by a native named Paul in Tobacco Plains, Montana, on September 12th, 1891.
“The first mosquito,” Paul said, “was travelling and saw at a distance a number of lodges. A voice said: ‘Come, eat chokecherries!’ But the mosquito said: ‘I don’t want to eat them.’ So the mosquito left and travelled on.
“By and by, he came to another village. A voice said: ‘Come, you shall eat serviceberries.’ The mosquito said: ‘I don’t want to eat them.’ So he leaves and sets out again.
“By and by, he sees another village. A voice says: ‘Come, you shall eat blood!’ This time, the mosquito goes up to the village. He eats very much blood. His belly swells so much that at last when it strikes against a stick it bursts, and the mosquito does. From his belly come forth a myriad of mosquitoes, who all fly away.”
The presumably massive mother of all mosquitoes which Paul described evokes another native legend told by the Huron and Petun – related Iroquoian tribes who amalgamated in the 17th Century to form the Wyandot Nation. In his 1888 article for the Journal of American Folk-Lore, American-Canadian ethnologist Horatio Hale included a Huron-Petun Creation myth in which giant mosquitoes are briefly mentioned.
According to this story, when the world was an endless sea peopled by aquatic animals and birds, a holy pregnant woman plummeted to earth from the heavens, having been pushed by her husband through a hole in the sky. The woman was rescued by the animals, who dove to the bottom of the sea and retrieved earth for her to live on, which was spread on the shell of an enormous turtle. In time, the woman gave birth to twins, one good, and the other evil. Together, these supernatural siblings set out to prepare the world for human habitation. Being incompatible, they parted ways and went about their work separately.
While the good brother made useful animals from which humans might obtain their necessities, the bad brother, as Hale put it, “made fierce and monstrous creatures, proper to terrify and destroy mankind – serpents, panthers, wolves, bears, all of enormous size, and huge mosquitoes, ‘as large as turkeys’.” The good brother quickly discovered the fruit of his evil twin’s labour, encountering, as Hale put it, “the snakes, ferocious brutes, and enormous insects which his brother had made, and overcame them… He did not destroy the evil animals – perhaps had not the power to do so – but he reduced them in size, so that men would be able to master them.”
Although it does not describe mosquitoes of monstrous size, this author would be remiss if he did not include a historic passage detailing a monstrous manner in which mosquitoes were once employed by native warriors of the Northern Plains. In his 1860 narrative of his 1857 and 1858 surveying expeditions along the Red, Assiniboine, and Saskatchewan Rivers, Canadian geologist Dr. Henry Youle Hind described a horrific method of execution to which Sioux warriors sometimes subjected their enemies on the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
“The barbarous and cruel treatment of prisoners so often described in narratives of Indian warfare,” Hind wrote, “is common even now in the prairies south of the Qu’appelle and the Assiniboine…
“Not a year passes without the loss of several Red River half-breeds by the scalping knife of the Sioux; and, as was the case in the autumn of 1858, quite close to the settlement of the St. Joseph, near the boundary line, about thirty miles west of Red River. When a prisoner is taken, the Sioux sometimes adopt a terrible mode of death during the summer season. They have been known to strip a half-breed, tie him to a stake on the borders of a marsh in the prairies, and leave him exposed to the attacks of millions of mosquitoes, without being able to move any part of his body. When the agony of fever and the torment of thirst come upon him, they leave him to die a dreadful, lingering death with water at his feet, and buzzards hovering and circling around him in greedy expectation.”
Two frontiersmen who nearly suffered this horrific fate were a half-Sioux interpreter named Joe Martin and an Irishman named John Brown, nicknamed ‘Kootenai Brown’ in later life for making his home on Alberta’s Waterton Lakes, which were known at the time as the Kootenai Lakes. In the autumn of 1867, while running mail for the U.S. Army out of Dakota Territory’s Fort Stevenson, Martin and Brown were captured by Sioux warriors under the command of Chief Sitting Bull, a full decade prior to his famous victory over the U.S. Army.
Brown described the experience in his journal, excerpts of which were published by Albertan historian William Rodney in his 1996 book Kootenai Brown: Canada’s Unknown Frontiersman. “Sitting Bull ordered us to get off our horses,” Brown wrote, “and when we did, he had us stripped as naked as the day we were born. They took everything, dispatches, mail, guns, horses, clothes… Some of the young bucks began yelling ‘Kash-ga, Kash-ga,’ meaning kill them, kill them. Sitting Bull raised his hand and shouted, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, we’ll make a fire and have some fun with them.’ We understood every word they said, of course, and we knew that Sitting Bull meant some playful mode of torture that the Sioux often inflicted on their captives…”
Brown went on to describe how the chief himself took him and Martin aside to the edge of a coulee, presumably in order to glean more information about them and their business. Martin berated the chief for displaying such unbecoming conduct towards fellow kinsmen, calling attention to his own maternal heritage and falsely claiming that Brown was a Sioux halfbreed as well. Sitting Bull doubted the false claim, noting Brown’s blue eyes and Caucasian countenance, but acknowledged that he spoke good Sioux, and observed that he wore his hair long, or ‘frontier-style,’ in the manner of the halfbreeds. He asked the captives why they helped the hated ‘Long Knives,’ or sabre-wearing American cavalrymen, to which the couriers replied that they had accepted a one-time job on account of their poverty.
During the interrogation, a dispute arose among the braves as to who would take the express riders’ horses. The captives used the opportunity to inconspicuously roll down the coulee into a neighboring body of water, which Brown identified as Strawberry Lake, North Dakota. They hid among the reeds as Sitting Bull’s braves blindly fired pot shots into the water. The warriors left the lake when darkness fell, allowing Brown and Martin to steal away in the direction of Fort Stevenson.
“The sun shone on us next day,” Brown continued, “and millions of mosquitoes seemed to find out that two naked human beings were available for food. They fairly swarmed upon us and there was not a spot on our bodies as large as a pinhead that they had not bitten.” The two men arrived at Fort Stevenson later that day, narrowly avoiding being eaten alive.
Today, a metal monument of a giant mosquito graces the community of Komarno, Manitoba – a rural settlement whose Ukrainian name means “lots of mosquitoes”. Built in the mid-1980s by Manitoban artist Marlene Magnusson Hourd, this statue, touted the World’s Largest Mosquito, eerily evokes the country’s native legends of giant insects, and the terrible torture once inflicted upon forgotten victims of the Northern Plains.