The Wendigo was first published in the collection The Lost Valley and Other Stories by Eveleigh Nash in 1910. A party of hunters ventures deep into the Canadian backwoods — vast, trackless forest where the silence is absolute and human presence feels temporary. One of the guides, Donat Donat, is seized by something in the night: he rises into the air, his voice receding into the distance, calling back with increasing terror and then with something worse than terror — joy.
Blackwood drew on the Wendigo legend of the Algonquian peoples — the spirit of winter madness that possesses men in the wilderness and transforms them into something no longer human. But he transforms the legend through his particular gifts: the terror comes not from the monster (which is barely glimpsed) but from the landscape itself — the vast, cold, silent forest that is indifferent to human survival and that conceals presences for which human language has no adequate name.
The story’s power depends on its evocation of the Canadian wilderness as a character in itself — not hostile but alien, a space where the assumptions of civilization (that nature is knowable, that human beings are the dominant presence, that the universe is scaled to human comprehension) collapse entirely. Donat’s fate — carried away into the sky by something too large and too fast to resist — is the fate of all human pretension in the face of genuine wilderness.
Collecting The Wendigo
First appearance in The Lost Valley and Other Stories (Eveleigh Nash, London, 1910): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- The Lost Valley first edition, fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300