An Outdoor Mystery: The Wild Woman of the Woods
About 10 years ago, I was camping alone in the backcountry of Southern BC, planning to make a hike into a lake just outside of Princeton in the morning to do some fly fishing. I arrived good and early, mostly because I wanted to make sure I’d still have lots of daylight left in case I got lost.
I managed to find my campsite without getting lost and immediately started getting camp set up for the night. By the time the sun started to set, I was relaxing by a campfire, dreaming about fishing the next day.
“Hooooo!”
A call pierced the dusky sky, and I sat bolt upright in my chair.
“Hoooo!”
A second call rang out in the wilderness.
In the silence that followed, two thoughts raced through my brain. The first was a rational thought. The second thought was much less rational. The call had an ethereal quality to it that sent a shiver down my spine. I knew I was in something of a Bigfoot hotspot and the call reminded me of some of the stories I’d heard.
Turns out, I was on the right track thinking about Bigfoot, but I wasn’t thinking big enough. “Sasquatch is seven feet tall,” Kwakwaka’wakw artist Wanye Alfred told me. “Dzunuk’wa, though, she’s as big as a house. Taller, even.”
To the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Dzunuk’wa, or the Wild Woman of the Woods as she is sometimes called, is a constant presence, both good and bad. She belongs to a family of giants who are known to live throughout the region. When I spoke to Alfred about Dzunuk’wa, he told me the giants were closer to the stories of trolls in Norway in terms of appearance and size, than they were to Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot. They are human-like, but also kind of grotesque, similar to a troll. And, while specific descriptions of her vary, depending on who’s telling the story, there are always similar traits, like her sleepy eyes, pursed lips, a broad nose, wild, shaggy hair and, often, large, pendulous breasts.
Her walk has a certain quality to it, as well, Alfred told me. A kind of staggering shuffle more than a walk. “It’s like the way you walk when you’re sleepy,” Alfred said. This sleepiness shows up in Dzunuk’wa tales as a way of tricking her. “It’s easy to make her fall asleep,” Alfred said. She also has a call, a “Hooo” that sounded an awful lot like the sound I heard in the woods that night, when Alfred demonstrated it for me.
The most consistent trait, however, is her appetite for humans, especially children.
Dzunuk’wa carries a basket on her back and puts any children she finds who’ve wandered away from their village at night. She takes them back to her house, a kind of tall structure that resembles a smoke house, to prepare her meal. As a result, a lot of stories of Dzunuk’wa seem to be tales encouraging children not to wander off into the dark woods at night.
I was lucky enough to have Alfred tell me a couple of stories about Dzunuk’wa. In the first, the son of a chief was given a knife that was specially made for him. The other children in the village were jealous of the knife and tried to bully the chief’s son into giving them the knife. The chief’s son ran and did everything he could to avoid the other kids, but they wouldn’t leave him alone. Eventually, he ran into the woods, knowing the other children weren’t supposed to follow. They, of course, followed and, eventually, the chief’s son was trapped up a tree.
Then the chief’s son saw Dzunuk’wa at the edge of the woods, stumbling towards them. He tried to tell the other children that Dzunuk’wa was coming, but they couldn’t understand him because he had a speech impediment caused by a hair lip. Dzunuk’wa captured all the children and stuffed them into her basket. The chief’s son used his knife to cut the basket open and when everyone was out of the basket, they ran back to the village with Dzunuk’wa following behind them.
Back at the village, a big pit was dug and covered up with branches, similar to the way you’d trap a tiger, Alfred told me. When Dzunuk’wa was tricked into stepping on the branches, she fell in the pit and the people of the village filled the pit with coals.
There are similar stories throughout the region where Dzunuk’wa lives. Sometimes in stories, when children escape or people trick Dzunuk’wa, she rewards them with riches, like blankets or items that can be used in trading. But, Alfred noted, these weren’t always just stories. There was a hint of reality to them. “Inside every legend is history,” he said. He added that in some stories, they used guns to try and stop Dzunuk’wa, which gave the stories an almost contemporary validity.
Along with being a scary story told to children, Dzunuk’wa was an important cultural creature for the Kwakwaka’wakw. During potlatches, new chiefs would wear a Dzunuk’wa mask and dance around in a shuffling manner, similar to how she walked, as a symbolic way of announcing their new role as chief.
Back in the backcountry of the southern interior, I shuffled a little closer to my campfire. I knew, realistically speaking, that the sound I’d just heard wasn’t something that I had to worry about. It was probably an animal, said the rational part of my brain. I took comfort in that, while the less rational part of my brain whispered about stories I’d heard about what lurks in the woods and, perhaps worse, hinted at stories I hadn’t yet heard.
