Pukwudgie

Across the Algonquian-speaking nations of the Northeast, from New England down through the lands of the Lenape, the Pukwudgie was a known and feared inhabitant of the deep woods — the 'little wild man,' a being older than the villages, who had to be treated with wary respect. The Lenape tradition holds, like its neighbors, that the forest belongs to many beings besides people, and that the small ones who dwell in the swamp shadows and hollow trees can be coaxed to help or, far more often, provoked to harm.

The story everyone agrees on is the turning: once, the Pukwudgies and people lived more or less in peace, until the little folk took offense — at being driven out, at being slighted, at being ignored — and turned their gifts against the very humans they had once tolerated. Ever since, the woods of the Eastern shore have belonged a little less to us. In Delaware's quiet forests, the old-timers will tell you, the path you walk is only borrowed.

Encounters follow a grim and consistent pattern. A hiker on a backwoods trail catches a sudden waft of sweet flowers, out of season and out of place. Then the small gray figure is there at the edge of sight — and the trouble begins. People report being walked in circles until they are hopelessly lost, hearing a voice calling from off the trail in a tone they almost recognize, and feeling an irresistible pull toward the edge of a high place. More than one fall in the woods, the lore insists, was no accident at all.

Delaware's terrain offers the Pukwudgie everything it likes: dense state-forest woodland, old quarry walls, swampy bottoms thick enough to hide a man two paces off the path. The encounters are rarely written down, because they are the kind of thing told in a low voice and not for the record — a relative who went into the trees and came out wrong, a child who followed a sweet smell and a small gray figure and was found, frightened and far from home, somewhere they should never have reached.

The Pukwudgie's powers are catalogued with unusual agreement across the woodland traditions: it controls fire and can hurl it; it blinds its victims with thrown sand or ash; it appears and disappears at will, never there when you turn to look; and it announces itself with that signature perfume of flowers. Some accounts grant it poisoned arrows and the company of a great horned serpent. All accounts agree it is to be neither chased nor insulted, for a Pukwudgie holds a grudge the way the woods hold the cold.

Skeptics file it with all the small folk of the world's forests — the way every culture seems to people its woods with something little and watchful to explain why people get lost, why children stray, why a trail you've walked a hundred times can suddenly turn unfamiliar. But the Lenape tradition treats the little wild ones as plain fact, neither beast nor god but neighbor. In the First State's last deep stands of timber, where the canopy closes and the smell of flowers comes out of nowhere, it is best to keep to the path — and to keep moving.