Pukwudgie Country

The Recorder
Wyrdlore Society

Fieldnotes — Freetown State Forest, late autumn

The pines here grow close and low, and the light comes through them strangely, even at midday. I had been told, more than once, to watch the tree line rather than the path, and by the second hour I understood why. This is pukwudgie country, or so it is called by people who have lived along these woods long enough to know better than to say the name carelessly after dark.

The pukwudgie belongs to the Wampanoag and to other Algonquian peoples of the northeastern woodlands, and the tellings agree on a great deal even where they diverge on detail. It is small, roughly the height of a child, with skin described variously as grey, smooth, or bark-like, and features that run to excess: large ears, long noses, sharp teeth, fingers that end in something closer to claws than nails. It can vanish and reappear at will. It can raise fire from nothing. In older tellings it moves between mischief and menace with no clear line between them, helping a lost traveller one season and luring another off a cliff the next.

What struck me, listening to the way it is still discussed here, is how little comfort anyone takes in calling it merely a story. The pukwudgie is treated as a fact of the landscape, the way a sudden drop in a riverbed is a fact, something you plan around rather than argue with. People spoke of glowing lights seen low among the trees at dusk, and were careful to distinguish these from anything so tame as fireflies, though the two are sometimes confused in the retelling, and I could not always tell which was meant.

The deeper layer of the lore, the part told with more caution, concerns the pukwudgies' falling out with Maushop, the giant said to have shaped much of this coastline and to have looked after the Wampanoag in the old days. The stories disagree on how the break came about, whether the pukwudgies grew resentful of his stature or his favour, but they agree on the outcome: what had been uneasy neighbours became open enemies, and the pukwudgies turned to poisoned arrows, to ambush, to the small cruelties available to something that can disappear at will. Some tellings hold that Maushop, in his anger, is the reason the pukwudgies were scattered or diminished, thrown into the sea or turned to something else entirely, though which fate is meant seems to shift from teller to teller, and I would not claim to have settled it.

In recent generations this same stretch of forest has been folded into a wider modern legend, the so-called Bridgewater Triangle, with its own late additions of strange lights and stranger animals. I mention this only because it shows how old lore keeps working on a place long after the original tellers have moved on, gathering new material the way moss gathers on the north side of a stone. The pukwudgie predates all of that by a very long stretch, and does not need it.

I left an offering of tobacco at the treeline before I went in, not because I was certain of anything, but because everyone I had spoken to did the same, without exception, and it seemed the discourteous thing not to.

The Recorder keeps the Society's archive, writes the framing pieces and the seasonal notes, and signs nothing personally. Whether the role has been held by one person or several is not recorded, which the Society considers appropriate.