Baykok

Also Known As: also pau’guk, paguk, baguck; Ojibwe bakaak, a skeleton in the sense of bones with the skin still drawn over them, from the word family of bakaakadozo, “s/he is thin, is skinny”; written Pauguk by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and by Longfellow
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: Death itself in skeletal form, equipped with a hunter’s bow, arrows and war club, and bringing certain death to anyone who catches sight of it.
Role in Mythos: It is the personification of death in Ojibwe telling, standing deliberately apart from the manitous and outside the whole exchange of offerings that governs them.
Relation to Humans: It hunts human beings and nothing else, and in the oldest account written down in English it makes no distinction between warriors, women and children. Nothing is offered to it and nothing is asked of it, because it is not a spirit that trades.

A warrior comes out of the smoke at the end of a fight, reaching for the thing he has won, and closes his hand on something cold and jointed. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set that image down in 1839, and it is still the oldest picture of the being to reach print in English. Not a monster stalked through the woods. A handshake nobody wants.

Schoolcraft called it Pauguk and gave it roughly a paragraph, which turns out to be enough. Death walking, and nothing else: no flesh on it and no blood in it, carrying a bow, arrows and a war club, and hunting nothing but people. Some tellings drew a thin transparent skin over the bones and set balls of fire burning in the empty sockets. It never speaks. It cannot change its shape. It is not counted among the manitous, the crowd of spirits filling the rest of the Ojibwe world, the ones who can be fed and petitioned and occasionally argued with. And seeing it settled the question. The person who saw it was going to die.

The name that reached English sits at some distance from the Ojibwe original. The word is bakaak, and it does not mean a bare rack of bones. It means something nastier and more exact: bones with the skin still on them. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary at the University of Minnesota does not carry bakaak as a headword at all, but it carries the family the word belongs to, including bakaakadozo, glossed there as “of a person, s/he is thin, is skinny.” The being is named out of the ordinary vocabulary for a body wasting away.

Longfellow put the name in front of an enormous audience in 1855 and kept the fire. In The Song of Hiawatha, Mudjekeewis promises his son a share of his kingdom for the day when the awful eyes of Pauguk glare upon him in the darkness. Later, when Hiawatha’s third arrow finally goes home, the sorcerer Megissogwon sees the fiery eyes of Pauguk, sees the eyes of Death glare at him, and hears a voice call in the darkness. Schoolcraft had been firm that the thing never speaks. In the poem, something speaks anyway.

The ordinary form of the encounter is much quieter than either version suggests. A man at the edge of a clearing at dusk sees a figure standing where no figure should be, too thin, holding very still. Nothing happens. Nothing needs to, because the seeing was the whole event, and he walks home knowing what he has been told.

The flying came later, and it came from a good source. Basil Johnston, the Anishinaabe writer and language teacher from Neyaashiinigmiing on Georgian Bay, gave Pauguk a place in The Manitous in 1995, where the being appears as the cursed Flying Skeleton. Johnston spent a working life carrying Anishinaabe material into English on Anishinaabe terms, and his book is the reason a great many readers know the name at all. Nothing in the older paragraph has the thing leaving the ground.

Then there is the version that has swallowed the internet. In this one the Baykok hunts warriors and only warriors, looses arrows nobody can see, clubs its prey down, opens the chest and eats the liver, and can lift a piece of a sleeping hunter’s stomach out without waking him. It is vivid, specific and endlessly quotable, and it turns up on page after page. Nearly all of it traces to one page of one book: Tom McGowen’s Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures, an illustrated children’s reference published by Rand McNally in 1981, page twelve. That is the citation.

The two accounts also disagree on the most basic point in the file. Schoolcraft’s Pauguk hunts men, women and children without preference, and the warriors-only rule surfaces a century and a half afterwards. Both cannot be the older tradition, and only one of them has the older claim on the name.

What the being can do follows from what it is. It has no use for ambush, because the encounter is already decided by the time it becomes visible. It cannot be flattered or fed or bargained down, since it stands outside the economy of offerings that the rest of the spirit world runs on. It does not borrow another face. It does not answer. The bow, the arrows and the club start to look almost ceremonial, equipment kept for a job the eyes have already finished.

Its limits are narrow in exactly the same way. It has one function and no second act: it does not create, tempt, teach, trick or transform, all of which the manitous do constantly across the same body of story, and it holds no country and grants no gift. Nobody records anyone defeating it, and nobody records it doing anything a defeat would interrupt. The oldest material gives it no beginning either. No first death, no crime, no curse laid on a named man, no explanation of why the bones walk. It is simply there, thin and burning-eyed, at the far edge of every fight and every long winter, and the origin stories that circulate now are not in that record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Baykok?

The Baykok is a skeletal death figure from Ojibwe tradition, written in nineteenth-century English as Pauguk. It is described as a body without flesh or blood, with thin transparent skin over the bones and fire in the empty eye sockets, carrying a bow, arrows and a war club. Anyone who sees it is understood to be about to die.

Does the Baykok really eat the livers of warriors?

That detail is late and thinly sourced. The claims that the Baykok preys only on warriors, fires invisible arrows and devours its victims’ livers trace back mainly to a single page of Tom McGowen’s Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures, a children’s reference book published by Rand McNally in 1981. The oldest account written down in English, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s from 1839, says instead that it hunts men, women and children alike, and mentions no liver at all.

What does the name Baykok mean?

Baykok is an English rendering of the Ojibwe word bakaak, which describes a skeleton in the sense of bones with the skin still drawn over them rather than bare bones. The word belongs to the same family as bakaakadozo, recorded in the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary as “of a person, s/he is thin, is skinny.”

Where does the Baykok appear in The Song of Hiawatha?

Longfellow uses the name Pauguk twice in the 1855 poem. Mudjekeewis promises Hiawatha a share of his kingdom for the day when the awful eyes of Pauguk glare upon him in the darkness, and the sorcerer Megissogwon sees the fiery eyes of Pauguk as Hiawatha’s third arrow kills him. The poem is how most English-speaking readers first met the figure.

Is the Baykok the same as Pauguk?

They are the same being under different spellings of the same Ojibwe word. Nineteenth-century writers, Schoolcraft and Longfellow among them, used Pauguk, and the form Baykok became the common English spelling later. Basil Johnston’s The Manitous, published in 1995, uses Pauguk and presents him as the cursed Flying Skeleton.