Elbow Witch

The smoke never fully clears from the lodge. It hangs in the bark rafters, settles into the furs, and stings the eyes of anyone who pushes through the door flap, and the two old women inside have breathed it for so long that the world has gone soft and gray to them. They have stopped relying on their eyes. They listen instead. A footstep on the trail, a branch swung aside, the long tired breath of someone cold and hungry at the threshold, and the sisters rise to welcome their guest. As they rise, they begin, almost gently, to sharpen their elbows.

Each woman carries a blade where her arm folds, a long awl of bone honed to a point and set into the elbow itself, the kind of tool used to punch holes in hide turned into a thing that punches holes in people. They keep the points tucked against their sides while they play the host. There is food on the fire. There is a warm place to sit out of the cold. They press close, fussing over the traveler, asking after the road and the weather, and at the moment the guest finally relaxes one of them drives an elbow sideways and the awl goes in. Then they eat. The elbow witches are cannibals, and every comfort of the lodge is bait.

They belong to one of the great hero stories of the northern woodlands, the saga of Aayaase, known also as Ayas or Iyash, carried among the Ojibwe and the Cree and their Algonquin and Innu neighbors. It is not a children’s tale and not a trickster’s romp; it is closer in weight to an epic, a single long story of betrayal and survival and a world set on fire and remade. Aayaase is a young man cast out by his own household, marooned on a bare island to die, who lives only because an old fox woman takes pity on him and teaches him what he will need. What follows is a long walk home through a country thick with monsters, each one waiting on the road like a door he has to get through. The elbow witches are one of those doors, and not the gentlest.

He came to their lodge the way travelers always did, pulled in by the smell of cooking and the gray thread of smoke against the trees. The sisters welcomed him and set about their work, sidling near, lifting their arms, jabbing at the place where his voice had just been. But the same fire that fed them year after year had clouded their eyes, and the haze inside the lodge finished what the smoke had started. Aayaase kept moving. He slipped between the two of them, ducked under a swing, stepped wide, and let them strike at the sound of him instead of the sight. The awls found flesh. It was each other’s. The sisters stabbed one another to death in their own smoke, and the hero stepped over them and walked on.

The story bends from teller to teller. In some versions the danger by the fire is not a tidy pair of awl-armed hags but a whole lodge of cannibal women, and Aayaase does not leave them dead at all. He changes them. He turns the man-eaters into bats, small and blind and harmless, sent flapping out into the dusk where they can do no more damage than a moth against a wall. The thread that ties every version together holds firm under the variation: a hungry thing that hunts by hand and by ear, brought down by its own ruined sight.

Their power is close and physical, and it asks for nothing fancy. An elbow witch needs no spell and no curse, only the reach of an arm and the patience to sit beside the trail until someone arrives tired enough to trust an open door. The bone awls turn every embrace lethal, and a single clean strike to the body of a weary guest is all the work the meal requires. Hospitality itself is the weapon as much as the blade is, because a stranger who has been fed and warmed does not brace for the host to lean in and kill him.

But the witches are old, and they are nearly blind, and the very fire that keeps them fed is the thing that wrecks their aim. They strike at noise and at motion rather than at any target they can clearly see, which means anyone steady enough to keep shifting his ground can make them waste blow after blow on empty air. Put two of them in one small lodge and their greatest danger becomes each other. They meant to eat him. They killed themselves instead. What undoes the elbow witch is never a stronger arm; it is a cooler head, the nerve to keep moving in the dark and let a clumsy, ravenous predator swing at nothing.

That is why they last in the telling. The forest in these stories is not scenery but a gauntlet, and the elbow witches are its sharpest reminder that the most ordinary things, an old woman by a fire, a meal pressed on a stranger, a roof against the cold, are exactly where the teeth are hidden. Aayaase left their lodge and kept walking, toward the family that had thrown him away and the long reckoning that waited at the end of the road.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Elbow Witch?

The Elbow Witch is a cannibal hag from the folklore of the Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe and Cree peoples of North America. Elbow witches appear as old women with sharpened awls of bone set into their elbows, which they use to stab and kill travelers who take shelter in their lodge before eating them.

What myth does the Elbow Witch appear in?

The Elbow Witch appears in the epic of Aayaase, also spelled Ayas or Iyash, the “Filcher-of-Meat,” a hero saga shared by the Cree, Ojibwe, Algonquin, and Innu. Aayaase encounters the elbow witches as one of many monsters he must survive on his long journey home after being abandoned to die by his own family.

How is the Elbow Witch defeated?

The elbow witches are defeated by their own blindness. Half-blinded by years of cooking smoke, they strike at sound and movement rather than a clearly seen target, so when Aayaase keeps moving and slips between the two sisters, they stab and kill each other instead of him. In some versions the hero transforms the cannibal women into harmless bats.

Why is she called the Elbow Witch?

She is called the Elbow Witch because of the sharpened awl of bone that juts from the point of each of her elbows. An awl is a pointed tool normally used to pierce leather and hide, and the witch turns this hidden weapon on her victims by driving her elbow into them while pretending to offer hospitality.

What culture does the Elbow Witch come from?

The Elbow Witch comes from Native American tradition, specifically the Ojibwe and broader Anishinaabe and Cree peoples of the northern woodlands and subarctic of North America. The creature is best known from the William Jones collection of Ojibwa texts and from the widely told Aayaase hero cycle.

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