Pamola

Fog on Katahdin comes uphill. One moment there is granite underfoot and the whole of northern Maine laid out below in flat blue plates of water, and the next there is nothing past arm’s length, the wind has an edge on it, and the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. This happens in August. Guides who have worked the mountain for forty years still describe it as something being done to them rather than something merely happening, and the Penobscot, who had known the mountain a great deal longer, agreed. Someone was doing it. His name was Pamola.

The mountain is called K’taadn, the greatest of mountains, and its summit was not a destination. It was a boundary. Hunting parties worked the slopes and the ponds below, and they went up to the shoulder of the mountain to be near the spirits who lived in it, and there they stopped. Above that line the weather belonged to Pamola and so did anyone caught in it. Henry David Thoreau found this out in August 1846, when his Penobscot guides declined to go any further up with him and told him why, reading the closing sky as a warning already delivered. He went on alone, got swallowed by cloud so thick he could barely see ahead of him, and turned back. “Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn,” he wrote afterwards, and he wrote it as a report rather than a joke.

What Pamola looks like depends on who is telling it, and the disagreement is old. The description that has stuck, repeated across Penobscot tellings and now printed on everything in the region, gives him a moose’s head, a man’s torso and arms, and the wings and clawed feet of an eagle. Another account describes something stranger and less domesticated: a human face the size of four horses set on a body otherwise like an eagle’s. A sketch attributed to the Penobscot chief Arexes in 1775 shows a winged shape with long talons carrying a man off through the air, and offers no face at all. Some tellings only say that he was large enough to lift a moose, which settles his scale without settling his anatomy. Wabanaki storytellers have pointed out that pinning him to one shape misses what he is, since beings of this kind change size and form as they please, and the urge to fix a single portrait says more about the people doing the fixing than about him.

His origin comes in two shapes as well. In one, Pamola was banished to the mountain by Gluskabe. In another, closer to the wider Algonquian account of how the world was arranged, the creator Tabaldak set the bird on Katahdin, and Gluskabe came to it afterwards and gave it work: to beat its wings and make foul weather, so that hunters would be kept off the high country and the game would not be pursued past what the land could carry. Read that way the storms are not spite. They are a policy, enforced with a bird’s shoulders, and it is a considerably better piece of wildlife management than most.

He was not, however, only a wall. Brother Eugene Vetromile, a missionary who spent twenty five years compiling an Abenaki dictionary, set down a Penobscot account in 1866 in which a hunter is caught by an early snowstorm at the foot of Katahdin and, out of options, calls on Pamola with an offering of fat and oil. The offering is accepted. The hunter is taken inside the mountain, into Pamola’s own household, and is introduced to his wife and children, and Pamola gives him one of his daughters as a wife. After a year he is allowed to go home to his people on the Penobscot River, under one condition, plainly stated: he must never marry again. He does. He is taken back to the mountain, and that is the last anyone sees of him. The bargain is generous and the penalty is absolute, which is the usual arrangement with mountains.

Those he took without invitation went somewhere worse. The old accounts say he carried people off to Alomkik, a place near the mountain whose name the early missionaries in Maine rendered simply as hell. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, who spent decades collecting the Katahdin material from Penobscot storytellers and published it in 1924 and again in 1942, recorded the night the Indian Island chief John Neptune spent shut up against him in winter, with a door Pamola could not get through, the wind working at it from outside until morning. Arnie Neptune, a descendant, still tells the story. In some tellings the shelter is a cave with a rock frozen into its mouth.

He may also keep a calendar. When Charles Turner Jr. made the first recorded ascent of Katahdin in 1804, the Wabanaki members of his party told him that Pamola lived on the mountain at least in winter and left in spring with a tremendous rumbling, which was why the climb could be attempted at all that season. They went up and came down without incident.

The last hundred years have been unkind to him in a particular way. Roy Dudley, who lived at Chimney Pond and guided on the mountain from the 1890s until his death in the 1940s, spun Pamola into the hero of a long comic cycle of campfire yarns in which the spirit falls ill and is nursed better, quarrels over territory with a lumberwoods ghost, hurls boulders into the pond to soak him, and steals all the water for a fortnight with a magic broom. Dudley’s Pamola is where the friendly moose face comes from, and from Dudley he passed onto beer cans, trail signs and a Boy Scout lodge badge. The being that once kept an entire mountain closed now sells pale ale. Penobscot knowledge keepers have largely kept the older and more serious stories inside the community, which given the record is not hard to understand.

What he can do follows from what he is. The weather above the treeline is his to make and unmake, and the record credits him with storm, thunder, driving snow, wind and the fog that arrives in minutes; he flies, he carries grown men and moose in his feet, and he keeps a household inside the rock where a year passes strangely. What he cannot do is follow you off the mountain. His authority stops where Katahdin stops, and inside that boundary he is bound by his own terms: a proper offering obliges him, a promise given binds him to keep it, and a door he cannot open holds him out until daybreak. Maria Girouard, a historian of the Penobscot Nation, puts the whole arrangement in two sentences. With proper respect, he will let you climb to the top. Disrespect will get you elsewhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Pamola?

Pamola is the guardian spirit of Mount Katahdin in Maine, in Penobscot and wider Abenaki tradition. He is a storm being who controls the weather above the treeline, and the most repeated description gives him a moose’s head, a man’s body, and an eagle’s wings and feet. Other accounts describe him quite differently, including one that gives him a human face as large as four horses.

Why did the Penobscot avoid climbing Katahdin?

Because the summit was Pamola’s, and he punished anyone who went up uninvited. He was said to raise sudden storms, snow and blinding fog against intruders, and to carry some of them off to a place called Alomkik, which early missionary sources in Maine glossed as hell. Katahdin was approached and revered but not summited.

Did Henry David Thoreau write about Pamola?

Yes. During his August 1846 trip to Katahdin, Thoreau’s Penobscot guides refused to continue up the mountain, reading the weather as Pamola’s anger. Thoreau climbed on alone, was turned back by dense cloud, and recorded the line “Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn” in his account of the journey.

Is Pamola evil?

No. He is dangerous rather than malicious, and the sources show him keeping bargains as readily as breaking people. In one Penobscot account written down in 1866, a hunter caught in a snowstorm calls on Pamola with an offering of fat and oil, is sheltered inside the mountain, and is given one of Pamola’s daughters in marriage before being sent home a year later. One version of his origin has him tasked with making bad weather specifically to stop humans overhunting the high country.

Why is Pamola on beer cans and Boy Scout badges?

Because of Roy Dudley, a Katahdin guide who lived at Chimney Pond from the 1890s to the 1940s and turned Pamola into the comic hero of a long cycle of campfire stories. Dudley’s cheerful moose-faced version is the one that spread into regional branding and outdoor culture, and it is a considerable softening of the older Penobscot figure.

Related Entries

Gluskabe, Tabaldak, Chenoo, Kee-wakw, Kukwes, Atshen, Aglebemu, A-senee-ki-wakw, Pok-wejee-men, Jogah, Mateguas, Thunderbird, Wendigo