Trauco

The sound arrives before anything else. Somewhere back in the old forest, where the trunks stand so thick with moss that daylight comes through green and secondhand, something is chopping. Three strokes, unhurried, and a tree goes over. Anyone raised in the Chiloé Archipelago learns to stop walking and work out which direction the noise came from, because the trauco strikes trees the way other beings knock at a door.

He stands about eighty centimetres. The accounts gathered across the islands agree on the ugliness and turn unusually specific about the legs, which end at the ankle in stumps with no feet on them at all. He cannot walk in any ordinary sense. He is nonetheless always exactly where he means to be. His clothes are quilineja, the climbing plant that ropes through the understorey of the archipelago’s old growth, worked into a ragged suit and a conical hat. Francisco Javier Cavada, whose 1914 study Chiloé y los chilotes was the first sustained attempt to write the islands’ folklore down, recorded that the hat might be quilineja or pompón moss instead. He weaves his burrow from the same fibre and eats the plant’s fruit. He is made of forest floor, more or less literally.

His tool is a twisted staff called the pahueldún, which becomes a small stone hatchet when he wants it to, and with it he brings down any tree in three blows. In the wet hours after dawn he works through the murta thickets, knocking on trunks, the flat hard sound carrying further through damp air than it has any right to. Nothing about the routine looks like hunting. That is rather the point.

The archipelago that produced him spent centuries mostly cut off from the rest of Chile, and its mythology grew out of that isolation: Huilliche and Chono belief braided together with what Spanish colonists brought south after 1567, held in place by an island Catholicism that never quite displaced the older system. Within that system the trauco is not a solitary character but a kind of being. Chilean heritage researchers writing on the indigenous substrate of these figures class him among the wekufü, the harmful non-human powers of Mapuche cosmology, alongside the pig-serpent cuchivilu, and they write his name in lower case precisely because there is no single trauco to capitalise. Williche communities have argued for a gentler reading, deriving the name from chawko, chaw meaning father and ko meaning water, which would make him a ngen’ko, an owner-spirit of the waters wrongly demonised by the church. The reading has a problem. The trauco hates water.

What he does is choose. He fixes on a young woman, and from that moment the stories describe something closer to gravity than seduction: she goes to him, even out of sleep, and there is no version in which refusing works. Chilote tradition holds her blameless for exactly this reason. Meeting him without being chosen is worse. He looses his aire, his breath, and the person is left with a twisted mouth, a bent back, stunned and unable to speak. The illness has a name in Chiloé, aire de trauco, and a corresponding name in Mapuche medicine, trafentun or topantun, a word that translates roughly as a collision. Anyone who has not yet noticed him and catches his eye may simply drop dead.

The claim usually attached to him in modern retellings is that he existed to explain the pregnancies of unmarried women and, less kindly, to bury the assaults behind them. That reading is real and it is late. Researchers working from case narratives collected in the islands point out that pregnancy is a rare outcome in the accounts people actually tell, and that when it happens the thing born is described as half human and half rotten trunk. The figure the archipelago describes is less an alibi than a presence: something that lives in decomposing wood and shadow, and that contaminates whatever grows in its part of the forest.

The fiura, also called the trauca, is his female counterpart, and she works the same territory by the same means. Between them they hold the dark interior of the islands, in contrast to the sea powers, the millalobo and the pincoya, who hold everything past the shoreline. Woven and carved traucos sit today in the basketry collection of the Museo Regional de Ancud, in quilineja fibre and in cancagua stone, the earliest of them made in the 1970s by the Mansilla Miranda sisters of Llingua Island.

His powers follow from what he is. Dominion over old shadowed woodland gives him the compulsion in the gaze, the sickening breath, the killing look, and the hatchet that makes short work of the trees he lives among; a being of humus and rot spreads rot, which is why the illness he causes is understood as contact damage rather than punishment. His limits follow from the same logic. Steel undoes him, and the knife carried as a contra against wekufü is the standard defence, laid crossed at doors and windows and under pillows. A sign of the cross drives him off, as does urine marked in a cross on the ground. And the water he abhors is the reliable escape: a family plagued by one moves to the far side of a channel or a river, and he cannot follow. There is a grimmer limit that no charm addresses. He lives only in ancient, unlit forest, and Chiloé has a great deal less of that than it used to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Trauco?

The Trauco is a forest spirit from the Chilote mythology of the Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile, described as a misshapen man of about eighty centimetres with an ugly face and legs that end at the ankle in footless stumps. He dresses in a suit and conical hat woven from quilineja, a climbing plant of the islands’ old-growth forest, and lives in hollow trunks and burrows made of the same fibre. Chilean heritage research classes him among the wekufü, the harmful non-human powers of Mapuche cosmology, rather than as a benign nature spirit.

What weapon does the Trauco carry?

He carries a twisted staff called the pahueldún, which becomes a small stone hatchet when he wants it to. With it he can fell any tree in three blows, and he strikes tree trunks as he moves through the forest. The sound of that chopping is the usual warning that he is nearby.

How do you protect yourself from the Trauco?

Steel is the standard defence: a knife carried as a contra against harmful spirits, and knives laid crossed at doors, windows and under pillows. Making the sign of the cross repels him, as does marking urine in a cross on the ground. The most reliable escape is water, which he cannot cross, so a family harassed by a Trauco moves to the far side of a channel or river.

Why is the Trauco blamed for pregnancies in Chiloé?

Chilote tradition holds that a woman he chooses cannot resist him, so she is considered blameless, and unexplained pregnancies were attributed to him. The idea that the legend existed mainly to cover up assaults is a modern reading rather than an old one. In the case narratives collected in the islands, pregnancy is actually a rare outcome, and when it occurs the child is described as half human and half rotten trunk.

Is the Trauco one being or many?

Many. Trauco names a kind of being rather than a single individual, which is why Chilean researchers write the word in lower case, and accounts refer to traucos in the plural. The fiura, also called the trauca, is the female counterpart and behaves in much the same way.

Related Entries

Caicai-Vilu, Trentren-Vilu, Pincoya, Caleuche, Camahueto, Basilisco Chilote, Imbunche, Peuchen, Nguruvilu, Wekufe, Colo Colo, Curupira, Pombero, Incubus