Unhcegila

The first warning was always the water. A slough that had lain flat for a generation would shudder and then sink, as if something beneath it had drawn a slow breath and held it. Horses would not drink there. Cattle wandered off the bank and did not wander back. Hunters who passed too near returned with their words broken into pieces, a froth gathering at the mouth, and within a few days they were gone. The Lakota and Dakota had a name for the cause of this, and they were careful with it. Unhcegila.

She did not begin as a shape. The oldest descriptions give her no body at all, only a pair of burning eyes set in a drifting mass of smoke and cloud, a mouth somewhere inside it lined with fangs. The form came later, or was revealed later, depending on which storyteller held the fire. When it appeared it was enormous: a long serpentine body plated in scales hard as struck flint, an armor that turned arrows and spears the way a cliff turns rain. Her claws were iron. Her voice was the sound of thunder rolling along the underside of a storm. To stand in her path was to feel the ground itself take her weight.

She came, the stories say, out of the primordial water, the deep that existed before the land was finished. She was not alone in it. The horned water serpents the people called Unktehi shared that element with her, and the oldest accounts have her traveling with them until they reached the Black Hills and decided the dark country there suited them. One telling has her kill a giant bear in those hills, and the bear’s fallen body became a rise that stands there still. Wherever she settled, the water answered to her, and the water was never kind for long.

A quiet day on her hunting ground looked like nothing at all. The pond sat smooth under a hot sky, insects skating its surface, a heron working the shallows. Then the heron was not there, and the surface closed over the place it had been without so much as a ripple reaching the bank. That was the ordinary business of her existence. She emptied the country around her slowly, a life at a time, and the people learned the shape of her hunger by the holes it left.

The danger was not only her bulk. Her eyes carried the worst of her. A direct look from them could kill outright, the way a hard frost kills a late crop. Those who survived the glance rarely survived it whole. Some lost their reason and spent their last days raving, foam on their lips, the madness running its course over a week or so until it finished them. Others were said to harden where they stood, turned to stone by a creature who treated a human life as briefly as weather treats a footprint. Floods followed her. So did the long unexplained absences that families learned to stop hoping against.

For all of that, she could be killed, and the people knew exactly how. Her armor was nearly perfect, but it was not perfect. Along her side, counting back, the seventh spot covered a flaw, and behind that flaw lay her heart. The heart was a red crystal, and it burned. An ordinary arrow shattered against her scales. Only an arrow prepared with the right songs and the right herbs could find the seventh spot and reach what waited under it. This was common knowledge and useless knowledge at once, because getting close enough to aim was its own death sentence. The crystal heart made the attempt worth dying for anyway. Whoever carried it away was said to hold tremendous power, and so warrior after warrior went out to the water with a good arrow and did not come home.

The version of the story that survives best belongs to two brothers, twins, one of them sighted and one of them blind. They set out together to end her and went first to a medicine woman who lived apart from everyone, an old woman of famously unpleasant appearance. She tested them before she helped them, taking for a while the form of a beautiful young woman to see whether their purpose would hold. It held. She gave them a bundle of arrows worked over with incantations and sacred herbs and told them plainly that nothing else would pierce the serpent. The brothers found Unhcegila, and at the seventh spot they struck the crystal heart, and the thing that had emptied the prairie was finally still.

What came after was its own kind of myth. As she died the sun came down hard on her, scorching the flesh from her enormous frame and drying the land beneath her into cracked and broken rock. The Lakota looked at the badlands afterward, at the bone-colored spires and the old skeletons weathering out of the clay, and saw the proof of her ending written across a whole region. Her great enemy, Wakinyan the Thunderbird, belongs to the same reckoning. Where she was water and flood and the cold of stone, he was storm and lightning and the dry wind, and the stories return again and again to their fights, in some of which it is his lightning, not a medicine arrow, that splits her heart.

Her powers all run back to what she was. A creature born of the deep water carried flood with her wherever she went. A creature armored in flint could not be reached by ordinary weapons. A creature whose heart was a burning crystal looked out through eyes of the same fire, and that fire was death to meet. Her weaknesses run back to the same source. The flint armor that made her nearly invulnerable left one seam uncovered, and behind it sat the one part of her that could be destroyed. The crystal that made her formidable also made her hunted, because a heart worth that much would never be left in peace. She was, in the end, undone by the exact thing that made her worth fearing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Unhcegila?

Unhcegila is a monstrous water serpent from Lakota and Dakota mythology, blamed for floods, sudden deaths, and unexplained disappearances. She is described as an enormous reptilian creature covered in flint-hard scales, with iron claws and burning eyes.

How was Unhcegila killed?

Unhcegila could only be killed by striking the seventh spot on her side, the single flaw in her armor, where her crystal heart lay behind a gap in the scales. Ordinary arrows shattered against her, so the killing blow required an arrow prepared with songs and sacred herbs. In the best-known legend, twin brothers, one sighted and one blind, accomplished this with arrows given to them by a medicine woman.

What powers did Unhcegila have?

Unhcegila’s deadliest power was her gaze, which could kill outright, drive a person into fatal madness, or turn them to stone. She also commanded flooding water and was armored in scales as hard as flint that ordinary weapons could not pierce.

What was Unhcegila’s heart made of?

Unhcegila’s heart was a burning red crystal, hidden behind the seventh spot on her side. The crystal was believed to grant tremendous power to whoever obtained it, which is why warriors repeatedly risked their lives trying to kill her.

How is Unhcegila connected to the Badlands?

According to Lakota tradition, when Unhcegila died the sun scorched the flesh from her body and dried the surrounding land into broken rock. The arid spires and weathered bones of the Badlands were seen as the lasting evidence of her death.

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Unktehila, Thunderbird, Čhápa, Canotila, Horned Serpent, Mishibizhiw, Misi-ginebig, Haietlik, Gaasyendietha, Sint Holo, Piasa, Jipijka’m