Wentshukumishiteu

Also Known As: Innu-aimun Uenitshikumishiteu; also Uentshukumishiteu; the name carries nitshiku, “otter”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It moves through solid earth, rock and river ice as easily as it moves through open water, leaving the ground rolling behind it like a wave.
Role in Mythos: A manitush of the Labrador interior that guards the young of the animals in its keeping and destroys the hunter who kills them.
Relation to Humans: Innu accounts are unanimous that it is dangerous and call it plainly evil, yet almost every story has it striking only in self-defence or in defence of its young. It is said to have opened a hole in the ground beneath the man who shot a young otter and to have left his companion, who had not fired, entirely untouched.

The ice on Mekentsheu-shipiss was thick enough that winter to carry a loaded sled, and it broke anyway. The Innu camped along the river heard it go in the night, a long splitting report travelling across the dark, and what they found afterwards was a clean circle punched upward through more than a foot of ice, with no tracks anywhere around it. Ice on a Labrador river breaks from above. It breaks under weight, under an axe, under the spring sun. It does not open in a neat ring from below, and the man who told that story knew of only one thing in the country capable of doing it.

It is an animal before it is anything else, and the name says so. Folded inside Uenitshikumishiteu is nitshiku, the Innu word for otter, and every description reaches for the same comparison: an otter, but enormous. Some who claim to have seen it thought seal instead, or sea lion, which is less of a contradiction than it sounds, since otter and seal sit very close together in Innu vocabulary and shade into one another. The fur is dark brown in most tellings and a startling yellow-orange in others. The oldest written account of the creature, set down by an American anthropologist who spent the winter of 1927 in the interior, gives it white feet and large ears and records its voice as a rising, low whistle, wheu-u-u, which he thought sounded like a quail. Other Innu say it growls exactly like a dog. The growl is usually the last warning anyone gets.

Its home is a small rocky hill on the north bank of Mishta-shipu, the great river that maps call the Churchill. The Innu name for the hill is Manitu-utshu, and it means what it sounds like it means. Inside, the hill is said to be hollow, arranged like an amishku’s lodge with its doorways underwater, so that the animal comes and goes beneath the river without ever surfacing. Near the top there is a small pond, and in the pond Innu have found seal bones, which is an impossible place for seal bones to be unless something carried them up through the rock. A tunnel is said to run from that pond down to the river. Whether anyone has followed it is not recorded, and the question rather answers itself.

The creature is not confined there. Sightings cluster at Muskrat Falls just below the hill, along the shore of Mishta-shipu where its tracks have been found in the mud, at Kakatshu-utshishtun, at Netaukau, at Seal Lake. It is reported in company as often as alone, in twos and threes and once in a group of four, which suggests a population rather than a monster. That is the peculiar quality of Uenitshikumishiteu in Innu thought: it is not a spirit wearing an animal’s shape but a kind of animal that happens to be terrible. Innu classification puts it in different boxes in different regions, sometimes among the manitush, the malevolent beings, and sometimes simply among the otters.

What it does is hunt seals and protect its young, and the two together are enough. Somewhere above all of it stands Missinaku, master of the aquatic animals, of fish and beaver and otter and muskrat and seal, and the arrangement between the Innu and the animal masters has always been a contract with terms. Take what is given. Do not waste. Do not overhunt. Handle the bones with care. Break the terms and the animals stop coming, and hunger follows, and in the worst cases something comes looking for you.

Two men went out after otter near Sheshatshiu in a story told in 1994. They found a pair of young ones, and one of them was white. That was the one the hunter wanted. He left his friend behind and worked his way close, and while he was settling into the shot his friend heard something in the water, low and rough, like a dog. Then the rifle went off. The water began to lift into a wave, and the hunter turned and ran, and as he ran the ground itself started to move the same way, rolling under him. His friend watched the wave in the earth overtake him. A hole opened, and the man went into it, and for a while afterwards there was screaming from under the ground. The other man was not touched. He had not fired.

That is the shape of nearly every account. It kills the one who shot, and only him. There is no ambush in these stories, no hunting of humans for its own sake, no appetite for people at all; the seals are what it eats. It comes when its young are killed and it comes with terrifying force, and then it goes back into the hill. Its powers are exactly the powers an animal of rock and river would need: it swims through water and under ice and through solid earth, it breaks thick ice upward from below, it opens holes in the ground and may leave tunnels where it has passed. Nothing in the landscape stops it, which is the entire point of it.

Its limits are just as exact. It is bound to particular water and particular stone, and its anger is reactive rather than roving. Leave the young alone and it has no business with you. It is not a god and rules nothing; it answers to Missinaku like everything else in the water. In the 2000s, when the province moved to dam the river at Muskrat Falls, Innu on the traditional knowledge committee said the same thing in plainer language than any story: leave the hill alone and Uenitshikumishiteu will not get angry. One woman, casting about for something a southerner might recognise, compared them to the burrowing creatures in the film Tremors, then watched a clip and said no, they do not move like that. The dam was built. The hill is still there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Wentshukumishiteu?

Wentshukumishiteu, properly Uenitshikumishiteu, is a large otter-like animal in the tradition of the Innu, an Algonquian people of Labrador and Quebec. It is best known for travelling through solid ground, rock and ice as easily as through water, and for killing hunters who harm its young. Innu accounts classify it variously as a manitush, a malevolent being, or simply as a kind of otter.

Is Wentshukumishiteu Inuit?

No. Wentshukumishiteu belongs to the Innu, who are an Algonquian-speaking First Nation of the Labrador and Quebec interior, and who are a separate people from the Inuit with a different language and a different religious tradition. English-language sources have frequently confused the two names, but every recorded account of the creature comes from Innu communities such as Sheshatshiu and Natashquan.

Where does Wentshukumishiteu live?

Its principal home is Manitu-utshu, a small rocky hill beside Mishta-shipu, the Churchill River, at Muskrat Falls in Labrador. Innu describe the hill as hollow with underwater entrances like a beaver lodge, and seal bones have been found in a pond near its summit. Sightings are also reported at Seal Lake, Kakatshu-utshishtun and Netaukau.

What does Wentshukumishiteu do to hunters?

It pursues the specific hunter who has killed one of its young, and it does not touch anyone else. In the best-known account, a man who shot a young white otter was chased by a wave moving through the ground until a hole opened beneath him and swallowed him, while his companion, who had not fired, was left alone.

What does Wentshukumishiteu look like?

It is described as a huge otter or seal, sometimes compared to a sea lion, with fur that is dark brown in most reports and yellow-orange in others. The earliest written description, recorded in the Labrador interior in the late 1920s, adds white feet and large ears. Its voice is given as a low rising whistle or as a growl like a dog’s.