The snow babies of the Great White North

by David Benjamin

“The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold…”
— Robert Service

MADISON, Wis. — Although systematically hushed up by the mainstream media, there are signs that the Wisconsin tradition of setting surplus children out in the snow in the dead of winter to be eaten by wolves is enjoying a clandestine revival.

The practice has long been suppressed by the state’s officialdom, whose latest effort to discourage this timeless method of population control (and parental discipline) is the restoration of a hunting season for wolves.

Indeed, the reintroduction of wolf packs into Wisconsin is seen as an unintended trigger for the rebirth of “hygienic infant mortality” in a region of harsh winters, barren breasts and undependable harvests.

It has long been thought that the practice of abandoning toddlers to the tender mercies of top predators in the northwoods originated with the Nantoka tribe, whose nomadic range covered much of the northern tier of territory that now composes Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. However, in his groundbreaking study of the now-extinct Nantoka, Snow Babies and Pagan Ritual in New France,1634-1763, historian Garrett Huxley stresses the fact that no infants were known to have been sacrificed to the Nantoka wolf god, Seena-Trah, until after the arrival of French missionaries in the 17th century.

Because of their nomadic nature, the Nantoka were an elusive target for the fervid efforts of French priests to pin down and indoctrinate these tribesmen into Catholicism. However, around 1645, according to Huxley, a swashbuckling cleric named Distinguette, who had a knack for learning Native American dialects, cast aside his priestly robes. He donned buckskin and moccasins and insinuated himself into the great traveling band of Nantoka led by legendary Chief Bloodtooth. For ten years, Père Distinguette plied Bloodtooth and his people with passages and prayers, which he translated into Nantoka, from the New Testament.

Père Distinguette, whose rare portraits show a striking resemblance to Brad Pitt, might have succeeded in converting the peripatetic Nantoka to the Catholic faith. However, he fell under the spell of Bloodtooth’s pubescent daughter Nancy, who was reputed to be breathtakingly beautiful and a little bit slutty. When Nancy turned up pregnant, she fingered the Father as the father, launching Bloodtooth into a rage that ended with Père Distinguette being skinned alive, stuffed with wild rice and cranberries, basted with bear fat and roasted on a spit over a slow, smoky fire of birch logs and damp spruce boughs. According to Huxley’s account, Père Distinguette made a tasty feast for the Nantoka version of Thanksgiving.

However, when Nancy gave birth to the bastard child of the missionary Frenchman, the baby boy’s angry grandfather gave Nancy a choice. Either she and her offspring would be banished from the tribe or she could simply abandon the baby to its inevitable fate in the February forest. Nancy, whom Huxley describes as “gay, sociable and immature” — being only twelve years old at the time of the birth — opted for Door Number Two.

In an effort to justify this act of uncommon cruelty, Bloodtooth told the tribe that their dalliance with the Catholic Distinguette had offended their Nantoka deities and that only a blood sacrifice from the family of the chief himself would restore the tribe to the gods’ good graces. The tribe bought this premise and the little boy was dropped into a snowbank overnight. All that Nancy found the next morning were shreds of the baby’s buckskin snowsuit and a lot of wolf tracks.

Over the ensuing decades, this sanguinary innovation evolved into a Nantoka ritual, first as a tactic to reduce the band’s numbers in years of scant foraging and bad hunting, then as an annual — then more frequent — rite meant to appease the gods — especially Seena-Trah. This strange but dramatic tradition became fashionable among some non-Native settlers who filtered into these remote regions toward the end of the 17th century.

Initially, the offering of “snow babies” was justified as a survival strategy in years of crop failure or during the frequent epidemics of diphtheria, typhus, smallpox, rickets and other frontier plagues. Eventually, however, it became — in some deeply isolated and backward wilderness outposts — a pseudo-religious belief that crying, misbehaving and “rambunctious” infants had been possessed by a northwoods demon known to indigenous shamans as “the Wendigo.” Although wolves, bears or mountain lions inevitably devoured the forsaken babes, the preferred story was that they had been swept up by the horrible Wendigo — who repaid the community by sparing it any further depredations.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the “snow baby” tradition was the literal obliteration of the Nantoka. They got so carried away with setting their children out in the snow, as offerings to Seena-Trah and the Wendigo that, eventually, no girls in the entire tribe ever reached child-bearing age. The wolf packs of the Great White North feasted and grew fat while the noble Nantoka, fatally corrupted by a randy priest from France, became as scarce as Easter Islanders.

Of course, as civilization spread through Wisconsin, the “snow baby” cultists who lived “Up North” were forced to abandon their grisly analog to the witch burnings of New England. Historian Huxley speculates that a small band of non-indigenous die-hards fled their village near what was once the French bastion of Fort Le Sueur and began a nomadic existence like that of the Nantoka.

This group, today constantly on the move in small convoys of recreational vehicles and Airstream trailers, practices a mix of French Catholicism and pagan animism, with an emphasis on worshipping the fertility of very young girls. It has been rumored that these “snow baby” cultists, tracing their roots all the way back to the sacrifice of Nancy’s firstborn son, are spreading their gospel among remote and impoverished denizens of northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.

With only the slightest suggestion, the economic desperation common to this frosty region can combine with the spiritual aura of the wildwood’s most powerful icon — Seena-Trah, the timber wolf. A family of five or six who are hungry, cold and at their wit’s end, can come to see a snow-baby offering as their Eucharist, and the flaming Wendigo as their Savior.

If the potential snow babies of Covid-ravaged Wisconsin are to be protected from the terrible choice of either freezing solid in the woods or being torn apart by ravenous wolves, the state’s leaders must stop denying this crisis. If they persist in their silence, cuddly kids in snowsuits will continue to wade motherless through the blowing drifts as they blunder into the fangs and merciless claws of the Great White North.