The Baykok: The Flying Skeleton That Hunts the Great Hunters
The Anishinaabe peoples of the northern woodlands — the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes country, of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Ontario, the same lake-and-birch world that dreamed the Wendigo of the starving winter — keep a death-spirit of the forest whose horror is drawn with a hunter's precise eye. The baykok (bakaak, paguk, and other spellings) is a skeleton that flies : emaciated past even the skeletal, a thing of nothing but bones and thin translucent skin stretched tight over them, its eye-sockets burning with a red or fiery light in the empty skull; it moves through the night forest with a dreadful screaming cry — the bakaak's thin shriek that freezes the hunter where he stands — and it hunts, invisibly or half-seen among the trees, with a weapon fitting to its world: it strikes its prey with invisible arrows , or beats them down with a club, and then it does the thing that names its whole nature — it takes the liver . The baykok kills, and eats only the liver of its victim...