El Trauco: The Forest Seducer of Chiloé Island
The archipelago of Chiloé, off the rain-drowned coast of southern Chile, is one of the most densely mythologized landscapes in the Americas — an island world of fog, potato fields, wooden churches, and temperate rainforest so thick that daylight enters it as rumor. Chilote tradition populates this world completely: the ghost ship Caleuche gathers the drowned into its luminous crew , the Pincoya dances the abundance of the shellfish beds , warlocks convene in their cave near Quicaví — and in the forest, squat and terrible, waits the Trauco. He stands, the tradition says, no higher than a man's waist: a gnarled dwarf of the woods, clothed in ragged quilineja fiber, faceless or nearly so, legs ending in stumps without feet, carrying a stone hatchet or a twisted staff called the pahueldún . He is hideous past description. And he is, in the whole inventory of world folklore, perhaps the most notorious seducer — for the Trauco's power lies not in beauty but in breath and gaze, and n...