When I was like 17, I lived in the woods on the northwest coast of canada. One day, I decided to go for a walk in a part of the woods I had never been to before. Because sometimes I see weird things out there, I made sure to bring my grandma’s dog with me, just running free and off-leash. These are wild woods, too, not parkland, so the only clear areas are deer trails. I stuck along to those because, you know, I don’t want to get lost, and about an hour in I hear this strange whistling. Just a short call- One long, sharp whistle followed quickly by a short, piping one. Now, I’m in a good mood and I figure it must be some new kind of bird, so I whistle back: long call, short call. It whistles again. I’m amused, so I whistle again. Long call, short call, and then just to be fun, I throw in a little trill at the end. It whistles back. It whistles back the exact same pattern. Now, normally that would freak me out, but I was in a REALLY good mood. A really weirdly good mood. So, I whistled again. And when it whistled back to me, I giggled. I… Don’t giggle. Not alone in the woods over basically nothing. The whistle came again, and there was a rustle in the distance. Seeing a shady outcrop, I ran to hide, feeling like I was playing hide-and-seek with someone. It whistled, I whistled back. Another rustle. Closer. I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen the dog in a while. I looked around, and saw him a few feet away, staring point-blank and totally still into the forest. The whistle came again, closer this time, and suddenly my weirdly bubbly feeling was gone. Instant fear. I got the dog’s attention and we absolutely booked it out of there, all the way back to the eight-foot-high gate that marked the start of the wild land. I locked it behind me, and we never went back. I never really had any idea what was whistling with me in the forest. Maybe some kind of mimic bird that had escaped home, or a squatter hiding out there sewhere messing with this kid and their dog. I only just remembered that when I was a kid, we learned about the Tsonoqua woman. The Tsonoqua woman is supposed to be an old woman who lives in the woods. She carries a basket on her back and has long, tangled hair. When children wander away from camp, it is said that she snatches them up in her basket and steals them away forever. But because she has bad sight, she uses her keen ears to hunt, and calls out with a birdlike whistle.
