More on the Snow Wasset

 Season 3, Episode 10: Regina

The snow wasset is another fearsome critter from North America, listed in William T. Cox's "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods."  The snow wasset lives in the snowy areas around the Great Lakes and north to the Hudson bay.  It's a monster created to explain what happened to lumberjacks who vanished in the woods in the winter.  They were eaten by snow wassets.

The creature travels around under the snow, feeding on hibernating animals, but also if given the chance leaping out of the snow to attack prey.  They look like long weasels or otters, and are said to be "four times the size of a wolverine and forty times as active."  In the summer, they grow little, stubby legs so they can move around, but in the winter, they shed those legs and move by wriggling through the snow.  They also change color with the seasons for better camouflage: white fur in winter and green fur in summer so they can blend into the cranberry bogs where they hibernate.

I'm sure the snow covered Midwest must have been terrifying during pioneer times and the lumberjack heyday when people would vanish into the stow with some regularity.  But there's something about the Chicago snowdrifts that stay for weeks and weeks on the edge of every sidewalk and in the corners of every parking lot.  They draw the eye when I'm walking home alone.  Could something be lurking there, ready to pounce?  The primal fear of the unknown under the snow is still alive and kicking in my lizard brain. 

I wanted to write about a pack of snow wassets attacking a snow plow, but I eventually felt that there wasn't enough going on there to maintain the whole A-plot of an episode.  In the Regina episode, the snow wassets stay in the background as a threat that looms in the unknown.