There is probably no one more associated with the idea of a ghost story or horror tale set in the North than Algernon Blackwood. He did write “The Wendigo”, after all in 1908. There was another story that predates Blackwood’s tale of the evil spirit of the Quebec woods., “Skeleton Lake, An Episode in Camp”. This one has the same setting, and was published two years earlier in his first collection, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906).
The plot of the story is simple: a group of moose hunters are joined one night by a man from a rival group. He is desperate to tell what happened to him and his guide, Jake the Swede. The people at the camp seem almost desperate not to listen to him, but in the end he tells that an accident happened and Jake was killed. Their boat capsized in a large lake and Jake was drowned. No one really believes him. He repeats the story over and cracks begin to show. The narrator shares a tent with him but must vacate for the man’s talk in his sleep is violent and self-incriminating. The canoe that had been supposedly cut for hand holds contradicts his lies. The final evidence is the body of Jake, bearing a guilt-pointing ax wound.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.