The Leshy is the shape-shifting guardian spirit of the Slavic forest, a being who can tower like a hundred-year-old pine or shrink to a blade of grass, with bark-like skin, blue blood, no eyelashes, and peasant shoes worn on the wrong feet. Drawing on 19th-century Russian ethnographies, peasant diaries, and modern psychological analyses of folklore, this episode asks why such a bizarre and terrifying creature was essential to the physical and mental survival of people whose timber, firewood, grazing land, and game all came from a wilderness that could just as easily kill them.

The conversation explains how the Leshy's inverted features mark him as master of the unclean force outside the ordered Christian world, and how his whistles, clapping, and whirlwinds announce his presence. It describes hunters sealing pacts with salted bread, hair cl ...