Conventional Western wisdom holds that the legend of the werewolf is a product of the Old World – a relic of classical mythology and medieval European superstition. From Lycaon, the ancient Arcadian king cursed by Zeus for the crime of cooking his son, to Gille Garnier, the 16th Century hermit who confessed to hunting children in the woods of eastern France, these dark lupine shapeshifters have prowled the folktales of the Old Occident for millennia. Some Canadians might be surprised to learn that werewolf stories independent of French or British influence permeate the indigenous folklore of British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, and the northern Territories. In this video, we will explore some of these forgotten native werewolf legends from Western and Northern Canada.
The Wolf Ritual of Vancouver Island
At Canada’s southwestern edge, across the Salish Sea from Vancouver, British Columbia, lies Vancouver Island, an enchanting land of low mountains, rocky coastlines, and Pacific rainforest. The lonely, mist-shrouded western shores of this great isle, from San Juan Harbour in the south, through historic Clayoquot Sound and Friendly Cove, to Checleset Bay in the north, are the historic kingdoms of the Nuu-chah-nulth, an ancient people more commonly known as the Nootka.
For centuries, the Nootka have practiced a strange winter ritual by which certain young men are supposed to become temporarily possessed by the spirits of coastal wolves. The first written reference to this lycanthropic ceremony was made in 1803 by John Rogers Jewitt, a 20-year-old English blacksmith who, along with fellow shipmate John Thompson, spent three years as a slave of Maquinna, the chief of the Muchalat Nootka; whose incredible tale we will explore more thoroughly in a future piece. Jewitt described this unusual rite in his 1815 narrative of his captivity, writing:
“On the morning of the 13th of December commenced what to us appeared to be a most singular farce. Apparently without any previous notice, Maquina discharged a pistol close to his son’s ear, who immediately fell down as if killed, upon which all the women of the house set up a most lamentable cry, tearing handfuls of hair from their heads, and exclaiming that the prince was dead, at the same time a great number of inhabitants, rushed into the house armed with their daggers, muskets, etc. enquiring the cause of their outcry, these were immediately followed by two others dressed in wolf skins, with masks over their faces representing the head of that animal; the latter came in on their hands and feet in the manner of a beast, and taking up the prince carried him off on their backs, retiring in the same manner as they entered. We saw nothing more of the ceremony, as Maquina came to us, giving us a quantity of dried previsions, ordered us to quit the house and not return to the village before the expiration of seven days, for that if we appeared within that period, he should kill us.”
American anthropologist Edward Sapir elaborated on this secret ritual, the particulars of which varied from band to band, in his 1911 article for the American Anthropologist. Sapir stated that the ceremony invariably took place during or preceding a winter potlatch, an extravagant feast held by First Nations throughout the Pacific Northwest characterized by gift-giving, revelry, and the wanton sacrifice of personal property. During the first evening of the festivities, warriors dressed in wolf skins and carved cedar wolf masks emerge from the woods and encircle the gathering, howling as they scamper on all fours at the edge of the firelight. The villagers respond to this development by descending into ostensible panic, uttering fearful wails as they douse their campfires.
During the chaos, several of the wolf-men dart into the milling throng and snatch a handful of pre-ordained young men, whom they carry off into the forest. When the campfires are rekindled, the villagers become aware of the abductions and make half-hearted efforts to recover their lost kinsmen, launching fruitless search parties and setting a wolf trap.
The festivities eventually resume and continue for three days. At night, the wolf-men make sporadic appearances at the edge of the village, howling and whistling as they dart in and out of the trees.
On the fourth day, with the professed objective of retrieving the shredded clothing and scattered bones of their missing kinsmen, the villagers congregate at the edge of the forest and sing a special song. In response, the wolf-men emerge from the forest with the young men they captured, both captors and captives being apparently mesmerized by the incantation. After hours of coaxing the wolf-men and their living prey to venture further from the forest, the villagers lasso the kidnapped youths and drive their lupine captors away.
The villagers proceed to usher the howling initiates, who are all supposed to be possessed by the spirits of wolves, into a longhouse. After donning special clothing and painting their faces black, a group of older warriors who had all completed the same rite in their youth subject the demoniacs to a long exorcism characterized by singing, dancing, drumming, and rattling. When the wolf spirits are finally evicted from their human hosts, the initiates and their exorcists undergo purification rituals involving dancing and ice bathing before rejoining their fellow tribesmen.
Scots-Canadian entrepreneur and politician Gilbert Malcom Sproat, a one-time resident of Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, elaborated on the Nootka concept of wolf possession in his 1868 book Scenes and Studies of Savage Life. Sproat wrote that, while fasting and praying in the wilderness in the hopes of acquiring the guardianship of a spirit protector, young Nootka warriors were sometimes said to happen upon a den of coastal wolves, who welcomed them into their pack. “After a time,” he wrote, “body and soul [change] into the likenesses of these beasts.” Sproat likened this supposed phenomenon to an ancient Greek legend recounted in the eighth volume of Naturalis Historia, the 1st Century encyclopedia written by Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. Citing a Grecian author named Evanthes, Pliny described an Arcadian cult whose male members were said to have the ability to transform into wolves. These shapeshifters disappeared into the mountainous interior of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and remained there for nine years, supposedly living among natural members of the lupine species.
Later in his book, Sproat described a savage variation of the Nootka wolf ritual which he witnessed himself. In December 1864, while he was serving as de-facto magistrate for the west coast of Vancouver Island, a wealthy Nootkan elder stabbed his female slave to death mere yards from his house, in a native village outside Port Alberni.
“The body was laid out without a covering by the water-side,” Sproat wrote, “about a hundred and fifty yards from the houses. There appeared to be no inclination to bury the body, and it was only after the chief had been strongly remonstrated with that the poor victim’s remains were removed, after two days’ exposure. I observed that even after this removal, certain furious rites took place over the very spot where the body had been exposed. The chief feature of the celebration, apart from the murder, was a pretended attack upon the Indian settlement by wolves, which were represented by Indians, while the rest of the population, painted, armed, and with furious shouts, defended their houses from attack…
“These Indians…” Sproat explained in a footnote, referring to the lupine imposters, “had their hair tied out from their heads, so as to represent a wolf’s head and snout, and the blanket was arranged to show a tail. The motion of the wolf in running was closely imitated. More extraordinary still was their acting as crows; they had a large wooden bill, and blankets arranged so like wings that, in the dusk, the Indians really seemed like large crows hopping about, particularly when, after the manner of these birds, they went into the shallow water, and shook their wings and ‘dabbed’ with their long bills.”
In a plagiaristic commentary on Sproat’s story, which appeared in his 1887 book The Races of Mankind – a work which, incidentally, is filled with similar infringements on intellectual property – Scottish scientist and explorer Dr. Robert Brown suggested that the Nootka wolf ritual “may be allied to certain superstitions once existing among other nations – the Lycanthropia of the Greeks, the Loup-garou of the French, the Persian Ghoule, the Teutonic Wehrwolfe, &c… Whether this had not something to do with the ideas regarding the transmigration of souls into other animals, or (as some of them say) in memory of a chief’s sons who long ago were carried off by wolves, I cannot decide.”
A third variation of the Nootka wolf ceremony is delineated by American anthropologist Alice Henson Ernst in her 1952 book The Wolf Ritual of the Northwest Coast. In this iteration, the feast is held inside a longhouse, which the wolf-men invade at the conclusion of a particular song sung by the potlatch patron. Most members of the human wolf pack have their faces painted black, and use woven cedar bark visors to tie blankets over their heads so as to give themselves the appearances of wolves, their snouts protruding above their foreheads. The four leaders of the pack have the privilege of wearing carved cedar masks.
“As soon as the Wolves come in,” Ernst wrote, “the fire is extinguished. Anyone can do this, by throwing on a bucket of water. The people now all get up and go to different places, acting as if afraid… The Wolf men enter, and crawl along the floor, circling the fireplace once, whistling. Women who have small children, one or two years old, hide these under their blankets, as though afraid of the Wolves. After the circuit, the Wolf men go out at the same hole they came in. Someone now rebuilds the fire; two appointed watchmen get up and go around, looking for those who are missing.”
Ernst explains that the young initiates are brought by their captors to a special secluded house in the woods, where they are supposed to become possessed by wolves. “One by one…” she wrote, “they are seized by this spirit or force, and act as though overcome. In a daze or faint, they are carried to the middle of the room and covered by blankets…”
After four days of feasting, punctuated by intermittent rituals with the ostensible purpose of rescuing the kidnapped children, the villagers coax the initiates back to civilization by singing songs intended to appease the canine spirits that have taken possession of their bodies. There follows five days of increasingly-intense exorcism, succeeded by three days of ritual purification.
The Werewolf of Langley, British Columbia
East of Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Georgia, is British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, the valley of the lower Fraser River. Once covered by dense lowland forest, this coastal region is the historic domain of the Downriver Halkomelem, a collection of Central Coast Salish First Nations. According to the aforementioned Robert Brown, there is an old Halkomelem werewolf legend featuring a hunter from what is now Fort Langley, British Columbia, located across the Fraser River from Maple Ridge.
“Stuckeia (the wolves),” Brown wrote, “were once a tribe of Indians who were turned into their present form… for their evil deeds. One day a hunter of Quantlin went into the mountains to seek his medicine. He travelled all that day and all the next day, still he dreamt not of his medicine; but he resolved to find it, be a great hunter, or die. One day he saw the light of a great fire on the side of a mountain, and drew near. Round it were the wolves sitting in a circle, talking of the day’s hunt. They had taken off their skins, and were drying them on sticks. Our hunter sprang within the light of the fire, and instantly the wolves jumped into their skins again, and howled round him, but the hunter moved not, and lay down and slept uninjured. That night he dreamt of his medicine, and next day he began to travel with the wolves, not his guardians, and did so for a long time, until his friends grieved for him and thought him dead. But one day a hunter saw him in the mountains travelling along the hill-side with the wolves. Sometimes he travelled on two legs – more often on all-fours. His face was bearded like that of a wolf, and he looked savage and fierce. So the young man went back to his village and told the story.”
Brown went on to describe how the man’s friends captured the werewolf with strong nets they fashioned from elk-sinew and brought him back to Kwantlen. There, they discovered that their wild friend had lost all his human attributes, including the ability to speak any human language. Every night, his mournful howls were answered by his new lupine kindred, who lurked in the forest beyond the village.
Eventually, the wild man slipped out of his tether and scampered into the woods. This time, the villagers did not pursue him. Legend has it that the man was spotted several times since, prowling in the mountains with the wolves. He was last spotted in the Fraser Canyon near Fort Yale, incidentally just a few miles downriver from the legendary underground den of the “dog people” which features in an old Thompson Indian legend that we explored in a previous piece.
Dogmen of the Fraser Delta
Another West Coast werewolf legend appears in Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit’s contribution to the 1917 book “Folk-Tales of the Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes,” which appeared in Volume IX of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society. Remarkably, this traditional Stahlo (i.e. Upriver Halkomelem) story bears striking resemblance to the origin story of the Tlicho or Dogrib Dene, a First Nation whose traditional hunting grounds lay between Great Slave Lake and the more northerly Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, a thousand miles to the northeast, which we explored in a previous piece.
In this story, an unmarried native girl who lived at the mouth of the Fraser River, in the general vicinity of Vancouver, British Columbia, was visited in the night by a mysterious young man who refused to tell her his name. Hoping to determine the stranger’s identity, she painted her palms with red ochre, and when he returned to her bed the following night, inconspicuously left red handprints on his sides.
The next day, the girl went throughout the village and looked for the marks she had left, but could not see them on any of the young men. When she returned home, she found her mother scrubbing the flanks of her father’s dog, admonishing the fool who had painted his fur red.
“The girl was ashamed,” Teit wrote, “went in, and cried to herself. In due time she gave birth to eleven pups – five male and six female. One of the latter was half black and half white.”
Infuriated by the scandal, the villagers banished the girl and her hybrid children from the village, and beat her canine paramour half to death. The wounded dog slunk away into the woods, and the girl set up her lonely camp on the Fraser Delta. That night, the young mother lit a torch and repaired to the beach to dig up clams for her hungry pups.
After a successful clam-gathering excursion, the girl headed for home. Upon her approach, she heard the sound of playing children emanating from her lodge. Suddenly, as if realizing that they had been perceived, the mysterious children quit their antics, and the lodge was silent.
The mother entered her house and found her pups inside, fast asleep. The floor of the lodge was covered with the prints of barefooted human children very much unlike the tiny canine paws of her children. The girl was puzzled that her pups had failed to bark at the intruders, considering their outward dog-like appearance, and determined to solve the mystery.
“The following night,” Teit wrote, “when she went out after clams, she put her robe on a stick, tied her torch to another one by its side, and hurried home. The pups thought she was still at the beach, and kept on dancing and singing. She crept up stealthily, jumped over the one on watch, and seized the skins of the others before they could get them, and threw them in the fire. Thus they remained children, while the black and white one remained a dog.”
Teit went on to explain how the pups’ father returned to his family when he was healed, in the form of a good-looking man. The Dog-Man was a successful hunter who fed his wife and children on deer, mountain goats, and other wild game he caught in the woods. Every once in a while, he left cuts of choice meat in the caches of those of his wife’s relatives to had treated her kindly in the past. In this way, he ingratiated himself with his in-laws, and eventually convinced them to accept his unconventional family back into the village.
Teit’s story ends on a disturbing note. “Then the people all returned, and were fed by the Dog-Man,” he wrote. “The ten children of the girl grew up to be handsome people, and they married among themselves.”
Werewolves of the Rocky Mountains
At the eastern edge of British Columbia lie the towering snow-capped Rocky Mountains, which run along the border of that province and its eastern neighbour, Alberta. The Stoney Indians, who traditionally shared this rugged range with the southerly Kootenay and northerly Shuswap, have their own werewolf legends, two of which appeared Sebastian Chumak’s 1983 book The Stonies of Alberta. Both of these stories were related by Stoney elder Joe Kootenay, or “Rolling Buffalo,” to folklorist Thomas T. Williams. Both of them are set on Spirit Island, a picturesque isle in Alberta’s Maligne Lake named after a tragic ghost story which we touched on in a previous piece.
According to Kootenay, long ago, a great battle was fought in what is now Jasper National Park between a mountain tribe and their easterly prairie-dwelling enemies. While fleeing from the advancing prairie warriors, a desperate mother belonging to the mountain tribe set her two small boys, named Star Robe and Scraping Wolf, adrift on a raft in Malign Lake, pushing them towards Spirit Island. Shortly thereafter, a prairie warrior bounded from the forest and crushed her skull with his war club. The invader peered out over the water, curious as to the task with which his victim had been occupied in her final moments, but was unable to see the two boys, as a thick shroud of mist had enveloped Spirit Island.
Following the battle, the two orphaned boys were raised by wolves, who took them into their den and brought them meat to eat. Scraping Wolf took well to the wild lifestyle of the wolves, forging a close bond with his adopted lupine brothers and developing a taste for raw meat. Star Robe, on the other hand, felt more at home by the campfire than in the wolf den, and pined for human company.
When they came of age, the boys left the den and began hunting on their own, making their home on Spirit Island.
One day, while they were sitting on the edge of Malign Lake making bone knives, the brothers were approached by an elderly medicine man named Braided Rawhide Necklace, who poled himself across the water on a crude raft. As he drifted up to them, the old man withdrew four pale blue stones from his medicine bag, intending to give them to the brothers. Before he could do so, a wolf began to howl in the woods nearby, startling the medicine man and causing him to drop the stones into the water.
Star Robe put aside his knife and dove to the bottom of the lake, retrieving the stones and returning them to the medicine man. Grateful for the restoration of these sacred items, Braided Rawhide Necklace promised to return in four days and repay Star Robe for his service. With that, the old man poled back in the direction from which he had come.
Four days later, a tall woman with a blue-painted face poled up to Spirit Island on the same raft that the old man had used. This bewitching woman approached Star Robe and introduced herself as White Hand, the eldest daughter of Braided Rawhide Necklace. At her father’s request, she had come to take Star Robe back to their village, where she was to be his wife. Fascinated by this enchantress, who was the first woman he had seen in his adult life, Star Robe readily accepted the invitation and bid farewell to his brother.
“Scraping Wolf is alone on the island,” Kootenay said. “He watches his brother disappear with the tall woman. By night, he listens to the song of the wolves. He sings to the night spirits: ‘I am going to make myself into a wolf.’”
Scraping Wolf built a big fire and invited his wolf brothers to sit with him. For four nights, the feral hunter and his canine kinsmen howled at the moon, beseeching the spirits of the lake to grant the young man his request. On the fourth night, Scraping Wolf grew wolf paws, and went away with the wolves into the mountains.
Later in his book, Chumak included a sequel to this story related by Joe Kootenay and recorded by Thomas T. Williams.
“It is the yellow-leaf moon,” Kootenay told Williams, referring to the month of September. “Star Robe crosses the mountain lake to look for his brother.
“On Spirit Island he finds some mysterious tracks. One footprint is human and the other is wolf. He follows this unknown trail. Soon he comes to a large wolf lodge. Many wolves are sitting in a great circle.”
Kootenay went on to relate how a she-wolf approached Star Robe and informed him that Scraping Robe had transformed into a wolf permanently. Heedless of her assurance that no power on earth could make his brother human again, Star Robe visited his brother that night in the form of an elk, assuming that form through the power of the blue stones he had taken from his father-in-law.
Star Robe proceeded to tell Scraping Robe the harrowing tale of his time in the camp of Braided Rawhide Necklace. Both his new wife and his father-in-law, he discovered, were what he called “evil walkers” and “snake people” –preternatural entities perhaps related to the sinister Soyeetapi, the serpentine mer-people of Blackfoot tradition. Although Star Robe’s narrative is cryptic, it seems to imply that White Hand, through Star Robe’s supplication, was transformed into a scattering of brown pebbles by the same spirits of Lake Malign that had transformed Scraping Wolf into a wolf-man. “And now I come back to my brother,” Star Robe concluded at the end of his speech. “I will not weaken our hoop.”
Since there was no way to transform Scraping Wolf back into a human, Star Robe used the blue stones to give himself the appearance of a wolf.
Kootenay’s tale ends in tragedy, with Scraping Wolf being eaten by mysterious animals called “dogfish” (perhaps bubot or mountain whitefish) after failing to heed a warning issued by the she-wolf. The wolves blame his death on Star Robe and confront him on Spirit Island, where the surviving brother successfully defends himself. The story ends with Star Robe heading east in search of his mother’s people.
Werewolves in Blackfoot Tradition
East of the Rocky Mountains are the Canadian prairies, a vast stretch of grasslands, coulees, and river valleys once dominated by buffalo. The western end of his geographic region, from the North Saskatchewan River near Edmonton, Alberta, to the Yellowstone River in Montana, is the historic domain of the Blackfoot Confederacy, an alliance of four warlike nations united by blood and a common language.
One Blackfoot werewolf story appears in American anthropologist George Bird Grinnell’s 1892 book Blackfoot Lodge Tales, which the author heard from a South Piegan Blackfoot elder named Double Runner on the Two Medicine River in Montana.
According to this story, there was once a Blackfoot man who had two shameless wives. The man suspected that his spouses picked up their immorality from other women in the band. In an effort to eliminate that bad influence, he packed his teepee onto his dog travois and moved his camp to a secluded butte overlooking a desolate expanse of prairie. Every sunset, the man sat on a buffalo skull atop the hill and gazed out over the plains, scanning the horizon for any sign of bison or enemy raiders.
Weary of this lonely self-imposed exile, the two wives conspired to murder their husband and return to their band. One morning when their husband was away hunting, they climbed the butte and dug a deep pit at the spot where he sat sentry in the evenings. That accomplished, they camouflaged the hole with sticks and grass and placed the buffalo skull atop this flimsy covering.
Later that afternoon, the hunter returned to camp with cuts of a buffalo that he had killed. After eating the meal his wives prepared for him, he ascended the butte, as was his custom, and sat down on the buffalo skull. The trap door gave way, and the hunter plunged down into the pit. He was injured so badly by the fall that he could not climb his way out.
Satisfied that their husband would die a slow and agonizing death, the wicked wives packed their teepee onto their travois and set out for the main camp. When they came within earshot of the camp, they began to wail, later explaining to their concerned kinsmen that their husband had failed to return from his hunting trip.
Meanwhile, back at the butte, the injured hunter was found by a Great Plains wolf, who sent word of his discovery to other prairie predators. Soon, a menagerie of wolves, coyotes, foxes, and badgers were standing around the edge of the pit, gazing down at the helpless native.
“In this hole,” the wolf declared, “is my find. Here is a fallen-in man. Let us dig him out, and we will have him for our brother.”
The other canines did as proposed, and soon the hunter was liberated from his underground prison. After feeding him a raw bison kidney, the wolves dragged the cripple to their den.
“Here,” Double Runner said, “was a very old blind wolf, who had powerful medicine. He cured the man, and made his head and hands look like those of a wolf. The rest of his body was not changed.”
The man-wolf lived among his canine companions for some time. One night, he led his furry rescuers to a pis’kun, or buffalo jump, where the Blackfoot had just slaughtered a herd of bison. The natives had surrounded their kills with snares set for the purpose of catching nighttime scavengers. Cognizant of these hazards, the man-wolf sprang the traps, allowing the wolves to gorge themselves on the fresh meat.
The man-wolf and his four-legged friends repeated this thievery several nights in a row. Baffled as to how the wolves consistently evaded their traps, the Blackfoot stopped leaving their good meat out at night, prompting the man-wolf to let out a half-human howl which convinced the natives that they were dealing with a werewolf.
“So they put pemmican and nice back fat in the pi’skun,” Grinnell wrote, “and many hid close by. After dark the wolves came again, and when the man-wolf saw the good food, he ran to it and began eating. Then the people all rushed in and caught him with ropes and took him to a lodge. When they got inside to the light of the fire, they knew at once who it was. They said, ‘This is the man who was lost.’
“‘No,’ said the man. ‘I was not lost. My wives tried to kill me. They dug a deep hole, and I fell into it, and I was hurt so badly that I could not get out; but the wolves took pity on me and helped me out, or I would have died there.’”
Enraged, the Blackfoot urged the man to punish his betrayers. In response, the hunter handed his wife over to the Ikunuh’kahtsi, members of a Blackfoot warrior society who administered justice at the behest of the head chief.
“After that night,” Double Runner concluded, “the two women were never seen again.”
Werewolves in Plains Cree Tradition
East of Blackfoot territory is the domain of the Plains Cree, the hereditary enemies of the Blackfoot, who have werewolf tales of their own. One such story appears in Reverend Edward Ahenekew’s 1929 article for Volume 42 of the Journal of American Folklore, in a long saga chronicling the adventures of Wesakaychak, a legendary Cree hero and trickster figure.
Near the beginning of this great Canadian epic, the child Wesakaychak and his younger brother, following a violent domestic dispute, find themselves orphaned and alone on the bank of a river. They are approached by an evil hairy man in a magic canoe named Waymesosiw, who will later become Wesakaychak’s father in law. Waymesosiw kidnaps the young protagonist and carries him off in his canoe, leaving Wesakaychak’s younger brother to fend for himself in the wilderness.
“Brother! Brother!” cried the younger child from the riverbank as Wesakaychak was borne away. “I will be a wolf! I will be a wolf!” Ahenakew writes that, through his tears, Wesakaychak “saw a young gray wolf run away into the woods.”
After numerous tribulations and dangerous adventures, Waysakaychak married Waymesosiw’s youngest daughter and settled down to raise a family. “Happy though Wesakaychak was with his young wife,” Ahenakew wrote, “one thing served to mar his contentment, and that was the uncertainty of his brother’s fate. He lost many a night’s sleep when it stormed, for the picture of his little brother running along the bank of the river, crying after him, was stamped indelibly on his mind. He must go back and find him. One night he told his wife this; and she gave her consent to his journey.”
Wesakaychak returned to the place where he had last seen his brother and look around for any sign as to the wolf-boy’s fate. He soon came across the sun-bleached skeleton of a moose, the bones being arranged neatly in a pile – evidently the remains his brother’s first kill. Wesakaychak followed a trail of tidily-stacked bone piles until he came across relatively recent paw prints. “Fresher and fresher grew the tracks of the wolf,” Ahenakew wrote, “even as they increased in size. The brother was evidently a full-grown wolf now; and Wesakaychak felt that any moment he might come upon him. He looked around carefully as he went so as not to miss him. Suddenly there was a crash and a large gray wolf bounded away from behind a willow brush. ‘Brother! Brother! It is I. Do not be afraid of me!’ cried Wesakaychak. The wolf brother stopped and approached fawningly.”
Ahenakew explains that the wolf-man had come to fear humans, and was even ill at ease in the presence of his own brother. Wesakaychak cleansed his sibling in a sweat lodge, and purified him with the smoke of sweet grass, restoring him to his former human form. The elder brother then welcomed the younger man into his lodge, where he was warmly received by Wesakaychak’s hospitable wife.
Ahenakew went on to relate two more stories featuring this wolf-man, who was compelled to resume or cast off his lupine form according to task he was required to perform. In the first story, the younger brother confessed to Wesakaychak that he had a wolf wife and son still living in the woods, which intuition told him were now in danger. With Wesakaychak’s blessing, he transformed back into a wolf set off in search of his wild family.
The younger brother arrived at his old wigwam in the woods and found that it had been taken over by a family of wolverines. He found his son living with his mother-in-law in another wigwam close by, both of them in a starving condition. The old she-wolf informed him that the patriarch of the wolverine clan had killed his wife. Rubbing salt in the wound of their bereavement, he forbade his own children from sharing any of their bountiful beaver meat with the canine couple.
After subjecting the wolverine to a humiliating death at the hands of his feeble mother-in-law, the young brother took up the mantle of fatherhood and taught his son how to hunt.
In the second story, the younger brother accidentally chased a deer into a lake, forgetting Wesakaychak’s prophetic warning against wading into a lake or stream. He was killed and skinned by water monsters who dwelled in the depths, but was later rescued by Wesakaychak, who retrieved his pelt and restored him to life.
The Carrier Dogman Story
The werewolf legend extends north to the subarctic, to the vast boreal forest which forms the northern half of Canada’s Western Provinces and the western third of the Northern Territories.
In his 1895 book Three Carrier Myths, French Oblate missionary Adrien Gabriel Maurice included an old Carrier Dene story with an unmistakable connection to the Cree Wesakaychak story above related. Maurice heard this story from a Carrier woman named Lizette Elmok, who lived in the village of Stellako at the western end of Fraser Lake about 37 miles southwest of Fort St. James, British Columbia. In this tale, the protagonist’s younger brother transforms into a wolf when he is abandoned on a lakeshore by the protagonist’s kidnapper, who plies the water in an iron raft. Later, after many adventures, the protagonist discovers that his wolf-brother was killed and skinned by dwarves on the shores of a faraway lake. After slitting the dwarves’ throats in the night, the protagonist retrieves his brother’s pelt and bones and brings him back to life.
Another of Maurice’s Carrier stories, told by Zacharie Nusihel of Stellako, is nearly identical to Teit’s dogman story set on the shores of the Fraser Delta. In this legend, a maiden was visited in the night by a stranger whom she marked on the shoulders with vermillion. The following day, she saw an old dog lurking near her father’s tent with red pigment in its fur.
Soon after, the girl became pregnant, and two months later, she gave birth to four puppies – three male, and one female. Scandalized, the whole village broke camp and moved away, abandoning the new mother and an old woman who thought herself too feeble to make another journey.
The rest of the story unfolds similar to Teit’s, with the mother picking bear-berries instead of hunting for clams, and the anomalous puppy – in this story, the girl – remaining a dog from the waist down only after being caught by her suspicious mother.
The Kaska Dogman Story
The Kaska Dene, who inhabit northern British Columbia and southern Yukon, tell a similar story about a girl who was impregnated by a dog-man. This story is more akin to the national origin story of the Dogribs, lacking the subchapter in which the girl’s mysterious nighttime visitors is marked by red paint. In this tale, which appears in a 1917 article by James Teit for the Journal of American Folk-Lore, the dog-man is the girl’s lawful husband, whom the girl clubs to death at night when she finds him chewing on a bone in canine form. In this variation of the story, the girl gives birth to seven puppies, six of them male and one of them female. Similar to the Kaska version, the mother discovers her children’s true nature on her way home from a berry-picking excursion, and the girl puppy, slipping into her dog skin more quickly than her brothers, remains a human from the waist up and a dog from the waist down. At the end of the story, the mother and her dog-children transform into stones on the Stikine River in northwestern British Columbia, in the heart of Tahltan Country, southwest of Kaska territory and north of Carrier Country. The story’s peculiar setting led Teit’s informant to suspect that the Kaska learned the tale from the Tahltan.
Dogmen of the Gwich’in
The legend of the Dogman can be found further to the north, in the folklore of the Gwich’in (also known as the Kutchin or Loucheux), who inhabit the frozen forests of northwestern Yukon and northeastern Alaska, and in the tales of the Gwich’in’s easterly neighbours, the Hare or Sahtu Dene, whose historic domain is the vicinity of Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. According to Adrien Maurice in his aforementioned 1895 book, these people shared a belief that “they formerly dwelt very far away in the west and beyond the sea, in the midst of a very powerful nation among which magicians used to transform themselves into dogs or wolves during the night, while they became men again during the day.” This legend, which apparently alludes to a race of dog-men in Siberia, seems to bolster the theory long held by linguists and anthropologists that the Dene nations originally came from Kamchatka, migrating across the Bering Strait land bridge into Alaska millennia ago.
Maurice informs us that the legend of a race of dog-men, who have heads and torsos like men and legs like dogs, also appears in the writings of Abbe Emile Petitot, a French Oblate Missionary who lived among the Dene of Northern Canada in the mid-late 19th Century. “Their name for these monsters,” Maurice wrote, “is Tlin-akeni, which means at the same time Dog-feet and Dog-race…”
In a footnote, Maurice cites Petitot’s 1886 French-language book Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, or Indian Traditions of Northwest Canada. One story in this book, which Petitot learned from his Gwich’in informants, describes how the dog-men lived in tents, never slept, and came out at night to hunt snowy owls and large yellow mice. The Gwich’in believed that these strange creatures were originally dogs which, through the influence of some preternatural power, had metamorphosed into their grotesque half-human forms. They maintained that their ancestors had been the slaves of these monsters in a dark country far to the west, and that dog-people could still be found in Yukon and Alaska, west of the Mackenzie Mountains. “That is why we make dogs suffer and make then man’s slaves,” said one of Petitot’s Gwich’in informants, “but we do not kill them; it is a crime to kill a dog, because they are our ancient enemies, and therefore human creatures. So we let them sleep in our tents, as we would men.”
Petitot identifies the westerly enemies of the Gwich’in, whom he believed inspired the legend of the Dog-men, as a people he called the “Kolloches” or the “Dattini” – perhaps the Kolchan or Upper Kuskokwim Dene of central Alaska. Bizarrely, more than one late 19th Century publications identify the “Kollouches” as the Haida, who inhabit the Queen Charlotte Islands south of the southern tip of the Alaskan Panhandle, a thousand miles south of Gwich’ in territory. Another identifies these mysterious people as the Chilkat Tlingit, rulers of the Alaskan Panhandle, whom a 1839 ethnography written by Russian-Alaskan governor Baron Ferdinand von Wrangell indicates may have some connection to the old Tanaina legend of the “Tailed Ones” or “Monkey Men.”
There are many more werewolf and dogmen legends endemic to Canada, some of which we explored in previous pieces. If you’d like to watch these videos, please click on the endscreen cards or the links in the description.
Sources
Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt: While Held as a Captive of the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, 1803 to 1805 (1815), by John R. Jewitt
“Some Aspects of Nootka Language and Culture,” by Edward Sapir in the January-March 1911 issue of the American Anthropologist
The Races of Mankind: Being a Popular Description of the Characteristics, Mannerisms, and Customs of the Principal Varieties of the Human Family (1887), by Robert Brown
Scenes and Studies of Savage Life (1868), by Gilbert Malcolm Sproat
The Wolf Ritual of the Northwest Coast (1952), by Alice Henson Ernst
“Folk-Tales of the Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes,” by James A. Teit (and Livingston Farrand, Marian K. Gould, and Herbert J. Spinden), for the 1917 issue of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society
The Stonies of Alberta: An Illustrated Heritage of Genesis, Myths, Legends, Folklore, and Wisdom of the Yahey Wichastabi (1983), by Sebastian Chumak
Blackfoot Lodge Tales (1892), by George Bird Grinnell
“Cree Trickster Tales,” by Edward Ahenakew in the October – December 1929 issue (Volume 42, Number 166) of the Journal of American Folklore
Three Carrier Myths (1895), by Adrien Gabriel Maurice
“Kaska Tales,” by James A. Teit, in the January-March 1917 issue of the Journal of American Folk-Lore
Bibliography of the Athapascan Languages (1892), by James Constantine Pilling
Monograph of the Dene-Dindjie Indians (1878), by Emile Petitot and Douglas Brymner
Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (1886), by Emile Petitot
Leave a Reply