The Sea-Wolf
The Pacific Northwest of the United States and
southwestern Canada is possibly home to a creature more bizarre than the area's most
famous inhabitant, Bigfoot.
If Native American tales are to be believed, the waters near British Columbia are home to
a creature they called Sea Wolf, sisiutl, wasgo, haietlik, or
any of several other names; this creature is unique among cryptids by having been a totem
animal of several tribes, an honor shared only with the Thunderbird.
Several native representations of the creature have been retrieved; all depict a long,
serpentine animal with small forelimbs and a doglike or crocodilian head. A vivid
description of the monster appears in a Native American legend:
Shortly the water of the lake began to churn, and the head and finned forelegs of the Sea-Wolf, which some call the Wasgo, appeared near the surface. As the huge beast rose through the open trap, snapping at the bait...the split cedar snapped shut on the monster, breaking its back. In spite of this injury, the Sea-Wolf snarled and pawed and thrashed.
The Kwakiutl tribe, who lived on the British Columbian coast north of the present-day
city of Bella Coola, specified that Sisiutl was an animal that was "of the
earth", not one of the mythical creatures of the sea; this distinctly shows that the
Pacific Northwest tribes were convinced of the animal's existence. As far north as
Alaska, the Inuit (Eskimos) spoke of the pal-rai-yuk, a creature which seems
analogous with the Sea-Wolf of further south, if not for its six legs.
Roy P. Mackal sums up reports of Canadian lake serpents in Searching for Hidden
Animals; the picture he ends up with is of a creature very much like the
Sea-Wolf. He goes on to speculate that the lake monsters are actually a surviving
populations of a type of primitive whale called a zeuglodon. Is the Sea-Wolf, too, a
zeuglodon?
As a final note, depictions of what may be the same animal as the Sea-Wolf have been found
as far south as the Nazca Plain, in Peru. One of the famous "Nazca lines"
depicts a whale-like sea monster, complete with two forelimbs, crocodilian snout, and
large eyes.
MACKAL, Roy P.
1980 Searching
for Hidden Animals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
MEURGER, Michel, and Claude Gagnon
1988 Lake
Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. London: Fortean Times.
SWORDS, Michael D.
1991
The Wasgo or Sisiutl: A Cryptozoological Sea-Animal of the Pacific Northwest Coast of the
Americas. Journal of Scientific Exploration 5:1.