The Headless Valley

 

The clip above is from Hammerson Peters´ cryptozoologically oriented YouTube channel, which frequently promotes his book “Legends of the Nahanni Valley” (a location in Canada´s Northwest Territories). I haven´t read it, but I have previously reviewed some other books on Canadian folklore. In this clip, Peters expounds on some length on the Waheela, a mysterious creature known from Native mythology and the yarns of White hunters and sensationalists. Unfortunately, it´s not known to science!

The Waheela is apparently particularly associated with the previously mentioned Nahanni Valley, but Peters have found similar stories from the US West, including a supposed encounter at the notorious “Skinwalker Ranch” in Utah. The Waheela is often described as a super-sized wolf-like creature, or an animal with both canine and ursid characteristics. “Cryptozoologist” Ivan T Sanderson was interested in the reports, and I suppose some enthusiasts within that particular subculture still are. Speculations about the Waheela´s real identity abound. Are they actual wolves suffering from gigantism, misidentified albino bears, or prehistoric survivals? Sanderson proposed that it could be a Amphicyon (a “bear-dog” believed to have been extinct for over 2 million years) or a Dire Wolf (believed to have gone extinct around 10,000 years ago).

While nothing´s impossible, the fact that modern science haven´t found any Waheela suggest another possibility: the beast doesn´t really exist at all. It seems to occupy a mythological Native landscape also populated by dangerous humanoids, ghostly monsters, deadly giant beavers, and creatures that simply can´t exist (such as the Otter-man). In the American West, a large white wolf is called “medicine wolf” and seems to be explicitly supernatural. The Inuit story retold by Peters is also clearly mythological in character. Indeed, do even the super-sized timber wolves mentioned in the stories of White hunters exist? They may just be yarns. And how are we to interpret the claim, mentioned by Peters in another video, that the main enemy of the Waheela is a “lion”, here interpreted as a Smilodon?

Judging from John Warms´ book “Strange Creatures Seldom Seen”, Native tribes in Manitoba – another part of Canada – claim that many different species of gigantic animals live in their territories. My point, of course, is that some of these creatures would have been found by now had they actually existed in flesh-and-blood fashion. A single and rare cryptid could (perhaps) hide out in some remote part of the Northwest Territories, but that an entire armada of over-sized Animalia could do so staggers the imagination…