Dogman & Werewolf Encounters

Two weeks after the flood, a woman and her brother go back to their mother’s house in southern Missouri for the things she keeps asking for. The water has gone down, but something came in with it and has been living upstairs. Her brother calls it a werewolf, and by the time the deputy arrives, they have agreed to call it a bear.

A farmer sees something at the edge of his pasture that he can’t name, so he calls it a dog and tells no one. In the bottoms after a flood, keeping quiet has a cost.

In the spring of 2005, seven undocumented laborers were clearing storm-wrecked timber deep in the Minnesota woods. Then they began finding wolves and coyotes torn apart and left in pieces. Soon they were seeing the animal responsible: huge, black, dog-like, and able to stand like a man. At first it ignored them. Then it took an interest in them. Twenty years later, one of the crew tells the whole story for the first time.

A young graduate biologist studied wolves in the woods of Cook County, Minnesota. She was twenty-five, two field seasons in, and thought she knew every animal that lived in those woods. She was wrong.

Five college students take an end-of-summer canoe trip down Minnesota's Kettle River, expecting nothing worse than sore arms and sunburn. Then something steps out of the tree line into their firelight — and the narrator, a lifelong skeptic who'd long since written off the cryptid stuff he loved as a kid, realizes he's looking at a dogman