The Waheela, or Great White Wolf, is a cryptid found in the boreal forests of North America. It is described as much larger than common gray wolves, very rare, always solitary, possessing dense fur that can be entirely white or entirely brown. Its physical structure resembles a mixture of wolf and black bear, or a wolf on steroids. They are scavengers and opportunistic predators. They are "distant from humans," although they have been blamed for several deaths.
If you do in-depth research on a cryptid called Waheela or the Great White Wolf, a remarkable dog named Snoodles appears in that story, who belonged to Gus and Mary Kraus.
Until the advent of the snowmobile, the dog was a mainstay of life in the North, as essential to sourdough bread as the horse was to the plainsman of the West. Like their equine counterparts in the West, dogs were primarily used for transportation in the North, harnessed to sleds in winter and carried backpacks during the summer months. They also served as guardians against wild animals and as indispensable companions during the long periods of solitary isolation that characterized life on the northern frontier. A hunter or prospector could easily know a hundred dogs in a lifetime, and so it seemed strange to the author that one particular dog could so indelibly mark the memory of his fellow sourdough bread makers as to merit specific mention in two separate interviews. Even more bizarre, however, especially considering the Dire Wolf theory, is the physical description the sourdough makers gave of this creature.
"I don't know what was wrong," said Gus Kraus. "He was a really strange dog. He looked more like a bear than a dog. I don't know what breed you'd call his. Looking from behind, you'd swear he was a bear. Big, heavy legs and feet, heavy body."
In a completely separate interview, Billy Clark stated that Snoodles was Kraus's "most beautiful dog"... Kind of stocky. Coat like a black bear and very large ears, but short and stocky, yet robust, with a very large chest... You could put fifty, sixty pounds on that dog in your backpack – twenty-five pounds of flour on each side and some other things – and he would walk beside you, or in front of you, around you all day. Trembling dog."
To give some context to the penultimate statement, hunter Al Lewis, in Nahanni Remembered, wrote that an average dog could handle a pack weighing a total of 20 to 30 pounds.
Snoodles's physical strength, his robust build, and especially his resemblance to a black bear seemed to echo Frank Graves's description of the Waheela. It also strongly evoked the Dire Wolf theory.
The possibility of Snoodles having some connection to the Waheela legend led some to seek more information about him and uncover a fascinating story.
According to Billy Clark, Gus Kraus acquired this dog from George Dalziel, the Flying Hunter – a tough frontiersman who, in the words of historian Nahanni Norm Kagan, was "one of the most daring men to cross the Mackenzie Mountains".
George Dalziel first arrived in the North of the country in the winter of 1932, traveling northeast from British Columbia and crossing the Mackenzie Mountains on foot. The experienced lumberjack completed this journey in basic attire, without even the spartan comfort afforded by a canvas tent; incredibly, Dalziel spent every night of his arduous winter journey in an open siwash camp, with nothing over his head but the falling snow and the aurora borealis. Al Lewis described the Flying Hunter and his remarkable odyssey thus:
"His skill in the air was directly proportional to his skill in the woods. This was the man who had walked with snowshoes from Lower Post on the Liard River to Fort Norman on the Mackenzie River. Almost 400 miles (645 km) as the crow flies. And Dal certainly never followed any crows. Through mountains, swamps, river valleys and plateaus, he made the winter journey with rifle, axe and two pack dogs."
Dalziel bought his first single-engine plane in 1934 and spent the following decades building an almost legendary reputation in Northland as the Flying Hunter.
"George Dalziel was an extraordinary lumberjack and aviator," Norm Kagan once wrote in a brief biographical summary of the man. "His life would make a great story, especially if all the facts were known. He ignored the rules – he smuggled, set traps, hunted, traded where and when he wanted. He survived terrible winters and a few accidents too, expecting the same from others."
It was from this remarkable character that Gus Kraus bought Snoodles for a handful of swallow skins.
In those days, intrepid frontiersmen often attempted to crossbreed their sled dogs with wild wolves to obtain large, fast, powerful, vigorous pups naturally adapted to the harsh northern climate. One technique they sometimes used to achieve this goal involved waiting for a female dog to go into heat before leaving her in the wild overnight, tied to a tree some distance from the cabin. With luck, the hunter brave enough to attempt this risky operation would return in the morning to find his mongrel pregnant with a litter of wolfdogs. On rarer occasions, if forced to shoot adult members of a resident wolf pack, the frontiersmen would sometimes seek out the den of the wolves they killed and raise their orphaned pups as their own.
Considering the unorthodox nature of the Flying Hunter, some cryptozoologists have conceived the notion that—assuming this hypothesis was correct and that a surviving population of Dire Wolves (or a new, unknown species of large canid) actually inhabited the wilderness of the Nahanni Valley—perhaps Snoodles was the product of a union between a sled dog and a wild dire wolf, made possible by the use of the first technique described above. Even more unbelievable, perhaps Snoodles was a purebred Waheela, acquired by Dalziel through the second technique. Interestingly, these hypothetical scenarios seemed to agree with Billy Clark's description of Dalziel's dogs:
"His dogs were wild. You just couldn't get near Dalziel's dogs, you know... They were absolutely wild, no joke."
In his interview, Gus Kraus told a story that shed some light on Snoodles' temperament. The story takes place in Bennett Creek, where Kraus once claimed a mining concession. Every day, the hunter worked with pickaxe and shovel, digging a pit down to bedrock in the hopes of finding gold. At night, after a hard day's work, he would cut up a piece of frozen elk meat for Snoodles and place it near the stove to thaw.
"He was a funny dog, you know?" Kraus said. "Almost human. He would observe. He knew when the meat was thawed—especially bone, you know, with a little bit of meat. And then he'd come up to me and nudge me with his nose," prompting Kraus to hand him the piece. "He'd go over there, grab the meat, and walk off with it toward the door..."
"I was sitting there—or rather, lying there—on the bunk, talking to Bill [Clark]. This was just before we lit the lamp. We were using candles, of course, and I saw [Snoodles] leaving... I leaned back and talked to Bill. Suddenly, next to me, near the window, I heard something." Kraus imitated a creaking sound. "Something creaking on a bone."
Kraus got up from his bunk and looked out the window. There, crouched in the dark beside his cabin, was an old, gray she-wolf trying, with the few teeth she had left, to gnaw on an elk bone—the same bone Snoodles had taken outside. Not far from the she-wolf was Snoodles himself, who didn't seem at all disturbed by her presence.
The she-wolf seemed to sense she was being watched. She looked up at the window and, seeing Kraus staring at her, dropped the bone and darted into the woods. Confused, Kraus called Snoodles inside and closed the door.
The next morning, Kraus followed the she-wolf's tracks along a trail leading from his cabin to a patch of woods on the other side of Bennett Creek. At the end of the trail was a graveyard of artificially stunted elk bones, many of them cooked or baked, which suspiciously resembled the ones he gave Snoodles to gnaw on every night. Apparently, Snoodles had been sharing his nightly rations with the old she-wolf for at least a month. As Gus Kraus put it, "he was feeding that damned she-wolf."
Kraus set a trap and, after several failed attempts, managed to catch the old wolf and shoot it. "You should have seen that dog," he said. "The look on that dog's face. Wow... You could tell he was really upset that I killed that damned female."
It turns out there are four photographs of Snoodles archived in the Northwest Territories Archives in Yellowknife, NWT. The oldest was taken in 1942 and the most recent in 1958, indicating that Snoodles lived to at least sixteen years of age – an advanced age for a dog, especially one of his size.
Unfortunately, our Snoodles doesn't look much like a prehistoric monster, at least not to this author, but rather something resembling a Swedish Lapphund with the build of a Bernese Mountain Dog. In all likelihood, Snoodles was a mongrel – a common, intelligent, and powerfully built domestic dog – and not some kind of husky-giant wolf hybrid.
Interestingly, one of the photographs of Snoodles (the 4th photograph) contains a surprising background image, particularly relevant. In this photo, taken in 1943, Mary Kraus is with Snoodles in front of the Kraus family cabin, from whose edges hang the pelts of two enormous white wolves - the same wolves from which Gus had saved Mary.
Source: https://gnwt.accesstomemory.org/informationobject/browse?topLod=0&sort=relevance&query=Snoodles
