Le Loup d'Eau: The Water-Wolf of the Ahnapee Mouth

The town was Wolf River before it was Algoma. Folks think it is named for the timber-wolf they used to scare the children with, a great gray wolf that would get them if they strayed toward the water. The fishermen knew it was not in the woods. After the tug John Evenson rolled over in the canal in June of 1895 and they never brought Boswell, the engineer, back up, the men working the Ahnapee mouth started saying the wolf had gone into the water, to take what the lake takes.

It carries a cold light it offers like a lantern, and the men who rowed toward it did not always row back. The fishermen called it the Loodoo. The proper name, worn down from the French, is Le Loup d’Eau, the Water-Wolf. Its form is three legible parts and no more: a drowned gray wolf’s head, a single anglerfish lure on a stalk rising from the brow between the ears, casting a cold blue-green light, and a long eel body armored with lake-sturgeon scutes. Along its flank it wears brass ship’s portholes lit warm from within. It wears the boats it took, their drowned lamps still burning inside it.

The name is not one word but a stratigraphy, the same sound-law that turned Ahnepee into Ahnapee and Beaudoin into Bodoh a township over. The fish-house ledger spells it Loopdo. The parish register has Loudeau. The children just said the Loodoo. Folks figured it was a kid’s word, but it is a worn scrap of French, loup d’eau, and the name remembered what the thing was after the men forgot.

Everything before the creature is a matter of record. The tug, the canal, the June that took the engineer. The creature is the one thing openly invented, set down among the facts so that the seam does not show. That is the whole method. You never have to pretend it is real for the lake to keep its cold light.