Waheela

Native tribes in the Nahanni Valley of the Northwest Territories of Canada have long spoken of an enormous wolf-like beast that stalks the frozen wastelands and is called the Waheela. The Waheela is usually said to look very similar to a wolf, but much larger, more muscular and heavily built, and with shorter, stockier legs that are longer in the front than in the back. Indeed the Waheela’s body is said to be almost bear-like in its shape and massive quality, and it is also often described as having disproportionately large feet that are almost like snowshoes with widely spaced toes, a broader, more formidable head than a normal wolf with smaller ears, and sometimes is mentioned as having long white fur. At least one eyewitness sighting has described the beast as being like “a wolf on steroids,” and standing around 3 and a half feet at the shoulder, which is far larger than a typical wolf.

The legends surrounding this creature say that it is a solitary hunter rather than a pack animal like wolves and most other canids, and that it has various supernatural powers. Interestingly, the Waheela’s main territory of the Nahanni Valley is also known for its large amount of disappearances and deaths, with corpses found here having a habit of being minus a head, leading to the rather ominous nickname "The Headless Valley." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5uuoYtEfz0)

Some have even blamed these mysterious deaths on the presence of the Waheela, and indeed the valley is wreathed in dark legends of the numerous evil spirits said to inhabit it. The Waheela has also been reported from Alaska and northern Michigan, and Ontario, Canada, also has its own version of the Waheela called the Ontario White Wolf.

Theories on what the Waheela could be vary, with one of the most popular ideas in cryptozoology being that it is not any sort of wolf at all, but rather a relic population of a prehistoric beast known as the bear-dog. These imposing creatures were from the family Amphicyonidae, a group of animals that resembled a hybrid between a wolf and a bear, hence their common name, and are thought to have died out in the New World around 2 million years ago and in the Old World around 10,000 years ago. A top proponent of the idea that the Waheela could be a surviving population of bear-dogs was the renowned cryptoloologist Ivan Sanderson, who believed that they could still remain in the extremely isolated, remote regions from which the Waheela reports come. Other theories point to a relic population of dire wolves (Canis dirus), which were large, heavily built wolves that became extinct near the end of the Pleistocene epoch, around 125,000 years ago. Yet other theories speculate that the Waheela could be some sort of North American relative of the hyena or a new species of large canid all together. More skeptical evaluations of the Waheela point to it being merely exaggerated reports of exceptionally large specimens of the known grey wolf (Canis lupus), or mere superstitious tales from Native folklore and legends. (Mysterious Cryptid Canids of the World)