Stanley Waterloo (1846-1913) was an American writer of note, largely for the novel The Story of Ab (1897), a prehistoric journal of a young man’s rise in the ranks of his tribe. He had a legal squabble with another writer of Northerns, Jack London, who wrote Before Adam (1907). London claimed his book was a commentary on Waterloo’s.
Both Waterloo and London wrote some strange Northerns, those tales of weirdness and horror set in the Arctic or the big woods of Canada or the Nothern US. London gave us mammoths while Waterloo prefers a way to explain werewolves.
“A Tragedy of the Forest” appeared in Waterloo’s story collection The Wolf’s Long Howl (1899). You know this is a Northern right at the get-go because it is in the snowy forests of Michigan’s Saginaw Valley. The unnamed protagonist is a hunter who has the job of supplying meat to the logging camp. He encounters a large gray wolf but the animal doesn’t attack him on his bed in the snow. The two trade spirits. We can now see life from the wolf’s point-of-view, as though a human observer is along for the ride.
The hunter, now bearing a wolf’s soul, runs to camp. The men there put him to bed and watch him writhe in pain. Meanwhile the wolf is out hunting deer. It fails to catch any and turns to other prey. He spies a human farm and its inhabitants. One is a young blond girl. The wolf goes for the child but it met by the farmer’s loyal hound. Back at the bunk house the man’s body rolls around in pain. As the wolf is killed by the farmer’s dog, the man in the bunk dies too. The child is saved.
Waterloo enjoys telling this story of what it must be like to be a wolf. If this story was a film or television episode there would be lots of shots through the wolf’s eyes. It has that “in-the-skin” feel. I think Waterloo is also determined to show how werewolf stories might happen somewhat logically. He doesn’t explain why the souls of the wolf and man exchange, only that they do. There is no supernatural explanation but nor does he try to explain it with psychology. The wolf doesn’t “think” it is a man. It really has a different soul in it.
Other writers would use this idea with humans alone in Freaky Friday situations. Mary Rodgers 1972 book was not the first. H. G. Wells used it in “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” in The Idler, May 1896. H. P. Lovecraft lifted it for “The Thing on the Doorstep” (Weird Tales, January 1937). Both these writers used it for horror purposes. The Freaky Friday version is more pleasant, a way to get two characters to understand each other’s lives. Waterloo’s version is obviously tragic but basically does the same thing. Bruce Elliott will do the opposite in “Wolves Don’t Cry” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1954) when we get to see a wolf living a man’s life.
The idea of a man’s soul being trapped in a wolf will get re-used by the Northerns biggest horror writer, Algernon Blackwood. In the story “Running Wolf” (Century Magazine, August 1920), Blackwood tells the story the other way around, from the outsider’s perspective. A man follows a wolf that does some incredible things because it has the ghost of a native man inside it. Blackwood’s story is supernatural, while Waterloo’s is less so.
