The Living Lakes: The Hodag

On some horribly still night, a cry rose from outside the bunkhouse.

“Oil! Bring oil!”

I was still awake. It had been a grueling three weeks at Mosquito Hill Logging Camp. A writer by trade, my body had been rendered useless by the daily labor, barely strong enough to scratch my racing thoughts into a notebook each night. The foreman, an old sausage of a Dwarf named Jakko, had agreed to let me observe the dozens of migrant Herran he employed, on the condition that I earn my keep.

For the whole of winter, I was the Cookee’s boy (an assistant to the assistant Cook), hauling canteens of water and steaming sacks of pancakes out to the workers, and lugging firewood back to the camp.

Now, nearly sixty souls jammed into that musky bunkhouse scrambled out of their cots and into the snow, bundled in blanketcoats and longjohns—Dwarves and Herrans blended together in their patchwork uniform. I followed, weakly.

At the stable, the Teamster continued to holler, and the lumberjacks huddled around him and an enormous lump of black that lay slumped in the snow. It was one of the hauling oxen, the older of the two. I tried to look for blood, but there was none to be seen.

A word began whispering round the men.

“Hodag.”

I thought it could be the beast that attacked the poor ox, some Herran word for wolf or cougar. Yet, when the Cook came bellowing out from behind, carrying hefty drums of oil, I knew I was mistaken.

The Cook doused the beast in oil, and the men took the weeping Teamster by the sleeve as they stepped back. I looked up to the grim Herran man beside me and asked for some explanation. He knelt down, but kept his eyes on the corpse.

“You burn ‘em out here,” he said. “Left alone too long and a Hodag gonna crawl out of there.”

He pointed to the broad chest of the ox, where stars reflected on it’s oiled up hide.

“Gonna crawl out of there and payback all the hits and kicks and whips the Teamster’s laid on.”

The man smiled for a second, then hawked a loogie into the snow. As if on cue, a flash of orange light came up from the beast. Torches had been thrown into the center and the men stepped back, only to slowly creep up toward the warmth.

I was thankful for the heat, and the powerful smell of roasted beef, but to my city-born eyes, the fire only made the woods darker.

- Butchko Halme, The Lakeside Almanac

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Howdy! Welcome to another missive from The Living Lakes. This time, we’re looking at a creature familiar to many Wisconsinites: the Hodag. A squat cross between a crocodile, an ox, and a bulldog, this “fearsome critter” is a staple of lumberjack lore. In The Living Lakes, and similar to real-world legends, Hodags are born from the corpses of abused work animals. If the animal isn’t burned, a Hodag will emerge from the carcass and stalk the woods surrounding the campsite it once called home.

Logging is a vital industry in The Living Lakes, where it’s uncommon to be out of sight of some vast tree line at any given moment. It is also an incredibly dangerous one. Even for the ape-like arboreal dwarves, it’s rare to meet a lumberjack on the other side of middle age. If you aren’t taken out by a falling tree limb, if you don’t drown beneath logs on the river, if you don’t catch some horrid sickness spreading around camp, if you don’t nick yourself on a rusty saw, and if you don’t find yourself on the wrong end of a knife argument, then you still have to deal with the monsters that lurk in the woods.

In the real world, the Hodag was a hoax pulled off by Gene Shepard, a log roller in Rhinelander. You can learn more about its history below from a book that’s been extremely helpful for this project: Daylight in the Swamp by Robert W. Wells.

For the miniature, I used a Reaper Miniatures bulldog that I was given by my friend Collin. It already had strange little fangs, which reminded me of the famous statue in Rhinelander. 

From there, I sculpted the back spines and the tail using a 1:1 mix of Green Stuff and epoxy putty. I opted for a more beaver-like paddle tail to help it navigate the swampy waterways and ponds of the setting. I imagine the Hodag lurking in the waters of a log drive like a Northwoods crocodile, waiting for log drivers to slip and fall into the river. I also didn’t have any bull horns, so I used antlers from the Grand Cathay Spirit Longma instead. Perhaps this Hodag uses its impressive rack to lure would-be hunters?

There are tons of lumberjack legends categorized under the historic term of “fearsome critters.” Even the silliest ones, like the no-knee Hugag mentioned above, give me folklore and bizarre creatures to flesh out the world. I’m hopeful that I’ll even be able to incorporate the granddaddy of them all someday: Paul Bunyan.

If you’d like to learn more about Hodags, check out this post on Wisconsin 101.

As luck would have it, I got to visit my friend who lives just outside Rhinelander last weekend. This gave me the perfect opportunity to snap a picture of my mini Hodag alongside the World’s Largest Hodag!

Hate that this fit is giving "the dichotomy is crazy"

Thanks for reading! 

xoxo, Gray