The Loodoo

Gather in, and mind the water.

A naturalist's field-notebook page studying the Loodoo: the water-wolf coiling through the deep, the copper-helmeted diver, the lit portholes along its flank, and the shanty written out in a careful hand. — From a shore-keeper's logbook. Le Loup d'eau, the Water-Wolf the fishermen called Loodoo. Observations and accounts collected along the north shore, 1871–1886.

Before the harbor had its name, before the piers were driven or the tug boats ran, when the river came down dark to meet the lake, there was the Loodoo. The old fishermen called it le loup d’eau, the wolf of the water, and told of it low over their nets and their suppers. But the children could not hold the old words in their mouths. They heard loup d’eau and said Loodoo, and said it again in their games and their dares and their bad dreams, until the small mouths had worn the name down soft and made it their own. And it was the children’s name that stuck. To this day it is the Loodoo the fishermen say, and the Loodoo the little ones are kept from at the water’s edge.

They say it is long as a schooner and pale as drowned moonlight, with the head of a wolf and the body of the deep. They say it takes the boats that do not come home. And should you doubt it, look close: all down its flank the brass portholes still burn, lamp by lamp, the lights of every ship it has swallowed, glowing yet beneath the waves.

Oh the Loodoo swims where the cold lights gleam,
  (haul away, O the wolf of the water)
with a lantern-diver a-walking his dream,
  (and it’ll carry you under)
he lifts his hand and the beast draws near,
not to drown him, no, but to hold him dear,
so mind the dark and the deep down here,
  (for the Loodoo’ll have you)

Some nights a diver goes down to meet it, an old copper helmet and a lantern swinging low, walking the drowned slope with the light held out before him. The beast rises. The man reaches. And there in the cold and the current the two of them touch, wolf and wanderer, more curious than afraid, the way the very oldest stories always end: not in teeth, but in wonder.

So when the wind comes off the lake and the harbor lights double on the black water, you will know which are the boats and which are the Loodoo, watching. Be kind to the water. Be home before dark. And if the little ones will not mind you, tell them true, the way it was told to you:

The Loodoo’ll get you.

Painted on an alley wall in downtown Algoma, August 2026, by Don Krumpos and Erin La Bonte. A companion to the freshwater estuary field guide a few steps down the same alley, part of a longer working to turn an overlooked corridor into a whole world of water, one wall at a time. Our thanks to building owner Nick Uecker and to the Community Improvement of Algoma.

Gallery