Shunka Warak'in, the Hutchins Beast of the Madison Valley, 1886

The upper Madison Valley. The 1880s. Israel Ammon Hutchins, a Mormon settler, ran a ranch beside the Madison River. About a year after a toll bridge was built there in 1885, he bought the bridge and the ranch from Mathew Dunham. The 2007 Bozeman Daily Chronicle placed the shooting on what is now the Sun Ranch.

Something was killing his livestock. Nobody knew what. At night Hutchins heard it. A long, keening wail.

Hutchins went out with his rifle and found the animal chasing his wife's geese. He fired. He missed, and killed one of his own cows. "The snarling attacker ran into the night, unfazed."

It came back. As J.W. Ocker tells it, "The next time he got it in its sights, though, he missed the cow and killed the cryptid."

The death was not quiet. In the son's account, the animal tried to attack the family as it died. It went for a rope, "tearing through a half-inch rope in one champing bite." And it "screamed like a person." Decades later the grandson, naturalist Ross E. Hutchins, wrote of "the human-like screams of the shunka warak'in."

It was "less like a wolf than a strange hyena." Short legs. High shoulders. A sloping back. Its coat was nearly black, with a hint of stripes on the flanks. The head was oddly shaped, with a narrow snout. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark later called it a "frightening-looking, primitive wolflike beast."

Hutchins traded the body to Joseph Sherwood for a cow. Sherwood was an amateur taxidermist trained by correspondence course. He ran a sawmill, a post office and a store-museum at Henry's Lake, Idaho. He mounted the animal snarling and, by Ross Hutchins's account, called it a "ringdocus." In 1948 the Salt Lake Tribune Magazine pictured it under another label, "Guyasticutus," saying it was shot "after its persistence in munching Cattler."

The mount stayed on display until about 1980. Then it disappeared. For years the only image was a photograph in Ross Hutchins's 1977 autobiography, Trails to Nature's Mysteries. In 2007 it was found "under a sheet" at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello. Jack Kirby, a Hutchins grandson, recovered it. It went on loan to the Madison Valley History Museum near Ennis, where it is the most popular exhibit.

What was it? Suggestions include a wolf-dog hybrid, a dog-coyote hybrid, a wolf-coyote hybrid, an unusual wolf, or a hyena. Ross Hutchins noted that "some have theorized" it was a hyena escaped from a circus, but the nearest circus was hundreds of miles away. Curator Larry Love has said a Smithsonian team examined the animal and could not identify it, a claim no other source backs up. The mount has never been DNA-tested. The museum and the descendants prefer it that way.

The name became its own mystery. Anthropologist Lance Foster tied the mount to shunka warak'in, a name meaning "carries off dogs," crediting Rae Ellen Moore. Coleman and Clark popularized the link in 1999, though the Ioway never reached the Madison Valley. Matthew Kennedy traces "Guyasticutus" back to the Gyascutus, a hoax-show creature of 1845. To him, the real puzzle is the name, not the animal. The museum simply calls it the Madison Monster.