The Hutchins Ringdocus, Montana's Shunka Warak'in (Madison Valley, 1886)

In the 1880s the Madison Valley of southwestern Montana was ranch country. Israel Ammon Hutchins, known as I.A., was a Mormon settler with a ranch on what is now the Sun Ranch. In 1886 an animal began killing livestock across the valley. At night, it screamed.

Elliott Hutchins, I.A.'s son, recalled "haunting screams at night" in his memoirs. Later retellings call the sound a long, keening wail. It left hair standing on end.

One winter morning, by the account later published by I.A.'s grandson Ross Hutchins, the dogs began to bark. "He discovered that a wolf-like beast of dark colour was chasing my grandmother's geese." Hutchins fired. He hit one of his own cows, which was on the other side of some brush.

The animal came back. This time he killed it. It did not die quietly. Elliott wrote that it "bit through a half-inch rope with a single bite and exerted his very last strength to reach any one of us."

Joseph Sherwood, a taxidermist and storekeeper, traded Hutchins a cow for the body. He mounted it with a snarling expression and showed it for decades at his store-museum at Henry's Lake, Idaho. He labelled it the "Guyasticutus", or "freak wolf". The family later remembered the name as "ringdocus". The mount later went into storage with Sherwood's collection at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello.

Measured after its recovery, it is 48 inches from snout to rump, not counting the tail. 27 to 28 inches at the shoulder. The coat is dark-brown, almost black, with lighter tan areas and a faint impression of stripes on its flanks. A narrow snout. A back that slopes down like a hyena's.

In 1977 Ross Hutchins published the story with a photograph in Trails to Nature's Mysteries. In 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark tied it to the Ioway legend of the shunka warak'in, the "carrying-off dogs", a link first suggested to Coleman by the Ioway writer Lance Foster. In 2007 another grandson, Jack Kirby, found the mount in Pocatello. "I never doubted the story," he said. It went on loan to the Madison Valley History Museum near Ennis, where it is now the museum's most popular exhibit.

A description sent to the Smithsonian brought no identification. A Cryptomundo commenter who said they were a curator wrote that two curators had judged it "a poorly mounted black wolf, period." Others proposed a hyena escaped from a circus, though the nearest circus was hundreds of miles away. Or a wolf-dog, dog-coyote or wolf-coyote hybrid. Karl Shuker has discussed a surviving prehistoric animal, such as the "running hyena" Chasmaporthetes ossifragus, and dismissed a wolf-hyena hybrid as biologically impossible.

Matthew Kennedy, writing in his Encyclopedia of the Snake River Plain, traces the old name to "Gyascutus", a tall-tale creature in newspapers from 1845. In 2007 Coleman proposed DNA work with Jeff Meldrum and a University of Maine lab. The test has never been done.

In 2018 a strange canid shot near Denton, Montana, proved by DNA to be a gray wolf. The Madison Valley animal has never faced that test. Montana calls it the Madison Monster. Idaho remembers Sherwood's museum. And in its case near Ennis, the creature still snarls.