The Wolf Demon: The Queen of the Kanawha

The great, round moon looked down in a flood of silver light upon the virgin forest by the banks of the Scioto, the beautiful river which winds through the richest and fairest valley in all the wide western land—the great corn valley of the Shawnee tribe—those red warriors who, in their excursions across the Ohio (the “La Belle” river of the early French adventurers) had given to the plains and valleys of Kentucky the name of “The Dark and Bloody Land.”

The tree-tops were green and silver; but under the spreading branches, sable was the gloom.

The strange, odd noises of the night broke the forest stillness. One hears all noises in the night even in a civilized land; how much more wondrous then are the wild, free cries of the inhabitants of the great greenwood, untrammeled by the restraining hand of man!

The free winds surged with a mournful sound through the branches of the wood.

A ring around the moon told the coming storm.

Dark masses of clouds dashed across the sky, ever and anon vailing in the “mistress of the night,” as though some unquiet spirit was envious of the pale moonbeams, and wished to cover, with its mantle, the earth, and cloak an evil deed.

A frightened deer came dashing through the aisles of the forest—a noble buck with branching horns that told of many a year spent under the greenwood tree.

Across a little open glade, whereon the moonbeams fell—kissing the earth as though they loved it—dashed the deer, and then, entering again the dark recesses of the forest, the brown coat of the wood-prince was lost in the inky gloom.

Then in the trail of the buck, guided by the noise of the rustling branches, came a dark form.

As the form stole, with noiseless tread, across the moonlit glade, it displayed the person of an Indian warrior.

A red brave, decked out in deer-skin garb, stained with the pigments of the earth in many colors, and fringed in fanciful fashion.

The warrior was a tall and muscular savage, one of Nature’s noblemen. A son of the wilderness untrammeled by the taint of civilization—a brave of the great Shawnee tribe, the lords of the Ohio valley from the oil “licks” of the Alleghany stream to the level prairies where the Wabash and the White pour their muddy tide into the great river of the New World, the winding, smiling Ohio.