Axehandle Hound

Also Known As: also written axe handle hound and axe-handle hound; given the mock Latin name Canis Consumens by Henry H. Tryon, 1939
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It lives on nothing but the wooden handles of axes and peavies, and it can strip a camp of a winter’s supply in a single night.
Role in Mythos: The axehandle hound is one of the fearsome critters of the North American logging camps, the joke animals lumberjacks used to explain missing gear and to test the credulity of new hands.
Relation to Humans: It never harms a man, only his tools, which in a camp that lives by the axe is a serious enough crime. Tryon records one logger who kept a hound as a pet and found it expensive to feed.

Morning in a northern logging camp, and the tool rack is wrong. The steel is all there: the bits of the double-bladed axes, the hooked iron of the peavies, cold and slick with frost. The wood is not. Where the handles ought to be there are ragged stubs and a carpet of pale shavings, and a crew of men who cannot work until somebody finds more handles.

The camp had a culprit ready. It was the axehandle hound, and it had been in again.

This is a lumber camp animal, and it never pretended to be anything else. It belongs to the fearsome critters, the menagerie of impossible beasts that loggers in the northern woods invented around the turn of the twentieth century and kept alive by telling them, with a straight face, to anyone who had not heard them before. Its printed record is short and specific. The Wisconsin folklorist Charles E. Brown, curator of the museum of the State Historical Society, listed it in his 1935 pamphlet *Paul Bunyan Natural History*, a catalogue of the wildlife around Paul Bunyan’s camps. Four years later Henry H. Tryon gave it a full entry, a drawing by Margaret R. Tryon and a mock scientific name, *Canis Consumens*, in his book *Fearsome Critters*, published by the Idlewild Press of Cornwall, New York. Nobody ever believed in it the way people believed in a ghost. It was believed in the way a snipe hunt is believed in: for exactly as long as the joke needed.

What Brown described was a dog put together from the contents of a tool shed. It looked something like a dachshund, he wrote, but its head was shaped like a hatchet, its body was short and shaped like an axe handle, and it walked on short, stumpy legs. Tryon gives the same build, a slender handle of a body on stumpy legs under a head like an axe. The joke is all in the silhouette. Laid on the floor of a camp at night, the hound would be hard to tell from the thing it was eating.

It ate only handles. Brown has it prowling the camps after dark and eating axe and peavy handles, the long wooden stocks of the hooked levers loggers used to roll logs, and nothing else, and he credits the hounds with putting away whole cords of them. Tryon calls it the bane of the supply and depot camps of the northern logging operations, the places where spare handles were stored by the box, and he makes it strictly nocturnal. His figures for one animal’s appetite are precise in the way only a tall tale can be: two boxes of DB handles, the double-bit axe handles, and sixteen six-foot peavy stocks, eaten in a single night.

The raid itself is easy to stage from the tellings. A depot shed in the small hours, snow ticking against the boards, the smell of pine pitch and lamp oil gone cold. Somewhere in the dark a dry, steady crunching, like a man working through a stick of kindling with his teeth. By lamplight there is nothing to see but a low shape slipping out under the door, and in the morning the storekeeper counts his boxes and swears.

Tryon’s entry carries the one real story the creature has, and it belongs to a logger named Jim Peters. Peters tamed an axehandle hound and kept it as a pet, which went well until the obvious problem arrived. Jim had a wooden leg, and the leg had been made from an axe-helve. A hound that regards axe handles as delicacies does not make an exception for its owner. Peters settled the matter by feeding it red oak handles, which, Tryon notes, the hound disliked as heartily as any experienced chopper. The punchline is a woodsman’s joke. Red oak was the handle wood a logger did not want, and the hound, it turned out, had the same taste in timber as the men it robbed.

That anecdote is about as close as the axehandle hound comes to a myth cycle. There is no origin story. No telling explains where the first one came from, how it breeds, or what it ate before there were axes. No source records anyone killing one. The animal exists to account for an empty rack, and the record never asks more of it.

It travelled anyway. Jorge Luis Borges, drawing on Brown’s pamphlet, put the axehandle hound into the section on the fauna of the United States in his *Book of Imaginary Beings*, which is how a joke from the Wisconsin woods ended up shelved beside the griffin and the basilisk. It turns up today in reference works on American folklore as one of the classic examples of the lumber camp tall tale, usually with the same sketch: hatchet head, handle body, stumpy legs, a bad habit.

Its power, such as it is, is the power of a pest. It is silent enough to work through a shed full of sleeping men, it can eat a box of handles faster than a crew can use them, and it leaves the steel behind as if to make the point. The camp’s whole economy runs on handles, so a single hound could stop a crew in its tracks.

Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of a dog with one idea. It works only at night. It can be tamed, by Tryon’s account, although it remains costly to keep. And it has standards. Give it red oak and it will turn its nose up, which makes the cure for the axehandle hound the same as the cure for a bad handle: buy better wood.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an axehandle hound?

The axehandle hound is a fearsome critter of North American lumber camp folklore, an imaginary dog that eats nothing but the wooden handles of axes and peavies. It was described in print by Charles E. Brown in 1935 and by Henry H. Tryon in 1939. Loggers used tales like it to entertain each other and to fool newcomers to the camps.

What does the axehandle hound look like?

The axehandle hound looks something like a dachshund, according to Charles E. Brown. It has a hatchet-shaped head, a short body shaped like an axe handle, and short, stumpy legs. Henry H. Tryon gives it the same build in his book Fearsome Critters.

What does the axehandle hound eat?

The axehandle hound eats only wooden tool handles, especially axe handles and the long stocks of peavies. It raids logging camps at night, and Brown credits the hounds with eating whole cords of handles. Tryon says one hound ate two boxes of double-bit axe handles and sixteen six-foot peavy stocks in a single night.

Why does the axehandle hound dislike red oak?

In Henry H. Tryon’s account, the axehandle hound dislikes red oak handles as much as any experienced chopper does. A logger named Jim Peters, whose wooden leg was made from an axe-helve, kept a pet hound and solved the problem by feeding it red oak handles. The joke is that red oak was the handle wood loggers themselves did not want.

Is the axehandle hound a real legend or a modern invention?

The axehandle hound is a lumberjack tall tale from the northern logging camps, never a creature anyone sincerely believed in. Its printed record begins with Charles E. Brown’s pamphlet Paul Bunyan Natural History in 1935 and Henry H. Tryon’s Fearsome Critters in 1939. Jorge Luis Borges later included it in his Book of Imaginary Beings, drawing on Brown.