Vučji pastir

Wolves, hares, and foxes each had their own shepherd in South Slavic folk belief. A human figure, cursed with the office, commanded the animals and decided their fates. The Wolf Shepherd was the most feared of the three. He gathered his wolves once a year, assigned each its prey, and made them invisible when he walked with them. Krauss recorded this belief from multiple informants in Slavonia and the Croatian Sava region in the 1880s.

Appearance

The Wolf Shepherd looked like an ordinary man. He carried a whip and sometimes a horn. When he cracked the whip or blew the horn, wolves appeared from every direction. While he accompanied them, the wolves could not be seen by anyone. A farmer might lose livestock and find no tracks, no blood, no sign of predators. The wolves had been there, but the shepherd had made them invisible.

Only one trick revealed them. If someone stepped on the Wolf Shepherd’s right foot, the wolves became visible. An account recorded around 1862 describes a dying old shepherd who asked his son-in-law to take his whip and crack it outside. The young man saw countless wolves surrounding the farmstead. No one else could see them. The old man explained the rule about the right foot. The young man later demonstrated this to a farm overseer, who stepped on his right foot and saw wolves on all sides.

Krauss did not record this story at second hand. He wrote in 1908 that he had heard it directly from the man who claimed to be the new shepherd. The man told Krauss he should come to the mountain and pay him a visit, where he would show Krauss every wolf in the forest. Krauss only had to step on his right foot. Whether Krauss accepted the invitation, his book does not say.

Origins

The office was hereditary, but not in the usual sense. It passed at the moment of death. Before dying, the Wolf Shepherd had to hand his whip to a successor. If he failed, his wolves lingered at his farm, visible and vulnerable, because without their shepherd they could be seen and killed. The transfer amounted to a curse pushed onto the next person willing or foolish enough to accept it.

Krauss suspected the figure predated Christianity. St. George (sveti Juraj) served as the patron saint of wolves in Croatian folk belief, commanding them and assigning their prey. Krauss argued that St. George had simply been draped over an older, pre-Christian wolf deity. The saint was the costume. The office beneath it was far older. His feast day, April 23, became one of the calendar moments at which villagers prayed for protection against the wolves and their hidden master.

A Christianized Croatian narrative preserved by Krauss has St. George turning a man into a vukodlak for nine years by throwing a wolf-skin over him. The man hunts in wolf-form for the full nine years, suffering through the curse. He is freed at Easter when he ambushes his own wife on her way home from the church service and eats the blessed candles she carries in her basket. The wolf-skin then drops from his shoulders. He stands again as a man. Krauss read this as evidence that the older office had survived under new authority. The pre-Christian Wolf Shepherd had the power to transform humans into wolves. St. George inherited the power but used it as punishment rather than as office. The structure stayed. The names changed.

Behavior

Once a year, in winter, around Christmas midnight, the Wolf Shepherd gathered all wolves on a desolate heath or in the wild forest. He cracked his whip and blew his horn. Each wolf came forward and received its allotment: which farms to visit, which animals to take, which humans to avoid or target.

A huntsman climbed a tree on Christmas Eve and witnessed the ceremony from above. The Wolf Shepherd appeared beneath him in human form, cracked his whip, and the wolves assembled. Each received its assignment. Last came a lame wolf who asked what prey it had been given. The shepherd answered: “The one up there, sitting in the tree.” The hunter was terrified and lay ill for a long time afterward.

The Wolf Shepherd also protected human herders, because herders tended the flocks his wolves fed on. Farmers who beat their shepherds when livestock disappeared invited punishment. The Wolf Shepherd would send more wolves to take more animals. One tale tells of a herdsman who lost a piglet and was beaten by his master. The Wolf Shepherd told the weeping boy to stay home the next day and let the master drive the herd himself. The master lost two pigs. When he later refused to share slaughtered pork with the Wolf Shepherd, wolves devoured every pig on the farm and all the stored meat.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The figure of a supernatural wolf-commander appears across northern and eastern Europe. The Norse god Odin kept two wolves, Geri and Freki. The Lithuanian vilkatis tradition included a wolf-lord who organized hunts. The Romanian pricolici, living werewolves, answered to similar forest authorities. In each case, someone stood between the human world and the wolf world, regulating the violence wolves could do.

The South Slavic version is distinctive because the office belongs to an ordinary man, not a god or spirit. He lives in the village. He has a family. His neighbors may not know what he is. The whip and the wolves are his burden, passed to him by the last man who bore it, and he will pass them on before he dies. The supernatural authority over nature sits inside a completely human life.

Modern Survival

The Wolf Shepherd has largely vanished from living folk practice. Krauss noted in 1908 that the werewolf belief was already fading, and the Wolf Shepherd depended on it. Where wolves were exterminated, their shepherd lost his purpose.

The figure survives in the ethnographic record and in scattered folk expressions. The Christmas midnight gathering of wolves persists as a motif in South Slavic folk literature. The idea that wolves answer to a human commander, and that this command is a burden rather than a power, has not found a second life in popular culture the way the vampire or vukodlak have. The Wolf Shepherd remains where Krauss found him: in the testimony of Slavonian farmers who knew that someone, somewhere in the district, carried the whip.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908)
• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, expanded 1852)