Stop in at the Forks Visitor Center and you just might pick up a story or two along with your tourist map.

Anita Wheeler of La Push, who works the front desk there, is a Quileute tribal member who learned traditional stories from her grandfather, stories in which animals become people and giants turn into rocks, that sort of thing.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Anita Wheeler tells one of her grandfather's stories.

When I was visiting, I heard her regale visitors with a couple of her stories. My favorite was about the Canine People, which started out, "Long, long ago when the animals were still people and could still take off their fur and feathers and be people..." and ended with a tongue-in-cheek lesson about why dogs sniff each other's rear ends. Weird, I know, but when you hear it you'll smile.

"The stories are my way of keeping my grandfather close to me," Wheeler says.

She also has a more modern-day story worth hearing, having to do with her grandfather.

In 1989, at age 33, Wheeler was part of a band of Quileutes who paddled canoes from La Push to Seattle as part of Washington's centennial celebration. Because many paddlers were making the trip, and stopping over at Suquamish on the Kitsap Peninsula, officials at the Suquamish Tribal Museum took the opportunity to seek help identifying the carver of an Indian canoe that was donated by a local non-native family that had owned it.

Wheeler's grandfather, who died when she was about 10, carved many canoes, and often decorated them with an Indian in a full feathered headdress, as worn by Indians of the plains, not Northwest natives. She had an old photo of him carving such a canoe.

"He had a real sense of humor," she explained about the headdress (and he knew what would sell to non-natives who grew up with cowboy-and-Indian movies).

When her group of paddlers landed in Suquamish, Wheeler said, a museum official told them about the old canoe, more than 100 years old. He explained that when conservators had stripped off old paint, they found an unusual picture. Unusual for a Northwest Indian canoe, anyway: a brave in feathered war bonnet.

"I burst into tears and said, 'That's my grandfather's canoe!" They asked if she was sure, and she pulled out the photo.

As a result, she and her daughter were allowed to paddle the canoe the final stretch of the trip to Seattle's Shilshole Bay.

"I cried the whole way. I was actually in a canoe he made, and I loved him so much and missed him so. My daughter kept nudging me and saying, 'Mom, stop it.' She was 10 and didn't understand." Tears welled in her eyes just with the retelling.

The canoe remains at the Suquamish Museum. And Wheeler continues to honor her grandfather by repeating his stories and creating artwork to illustrate them.

Stop in at the Forks Visitor Center and ask her about those dogs.