Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Read online

  Hal Johnson, illustrated by Tom Mead

  Fearsome Creatures

  of the Lumberwoods

  20 Chilling Tales from the Wilderness

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Dear Reader

  1. Hodag

  2. Hugag

  3. Gumberoo

  4. Roperite

  5. Snoligoster

  6. Leprocaun

  7. Funeral Mountain Terrashot

  8. Slide-Rock Bolter

  9. Toteroad Shagamaw

  10. Wapaloosie

  11. Cactus Cat

  12. Squonk

  13. Whirling Whimpus

  14. Acropelter

  15. Hoop Snake

  16. Snow Wasset

  17. Central American Whintosser

  18. Billdad

  19. Tripodero

  20. Hyampom Hog Bear

  Fearsome Facts

  For Those Wanting More . . .

  About the Author and the Illustrator

  Editor’s Note

  This book is a retelling—a reimagining, really—of Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, by William T. Cox. Published in 1910, Cox’s book is one of the few sources of mythological animals in North America. Some of these creatures you may have heard of before (if you ever find yourself passing through Rhinelander, Wisconsin, be sure to visit the statue of the Hodag) while others seem to begin and end with Cox’s telling.

  In this new version, the stories have been entirely re-imagined by Hal Johnson who often borrowed from other myths and lore. If you’re from Arkansas, you might know about the gowrow that feasts on shadows, just like the snoligoster; if you make your home out west, you may have heard tall tales about the slim cowboy who dodges a lasso by turning sideways. Because what good are tall tales if they always stay the same? Better to pass them around, exaggerate, and embellish, so they can grow taller (and sometimes wider).

  Dear Reader

  The world is filled with frogs and zebras, and you have probably seen them both in zoos and dissected them both in school. But the world is filled with stranger animals, fearsome creatures too terrifying for most zoologists to understand.

  I have devoted my life to their study. I am a cryptozoologist and, if I do say so myself, at or near the forefront of my field. So many colleagues have been eaten by chimeras, incinerated by salamanders, or pecked to death by barnacle geese; there is not necessarily much competition left.

  The focus of my study has been the lumberwoods of North America, a land still wild and untamed at the margin, populated only by lumberjacks and their mortal enemies, the cruel trees that once tyrannized this land—and, of course, by fearsome creatures.

  This book is the fruit of a lifetime of death-defying feats in the jaws—the literal jaws—of some of the deadliest animals ever to stroll across the earth, but it is by no means complete. There are many undiscovered, or half-discovered, creatures still extant on this great continent. There is the hidebehind, for example, whose most distinguishing feature is that whenever you look at it, it is hiding behind something. Pecos Bill caught one and donated it to the Cincinnati Zoo; but even then, when researchers tried to study it, the creature was always concealed behind the bars of its cage. There’s not much to say about such a beast; not much is known, so I also left the hidebehind out. I left out the slink and the ring-tailed tooter. There are enough fearsome creatures in this continent to fill sixty or seventy books such as this one. I sometimes marvel that anyone makes it to the grocery store and back alive.

  Fearsome Creatures

  of the Lumberwoods

  Hodag

  (Imperator rex)

  While he lived, Paul Bunyan served as the master of the Michigan lumberwoods; since his death, its only master has been the hodag. Three thousand pounds of pure carnivorous appetite, the hodag most resembles a bull-horned rhinoceros with a spiny back.

  There are larger creatures in North America, and there are faster creatures in North America, but there is nothing that can challenge a hodag.

  I almost owned a hodag, or a part of a hodag—more or less. A smooth talker named Wellborn T. Herder had a plan to capture and exhibit the hodag as part of a traveling amusement show, and he sought me out as a potential investor.

  “I will invest in your scheme,” I told him, “if you can answer three simple questions about Browne’s Pseudodoxia.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Herder, so I threw him out the door. But he did eventually find a backer, a mantis wrangler named Constantine Vosko, and the two conspirators twirled their mustachios and discussed their plans. With Vosko’s cash, Herder bought a large tent, painted outside and in with colorful, borderline realistic pictures of the hodag, breathing fire (impossible!) and swallowing people by the busload (possible). The tent fit in the back of a large truck they would take turns driving. Oh, they were clever fellows.

  Herder and Vosko would roll into town with the truck’s sound system blaring: “See the wild hodag! Nature’s fiercest antagonist! Absolutely not for children!”

  They set up the painted tent and charged a sawbuck (that’s $10) for entrance. The hodag, Herder explained to the packed house, was behind this curtain here, and he would be leading the beast out, in chains, very shortly—but first a description of the terror that is the hodag!

  At that moment, Vosko, crouched behind the curtain, pressed play on the terrifying field recordings of the grunts and screams—the roaring! the snarling!—of a young wild hodag. Herder, dressed in the sequined cape of a circus daredevil, regaled the audience with tales of hodags ripping up trees by the roots and redirecting rivers with their great horns. And as he spoke, the sound of the hodag would reach a crescendo, until, at the precise moment, Vosco would rattle chains and shout from the back: “Have mercy on us ALL! The hodag’s escaped!”

  At this point he would pull a lever and the tent would half-collapse. The terrified townsfolk would bolt out the way they’d entered, leaving Herder and Vosko to roll up the tent quickly and jam it into the tractor trailer, their pockets filled with ten-spots. No one ever stayed around to demand a refund. And Herder and Vosko were off to another town, with another group of gulls to defraud with their hodag noises and their showmanship. They crisscrossed the Midwest with this act, fleecing towns and congratulating each other.

  If Herder had known that Browne’s Pseudodoxia was a classic seventeenth-century treatise on the history of errors, especially the history of errors concerning fearsome creatures (which he did not), he would have received my expert advice; and my expert advice would have been for them to stay the heck out of Michigan.

  They did not ask me, of course. And so one bright autumn day they ran their scheme in Sandlebarge, Michigan, a small town in the Upper Peninsula. Wellborn Herder was in fine form, strolling back and forth before the audience in his sequined cape. He spoke of the hodag’s well-known antipathy to lemons; of the hodag’s beautiful tears, which coalesce into gemlike drops, and which have been worn for centuries as jewelry by the native Chippewa; but mostly he spoke of the deadly ferocity of the hodag, and had even begun calling out a roll of the many who have lost their lives to the beast’s voracious jaws. As he always did, C. Vosko hid behind the curtain and played his old tape of hodag cries. Everything was on schedule. Everything was according to plan.

  Herder had the crowd on the edge of their seats with his bloodcurdling tales, when suddenly there was a great crashing noise from the back, and a cry from Vosko—a cry of pure terror, cut short. Part of the tent collapsed. This is not the right time at a
ll, thought Herder, but he decided to play along. “Flee! Flee the hodag!” he cried, his face a study in feigned terror, and the audience streamed from the tent in a panic.

  Herder, meantime, pushed back the curtain to snap at his partner for changing up the program. There, behind the curtain, what did Herder see? He saw Vosko, his eyes wide and his shuddering lips unable to gasp out a word. The upper half of his body was there, but the lower half was already disappearing down the maw of an enormous beast.

  Investigators later determined that it was a mother hodag, attracted to the sounds from Vosko’s recorder, the sound of a young hodag crying.

  Investigators found half of Vosko and about a quarter of Herder, but the tape recorder was never found. The mother hodag had carried it away with her.

  Left behind, rather pathetically, was a small pile of gemlike tears.

  Hugag

  (Sinegenu coniferferus)

  There are several animals on this earth that lack knees; most of these are legless creatures, snakes or fish and the like. But only the hugag has four long, straight legs that cannot bend at all. This unusual characteristic gives the beast a distinctive, lumbering gait. Some say the forests it lives in are for this reason known as the lumberwoods; others say this is a lie. But none can deny the presence of the hugag, the largest land mammal in North America.

  Indeed, the diet of the hugag—tree bark and pine needles, which it strips from the trees with its dangly lips and swallows whole—coupled with its great size and prodigious appetite, risk destroying wide tracts of the lumberwoods through overgrazing. As the hugags have few natural predators, the need to control their population has been a public policy issue since the nineteenth century. But how to hunt a creature the size of seventeen President Tafts?

  Lumberjacks sought in vain to dig a pit so broad that the hugag could not stride right over it on its storklike legs. They wondered if fire would work against its resinous coat (it would not). They tried shooting the beasts, but hugags are so large that bullets entering their body tire out and quit before hitting a vital organ. Even tracking the hugag is difficult as its tracks are so far apart. Furthermore, it possesses unsurpassed natural camouflage: The pine needles it eats pass unbroken through its digestive tract and into its bloodstream, to pop out through the creature’s skinlike quills. The hugag is literally bristling with plants, and blends in with the evergreen trees all year long.

  Can’t hunt it; can’t trap it.

  The hugag presented a problem. Until, that is, an opportunistic lumberjack named Kennebec Joe struck upon the solution.

  There are certain nocturnal species of tree that are only seen at night, and experienced lumbermen go “night-logging” to harvest them. It was on one such night-logging expedition that Kennebec Joe first saw a slumbering hugag, leaning against a tree to support its massive frame. (Because of its kneelessness, the hugag must sleep standing up, like a Frenchman.) Kennebec Joe learned to distinguish which particularly attractive and comfortable trees the hugag favored, and he began “notching” them, sawing halfway through the trunk.

  When the hugag leaned against the weakened tree at night, its great weight would break the tree in two, causing the creature to fall helpless to the ground. (If you, dear reader, have ever tried to stand up without using your knees, you will know how difficult it is.)

  Once the helpless beast is flailing on the forest floor, the hunter’s only concern is reaching it before a wampus cat or fearsome hodag discovers and consumes it, pine needles, bones, and all. Not coincidentally, this method allowed Kennebec Joe to fell a tree with only half the lumberjacking work.

  Thanks to Kennebec Joe’s innovation, the hugag population fell to manageable levels. They may still be spotted in the wild along the northern banks of Lake Huron, where human life is cheap and there is no law. Locals sometimes attempt to lasso them and put them to work drawing carts or sledges, but the resin from their piney skin just gums up the harnesses. “The hugag cannot be tamed” is the motto of the Manitoba branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

  The most famous hugag, though, is neither on the W.C.T.U.’s medallions nor one of Kennebec Joe’s trophies. Rather it is the notorious talking hugag discovered by Enoch Melanchthon in 1899.

  It transpired that Enoch Melanchthon (a local schoolteacher of upright and unimpeachable character) arrived one day in the notary public’s office in Hayward, Wisconsin, and swore an affidavit that he had heard a hugag speak; and not, furthermore, in the fragmentary and monotonous mode of the parrot—a cheap parlor trick!—but in complete and intelligible sentences.

  The news set northern Wisconsin abuzz with excitement, and with a small degree of guilt. If the hugag were indeed an intelligent creature, capable of mastering the English idiom, perhaps it was criminal to saw through their sleep-trees; also to decapitate them and use their skin for bathroom air fresheners.

  Eggheaded East Coast scientists flew (by autozeppelin) to Wisconsin in an attempt to record a hugag in the act of speech, but the only words their wax cylinders succeeded in catching were “blart” and “grah,” words of arcane meaning and which some averred were not proper words at all; no one would play hangman and choose “blart.”

  Enoch Melanchthon, meanwhile, sat through several dozen newspaper interviews before an enterprising reporter thought to have him transcribe the sentences he had heard the creature utter. In the newsroom, Enoch Melanchthon sat at a mahogany desk. He twirled a pencil around his thumb. He had to concentrate hard to remember the exact wording; also he was not the most literate of men. Painfully and laboriously, in crude block letters, Enoch Melanchthon slowly scrawled out what he remembered the hugag saying. He wrote:

  He got no further before the room cleared. The reporters were busy grabbing up saws and axes and heading into the lumberwoods to notch trees in hopes of catching the dire hugag and freeing whoever was within its belly. Nineteen hugags fell that fateful week, each cut open to reveal only a collection of undigested tree barks, before one was found that, when slit, emitted a pale young woman, clad in a dress made from pine needles, clutching a human skeleton.

  She explained quickly that she and her mother had been accidentally swallowed whole by a weak-eyed hugag when she was a mere babe, presumably while the two of them sat on the low-hanging branch of a pine tree. Unable to escape from the creature’s stomach, the two had learned to adapt to life inside the hugag. They ate pine needles and bark, and the occasional passing snake. They kept themselves sane by humming hymns and reciting what few verses of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” the mother could remember. Finally, the mother died from terminal despair and the young woman found herself alone, accompanied only by her mother’s skeleton, which she used as an armchair.

  She was very grateful to be freed at last from her strange captivity. She was especially happy to see the sun, about which she had heard many stories. And so the mystery of the talking hugag was solved.

  “This kind of thing probably happens more often than we know,” said the governor of Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., in his official statement to the media. The young woman’s pine needle dress was donated to the Smithsonian.

  And that young woman grew up to be my wife.

  The hugag who could say “blart” and “grah” turned out also to be a fake.

  Of course, the mother’s skeleton was also donated to the Smithsonian, but it was later stolen and used as a xylophone.

  Gumberoo

  (Triskaidecapus elastica)

  Unique among all animals, the gumberoo possesses thirteen limbs.

  The gumberoo’s forelimbs are long and gorilla-like, while its three hind legs are squat. Its remaining eight limbs radiate from around its abdomen, like the spokes of a wheel, permitting the fearsome creature to roll itself through the rain forests of Washington State and south to Oregon at speeds almost faster than the eye can see. Such a trip inevitably makes the creature dizzy, an
d so it never travels far in this fashion.

  The gumberoo’s rubbery skin is remarkable for its resiliency. Nothing seems to penetrate it. Clubs and axes rebound harmlessly with a rubber “boinging” sound, and bullets fired at the gumberoo inevitably sink in before bouncing back, directly at the rifle that fired it. In at least four cases (in 1816, twice in 1897, and in September 1903), the bullet has reentered the very rifle barrel it came from; but usually the return is slightly off, and the would-be hunter finds himself shot, quite rudely, with his own bullet.

  Most have learned not to shoot at the gumberoo, although in the gloaming the gumberoo can easily be mistaken for a bear wearing a belt of legs, a not uncommon sight in the Pacific Northwest, which explains the error.

  The fearsome creature spends most of its life hibernating, often wedged into a narrow crevice or uncomfortable hole: Its pliant skin and cartilaginous bones permit it to deform its body into unusual and amusing shapes. When it wakes, it is inevitably ravenously hungry; it becomes one of the most dangerous forces in the temperate rain forests, swinging through the trees and eating every animal it sees, bones and all. It can eat an entire bull moose in about four hours; an average-size Sunday school picnic, picnickers included, would take scarcely two. Its body distends after the repast, like a Frenchman’s, to fit more food; and ever it wants more.

  The rubbery skin of the gumberoo has no pores, and so the creature cannot sweat. Consequently, it is in perpetual risk of overheating, a risk only exacerbated by the flammability of its flesh. Exposed to open flame, the gumberoo burns brightly for only a few seconds before being reduced to memories and ash. After a forest fire, rangers report a distinctive stench throughout the burnt-over regions, the stench of hundreds of hibernating gumberoo gone to glory. It smells like a tire fire.