Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Page 2

  Of the innumerable attempts to take a gumberoo alive, the most celebrated was that of Gavrilo Princip, who spent ten months in 1913 and early 1914 hunting gumberoo.

  Princip tried everything to trap the gumberoo. He dug pits, as we all, dear reader, have dug so many pits to capture fearsome creatures; but the gumberoo, upon falling in, simply bounced back out every time. He tried dropping cages and nets on the gumberoo, only to find its rubbery form easily slipped through the narrow bars and the tiny mesh. He sought the beast in winter, hoping that the cold would hinder its springy nature, so it could be knocked senseless by a club to the head. Unfortunately, in the cold the gumberoo grows brittle, and Princip only shattered his prey.

  And all the time he hunted, Princip was in deadly danger, for the gumberoo possesses three methods of locomotion—strolling along the ground, swinging through the trees, and rolling like a wheel—and escape from a creature with three methods of locomotion is all but impossible. We have already mentioned the voracious appetite of the gumberoo.

  “I’m not afraid,” Princip told reporters.

  At last Princip enlisted the aid of a mysterious species from Pennsylvania with the unfortunate name of “timberdoodle.” (Other Pennsylvanian animals include the archaeothyris and the carbonerpeton.) The timberdoodle is a small carnivore unique in that once it bites down, its jaws will not open again until it hears the sound of thunder; during dry spells, the creature may well starve. Princip knew that in the rain forests of Washington, the timberdoodle would have no such troubles, and brought it thence in a sack. Princip then set to work tracking the gumberoo—the easiest part of his job, for few creatures in the wild lay tracks like a unicycle’s.

  Indeed, Princip soon found a gumberoo still slightly dizzy from its travels, and he sicced the timberdoodle on it. If most creatures were to bite a gumberoo, their jaws would bounce right back open, but, of course, the timberdoodle’s jaws could not reopen in the absence of thunder, so it kept its grip on the rubbery flesh of the gumberoo.

  The startled gumberoo took to the trees in a panic, rapidly swinging away through the low branches, leaving a long, distended, rubbery trail of stretched skin behind it. The rubbery trail grew longer and longer, as the timberdoodle (by this point Gavrilo had staked down the biter with croquet wickets) could not let go, and the gumberoo would not stop fleeing. Migrating deer passing south were caught in the stretching band, which bounced and flung them back, confused and cold, to the freezing north of British Columbia.

  By this point, Princip (an excitable man) thought his game was all but caught, but unfortunately the sound of deer being catapulted backward so resembled thunder that the timberdoodle opened its jaws. Predictably, like a stone in a slingshot, the gumberoo was launched forward, and it flew through the air, out of sight. But midflight it struck a mountainside—probably Glacier Peak—and rebounded backward, eventually landing and rolling gently right toward an ecstatic Princip.

  Here was the deadly scourge of the Northwest, unstoppable and hitherto uncatchable, stunned from its unprecedented journey.

  “Nothing left to do but roll it to civilization,” said Princip, smiling smugly to himself, moments before an ash from his cigarillo fell on the stunned gumberoo. The fearsome creature ignited, and an instant later there was nothing left of Princip’s dreams but a fine spray of ash smudging his face. Brokenhearted, with only a timber- doodle in his sack, he returned to civilization, or at least to Olympia, Wash.

  Once Princip reached the city, he began to sicken and weaken. He was short of breath. He had a hard time keeping food down. Doctors diagnosed him with tuberculosis, but they diagnosed everyone with tuberculosis in those days. Modern medicine was in its infancy; how were doctors to know that the incinerated gumberoo had coated 65 percent of Princip’s internal organs with a rubbery film that hindered respiration and almost entirely prevented digestion? Food just bounced off his stomach and out his mouth again. It was disgusting—it was also killing him.

  As his body consumed itself and he realized he did not have long to live, Princip abandoned his hunt for the gumberoo and vowed to bag the biggest game of all—he vowed, in the little time he had left, to hunt down the Archduke Ferdinand. Such an audacious and romantic hunt captured the imagination of the people of Olympia, and they all gathered around the train station, as he began his journey to Europe, to wish Princip good hunting. His eyes were sunken, his face sallow, and he looked like a dead man already; but such are the dooms and the dangers of hunting gumberoo.

  And so the record remains: No one has ever captured a gumberoo alive, although Princip did catch his other prey, in the end.

  So many stories in the lumberwoods are terrifying and sad that it’s heartwarming to report that a man achieved his dream.

  Roperite

  (Malicius dominguesensis)

  About thirty years ago I was searching for carnivorous butterflies in the American Southwest when I heard the word “roperite” spoken in hushed tones by a group of Paiute prospectors. They were referring to a local web-footed desert biped with a long, prehensile beak that ends in a lariat. “That doesn’t sound so scary,” I said to myself, “because I am not afraid of lariats.”

  Then my companions pointed out how close a lariat is to a noose.

  Science says that when a male toad hatches a sow’s egg under a gibbous moon, the result is a roperite. But the natives of the Mojave Desert tell a different tale. They speak of a time, two hundred years ago, when the desert land was fertile and choked with whipper weed, and the Spanish crown parceled it out into ranchos, on which herds of fat cattle roamed, grazing and causing mischief.

  It was a cruel era, and the men who lived through it were bloodthirsty scallywags; but the cruelest of all was the rancher known as José Maria Dominguez. Night and day he’d ride through the whipper weeds of his rancho looking for cattle rustlers to lasso and drag to their deaths, as was the custom at the time. He became so adept at the practice that cattle rustlers did not offer sufficient sport, and he began lassoing other creatures, too, such as vagabonds, drunks, jackrabbits, and orphans. It is likely that many of those he served so harshly did not deserve it, especially the orphans. But one does not win the title “cruelest of all” by handing out candy.

  To be fair to the man, he worked hard to achieve his dream. And when he died, the Paiute said, his spirit walked the land on two webbed feet, still lassoing the helpless and dragging them to their deaths. Thus was he either rewarded for his hard work or punished for his cruelty, depending on your viewpoint. (The spirit of Dominguez’s horse became a species of flowering cactus, which seems less apt. But the ways of the desert are strange.)

  Whether the Paiute were correct about José Maria Dominguez, or just pulling my leg—not the wooden one, the fleshy one—the fact of the roperite is indisputable. We simply don’t know if the creature is the specter of that old Mexican rancher or a natural creature that eats and breeds and spreads diseases.

  Are there many roperites, or only one? Only one has ever been seen at a time, but this proves nothing; have you ever, dear reader, seen two unicorns at the same time? Some creatures are just antisocial, and an animal that murders anything it sees with its nooselike beak . . . I would call that antisocial.

  No footage exists of a roperite attack, but eyewitness descriptions are particularly spine-chilling. Silently racing on its enormous webbed feet, the roperite comes speeding over the sands, faster than a cactus cat. Its serpentine beak with its curious loop lashes out and grabs you, or a nearby orphan. Lucky is the man who finds the roperite’s lariat land around his throat, for he is soon strangled; the unlucky is dragged over the harsh and abrasive Mojave sands.

  It all happens very quickly. He may think, “Aw, this isn’t so bad,” but then he looks down and sees that his legs have been half worn away and he is being dragged along on his quickly disappearing knees.

  Mercifully, the victim is usually reduced to a f
ew wisps of skin and hair before full realization sets in.

  Horses cannot outrun it; mongooses cannot outrun it; dune buggies it passes on the left; roadrunners, says cryptzoologist William T. Cox, it “steps on or kicks out of the way.”

  One creature immune to the predations of the roperite is the shar-pei breed of dog. If you have ever seen a shar-pei, you will know that it is covered with loose, wrinkled skin. When a shar-pei is dragged by a roperite, its skin does not wear off, as yours would, dear reader; it just unspools, stretching further and further out behind it, as one by one the wrinkles disappear. Eventually the roperite tires, and releases its prey; the pup finds itself confused in the desert, with smooth, wrinkle-free skin and a long flesh trail behind it, which it can follow home.

  Since the roperite is a purely malicious creature with no redeeming features, not even attractive plumage, locals have long put bounties on the beast. Those who have hunted it have all come to grief: Some have been dragged to their doom when their erstwhile prey got the drop on them, but others have perished in a stranger manner.

  Although it is possible to wound a roperite with a bullet, no one has as yet managed to kill one; and the roperite is so fast, it turns out, that even wounded it can whirl around in a half circle so that the bullet comes out the far side, heading right back at the hunter. Few who have wounded a roperite have lived to tell about it. And the injured creature lopes off into the desert to lick its wounds, recuperate, and await the chance to return.

  There is only one man who is known to have thwarted the roperite unequivocally, and that is Hueco Slim.

  Hueco Slim was a rough customer who rode the range at the turn of the last century until the encroaching trolley cars and telegraph poles scared him off for good. He was famous for his gruff demeanor, his epic stubble, and his wire-thin frame, the thinnest in the territories. His horse, a mare named Flaca, was even thinner, and most people found her peaked back too narrow to perch on and would just slip right off; but Hueco Slim’s narrow buttocks sat on her bareback like a knife edge on a knife edge; and in this way they traveled the length and breadth of the Southwest.

  Coming down through the Sierra Nevadas one morning, Hueco Slim saw the dread figure of the roperite bearing down on him. Although he put the spurs to Flaca, he knew that outrunning the creature was impossible, and sure enough, the roperite had soon caught up and threw its noose of a beak over Hueco Slim. But Hueco Slim proved so slim that when the roperite drew its noose tight, Slim turned sideways and passed right through it.

  Three times the creature lassoed Slim, and three times the cowboy turned sideways and escaped. Despairing, the roperite managed to lasso Slim’s mare, but when it cinched its beak, one of Flaca’s razor-sharp protruding ribs sliced the lariat in two. Hueco Slim and his mare rode away, leaving a useless, nooseless roperite behind them with a tear in its eye.

  Either the roperite healed, or learned to splice, or there are more than one of them, because it has killed at least twice since then. The last recorded time was in 1993, when Lester Blemmelmann was snatched from a tour group, dragged and sanded away until nothing remained but his metal hip.

  If you see a sow’s egg, you might be tempted to destroy it, to help rid the world of this scourge; but I would request, dear reader, that you mail it to me instead. I have a plan to domesticate roperites and use them to haul novelty wagons through amusement parks, but I need some breeding stock. I will pay with blood diamonds or Confederate dollars. I can’t see how this could go wrong.

  Snoligoster

  (Rotorcaudus dorsocerus)

  In the swamps of Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, the alligators fear the bootleggers, and the bootleggers fear the alligators, and they both fear the snoligoster as they fear no other creature.

  Although many animals will prey on humans—such as the puma, the tick, the Frenchman, and the hodag—only the snoligoster is cruel and vain enough to parade its victims around after slaying them.

  The snoligoster has no limbs, but it does sport a large, curved horn sprouting from its back. When hunting, the creature seizes its prey in its powerful jaws and flips the poor sap backward, impaling him on the dorsal spike.

  The effect is quite delightful to watch, but also tragic and disgusting; nevertheless, if you are at all interested in juggling or acrobatics, dear reader, or in the ball-and-cup game, it is worth your while to seek out and spy on a snoligoster on the hunt. With luck, you will see the creature impale an evil person, and then you won’t have to feel so bad.

  After mounting its prey on its horn, the snoligoster speeds through the swamps until it reaches a particularly sunny place, where it swims back and forth in the sunshine, as if displaying the impalee with pride. It does this because what the snoligoster eats is not flesh, but only the shadows of flesh, and only by hoisting that flesh high upon the spike can it bend its long neck to graze upon its victim’s shadow.

  Naturally, the creature does not hunt at night; nor does it hunt at noon, when the sun is high and casts no shadows. Morning and evening show the longest shadows, and therefore the most nourishing repast.

  Sometimes the poor victim impaled upon the spike lingers, still alive and in such cases must bear the agony of being transfixed as well as the humiliation of having his shadow consumed.

  In one memorable instance, Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long, during a morning photo op in the bayou, sat on what he had assumed was a moss-covered log. It was not a log.

  Moments later, he was tossed through the air and landed on the snoligoster’s horn, which passed right through the region where his heart should have been (he kept his heart in an ivory box in the state capitol). As the snoligoster swam back and forth in the beautiful sunshine, Governor Long begged someone in the crowd to kill him and end his misery, but no one knew how, so instead everyone took pictures and shouted encouragement. The photographs, thanks to the snoligoster’s tasteful sense of lighting, were extremely attractive, and when printed on nickel postcards sold quite well. The late governor is still known in Louisiana as “Huey Pierced Lung,” and everyone has a good laugh.

  Not all encounters with the beast end in such a jovial and amusing way, though. I once housed a young snoligoster in a swamp pen in my personal menagerie, cultivated and maintained by Hans, my manservant. Hans disobeyed my direct orders because they interfered with his cartoons, and tended to his maintenance duties—mostly raking and weeding—not at noon but as evening came. Needless to say, Hans’s shadow fell through the chain-link fence, directly in the snoligoster’s path. Hans appeared the next morning with only the ragged stump of a shadow, and it was weeks before a new one, thinner and wispier and a little off-center, grew in. This is the kind of tragedy that can befall one who is careless around a fearsome creature.

  Most terrifying is the story of the snoligoster and Lawrence Alaminos, a man afflicted with that strange disease known as “biumbralism.” After fooling around with forbidden experiments in the dark arts, Alaminos had accidentally acquired a second shadow that spread across the ground at right angles to his own.

  This shadow craved human blood and would whisper to Alaminos, when it grew long and powerful, that he must serve it in the name of evil. Alaminos sought me out for advice, and, in my tasteful oak-paneled library, where candles projected the mocking, prancing form of Alaminos’s evil shadow on the wall, I told him to seek out the snoligoster, for no other creature had the power to consume shadowstuff.

  Alaminos caught the next bus to Florida. The passing streetlights shining through the Greyhound window set his shadows moving in crazy crisscross designs along the walls.

  “At your touch the innocent must burn,” one shadow cackled, in a voice only Alaminos could hear. The other shadow stayed mute. Alaminos brushed the sweat from his brow and offered a silent prayer that he would succeed in his mission or die in the swamps; already he could feel himself growing slightly mad.

  Somewhere in the Okef
enokee Swamp, among the mosquitoes thick as fog and leeches large as baguettes, Lawrence Alaminos must have found a snoligoster; he must have contrived to grapple with it and cling to its dorsal horn; he must have screamed as the fearsome creature swam to the sunny glade and tore out his shadow by the roots. He must have laughed with relief as he fled the swamps.

  I ran into Alaminos several years later at one of the countess’s parties. The pupils of his eyes were fully dilated, and he could not stop his maniacal grinning. He cast a single shadow, as all decent people do.

  “I see you survived the snoligoster,” I said, tipping my hat in congratulations.

  Alaminos drew from his sleeve a curved dagger with a skull-head pommel. At that moment I realized what had happened. The snoligoster had eaten the wrong shadow.

  Leprocaun

  (Pygmailicius hibernicus)

  The leprocaun is closely related to the more famous leprechaun, although it is poorer and less obsessed with marshmallows. Leprocauns are indigenous to Ireland and were introduced into Canada in the 1830s, when they stowed away on boats bringing Irish immigrants. (The Irish population of leprocauns was later exterminated— consumed, it is said, by hungry Irishmen. The last leprocaun in Ireland was seen in 1851; he was braised and served with a sprig of parsley.)

  Leprocauns are noted for their skill at playing haunting melodies on pipes fashioned from cattails. Although they resemble leprechauns to some extent, they are uglier and more savage-looking. They wear trousers made of rat skin and shoes made of hamster skulls. Whereas catching a leprechaun might get you a pot of gold, catching a leprocaun will get you nothing more than fleas, and perhaps a nasty rash.