Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Read online

  He was filthy, and he was holding a filthy sack, and from that sack came the sound of a sobbing, a heart-wrenching sobbing such as I have never before heard.

  I literally removed my hat, exposing the metal plate over which hair no longer grows. Wentling was due that much.

  “Perhaps you have noticed,” that insufferable little prig said, “that I have hear a bag with a squonk in it.” You will notice that he said hear instead of here; Wentling never had learned how to spell.

  And in his subliterate, poorly spelled patois, he began to lecture me on his cunning victory; on his cleverness; on his innate superiority to your humble narrator. And the whole time the keening in the sack grew in volume, such that Wentling had to speak louder to be heard. Just as he had reached the climax of his irritating lecture, the weeping from the bag abruptly stopped.

  Wentling and I stood in the eerie silence, eyeing each other across my desk carved from a leviathan’s bacula.

  With reluctant hands, Wentling opened his sack and looked inside. Inside was only liquid.

  The poor squonk had become so miserable that it dissolved in its own tears. There was nothing left of the squonk. There was no evidence that the squonk had ever been caught at all.

  Wentling completely lost it at that point. His glory at being the first person to have ever caught a squonk melted away. “You’ll tell them,” he begged me, grabbing me by my smoking jacket, “you’ll tell them I really did catch it.” But, of course, I had never even seen the squonk, only heard what may have been one.

  Weeping now, Wentling fell to his knees. “What’s the use?” he said, again and again. And then he began to confess to me things no human being should know. His life was a failure. His wife was in love with her grand vizier. Sometimes, in the bathroom, he produced horrible things. Other times, he felt like he needed to sneeze, but no sneeze would come. He went on and on.

  Now, I hated Wentling as few men have ever hated, but I could not bear to see a fellow creature in such paroxysms of despair. I sat him down in an armchair and went off to get him some Darjeeling tea with bergamot, a cup that always cheers. When I returned a few minutes later, the chair was empty. His clothes, soaking wet, were hanging off the chair. The chair was also soaking wet. Wet with tears. There was nothing else left of Jean-Paul Wentling.

  For the misery of the squonk is contagious misery. With fireplace tongs I carried his sack outside, and I poured the squonk’s tears down a storm drain. I burned Wentling’s clothes, and I even burned the soaking armchair, even though it was a Louis XVI–style bergère, comfortable and hard to come by. I wasn’t taking any chances. No longer do I hunt squonk.

  Whirling Whimpus

  (Vertex sp.)

  In the upper peninsula of Michigan, there lives a creature called a dungavenhooter, which resembles a crocodile with no mouth. It pounds its prey with its heavy tail until the poor victim is reduced entirely to a gaseous form, which the dungavenhooter then inhales through its enormous nostrils. All its sustenance comes this way, through the nose, like the Astomi in India.

  I mention the dungavenhooter because the power of its tail to reduce a moose calf or a hiker to gas is unprecedented in nature; but the power of the whirling whimpus comes close. While the dungavenhooter requires time and multiple blows to gasify its prey, the whimpus can, in an instant, reduce a grown man to a consistency that is usually described as “syrup.” Being turned into syrup is not quite as bad as being turned into gas, dear reader, but it cannot be a pleasant experience.

  The skill of the whimpus lies in its ability to spin at such a rapid velocity that it is almost invisible, resembling in this way the whirlwind that can only be detected by the pieces of leaf and dust swirling within. When the whimpus reaches its fastest rate of spin, it simply extends its long arms, and anything it touches instantly becomes syrup. Some call it slime or goo, but that is hardly appetizing. The greedy way the whimpus licks the stuff off its paws indicates that it must be syrup.

  A whimpus usually feeds on deer and feral hogs, which abound in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee where it lives, but it will eat a human should one come across its path. Often these poor saps are declared missing, and, because search parties rarely look for syrup stains in their investigations, no trace of them is ever found. To call them lost is just wishful thing, as few are ever lost in the Cumberlands; they are merely the food of the whimpus.

  You may have heard of Troop 2––5 of the paramilitary youth militia known as the Boy Scouts of America. Today Troop 2––5 is famous for being a ragtag band of mystery-solving boy sleuths, but back in the dark days of 1978, the troop was known for a camping trip that ended in tragedy: the loss of six scouts, most of whose bodies were never recovered. Five of these scouts were tenderfoots, and hardly missed, but the sixth, Beauregard Shagtemple, had earned the coveted merit badge in phrenology, and so search parties combed the area for weeks—to no avail.

  Beauregard Shagtemple was my nephew, and the young scamp had hidden the keys to my strongbox a week before disappearing, so it was particularly important to me that he be found, if only so I could learn the location of my keys. But I knew from my studies of the Cumberlands that a disappearance in these dread mountains meant an encounter with a whimpus, and I knew, from my research into the whimpus, that never would I see my nephew’s face in God’s sweet world again. So I located a reputable medium (no mean feat) and got her to call young Shagtemple on her Ouija-brand oracular board. From the board, from the medium, from Beauregard Shagtemple, I learned the horrible truth.

  The six scouts, Shagtemple in the lead, had indeed gone hiking in an area that they should have clearly seen was marked with whirling whimpus spoor. They ignored the doe-flavored syrup on the nearby trees. They ignored the distant droning sound, like a giant top, as it came closer and closer.

  They were crouching down to smell a bloodflower (the state carnivorous flower of Tennessee) when the whimpus struck from behind. Three lads were turned into scout-batter before anyone knew what was happening. And then, remarkably, the whimpus stopped spinning.

  Sightings of a whirling whimpus are exceptionally rare, and rarer still is a glimpse of the whimpus at rest. The fearsome creature resembles a large gorilla with extra-long arms and only one leg, which ends in a hoof. On this hoof it stands and spins. Beauregard Shagtemple and the two tenderfoots watched in awe as the whimpus, slowly and deliberately, licked the sticky remains of the their former comrades off its paws with a long, pimply tongue.

  “Maybe it’ll be full,” one of the tenderfoots said.

  But then the whimpus hopped up on its single hoof. It began to spin like a ballerina, faster and faster, until it became just a blur, and then a whir, which is the technical term for a blurred blur. Soon it was nothing more than a disturbance in the air rattling branches nearby and kicking up dust. The scouts ran, but who can outrun a whirlwind? They sowed the wind, and they were reaped.

  Beauregard Shagtemple saw one tenderfoot go down, and then he stopped running. He saw a whirlwind ahead of him. When he turned to each side, and even behind him, there was a whirlwind there, too. He thought for a moment he was surrounded. But then he remembered what he’d learned earning his meteorology merit badge.

  Cyclones and tornados whirl their winds around a central area of calm, called the eye of the storm. You can stand in absolute stillness and calm while all around you is whirling chaos: You are in the tornado’s eye. And at that moment Beauregard Shagtemple could see that on every side the whirlwind whirled. He realized that he was standing safely at the very eye of the whimpus. Then he realized that made no sense, and so he was turned to liquid.

  A moment of silence, please, dear reader, for Beauregard Shagtemple. Worst of all, I learned he had my keys on him at the time, which means they were liquefied, too.

  The last tenderfoot survived, incidentally, and staggered out of the woods weeks later, hale though quite mad. But who cares abo
ut that? Now I’ll never get into my strongbox. And the creatures inside it are getting hungrier.

  Acropelter

  (Papio stretcharmstrongus)

  The acropelter dwells high in the trees throughout the vast belt of lumberwoods that stretches across the northern part of the continent, feasting on woodpeckers and owls.

  Some say the acropelter is not necessarily hostile to humanity and only attacks lumberjacks when they are chopping down the trees the acropelter calls home. These people are fools.

  The acropelter is the largest New World monkey, closely related to the African baboon, but slightly more evil. Its arms are preternaturally long. The older the acropelter, the longer the arms—the longer the arms, the more elbows each arm has. It is disturbing to see an old acropelter with six or seven elbows in each arm swing disjointedly through the trees, stopping only to wrench a dead branch from a trunk and hurl it at a poor soul below.

  As elementary knowledge of mechanics teaches us, the longer and bendier the arm, the more powerful its throw. The acropelter is therefore deadly when it hurls its missiles (occasionally rocks, but usually dead tree limbs). Those struck dead by the hurled branches are stashed in hollow tree trunks, where they are sometimes located by search parties or concerned relatives. The corpses, when dragged from the hollows, are always found to be missing their arms.

  Lumberjack Ole Kittelson is one of the few to survive an acropelter attack. The acropelter that pegged him was a juvenile, with arms scarcely longer than a man’s, and the branch it threw was particularly mealy and shattered to powder on Kittelson’s hard dome. Kittelson purchased a motorcycle helmet, which he wore night and day, and became one of the first to study the acropelter in detail.

  Kittelson began by prying through innumerable dead trees to find the carcasses of acropelter victims long undiscovered. The bodies were never eaten—humans do not taste as sweet as owls, nor as saltily delicious as woodpeckers’ tails—but the arms were always gone, bones and all. To a man like Kittelson, dogged and tough but not very bright, this was a mystery he could not let go.

  Whe n no further clues were forthcoming, Kittelson tried to interview acropelters. He’d stand beneath their trees, helmet on. “You have nothing to fear—I’m unarmed,” he’d shout up at them, unaware of the grim irony. “If you need anything, I’d be glad to give you a hand.” The fearsome creatures would answer by pelting him with branches, which bounced off his helmet and battered the rest of his body.

  Finally, an ancient acropelter swung over Kittelson. Its arms were at least twenty feet long, with as many joints as a squid’s tentacle. It snapped off the largest, sturdiest tree branch it could find. Kittelson smiled up at the creature, and the creature smiled back. “I found his smile quite disarming,” Kittelson later told me.

  When the acropelter hurled the branch, its long arm cracked like a whip. The branch hit Kittelson squarely on the head and broke his helmet in half. He fell unconscious, but was not yet dead. He would be found an hour or so later, partially stuffed in a tree, weak from blood loss. Both of his arms were missing.

  When I interviewed Kittelson three days later, he told me all his secrets: that he had once kissed a dog on the lips, that he ate toothpaste like candy. “I care nothing about these things,” I said. “Tell me of the acropelter.”

  He managed to choke out what he had seen. Knocked senseless by the acropelter’s blow, he regained consciousness just as the enormous beast was tearing off his arms as though they were dead branches. Grabbing the limbs by their bloody sockets, the beast waved them around like pennants. Kittelson watched in horror as his disembodied hands began to flex and grasp with a life of their own. Slowly, the acropelter’s hands fused to Kittelson’s arms, its skin spreading and growing over the seam between them, the nerves and veins snaking forward to merge with these, its new limbs.

  Kittelson now saw that the acropelter’s long arms were a chain of human arms, each hand gripping the base of the next arm. Using Kittelson’s former hands, the acro-pelter stuffed him in a hollow tree and took off into the forest.

  The two halves of Kittelson’s helmet were donated to the Smithsonian’s cryptozoology wing.

  Hoop Snake

  (Orotundus velox)

  Although Australia has the most dangerous snakes of any continent (one study claims that 130 percent of Australian snakes are venomous, which sounds to me like a mathematical error), North America comes a close second, with the rattlesnake, the copperhead, the Wisconsin python, the subterranean snake-man of Fairfield County, the cottonmouth, and, deadliest of all, the hoop snake.

  The hoop snake is named for its unusual method of locomotion: It grabs its tail in its jaws, forming a hoop, and rolls by flexing its muscles to adjust its center of gravity. On a clear, smooth surface, the hoop snake can reach sixty miles per hour. When it is pursuing prey, the snake is difficult to elude: If you leap over a fence to escape, dear reader, the snake just unhoops, crawls through the fence, and then rehoops on the other side.

  What makes the snake truly terrifying is its virulent poison, which it keeps in a stinger in its tail. Victims stung by the hoop snake rapidly turn purple, swell up, and die.

  In 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell was stung in the right arm by a hoop snake while surveying the Grand Canyon. Powell immediately removed his right arm with a hatchet and cast it aside. The arm, even after amputation, continued to swell. A member of the expedition, William H. Dunn, poked the swollen limb with a stick, causing it to explode. Some of the tainted blood from the exploding arm hit Dunn in the eye; Dunn died in agony six days later (Powell survived).

  Other memorable individuals killed by the hoop snake include Harriet Beecher Stowe, President Warren G. Harding, Kit Carson, the Lindbergh Baby (perhaps), and P. T. Barnum’s beloved little circus performer Admiral Dot.

  But the worst disaster, in terms of loss of human life, precipitated by the hoop snake was the notorious case of Edmund Virgil Bodenschantz, a farmer in now-defunct Oleander County, Maine. In 1865 he was hoeing his turnips when he saw a hoop snake rolling across the fields toward his hog pens. In a somewhat foolhardy display of bravado, Bodenschantz raced over to the hogs, brandishing his hoe, and caught the snake as it was slithering into the pigsty. During the brief but chaotic melee, Bodenschantz managed to decapitate the snake with the hoe, while the snake’s own attack with its caudal stinger was luckily blocked by the hoe handle.

  Immediately, Bodenschantz dropped the hoe, the handle of which had begun to swell. He fetched over some neighbors to witness the unprecedented phenomenon, so we do have several eyewitness accounts and one rough pencil sketch of the scene, made on the back of an envelope.

  By nightfall, the hoe handle had swollen to the size of a small tree; by the next morning, it was the equivalent volume of about seventeen cords of wood. The split metal hoe head was still attached at one end, and the serpent’s tail was embedded in the wood, pulsating eerily.

  Bodenschantz tried to make the county fair circuit, displaying the headless hoop snake and the enormous swollen handle, but his story was rejected as implausible, and he was pelted with fruit and old patent medication bottles. The envelope with sketch was rejected as insufficient evidence. Seeking to make at least some money off the handle, he sold it as timber to a local toothpick conglomerate, Hygienic Best, which was able to turn the handle into some fourteen million toothpicks.

  Unfortunately, the toothpicks were saturated with the virulent poison of the hoop snake.

  Eighteen thousand boxes of Hygienic Best toothpicks were recalled. Three boxes, however, made their way past the range of the recall; they had been ordered by the Mayor’s Office in New York City, to be used at the annual Mayor’s Gala (at 350 Fifth Avenue; by invitation only).

  As the telegraph wires had been cut by savage Frenchmen, a Hygienic Best messenger (Mr. Jonathan van Oort) had to ride night and day from Maine to New York to explain the error. Fortuitously
, Van Oort arrived at the Mayor’s Gala just before the hors d’oeuvres were to be served. But at the door the mayor’s honor guards, dressed as Prussian admirals, seized Van Oort; his clothing, ragged and dusty from several days’ ride, was considered inadequately festive for the Gala. They took him for a beggar from the Bowery; or a ruffian from Tammany Hall; or even a Brooklynite. They struck him with truncheons and would not listen to what he said. What he said was:

  “You’ve got to let me in! Those toothpicks are venomous! They’ve been poisoned by a hoop snake! In the name of this great republic and its thirty-six states, you’ve got to let me warn the mayor!”

  “By invitation only,” the guards replied, with their truncheons.

  Inside the mayor’s mansion, though, his words came through only as the muffled and piecemeal cries of a madman. “Toothpicks . . . hoop snake . . . thirty-six!”

  Colonel Benajah P. Bailey, retired, late of the 86th Infantry, had been bloviating to a circle of admirers about his campaigning at Fredericksburg when he heard these fragments. He set his snifter of brandy down on a silver tray and said, “Hoop snake, eh? Heard about one of those fearsome creatures outside of Chancellorsville. Stabbed a squirrel with its tail spike, it did, and started to swallow the poor varmint afore it had finished swelling. Stuck in that fool snake’s throat and swelled it up like a balloon, until its gasket ruptured. It was the most repellent thing I ever saw, and I seen a man take a cannonball through his bosom at Gettysburg.”

  Caroline Astor said that such talk was vulgar, and wouldn’t the colonel please try the canapés?

  They were just coming around, on silver trays, each peirced by a festive toothpick. The colonel took a canapé in hand, but he kept speaking, as he usually did. “Queer thing, the hoop snake. They say its poison is worse than a Frenchman’s socks. Met a man from Texas once—a Union man, but from Texas—told me a story about a rattlesnake they got down there. Said it was the most toxic of varmints. His story had it where a cowboy stepped on a rattler’s head and died the same day. His boots, they got passed on to a friend.