Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Read online

  “His friend put on the boots, also fell over dead.

  “His son inherited, but he put on the boots and fell dead in his turn. Altogether five miserable cusses wore the boots and died afore anyone thought to look inside the boot. There, dadblastit, was a rattlesnake fang, jest stuck in the sole and poisoning anyone who put it on.”

  He raised the canapé to his lips, but there the colonel paused, as though lost in thought. It was the first time he had stopped talking (other than to take a sip of brandy) in seven hours. Outside the window a dim, mad voice could still be heard howling about toothpicks. The colonel said, “Them folk from Texas think everything in Texas is the biggest, the orneriest, and the dangerousest. Five from one snakebite, that’s no small shakes. But I’d like to see how many a good old hoop snake could get with jest one little sting. By gum, that I’d like to see!”

  But he never did. For then Colonel Bailey popped the canapé in his mouth and fell over dead. All around him, as he would have noticed if he’d been the sort to pay attention, writhed the cream of New York society, over a thousand men and women swelling and bloating in their finery. Caroline Astor also broke a string of pearls, so the evening was a complete disaster.

  In concession to the powerful toothpick lobby, Mayor Hoffman covered up the mass poisoning, blaming the deaths on cholera, but the Hygienic Best toothpick factory closed down regardless. No one would attempt to manufacture toothpicks in Maine for another twenty years. And on one night in New York there were 1,137 deaths from one snake’s sting, a record that will probably never be bested, not even in Texas.

  Snow Wasset

  (Serpentoformus ferox)

  The scariest things always dwell underneath. Underneath that rock over there crawl blindworms and grubs and other foul creatures. Underneath the soil lurk the drow, slipping up to the surface world to steal human children. And underneath the drow loom fell caverns with ancient beings who have never seen the sun. Underneath the oceans the true masters of this world swell and burble. All of this is Cryptozoology 101. But what is rarely spoken of is what strange creature lives underneath the snow.

  In the northern reaches of Canada, the undersnow is ruled by the savage wasset. Its kingdom is seasonal, and during summer months it crawls around bogs on stubby legs, estivating through the hottest period (“estivating” is the term for summer hibernation). When the snow begins to fall, the wasset sheds its legs like a bad haircut and begins a new life swimming under the snow. When man or beast passes above the wasset, it bursts through the snow crust, grabs its prey, and tunnels back under, leaving nothing behind but a hole in the snow and a few drops of blood.

  The wasset is genuinely considered to be the second fiercest and toughest creature in North America, after the hodag. But because it lives in places sparsely inhabited and rarely visited, the wasset usually poses no danger to humans. However, the forbidding northern wastes of Canada have had their boom times: the Gold Rush of the 1890s, the Uranium Exploitation of the 1930s, and the Fluoride Excitement of the late 1990s. Times like these, the wassets feast.

  In 1998 thousands of fluoride miners had thronged to the Arctic reaches around Great Bear Lake to seek their fortunes. One of those thousands was Khenbish McDouglas, a young man who had left a dull life as a starfish sharpener in Vancouver, dreaming of a northern paradise where the streets were paved with fluoride. Instead, he found a harsh, untamed, roadless land, where it was so cold that if you cut yourself shaving the blood came out in cubes. McDouglas joined a caravan of three dozen miners snowshoeing deeper into the wilds, in search of rich veins of fluoride to mine and ship to needy southern dentists.

  McDouglas’s caravan moved slowly, for it was bitter that winter. The thermometer read thirty below—if that thermometer had been an inch longer, everyone in the party would have frozen to death. And as the miners tramped across the blistering wastes, the sound of their snowshoes brought the wassets slithering like eels through the undersnow. The feasting of the wassets, when they struck, was horrific.

  One by one, screaming miners would be pulled under the snow, out of sight and gone.

  The miners could hear their comrades’ bodies being devoured, right under their feet. They lost five good men that first day of the trek, and also Stinky Lou.

  Each wasset, as it dragged a man down, stopped to feast on its prey. It is their usual custom to build a nest inside the corpse and devour it from the inside. As a grown man will feed a snow wasset for about a week, the party should have had plenty of time to move on while the wassets dined. But still they were not safe; for one wasset proved cunning, and realized that if it killed more miners than it could eat, their corpses would stay fresh in that natural icebox that is the Northwest Territories; it could then dine all winter, at its leisure. And so every day, as they marched along, another miner would be sucked under the snow. The first half of every day was a time of stark terror for the miners, until the wasset struck and another one of their friends died. Only then could they breathe easily.

  Sweat froze on Khenbish McDouglas’s brow in the morning, and he would chip it off at night. He was not the only one sweating in terror. Even the bravest sourdough—as the miners were called—would not wish to be tracked day by day by a fearsome creature, hundreds of miles from civilization.

  At night the miners would climb the great pine trees that dotted the area, for the wasset cannot climb. But morning always came, and morning brought death.

  In desperation, the miners tried setting traps for the wasset, hunting local fauna—arctic porcupines or teacup wolverines—and hanging the game under deadfalls or over snares. The wasset claimed the bait, but it was so swift in striking that the deadfalls landed harmlessly behind it and the snares caught nothing but frozen chunks of air. And each day there were fewer and fewer miners left to set snares and hunt bait.

  At last the wasset had brought the miners’ numbers down to just four poor souls. The four spent that long, bitter night in the trees weeping and wishing they were home.

  They couldn’t literally weep, of course; their tear ducts were clogged with ice. But they were pretty sad, nonetheless.

  The next day brought better luck, though, and it was all thanks to Khenbish McDouglas, whose trap finally caught the beast. McDouglas had set a snare with a porcupine as bait, and he had accidentally hung his porcupine upside down. The snare was ineffective, but when the wasset leapt up to grab the porcupine, it swallowed the spiny beast hind end first.

  Even a hodag would be discomfited, should it swallow a porcupine backward. The wasset choked for a while, rolling back and forth in the snow, and the miners all ran forward and battered it to death with shovels and picks. Then they skinned the beast.

  Because a wasset’s hide has no armholes, it has long been desired by Native Americans as it makes excellent canoes. Similarly, the surviving miners (except for Stinky Lou’s brother, Jim, whom they left behind) were able to stretch the hide around a frame to fashion a sled, which they rode down the indigenous luge trails back to Alberta. They no longer cared for fluoride mining—they wanted only to be somewhere warm and not dangerous. As they sailed along they ate wasset meat and clutched their weaponized shovels against any dangers that might come spiraling out of the dark. They ate heartily. By the time they coasted into Fort McMurray, all that was left of the wasset was its bones.

  No fully intact wasset skeleton had ever been recovered, so McDouglas found himself possessed of a valuable property. He sold the skeleton to the Musée Canadien for a hefty sum. Craftsmen mounted the skeleton in the museum’s cryptozoology wing. There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Khenbish McDouglas was invited. It was a long way to come for a boy from small-town Vancouver.

  Later, after the crowds thinned out, Khenbish McDouglas stood alone in the vast marbled hall, gazing upon the bones of the fearsome creature he had captured. He was a celebrity now, and would sharpen sea life no more. Was that pride he was exuding—pride in a
job well done?

  He heard it before he saw it.

  The mounted skeleton of the snow wasset popped free of its moorings, one by one, and it sounded like popping corn. Khenbish McDouglas turned and saw the skeleton snaking toward him, its ribs clattering along the marble floor. It was only then that he realized: This whole time, the wasset had just been playing possum.

  Central American Whintosser

  (Helicoform mexicanus)

  An ancient maxim, often attributed to the Chinese historian Sima Qian, holds that whatever runs can be snared, whatever swims can be netted, and whatever flies can be shot, but because no one knows how a dragon moves, no one knows how to catch one. The same may be said of the whintosser.

  The whintosser’s method of locomotion is improperly understood. It must involve legs, for the whintosser has twelve of them circling its body like spokes on a wheel. Its head and tail are attached to its body by ball-and-socket joints, so that whichever set of legs is down, the whintosser is always right side up. It can fall down a mountainside without getting dizzy, which is fortunate, for it often falls down mountainsides.

  José Mariano Mociño was the first to describe the whintosser, circa 1798 in the Mexican state of Guerrero. “What a handsome animal!” he exclaimed, in Spanish, or perhaps French. The whintosser then beat him up, stole his compass, and ripped up his notes. This is the nature of the whintosser. It is an unpleasant nature.

  Worse still, some whintossers have developed a taste for human flesh by eating Band-Aids. These man-eaters, or menschenfresser as the locals in Guerrero call them, crave nothing less than human meat, for the flesh of the human is the sweetest and juiciest of all meats.

  A friend told me that.

  I encountered the whintosser while exploring the Laguna Mountains of California in search of the wild plunkus with my manservant, Hans. We had thrown dice on the journey out to learn how our hunt would go, and they came up snake eyes every time. I figured it meant we’d never catch the plunkus, but we caught one easily; it turned out that “plunkus” is just another name for the dingmaul, an animal I’ve seen about a thousand times, so that was a great disappointment. It was while we were packing up camp and feeling blue that the whintosser attacked.

  We had hired several native guides, mostly surfers and out-of-work actors, and the whintosser instantly consumed them all. “Bummer,” I heard one of them say, as Hans and I ran away.

  I knew that most bullets go unnoticed by the whintosser, and the large Teflon-coated, elephant-maiming bullets we carried would only make it mad. “I think this one is a menschenfresser,” I told Hans as we ran, but, of course, he did not speak Spanish. I wanted to point out that it was unusual to see a whintosser this far north, and speculate on its motives, but I decided I would be better off making a plan for escape. I distracted it for a few precious seconds by scattering Band-Aids behind me. Nevertheless, the rolling, jouncing, inimitable gait of the menschenfresser whintosser had it gaining on us steadily. In rough terrain it ran its fastest, for it could jump in the air and, like a crooked quarter, always land up. With my diamond-sharp mind I also noticed that the whintosser instinctively scrambled about on whatever legs were touching the ground.

  Thereupon I led Hans through a large hollow log I’d spotted lying near the trail. The whintosser was close behind us, in the proverbial “hot pursuit,” as we raced through the log, crouching and ducking our heads in the tight squeeze.

  And here we experienced the very event I had been anticipating. In the narrow confines of the log, the whintosser’s legs, for the first time in its life, all touched down simultaneously. Below, it felt ground; above, it felt ground; all around, the whintosser felt ground. It could not help itself; it began to walk, with its three sets of legs, in three separate directions. In doing so, it tore itself into three separate pieces. Each piece emerged from the log and scampered off in a different direction, going twenty or thirty yards before each of the creature’s three parts collapsed in a pool of blood: one-third of the whintosser’s blood per piece.

  I had been busy sniffing out by divining rod the most effective path of escape, and so I did not witness the death of the whintosser myself; but Hans did. And I looked up in time to see Hans’s own terrible fate.

  I have seen, in my travels, what can happen to a man who tries to follow with his eyes two objects moving away from each other. One eye looks left, and one eye looks right, until the face begins to look like the face of a walleyed pike. Most men blink, and get off with nothing worse than a wicked headache, but a strong-willed man (Theodore Roosevelt was such a man) will find his eyes traveling in separate directions with sufficient velocity that they will either jump from his head or, if they are tightly secured in their sockets, tear his head in two. Off the coast of Thrace, I once encountered a harpy that became unmoored from its own reflection in the sea; a young Theodore Roosevelt, who was with me at the time, watched the harpy and its wayward reflection until his entire body was torn in two (he managed to survive, of course).

  Hans was not so lucky that day. One of his eyes followed one piece of the sundered whintosser, and another eye must’ve followed another piece, or perhaps tried to follow two, for there were three whintosser pieces and he had but two eyes. Indeed, Hans’s face quartered itself, smack down the middle and also across the eyeline, so that each eye fell into two limp pieces, like a bisected grape. The four parts of his head struck the ground right in front of me.

  My efforts to halt the migration and spread of the Central American whintosser are well known enough that I need hardly repeat them here. I have coordinated with the Mexican and United States governments. I have laid snares and piloted dirigibles. I have kept busy, and I do not think about what I saw.

  But at night, in bed, the sight of Hans’s four head quarters continues to haunt me; keeps me from sleep; drops into my dreams (when I finally do sleep) like pieces of hail, sending me shrieking back to consciousness and gnawing at my bedclothes.

  I have seen a wasp laying its eggs in an orphan’s eyes. I have seen two cannibals fight over seconds until there was only one cannibal. I have seen The King in Yellow, that accursed drama of doomed souls. I have seen a grown man fall into the pool of Scylla, and emerge covered with barking dogs—I mean his flesh literally turned into barking dogs, so that he was a man-shaped mass of barking dogs. I have seen some horrible things in my life, but nothing quite as horrible as the four pieces of Hans’s skull.

  For the whintosser, with its three sets of legs, ran in three directions. But Hans managed to split his head into four pieces. Three of those pieces were watching the whintosser, but what was the fourth one looking at? It is this thing, the fourth thing, the quartum quid, that I fear. Is that fourth thing alive or dead? Does that fourth thing thirst for revenge? I am safe from the three pieces of the dead whintosser, but will I ever be safe from the fourth thing?

  Some have told me that I am mad, that there is no fourth thing, but that makes it even more terrifying.

  Even more terrifying, because how can I defend myself against something that does not even exist?

  Billdad

  (Castor saltissimus)

  The werewolf is one of the most famous of all fearsome creatures, perhaps due to the number of American celebrities (Emily Dickinson, Henry Clay, Eli Whitney) who have succumbed to lycanthropy. But they are not the only creatures that perpetuate their existence with a bite. Vampires, once much fiercer than they are today, are another notorious example, as is the common mongoose, whose bite slowly transforms the unwary into a shriveled, hairy parody of a human, and thence into a full-fledged mongoose. Dante describes (in canto 25 of the Inferno) a serpent that can bite a man and then switch bodies with him. And then, reversing everything, there is the billdad.

  The billdad’s bite is scarcely dangerous to a human; it lacks even rudimentary teeth. As it dwells only in the isolated lake regions of Franklin County, Maine, little was known abo
ut the creature until the mid-nineteenth century, when Erasmus D. Prescott set up a steam-powered sawmill along the Fairbanks, a small Franklin County stream surrounded by good pine and spruce. “The enterprise did not prove a pecuniary success,” as contemporary sources put it, for the mill consumed more trees in its steam furnace than it cut, but Prescott did manage to capture, in a fox trap, a strange animal that resembled a kangaroo with a broad, flat beaver’s tail. He called it a “billdad,” for reasons that will never be known, for one day, Prescott and his billdad disappeared. Concerned neighbors ransacked his house, but they found nothing of value. Dirty dishes were in the sink. Prescott’s pajamas were still in the bed. He was never seen again.

  The billdad, however, or at least a billdad, was spotted a few days later frolicking around the homestead of an H. W. “Excelsior” Priest, Esq., and family. It looked younger than it had before, and neighbors heard Priest remark that it certainly appeared appetizing, with its plump springy drumsticks and its fatty tail.

  Priest’s wife and six children were so sick of their diet of acorns and moss that nearly anything may have looked appetizing.

  One fact remains unassailable: Shortly thereafter, the Priests were all gone, never again to be seen. “Must’ve moved away,” said the neighbors, rooting through the belongings they’d left behind. They’d left a lot behind.

  Out on nearby Little Kennebago Lake, the billdads hopped and flourished. “There sure be a passel of billdads ’round here,” people would say that summer, the summer of 1888. They spoke in broad Maine accents, and were very colorful. “Look mighty toothsome, too.” Addison McIntyre, who’d bought the old Jeremiah Stinchfield place, managed to trap some of the creatures and brought billdad kebabs to the Saturday church picnic. Next day, there were a lot of empty pews in the church. Next day, there were a lot more billdads fishing in the lake.