Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Page 7

  By this point everyone around knew what was going on. They had the circumstantial evidence, of course; they also had the last entry in little Susie McIntyre’s diary, which read, in part:

  Throughout Franklin County people swore off the consumption of billdad. Only problem was that everyone at the picnic had agreed (before their transformation) that roast billdad was about the tastiest thing they’d ever had. This was 1888, of course, before Oreos and MSG, when most food just tasted like wet cardboard; or maybe the billdad’s flesh really was that sweet. Susie McIntyre’s diary also read, “Billdad tastes better than apple pie made of wishes.”

  People would gather around the lake to watch the billdads fish. A billdad hunkered crouched on the shore until a fish came near the surface of the lake; then it would leap out across the water, twenty or thirty yards a leap, passing right over the fish and walloping it on its head with that flat beaver tail. The stunned fish was then easy pickings for the billdad. “Seems to be a good enough life,” people said to each other. Their eyes darted back and forth. They licked their lips. Many already had their nets out. Apple pie made of wishes sounded mighty good. Franklin County was soon depopulated, and the billdads were clogging the ponds.

  According to a Zoroastrian creation myth, back in the days of Mashya and Mashyana (the Adam and Eve of Zoroastrian tradition), babies tasted delicious, and the first couple would eat each and every child they birthed. It was a crisis, for no new humans lived past their infancy. Lest the human race begin and end with the first couple, their creator, Ahura Mazda, took away the savor of baby flesh. He made children taste so disgusting that Mashya and Mashyana would raise children and populate the world instead of eating them. But the savor that had tempted Mashya and Mashyana, that savor of primordial baby—that savor was still in the meat of the billdad. And Ahura Mazda did not work his miracles in Maine; so Governor Sebastian Streeter Marble had to step up.

  Governor Marble had heard about the Franklin County atrocity and feared that gourmands from other parts of his great state might seek out billdad and become billdads in turn. He secretly imported a crew of Grahamites—a vegetarian cult from Massachusetts—and bade them travel to Franklin County with syringes and inject all the billdads they found with castor oil. This catch and release program resulted in a generation of foul-tasting billdads. The curious who came to Franklin County in search of a meal pronounced, as they underwent their transformation, that it had not been worth it at all. Many others were turned off by the horrible smell, and never even ate the meat they’d come for.

  Soon Franklin was repopulated with humans, the locals shunned the billdads, and their population dropped off. If anyone ate a billdad again, it was no one very important or influential. The story of the delicious billdads was forgotten to all except those willing to slog through the secret memoirs of Sebastian Streeter Marble (such as yours truly, dear reader).

  And I wondered: What if “billdad transformation” was strictly a local phenomenon; what if billdad meat, when exported from Franklin County, Maine, becomes harmless? There is precedent for food to have different effects in different regions: For example, if you eat human flesh in Canada, you become a wendigo, an accursed monster; while if you eat human flesh in Paris, you become president of France, if I understand their electoral process correctly. If billdad sausages could be sold everywhere except parts of Maine, that would still be a lot of sausage sales. I consider myself a man of independent means, and I do not wish to sound avaricious, but maintaining a cryptozoological garden requires funding that is difficult to acquire when so many of my visitors are eaten, mauled, poisoned, petrified, or have eggs laid under the skin. Every billdad sausage sale could help defray the cost of putting better locks on the shagamaw pit.

  I sped to Maine and caught a billdad (rare and elusive as they now are). Then I sped to Cusco, Peru, the furthest I could go from Maine without having to switch time zones and interfere with my carefully cultivated sleep schedule. The city of Cusco is near where guinea pigs were first domesticated, so it seemed a fine place to find a human guinea pig. I fried up some empanadas with billdad meat inside. “Would you like some free empanadas?” I asked a passerby. I tried to choose a passerby who looked like a scoundrel, so I wouldn’t feel too bad if my experiment transformed him into a billdad.

  He took two or three bites out of one empanada and then threw it on the ground. “It tastes like my butt,” he said, or he may have. My Spanish is not so good. Anyway, I already said he was a scoundrel.

  “Possible it could use some seasoning,” I thought, and absentmindedly popped a spare piece in my mouth. It was quite good, and tasted like chicken. Only after I’d polished off the empanadas did I realize I had tasted billdad meat.

  I did not wish to become a billdad! I don’t know how to swim, and I would find life as a billdad unpleasant. But, as the long seconds of anxiety ticked away without my legs elongating, I decided that the experiment had been a success. I headed back toward my hotel, congratulating myself on a job well done. I cast one last look over my shoulder as I went, and that’s when I saw the scoundrel who had rejected my empanadas—I saw him suddenly melt away into three rats connected at the tails. The rats scampered down a Cusco alley that was six centuries old. And I ran away, too.

  Now I lie here in bed at night, trembling with dread and anticipation. Every nervous twitch makes me think I’m splitting into rats. Every squeal and creak of my manor house makes me worry that these are squeaks from my own tiny voice boxes. I think I’m starting to grow feathers, but that could be unrelated. I know that at any moment the horrible transformation could begin, like a second puberty; and one was enough. Perhaps, I tell myself, that jerk could turn into three rats anyway. It seems like the kind of thing a scoundrel like him would do. But really, when I look at this rationally, what are the odds that the one human I fed my billdads to was capable of such a feat?

  I have run the numbers, and the odds are less than one in fourteen.

  Tripodero

  (Bertha magna)

  For three days my study smelled of tobacco smoke. I opened the windows and sprayed civet musk liberally, but the smell just got worse. Then one day, as I was poring over volumes of forgotten lore, my old colleague Ludvík Ctvrtlik strode through the door. He was smoking a pipe. “You can’t smoke in here,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me. “This is time smoke. It travels backward in time, so the smell doesn’t linger. As soon as I leave the room you won’t smell a thing.”

  “But that means that for the last few days—” I began, but he hushed me with a wave of his pipe. He had come with other plans. He wanted to enlist my help in securing the eggs of the tripodero.

  The tripodero is one of the most mysterious species on the North American continent, and one of the most dangerous. It is the world’s largest land echinoderm—echinoderms being the strange phylum of creatures that includes the starfish, the sea cucumber, and William Wordsworth. Of all invertebrates they are the closest relatives to humans, but their thought processes are the most difficult to understand. No one has ever reasoned with a starfish. And no one has ever stolen a tripodero’s eggs.

  Ctvrtlik extracted a small-scale model of a tripodero from his carpetbag. It was made of brass, but was otherwise very lifelike. Easy to see were the tripodero’s most distinguishing features: two long telescoping legs that permit the creature to change its height radically. These, along with its prehensile, tentacle-like tail, put the “tripod” in “tripodero.” In the mountainous chaparral thickets of California, where the tripodero lives, these legs can telescope up to ten feet in length, or shrink back down to almost nothing, allowing the creature to tower over the bush or slink underneath it. But this is not what makes the tripodero dangerous.

  The head of the tripodero is almost featureless except for a puckered mouth, from which it is capable of expelling sharp, rock-hard “teeth” with the force of a cannon. It seems to regrow th
e teeth quickly, or at least no tripodero has ever been found to run out. And the force with which it fires these teeth can penetrate even an armored tank, or the skin of a whintosser.

  “We’re both going to die,” I told him; but Ludvík Ctvrtlik had come prepared. He possessed a device powered partly by the philosopher’s stone and partly by steam, which was capable of throwing up a kinetic suppressor shield in front of us; the tripodero could fire all the teeth it wanted at us, yet we would be safe.

  I hope I have drawn a sufficiently accurate character of myself that it is clear I am always up for adventure, especially if it involves stealing things from a poor dumb animal. Just to be sure, I diced for the success of the mission and threw snake eyes every time. But I’m always throwing snake eyes over California. Probably the dice are loaded.

  Getting to the West Coast was easy enough (there is a secret passage through the conservatory), but our trek through the mountains contained enough adventures to fill a volume in the life of Baron Trenck. There were lava flows and ice floes and sentient waterfalls and salamanders made of glass. There was a labyrinth fashioned completely out of blood, with the void in its center and the only exit through a needle’s eye. There was also a gift shop that sold hot chocolate, so it wasn’t all bad. And finally, on torn and bleeding knees we crawled over a ridge and saw before us a cache of tripodero eggs.

  Tripodero eggs are cubes, so they don’t roll down the slopes and off the cliffs of the scrub mountains. Whether they are laid square or come out round and are later squared off, like the baby in the Honcho Gusho Shinshi who was placed in a box until it developed corners, is subject to debate. What is not subject to debate is that the eggs are jealously guarded by an adult tripodero, always on the lookout for any mischief. This tripodero strolls around on its long legs, presumably searching for food, and by all appearances not paying attention to the eggs. But anyone approaching too close just gets gunned down, a tripodero tooth smack between the eyes.

  We saw no tripodero around, but this meant nothing. The eggs would not be unguarded.

  Undismayed, Ludvík Ctvrtlik brought out the mechanism for his kinetic suppressor shield. We turned the crank and fiddled with the dials. When all was ready, Ctvrtlik carried the device and I carried the sack, and we ran forward. The kinetic suppressor shield was invisible (of course), so I could only take it on faith that it was working. I knew that I was gambling not only with my own life but also with the lives of all the parasites that throve inside my guts; tripodero eggs, however, were worth the gamble. Not only was it necessary for scientists to study their shape and taste, but also my collection felt incomplete without at least one. Where other eggs rolled around willy-nilly, the tripodero egg could sit flat on a desk, and even be used as a paperweight. I tried to think of the eggs’ utility and charm, and not of the mortal danger in which I was placing myself and my intestinal leeches.

  For indeed, no sooner had I started shoveling eggs into the sack than a distant rustling in the chaparral indicated the awareness of an adult tripodero. With a bizarre slide-whistle sound, the fearsome creature suddenly telescoped up from out of the brush a hundred yards off. An unearthly keening was its only warning. Then it began to fire. There was a puff from the sphincteral cannon of its mouth and the crack of the sound barrier being blown through as a tooth came rocketing toward us.

  This was the moment of truth. Perhaps I paused in filling the sack. Afraid for its life, a tapeworm I’d harbored for several years evacuated my body and crawled a rather filthy trail across the rocks, seeking a safer host. But in general I was resolute.

  Any conventional shield, even one seven ox hides thick, would have been sundered by one blow of that tooth. But a kinetic suppressor absorbs kinetic energy, and it grows stronger the more force is thrown at it. The tooth struck the shield, slowed to an abrupt stop, and then fell harmlessly to the ground.

  “It’s working,” Ctvrtlik shouted, like a dimwit.

  It was the work of a moment to finish stowing the eggs, sixteen in all. Four or five more booming sounds, and when I looked up several more teeth were tumbling down, halted by the kinetic suppressor. There was also a tripodero stalking across the brush at us on its ten-foot-long legs. We started to run, but we were hampered by the encumbrance of my sack, and by Ctrvtlik’s need to keep his device angled such that the kinetic suppressor and its invisible shield were behind us. I gave a little hop to avoid stepping on my old friend the tapeworm. If we had to run through chaparral, we would have been caught in an instant, but we ran in the other direction, up a rough path to a craggy peak. The tripodero’s legs could not bend in the way needed to clamber up after us. We stood there, on the peak, looking at the rough ground we’d just scrambled across, over at an utterly alien face that nevertheless radiated despair. The tripodero turned away from us, perhaps (we thought) in shame.

  And then its legs, already ten or twelve feet long, began to extend further. It rose higher and higher, until it must have been twenty feet off the ground. The legs tapered to pencil slimness, and the whole body swayed in the gentle breeze.

  Still looking away from us, it angled its snout and fired.

  “I wonder what it is shooting at now,” Ctvrtlik said, straining his eyes. These were his last words, for just then a tooth struck him from behind, emerging from his forehead right between the eyes. He crumpled to the ground, dropping the kinetic suppressor, which shattered. The tripodero didn’t know the shield was down, of course, and it was preparing to fire again, the long way around the earth, when I hallooed and set the sack down, gently, displaying the eggs. With fishing wire I lowered the sack from the peak, letting it rest on a soft shrub. As the tripodero moved to reclaim its eggs, I split for the hills. Piranha-buzzards had already stripped Ctvrtlik’s body to a skeleton, but I did take his philosopher’s stone. I also had three tripodero eggs, which I had secreted under my hat. For I knew the tripodero, like all echinoderms, could not count past twelve. It would never even know these were gone.

  You can see them on my desk. I’m hoping they’ll hatch.

  Hyampom Hog Bear

  (Ursus curare)

  The Hyampom hog bear gets its name not from its pug, swinish nose (which it nevertheless possesses) but rather from its diet.

  The mountains of Hyampom, California, are verdant with oak trees, the acorns of which make delectable pig fodder. Consequently, there have long been a large number of hog ranches in the area, their pig drifts running free, feasting on acorns and awaiting the roundup. “Can’t wait for the roundup,” the pigs may whisper to each other, for, being pigs, they are too stupid to understand that the roundup will spell their conversion into sausage. But sulking along these same mountains is the hog bear, hankering for a roundup of its own.

  As the hog bear is an elusive creature, its existence was first deduced only by the carnage it left behind. Swineherds patrolling the mountains would hear pained squealing, and, ascending to investigate, come across whole drifts of pigs, each one with an enormous chomp taken out of its fatty back. Not only was the chomp painful to the pig in question but also the bacteria in the bear’s filthy mouth would infect the wound, tainting the taste of the pig flesh such that it could only be used in bologna or chewing gum, and not in any high-grade meats. Perhaps this is the reason the hog bear takes only one bite out of each pig—the second bite tastes skunky. Or perhaps pigs are like apples, and the first taste is always the sweetest.

  Regardless of motive, the hog bear’s actions had the unfortunate result of spoiling the whole drift of pigs, when one pig could have satisfied the appetite of a bear this size.

  Although the swineherds and hog ranchers of Hyampom usually encourage an all-pork diet, the hog bear’s habit of not paying for the pigs it consumes was universally condemned by the American Ham Association. What they could not agree on, though, was what to do about the situation. Keeping the pigs penned up would be prohibitively expensive, as would multiplying the number of
swineherds on guard. Injecting the pigs with foul-tasting castor oil (the “billdad gambit”) would have ruined them for the market. One enterprising rancher, Marcus Wasselbaum by name, dressed his pigs in cheap human clothes, with wigs and a touch of mascara, to deceive the bears, which worked temporarily.

  Eventually a hog bear caught on, and one day swineherds came across a whole drift of bleeding pigs in prom dresses and tracksuits, each with a missing chunk of back flesh; their wigs slipped askew; their mascara running. Ursodental experts determined that all the bite marks came from the same set of jaws. Psychiatrists agreed that no one who witnessed the scene should be allowed to own knives or operate heavy machinery.

  Why didn’t the pigs scatter when the hog bear came near? How was a lone hog bear able to take one bite out of twenty or thirty pigs in succession? These mysteries remained unsolved, even as scientists collected hog bear footprints and hog bear spoor and sold hog bear merchandise.

  “I bet the hog bear is just a fat hairy guy who likes bacon,” said President Truman. “Everyone likes bacon.” But President Truman was wrong.

  By the late ’60s the hog bear problem had reached a crisis level. California was in danger of losing its pork production to fish-fed pigs raised on rafts floating in the Pacific, and those hog bears weren’t helping. The American Ham Association hired Eugene S. Bruce, Jr., of the U.S. Forest Service, one of the few men to have seen a hog bear in the wild, to advise them. Bruce tried hunting and trapping, but he had the most success with “beating parties”—large groups of people banging tambourines and drums to scare the hog bears away to another county. Some brought electric guitars with portable amps; some brought saxophones. After six months, and great expense, most of the bears had fled in terror from the noise, and the pigs looked safe.