Fantastically Wrong: Ridiculous Mythical Critters Dreamed Up by 19th Century Lumberjacks

The tripodero, a ferocious beast of American lumberjack lore, was said to have a four-power scope on its pellet-shooting mouth. The artist here left that out, though, because it would have really just been over the top.

America has the most ridiculous mythical creatures the world has ever known. Hands down. Nowhere else has a mythology formed so beautifully in a perfect amalgam of too much whiskey, too little sleep, and perhaps some accidentally consumed magic mushrooms.

These are America’s little-known “fearsome critters,” which came principally from lumberjack lore. Consider the Funeral Mountain terrashot, a walking casket that blows up when it stumbles into a searing desert. Or the tripodero, which has telescoping legs for seeing over bushes and a mouth that fires dried clay at its victims. Or the hidebehind, a lumberjack-hunter that you can’t see because—conveniently enough for the myth—when you look its way it ducks behind a tree. Also, it hates alcohol, so the only way to make sure it doesn’t eat you is to be drunk all the time. Ah, America.

Perhaps the most fascinating monsters of American lore, though, are the ones that serve to explain the phenomena we encountered as we headed west. That’s no different than any other folklore, really. In the absence of solid science, we humans will come up with any spectacular theory that will do—usually to serve as some sort of moral lesson or strategy for avoiding bodily harm.

But what’s remarkable about these fearsome critters is how they go about making sense of our world in the most nonsensical ways imaginable. They’re silly. They’re irreverent. And they’re probably standing right behind you.

Here are three of my favorites.

The hugag is like a moose, minus the knees and the dignity.

The Hugag

Scientific name: Rythmopes inarticulatus
Responsible for: fallen trees

Canada has the moose, but America has a 13-foot-tall moose-like… thing that has corrugated ears and an upper lip that’s so long the beast must take care to avoid tripping over it. According to William T. Cox, in his seminal encyclopedia Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (the source of the brilliant scientific names here, by the way), the hugag has “a perfect mania for traveling.” It’s harmless to humans, but is saddled with a fairly serious handicap: It has no knees, so it has to goose-step around like every day is a military parade.

Accordingly, the hugag can’t lie down, on account of not being able to get back up. So to sleep, it must lean against trees. And that, good Americans, is why you hear trees fall in the night. It’s not the beavers compromising the structural integrity of such vegetation, or that dead trees falling over on their own is a regular occurrence in the forest. It’s the floppy-lipped hugag. (By the way, if you’d like to catch one, a proven technique is sawing two-thirds of the way through a tree and waiting for a hugag to lean against it. As the tree falls, so too will the beast tumble to the ground, where it is easily slaughtered.)

This creature, though, is far from an American creation. It was Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, who wrote in book eight of his Natural History of the “achlis.” It’s an animal “not unlike the elk but has no joint at the hock and consequently is unable to lie down but sleeps leaning against a tree, and is captured by the tree being cut through to serve as a trap.” He also notes its exceptionally big upper lip. “On account of this it walks backward when grazing, so as to avoid getting tripped up by it in moving forward.”

It’s likely inspired by the moose, which while iconically Canadian, also can be found in northern Europe and Russia. It also roams the northern United States, hence its adoption into American lore. I suspect the idea of the achlis or hugag leaning against trees comes from bull moose using trees to both deposit their scent during the mating season, and to scrape off the velvet tissue that covers their antlers as they grow. And while they aren’t typically known to be bested by vegetation, they sure as hell have been known to get drunk on fermented apples and get stuck in trees.

The splinter cat is like a regular cat, minus any semblance of logic.

The Splinter Cat

Scientific name: Nasusossificatus arbordemolieus
Responsible for: shattered trees

This husky feline is an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees, which it mines for bees and raccoons. Climbing a tree, it propels itself off with powerful legs right into another, blasting the trunk with its wedge-shaped snout and reinforced noggin. The experienced frontiersman knows well “the moronic activities of the Splinter Cat,” writes Henry H. Tryon, who published his own Fearsome Critters in 1939, three decades after Cox’s encyclopedia. “If the Cat finds food in the ruptured trunk, he is temporarily appeased. If not, he goes immediately for another tree. And right there is the big trouble. The Cat doesn’t use any judgment in selecting trees, he just smashes one after another until he gets a meal.”

“Like many of the cat tribes,” Tryon adds, “he is strictly a night traveler and hence is rarely observed. But he’s often heard, and the abundance of his work is ample evidence of his existence, numbers and activity.”

In reality, the splinter cat’s destruction is the work of lightning. When a tree is struck, sap boils and steam forms as cells in the wood explode. If the path of the lightning runs more along the edges, the tree can survive, less a good amount of its bark. But if the strike travels down its core, the whole thing can pop like it was packed with dynamite, sending wood shards flying and branches crashing to the ground, no fiendish felines required.

The gumberoo is like a bear, minus the hair and reasonable body type.

The Gumberoo

Scientific name: Megalogaster repercussus
Responsible for: forest fires

The gumberoo is much like a bear, though it is hairless save for “prominent eyebrows and some long, bristly hairs on its chin, but the body is smooth, tough, and shiny and bears not even a wrinkle,” according to Cox. Its hide is so tough, in fact, that it can repel hornet stings, charging elk, and even bullets. Tryon notes that a certain S. W. Allen “photographed one, but the negative exploded.”

Perhaps that is why this extremely combustible beast is said to burn like celluloid film. Heat makes the thing swell and explode, and that’s how we get forest fires. Writes Cox: “Frequently during and after a forest fire in the heavy cedar near Coos Bay woodmen have insisted that they heard loud reports quite unlike the sound of falling trees, and detected the smell of burning rubber in the air.”

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