Unlikely Creatures from American Folklore
An amusing example post from This is True's Bonzer Website of the Week, Futility Closet.
Unlikely Creatures from American Folklore
- The gillygaloo lays cubical eggs that won't roll downhill (hard-boiled they make excellent dice).
- The gyascutus has legs of unequal length so that it can walk easily on hillsides.
- The Funeral Mountain terrashot is shaped like a casket and explodes in the desert heat, leaving a grave-shaped hole.
- The squonk weeps continually at its own ugliness, and when surprised dissolves entirely into tears.
- The tote-road shagamaw has a bear's front feet and a moose's hind feet, leaving tracks that change every quarter mile.
- The slide-rock bolter (below) skids on its own drool across valley paths, scooping up tourists.
"A forest ranger ... conceived the bold idea of decoying a slide-rock bolter to its own destruction. A dummy tourist was rigged up with plaid Norfolk jacket, knee breeches, and a guide book to Colorado. It was then filled full of giant powder and fulminate caps and posted in a conspicuous place, where, sure enough, the next day it attracted the attention of a bolter which had been hanging for days on the slope of Lizzard Head. The resulting explosion flattened half the buildings in Rico, which were never rebuilt, and the surrounding hills fattened flocks of buzzards the rest of the summer." (William Thomas Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, 1910)
Rico, Colorado, happens to be just a few miles from the This is True offices. Probably half the buildings in Rico were never built in the first place!
--Visit Futility Closet.
Posted January 8, 2010 3:30 PM
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