There is also a folk style and structure to the news stories that report these alleged big-cat sightings. Here are just two more examples quoted from clippings in my files:
A COUGAR STALKING BETHESDA [MARYLAND]?
Some people claim to have seen one. Others think they have heard one wailing in the night.
But naturalists say it probably isn’t so….
The Department of Natural Resources, which deals with area wildlife, gets reports of cougarlike animals about five or six times each year, [Clif] Horton [district wildlife manager of the DNR] said.
“None of them are ever substantiated,” Horton said.
(the Montgomery [Maryland] Journal, June 3, 1994.)
The cougar remained a fugitive.
The big cat eluded a roving circus of police, bloodhounds, news helicopters, reporters and gawkers yesterday, not once showing itself during an intensive four-hour search along West Cobbs Creek Parkway in Yeadon, Darby and Southwest Philadelphia….
Police still did not have a clue to the animal’s owner, despite calls from tipsters throughout the day. One woman apparently called both the Philadelphia Zoo and Yeadon police to say she had lost her 4-year-old pet cougar, but that lead turned out to be fraudulent….
No exotic animal permits have been issued in the Philadelphia area by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
(the Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1995.)
In another kind of Wild Kingdom legend an old rural story is repeated in a modern urban setting. I got this account of a storytelling session that took place in an Austin, Texas, bar in a 1990 letter from Brenda Sommer, then a bartender and one of my best correspondents. I quote only one of Ms. Sommer’s beautifully told stories from her letter:
I have to write to you before the bar napkin that my notes are written upon disappears into the mess that is my desk.
To set the mood: it was a slow Wednesday night at the bar, muggy outside but just right inside for Margaritas. Two good-old boys who wouldn’t allow me to ignore them had reached the end of their list of current jokes, when one of the Bubbas was reminded of a story his uncle had heard about a fellow in Beeville, Texas.
It seems that one afternoon, this fellow had killed a big rattlesnake out by his woodpile, chopping its head off with a hoe. Later that night, he happened to recall that his grandson was collecting rattles for a school project, so this bright guy went out in the dark and over to the woodpile. He felt around until he found the rattle end of the snake, chopped it off, and went back inside to bed.
The next day he went past the woodpile and noticed that the decapitated snake was still there with the rattle intact. After he awoke from his dead faint, he realized that in the dark he must have removed the rattle of this snake’s live mate!
“Well, now, just a minute,” said the other Bubba. “I heard that one in Louisiana.”
Indeed, this “out of the mouths of Bubbas” yarn is an old southwestern favorite. Folklorist Linda Kinsey Adams, who researched folklore of the rattlesnake, found this to be the most common rattlesnake story told in north-central Texas. Since this thriller tale was usually told as the experience of a FOAF, the story was able to make an easy transition to the style and context of a modern legend told in an urban bar. I call it “The Wrong Rattler.”
* * *
“Foiling Foxes”
From the Daily Mail, an English newspaper, 1997
Q. We are plagued by urban foxes whose antics keep us awake at night. How can we get rid of them?
Mrs. P. McGuire, Croydon
A. Place plastic bottles half-filled with cold water around the garden, especially at night. The wind will blow into the bottles, making a low whining sound that foxes hate.
Mrs. K. Bednall, Tonbridge, Kent
* * *
“The Kangaroo Thief”
The most traveled story about Australian kangaroos came during the America’s Cup. There are at least three versions.
• First one we heard involved the fashionable Gucci people who came over to support the Italian cup entries. Between races, a group decided to drive into the country to look for roos.
As it turned out, their Land Rover ran into a kangaroo but only stunned it. As the animal lay in the road, trying to recover, one of the Italians decided it would be clever to take a picture of it in a Gucci jacket. The driver offered his.
So, the kangaroo was fitted with a jacket, but before the picture could be taken, the animal recovered and bounded into the bush, resplendent in its new attire.
There was one hitch. The keys to the Land Rover were in one of the jacket’s pockets.
• A San Francisco writer uses crew members of the Canada II 12-meter. They drive into the outback and run into a kangaroo, which is temporarily knocked out. The Canadians dress the animal with crew jacket and baseball cap.
The kangaroo leaps up and heads for the hinterland, dressed in the sailor’s jacket which contains money, and most important, a passport.
• This time it’s the noted sailmaker and sailing star, Lowell North, who gets out of a car, puts a blazer from the Eagle 12-meter syndicate on the kangaroo.
Before he can take a picture, the kangaroo leaps into a thicket never to be seen again except, possibly, by two other kangaroos—one with a Gucci label, another with Canada II on it and a Canadian passport.
From his column “Some tall tales from the outback” by Red Marston in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, August 12, 1987. All three versions of the story were rampant at the time, and were repeated by many print and broadcast media. Graham Seal mentions the story being told about visiting English cricket teams in the 1950s in his 1995 book Great Australian Urban Myths, and Amanda Bishop titled her 1988 compilation of similar stories from Down Under The Gucci Kangaroo. Bishop mentioned prototypes for the modern versions told as a “bush yarn” in the 1930s; however, Australian folklorist Bill Scott told me that he had found an earlier record in a 1902 book called Aboriginalities. In the 1960s in the United States “The Kangaroo Thief” became associated with “The Kingston Trio” because Dave Guard of that popular folk-singing group told it as an experience the group had while touring in Australia. The story continues to circulate: it was in Canadian Forum in April 1992 and in the English periodical the Guardian on February 27, 1993, and I spotted it posted to an Internet message board in October 1997. The following legend is a variation on the theme.
“The Deer Departed”
A HUNTER WITHOUT A GUN
George and his friend Peter were fond of deer-hunting, and whenever they had a free day during the deer-hunting season, they took their guns and went off into the forest.
One Saturday they were sitting on a log eating their sandwiches and drinking their coffee when they saw a man walking through the snow towards them. He was dressed in deer-hunting clothes, but he had no gun with him. When he got nearer, the two friends saw that he was following a deer’s track in the snow. They were both very surprised to see a man tracking a deer without a gun. So when he reached them, they stopped him and asked him whether anything was wrong and whether they could help him. The man sat down beside them, accepted a cup of coffee and told them his story.
Like them, he had gone out deer-hunting that morning with a friend. They had seen a deer with very big horns, and had followed it for some time. Then he had fired at it, and it had fallen just where it stood. He and his friend had run over to examine it, and he had said to his friend, “This deer’s horns will make a wonderful rack for my guns when I get it home.” He had then arranged his gun in the deer’s horns and stepped back a few yards to see exactly how they would look as a gun rack on the wall of his study. He had been admiring the effect when the deer had suddenly jumped up, shaken itself and raced away, carrying his gun firmly stuck in its horns.
Dumb-hunter stories are numerous. This story is from a textbook in the People’s Republic of China: College English: Fast Reading, Book One, Exercise #4, published by the Shanghai Foreign Language Press. The Chinese
version of an American urban legend turns “The Deer Departed” into a tale-within-a-tale, drops the idea of taking a photograph of the trophy, and adds a hunting buddy to the cast of characters. The “Comprehension Exercise” following this story includes this interesting multiple-choice question: “What is the usual weapon in deer-hunting? a. Knives, b. Gun racks, c. Rifles, d. Pistols.” Another question asks why the deer ran away, a detail that is not specifically explained in this version; the apparently correct answer choice is “because the hunter had missed his shot.”
“Horsing Around”
Men who went hunting with him learned that behind that stolid exterior was a sense of humor. Some of Coke’s [Coke Stevenson, former Texas governor] “gags” would, in fact, become staples of Austin lore. During a hunting trip with several fellow-legislators and a lobbyist, for example, a rancher, an old friend called Stevenson aside and told him that in one of the back pastures where the men were to hunt was an aged horse—an old family pet—so infirm that it should be destroyed. The rancher asked Stevenson to do it for him. Stevenson agreed. As the hunters’ car was passing the horse, he asked the driver to stop, and got out. “I think I’ll just kill that ol’ horse,” he said, and, taking aim, shot it in the head.
His companions, unaware of the rancher’s request, stared in amazement.
“Why did you shoot that horse?” the lobbyist finally asked.
“I just always wondered what it would feel like to shoot a horse,” Stevenson drawled. Pausing, he stared hard at the lobbyist. “Now I’m wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man.”
From the New Yorker, January 15, 1990, p. 60, in Robert A. Caro’s series titled “Annals of Politics.” Governor Stevenson may actually have enacted this old hunting yarn; if so, he was lucky that things did not end the way the story often does—with the other hunters in panic shooting, or at least attacking and disarming, the perpetrator of the prank. In The Baby Train I titled this story “Shooting the Bull,” since another version of the story has the fellow hunters shooting one of the farmer’s prize bulls after the prankster has shot the old horse, mule, or cow as the farmer had asked him. This is evidently a favorite story among American professional athletes, a famous version having often been told by Billy Martin, who claimed that the prank was played on him by Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford when the three baseball greats were deer hunting. David Young of Ore City, Texas, reported to me in 1991 that Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry told it that year as a true experience when he had taken coach Mike Ditka of the Chicago Bears hunting in Texas, but when asked about the incident, Landry confessed that he just liked to tell the story “to get things going.” Versions of this legend appeared in Morton Thompson’s 1945 book Joe, The Wounded Tennis Player and in H. Allen Smith’s 1953 book The Compleat Practical Joker. Tobias Wolff based his story “Hunters in the Snow” on the shooting-a-man version of the legend that appears in his 1981 book In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.
“The Hapless Water Skier”
In 1965 while I was stationed at Eglin AFB, Florida, I was invited to go water skiing with the family of a friend on a small reservoir in southern Alabama. Along the edge of the lake was an area of tree stumps and fences protruding from the water. As we were getting ready, the boat owner told us he would keep us well clear of the shoreline, because the summer before a skier had fallen and had been killed there.
According to him, as the boat went back, the skier started yelling for help, saying he was tangled in barbed wire and couldn’t move his legs. When they pulled him from the water, he was dead. He had fallen into a nest of water moccasins and had died from over 100 snake bites.
Two years later I was at Barksdale AFB in northwestern Louisiana. Again, I was invited to go water skiing, this time in one of the local bayous. As we got ready to start—I’m sure you are ahead of me now—I was told we must stay away from the shoreline where all the dead trees were, because last summer a skier was killed when he fell into a nest of water moccasins there.
This version of a widespread southern story came in a 1991 letter from Lt. Col. Gary L. Dikkers, USAF. Dr. O. Finley Graves of the University of Mississippi, who published a 1978 article in Southern Folklore Quarterly about snake stories, wrote to me pointing out occurrences of “The Hapless Water Skier” in southern literature, including Ellen Douglas’s 1988 Can’t Quit You, Baby, which described it as “an apocryphal tale…that rolled like ball lightning through the Mississippi Delta during the late ’60s.” Could the story possibly be true? Douglas quipped that “It’s always true. Always true that a tangle of water moccasins lies in wait for the skier. Always, always true.” In 1990 the San Antonio Light discussed water moccasins, or “cottonmouths” as they are often called, in its “Who’s Who at the Zoo” column, describing this species as “quiet and not easy to locate.” The column mentioned as mere hearsay the story of a little girl who fell while water skiing on Lake Amistad and was “immediately killed by multiple moccasin bites when she landed in a ‘nest’ of these snakes.” Naturalist Bruce Lee Deuley, writer of the column, commented, “There are no water moccasins in Lake Amistad, and I have found no record of these reptiles traveling or grouping in large colonies.” Whether such a death ever happened, it’s highly unlikely that virtually the same accident occurred in many different places and times, yet always escaped the notice of wildlife experts.
“The Giant Catfish”
There are the stories about the divers who work for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and swim down to the bottoms of the Colorado River dams to clean the grates and make repairs.
Anglers say a diver saw a flathead [catfish] so big that, as Rich Beaudry of the Arizona Game and Fish Department puts it, “You’d have to have a jack winch on a truck to pull him in. And the reason nobody has ever caught one is that they’re so big they keep breaking the lines.” And then Beaudry adds, sadly, “Trouble is, it’s always ‘my friend the diver’ who’s seen it, but you can never find the diver.”
From Arizona Highways, November 1991. Robert Miller of Richfield, Utah, who sent me this clipping, commented “for the past 25 years or so I have heard stories about huge catfish that were supposedly seen from Hite, Utah, all the way to Yuma, Arizona.” Midwestern versions are discussed in John Madson’s 1985 book Up on the River: An Upper Mississippi Chronicle. Stories of giant catfish have been told for generations throughout the South, Midwest, and Southwest, places where truly huge catfish do indeed grow, but never to quite the proportions claimed by legend, i.e., as big as calves or cows or even cars. In modern versions the fish is mistaken for a Volkswagen Beetle because its mouth is slowly opening and closing like a car hood lid being moved up and down in the current. In another variation on the theme, the body of a drowned passenger may be said to still be locked inside the VW, and several giant catfish are prowling outside trying to find a way in. Divers, seeing such horrible sights, emerge from the depths pale and shaking. They vow never to dive in murky rivers or reservoirs again, and overnight their hair turns white from the shock. A good collection of catfish facts and folklore is included in Jens Lund’s entry “Catfish” in the 1996 work American Folklore: An Encyclopedia.
“The Flying Cow”
Moscow, April 30 [1997] (Reuters)—A tale of Russian cows falling from the sky onto a fishing boat in the Pacific has been keeping German diplomats on their toes.
But the story, reported by the German Embassy in Moscow to the Foreign Ministry in Bonn and made public by a German newspaper, bears all the hallmarks of an urban legend—a fantasy, told and retold until it gains an air of authenticity.
It goes like this: Several weeks ago Russian rescue workers picked some Japanese fishermen out of the sea and detained them after they claimed their vessel had sunk after being hit by a cow.
Investigations by Russian authorities then uncovered a bizarre crime story, involving Russian soldiers and airborne cattle-rustling, the daily Hamburger Morgenpost wrote.
“Members of the Russian forces stole a cou
ple of cows and transported them in a plane. During the flight the cattle got out of control. The crew felt forced to throw the cows out in order to avoid a crash,” the paper wrote, quoting from an official embassy dispatch.
Sources in the German embassy told Reuters that there had indeed been such a wire and indeed, the quotes were authentic.
So far no clear source has emerged for the story and some people say it sounds very similar to an episode in a popular recent Russian film called Osobennosti Natsionalnoi Okhoty (Peculiarities of the National Hunt).
The film, also one of Russia’s bestselling videos, depicts hunters stealing a cow and hiding it in a military jet.
Some six months ago the Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, inspired by the film, wrote a short report involving cows and planes in its column Baiki, one of the paper’s journalists told Reuters.
Baiki translates as “invented stories” and covers yarns like the one about baby crocodiles flushed down toilets into the sewage system where they grow before creeping back into flats and houses.
Russians say the cow story even predates the film as a longstanding joke in which a Russian fisherman explains the loss of his boat with the falling cow yarn.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 34