The Beasts that Hide from Man (31 page)

Another figure in Greek mythology who underwent a canine transformation, though this time in reverse, was Lycaon. This wicked, foolhardy king of Thessaly served up human flesh to Zeus, in order to test whether the supreme Greek deity would recognize it. Needless to say, Zeus did, and as a punishment he changed Lycaon into a wolf. Interestingly, however, Lycaon is often portrayed not as a complete wolf, but rather as a wolf-headed man.

Zoologists seeking to nominate real animals as the inspiration for the legends of cynocephali generally offer two principal candidates. The first of these is the baboon, of which there are several species. The heads of these large monkeys are certainly very doglike; indeed, the yellow baboon is known scientifically as
Papio cynocephalus
. And the sacred baboon
P. hamadryas
is native to Ethiopia, the source of the earliest cynocephalus myths.

The second candidate is the indri
Indri indri
, the largest modern-day species of lemur, and indigenous to Madagascar. Measuring over three feet, but only possessing a very short, inconspicuous tail, and often spied sitting upright in trees, this highly distinctive creature does look remarkably like a short dog-headed human.

The indri did not formally become known to science until 1768, when French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat arrived in Madagascar. Even so, when other, earlier travelers visiting this exotic island returned home to Europe and regaled their listeners with much-embellished accounts of their journeys, these may well have included exaggerated tales about the indri.

Certainly, it would not take a sizeable stretch of the imagination to convert a dog-headed lemur into a fully fledged cynocephalus—thus breathing life into a being that never existed in reality, yet which would be faithfully chronicled by a succession of relatively uncritical scholars for many centuries thereafter. Of such, indeed, are legends all too often born.

At the southern end of the Mackenzie Mountains, an area comprising coniferous forests and barren tundra, lies the Nahanni Valley, situated just inside the Canadian Northwest Territories’ border with the Yukon Territory. On first sight, it may well seem a fairly nondescript, unexciting locality, but it has an evil reputation, as evinced by its nickname, “The Headless Valley/’ Indeed, its nickname is well earned, for over the years there have been many verified but officially unexplained cases here of prospectors and other wayfarers, found dead—and minus their heads!

To the native American Indians inhabiting this forbidding zone, however, there is no mystery. They are convinced that these deaths are the work of a monstrous wolf-like beast indigenous to northern Canada and Alaska, and referred to by them as the
waheela
.

The
waheela
first attracted widespread public attention in October 1974, when an article on this hitherto-obscure mystery beast, written by eminent cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, was published posthumously in
Pursuit
, the journal of the Society for the Investigation of The Unexplained (SITU). Sanderson revealed that at widely separate times he had received near-identical data concerning such creatures from two wholly independent colleagues.

The first to have contacted him was Tex Zeigler, a professional cameraman and film director, who had gathered information regarding the
waheela
while visiting Alaska. Around 15 years later, Sanderson had received some data describing an identical mystery beast from an experienced truck mechanic, whom he chose to identify only as “Frank” in his article. Frank claimed to have spied one of these animals while passing through the Nahanni Valley, and gave the following details concerning his close encounter of the cryptozoological kind.

Frank had left some friends at a camp below the Virginia Falls, and had journeyed up the Nahanni River with an American Indian friend whose home lay some distance further north. After a day’s strenuous paddling, they made camp, and for several days they remained in this area, hunting game for food, which was plentiful here. One day, after reaching a plateau carpeted with grass and bushes but ringed by dense forests below a steep bank, the Indian decided to try and flush some game from the forest. So he told Frank to stay on the plateau, where he could readily spy and thus bag anything that emerged from the trees below.

After waiting on the plateau for a time, Frank suddenly noticed some bushes at the very edge of the forests begin to move. He called out, to ensure that it was not his companion who was responsible for this movement, but he received no response — at first. Then, without any warning, an amazing creature stealthily emerged, which Frank evocatively described as “the grand-daddy of all wolves”!

It resembled a pure-white wolf, with very long, shaggy fur, but was truly enormous, standing about three and a half feet at the shoulder. Apart from its snowy pelage, however, the most eye-catching feature of this extraordinary animal was its head, which was very wide.

After it moved to within 20 paces of him, Frank became so alarmed that he fired both barrels of his 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with birdshot and heavy ball, and was convinced that he scored a hit on the beast’s left flank. However, his shot did not seem to have any effect upon the creature, which was no doubt shielded from injury by its exceedingly dense coat. Instead, it simply turned away, and leisurely ambled back into the forest. Thoroughly bemused and shaken, Frank lost no time in relating his eerie visitation to his Indian friend, but received no reply from him. It was evident that his friend knew of such animals, but considered them to be evil, illomened entities. Nevertheless, Frank eventually persuaded him to talk about them, and learned that they were indeed familiar to him.

The Indian stated that the creature Frank had seen was not a wolf but something completely different. Its kind are much larger than wolves and have much broader heads too, but their legs are shorter, their tails are thicker, and their ears are smaller. In addition, the toes on their feet are splayed far apart from one another, unlike those of wolves, which probably affords them a somewhat flat-footed, bear-like (plantigrade) mode of walking. Also unlike wolves, they are solitary hunters, and tend to be scavengers rather than active predators. Rarer than wolves, they spend most of the year up near the tundra region, coming south only in winter—except in the Nahanni Valley and certain other valleys to the west, where they reside throughout the year, but remain aloof from humans.

Needless to say, this description does not match that of true wolves, but it compared perfectly with the
waheela
accounts collected in Alaska by Tex Zeigler. Even more significantly, however, it also closely recalls a very distinctive taxonomie family of carnivorous mammals currently believed to have been extinct since the Ice Ages.

Known technically as amphicyonids, they are colloquially referred to as bear-dogs, and for good reason, because they seemed to combine the burly, short-limbed, plantigrade body plan of bears with the dentition and facial structure of dogs—as does the
waheela
. Moreover, bear-dogs survived in North America until at least as recently (geologically speaking) as two million years ago, and lingered on in parts of the Old World until a mere 10,000 years ago. Their ultimate extinction is believed to have been due to competition with more efficient carnivores, such as the wolf and other canids—but what would happen if a population of bear-dogs managed to survive in remote barren areas rarely ventured into by canids and human hunters, such as the tundra of northernmost North America?

Is it possible, as speculated by Sanderson, that, freed by this region’s inhospitable environment from the pressures of intense interspecific competition and also persecution by humanity, a species of bear-dog has surreptitiously persisted right into the present day? Morphologically, there is no doubt that a surviving amphicyonid could provide a very persuasive identity for the mysterious
waheela
, but without a complete specimen for formal examination, we will never know for sure—and it would require an exceedingly intrepid investigator to seek out a creature that can apparently decapitate a man with a single bite!

Medieval mythology is populated not only by such renowned examples of fabulous beasts as the unicorn, dragon, griffin, and basilisk, but also by a host of lesser-known yet no less fascinating fauna, which include among their number a particularly mystifying creature—the so-called “mimiek dog.”

It was said to originate in the Middle East, particularly in the Libyan province of Getúlia, and a concise account of this peculiar animal can be found in Edward Topsell’s bestiary,
The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes
(1607). According to Topsell, the mimiek dog is:

Any dog whose muddled morphology combined the face of a hedgehog with the body of an ape would be a wonder to behold, but its talent for mimicry set the mimiek dog even further apart from the typical canine creed. Consequently, they were much sought after by traveling players and puppeteers, who would train them to participate in their performances.

One such performance took place during a public spectacle at Rome, attended by the emperor Vespasian. It featured an extremely versatile mimiek dog that effortlessly imitated the behavior and cries of a diverse range of different types of dog and other animals too. Its pièce de resistance, however, was its own tragic death, after eating some poisoned bread—and its enthusiastic resurrection from the dead at the end of the play, which it performed with great verve, delighting the emperor and the other members of the audience, who included the famous Greek biographer Plutarch from the first century AD.

Yet in spite of its erstwhile popularity, today the mimiek dog is largely forgotten, and even among those few zoologists aware of its history as recorded in ancient and medieval works there is no firm agreement concerning the precise identity of this extraordinary little animal. Indeed, there is no guarantee that it was actually a dog at all.

In
Curious Creatures in Zoology
(1890), John Ashton believed that it was a poodle, but the picture reproduced here, from Topsell’s bestiary, is hardly reminiscent of this familiar breed, or even of some ancestral form. And it would be a very clever poodle indeed that could adequately perform the tasks normally carried out by human servants. Similarly, for all sorts of fundamental genetic reasons, the suggestion made by some early authorities that mimiek dogs were the product of illicit liaisons between dogs and apes does not merit even the briefest of considerations.

A far more likely explanation for this furry caricaturist is that the mimiek dog was not of the canine persuasion at all. Certainly, its gift for accurate impersonation and mimicry readily recalls a monkey. More specifically, its ape-like body, long limbs, dense fur, and slender muzzle are all consistent with baboons. One species of baboon occurs in Egypt (though not in Libya), from where specimens accompanying traveling performers could have reached Europe (including England, where mimiek dogs were indeed present, according to Topsell).

Such an identity may even explain the strange idea that the mimiek dog was a simian-canine crossbreed, because baboons have monkey-like bodies but very dog-like heads. As already alluded to when discussing the cynocephali, exemplifying this latter characteristic are the yellow baboon, referred to scientifically as
Papio cynocephalus
, and the anubis baboon, named after Anubis, ancient Egypt’s jackal-headed god of embalmers and death.

Baboons are easily trained to perform tricks, they are often kept as intelligent pets, and sometimes have even been taught to carry out tasks normally reserved for humans. Perhaps the most famous example was a baboon from the late 19th century called Jack, who worked for most of his life as a signalman, assisting his crippled human master to operate the railway line signals at a small train station in South Africa. Throughout his amazing career, which spanned nine years, Jack never made a single mistake! During the 1970s, another baboon was fulfilling the same role at a railway station near Pretoria, and there was a baboon elsewhere in South Africa whose farmer owner had trained him as a shepherd!