Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (43 page)

Most urbanites seldom
see wildlife except in zoos or, occasionally, when traveling through the boondocks. Thus, the possibility of an occasional contact with a wild creature
anywhere
deserves commemoration with a legend; for examples, see “The Elephant That Sat on the VW” in Chapter 4, “Alligators in the Sewers” in Chapter 8, and “The Stunned Deer—or Deer Stunt” in Chapter 19. In each of these legends, as well as in others, an animal has somehow wandered to a site or into a situation where it does not belong, and the result for human beings is a certain amount of discomfort and a whole lot of storytelling. Whenever wildlife strays from its home turf, or whenever people invade the wilds, the legends tell us that some contact is possible, often with bizarre results.

Of course you don’t need
real
contacts with the Wild Kingdom to have legends. To the contrary, the more mythical the beast the better, legend-wise. What are the chances of someone spotting an actual alien black panther, or even a native cougar, roaming free anywhere in the United States? Realistically, about nil, except for the very remote possibility of an escaped zoo animal or exotic pet. Despite the odds, local newspapers regularly report sightings like the following, quoted from the
Flint (Michigan) Journal
of February 3, 1995:

It turns out that reported sightings of big cats are not so unusual in eastern Michigan. As I wrote in
The Baby Train,
“Phantom panthers were reported in Manchester, Michigan, in 1984, in Milford in 1986, and in Imlay City in 1989.” All of these communities are just 30 or 40 miles outside of Detroit, home of teams named the Tigers and the Lions. Could there be a connection?

The Motown-area panthers, like all these legendary stray monster felines, are hard to track and impossible to verify. As the Michigan DNR official was quoted saying in the Flint Township case, “I’ve been out on these things over the years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where an exotic animal was found.” (If only he had omitted “I don’t think” from his statement; surely if he
had
found an exotic animal he would have remembered it!)

What accounts for the repeated claims of cougar-sightings in the same general area? Some people have suggested that there must be
something
out there or such reports would not recur. Another popular theory holds that since several people always say they’ve seen the big cats, these witnesses couldn’t all be lying. Wildlife officials generally agree that people have indeed seen something—movements, shadows, unidentified animals, paw prints—and sometimes have heard strange cries in the night. But the authorities interpret these incidents to be mistaken identifications of large dogs, house cats, or possibly smaller local wildcats, bobcats, or the like. Not cougars, and certainly not black panthers. My own folkloric insight would add that such reports are not confined to one region, but occur widely in the United States and also in Europe, notably in England and Italy in recent years. Also, similar motifs recur in all of these stories, suggesting the transmission of folk rumors, hoaxes, and legends rather than the straying of actual panthers or cougars. People are not lying, but they are circulating unverified folklore.

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]?

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:

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.”

“The Kangaroo Thief”

T
he 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”

M
en 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.