Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/181

Rh accounts of an animal which, though exceedingly rare, is occasionally met with in the mountains, but, from its supposed ferocity and the fact of its being a cross between the devil and a bear, is given a wide berth whenever it makes its dreaded appearance. Most startling stories were told of its audacity: how it has been known to leap upon a hunter and devour him in a twinkling; often charging furiously into a camp and playing all sorts of pranks on the goods and chattels of the mountaineers. The general belief was, that the animal owes its paternity to the old gentleman himself; the most reasonable declaring it to be a cross between the bear and wolf. Plunting one day with an old Canadian trapper, he told me that, in a part of the mountains which we were about to visit, his comrades once had a battle with a 'carcagieu,' which lasted upward of two hours, during which they fired a pouchful of balls into the animal's body, which spat them out as fast as they were shot in! Two days after, as we were toiling up a steep ridge after a band of mountain-sheep, my companion, who was in advance, suddenly threw himself flat behind a rock and exclaimed in a smothered tone, signaling me with his hand to keep down and conceal myself, 'Sacré enfant de Gàrce, mais here's von dam carcagieu!' I immediately cocked my rifle, and, advancing to the rock and peeping over it, saw an animal, about the size of a large badger, engaged in scraping up the earth about a dozen paces from where we were concealed. From its appearance I at once recognized the mysterious quadruped to be a 'glutton.' After I had sufficiently examined the animal, I raised my rifle to shoot, when a louder than common 'Enfant de Gàrce!' alarmed the animal, and it immediately ran off, when I stood up and fired both barrels after it, but without effect, the attempt exciting a derisive laugh from the Canadian, who exclaimed: 'Pe gar, may be you got fifty balls; vel, shoot 'em all at de dam carcagieu, and he not care a dam!' "

But, after all, the foundation dogma, the existence of a wolf-like animal of prodigious voracity, was less insane than incorrect, and as such was renounced without regret. The joint-snake idiocy, on the other hand, though knocked to pieces a hundred times, persists in reviving with symbolic promptitude. In the Rocky Mountains, on the lower Mississippi, and all through the southern Alleghanies, farmers and hunters still believe in the self-reconstructive power of a reptile that survives dismemberment with the facility of a New York tramway ring, and, after picking up a jaw-bone here and a couple of vertebrae there, pursues its way rejoicing, and ready to segregate again at a minute's notice. Time-honored dogmas are ridicule-proof; and how shall we, in this special case, avail ourselves of Schopenhauer's maxim that the best way of refuting a superstition is to explain it? Should the strange delusion be founded on the habit of certain ophidians that make the pit of their oesophagus a place of refuge for their new-born offspring? Dozens of young snakelets have been seen