ALI SHAW

January 1st 1909.  Ten-Footed Bear.  Tarak told us Wednesday evening that the tenfooted bear lives mostly in the water like a seal.  Looks like a polar bear all but the ten legs.  When he walks on ice the five feet of each side track after each other so the bear makes a double track like a sled.  Walking the bear often gets his legs tangled up; there are so many, he can’t manage them all.  Once a man was followed by a ten-footed bear.  The man walked between two cakes of ice and the bear was caught in the crevice between them.  If his feet had not become entangled he might have gotten off.  As it was, the man speared him.  When dying, the bear fell on his back, all his feet pawing the air.  This is an old men’s story.  Tarak never saw such a bear or tracks.

- Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in his Stefansson-Anderson expedition journal, 1908-1912

One of the wonderful things about monsters is that you can make them even more monstrous by merging them together.  Many fabulous beasts are a fusion of animal body parts, or of multiple instances of the same creature crammed together: one body with three heads or nine tails.  So too the qupqugiaq of the Arctic, who the Inuit and Inupiat peoples describe as a massive polar bear with ten legs.  During blizzards, the qupqugiaq rolls onto its back and waves all its limbs in the air.  Fooled by the swirling snow, the unwary hunter mistakes the moving legs for a human crowd and goes to them.  Then the qupqugiaq tears him into more than ten pieces, and feasts well.

We don’t know much more than that about qupqugiaqs (most of those who survive an encounter only do so by killing the bear), although it would be wrong to think of them as malignant creatures just because they like to snack on human beings.  That’s just bears being bears.  Evidently the ten-legged polar bear can be an aid as well as a danger.  In Explorations in Anthropology and Theology, by Frank A. Salamone and Walter R. Adams, the authors’ Inupiat host describes how his son inherited a ten-legged bear as an animal helper (a feral kind of guardian angel) from an ancestor.  ‘Polar bear helpers grow to a gigantic size,’ he explains, ‘then develop three more pairs of legs to become the ten-legged polar bears known as kiniq or qoqoqiaq.’

There’s another kind of many-legged and nigh-on mythic bear out there, officialy named the tardigrade but more commonly referred to as the water bear.  At less than a millimetre in size, it’s obviously not a member of the ursidae family of mammals.  But, hey, those extra limbs also bar the ten-legged polar bear from entry into the mammalian club, so I’m calling both of these creatures as members of familus qupqugiaq.  To make up for their size, water bears have powers.  They can ressurect themselves, for a start, and they can become invulnerable when the need arises.  In September 2007, two water bears blasted off in a rocket from Kazakhstan.  In orbit around the Earth, they endured the airlessness and vastness of space as well as the lethal radiation of unfiltered sunlight.  Then, after ten days, they returned from their mission alive and well.  Here’s water bear expert Mike Shaw (no relation), outlining some of the amazing properties of these animals.

 

 

I can think of one reason why those water bears survived: there are already bears in space, and these star bears took a shining (forgive me) to them.  Ovid describes how Juno transformed Callisto and her son Arcas into bears, only for Jupiter to throw them into space.  You can listen to Ted Hughes read his translation of that sequence at the National Gallery’s website, and you really, really ought to.  ‘Then to empty her cries of their appeal / The goddess nipped off her speech.  Instead of words / A shattering snarl burst from her throat, a threat – / Callisto was a bear.’

That story describes how the stars of Ursa Major came into being.  Likewise the Iroquois tell a story of the same constellation bear.  Three hunters chase the animal so high that they end up in the heavens.  ‘As it broke from the cover of the pines, the four hunters saw it, a gigantic white shape, so pale as to appear almost naked.  With loud hunting cries, they began to run after it.  The great bear’s strides were long and it ran more swiftly than a deer.’  In outer space, they spear the bear, cook it and eat it.  Then, to their amazement, it comes back to life.  Like the water bear, it can withstand just about anything.

According to Wikipedia, ‘The pre-Christian Finns believed the bear to have come from the stars and that it had the ability to reincarnate.’  A chap called Matti Sarmela has written a fascinating and extensive study called The Bear in the Finnish Environment, where he notes that, ‘Narratives of the bear de­scended or evicted from heaven are also found with Siberian hunting peoples. One of the closest equivalents of the Finnish bear birth poem is the Khanty myth narrative. In the beginning of time, the bear lived in the heavens. Defying the orders of the master of heaven or supreme god To’rom, it wanted to take a peek at earth and was enchanted by the land of the Khanty. By defying the order, the bear committed a “deadly sin” and as punishment, the supreme god ordered that it should be lowered in a cradle by golden chains onto earth.’

If interstellar cousins aren‘t behind the water bears’ miraculous antics, perhaps they’re due to all those legs.  Perhaps many-legged bears are just plain magic.  Further evidence comes in the form of one more nearly-bear, the woolly bear caterpillar.  This is another diminutive species of qupqugiaq that likes to come back from the dead.  It’s also my chance to once again shoehorn into this bestiary the work of the peerless David Attenborough.  He, as far as I’m concerned, is the closest thing we have on Earth to a mighty bear spirit…

 

She is one of the Panotii.  She has ears so big that she can hear evil.  Sometimes she goes out with no clothes on, because her ears are big enough to wrap around her and keep her warm.

She lives on an island along with the other Panotii.  Noted cataloguer of made-up beings, Pliny the Elder, wrote that this place, this All-Ears Island, lay somewhere within landlocked Asia.  Another ancient geographer, Pomponius Mela, thought it was one of the Orkney Isles.  Thankfully, the mapmakers of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a 700-year-old map inked onto vellum, cleared up the matter.  Their Mappa Mundi is a fabulous work, as attested to here

What the BBC video doesn’t show is a little island in the top left of the map.  Squint at this and you’ll see it…

…but in case you couldn’t make it out, here’s a close-up.

That’s All-Ears Island, and let me give you its geographical context in the world as we know it.  The furthest north point on this map is India, and the British Isles are in the bottom left, at about eight o’clock.  That circle in the centre of the map is Jerusalem.  Midway between Jerusalem and ten o’clock is Noah’s Ark, while Gog and Magog are closer to eleven.  By now you should have a pretty clear idea of where All-Ears Island exists.

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Time for a big-eared interlude, because it’s cute to do so.

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Sebastian Brant wrote about the Panotti in his edition of Aesop’s Fables (that’s his woodcut, above, from page 372), while they also appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle (below) and in the bottom right corner of this elaborate stone relief from the Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in France.

The British Library has another fabulous image on its site, into which you can zoom and zoom until you can see the brush marks in the ink

I like the way this Panotii has rolled up its ears to either eschew decency or catch some sun.  The BL’s accompanying article states that the Panotii can even escape from danger by flapping their ears and flying away.  Which reminds me of this…

Medieval Europeans believed in many strange peoples inhabiting the uncharted lands beyond the edges of their maps.  The medieval conception of the world would have been of a charted haven surrounded by boundless strangeness.  Living in the far distance were all manner of wonderful civilizations: the one-legged people, the people whose faces looked out of their chests, and the people with the heads of dogs.

It’s impossible to be sure of how these stories originated.  No doubt they’re due in part to a fear of the unknown, to medieval man’s sense that Christendom was an island in a sea of heathens and demons.  More charitably, it’s possible that explorers simply made up such peoples, knowing full well that their audiences at home would never be able to disprove their claims.  Such explorers would have known, too, that often a little bit of fiction makes life more fascinating.  There’s also a theory that travellers mistook certain animals for men.  In the case of the dog-heads, it’s possible that explorers saw baboons or lemurs and thought they were types of human being.  At Wild Film History you can watch David Attenborough talk about the indri…

Wherever he came from, and regardless of whether or not he was actually a lemur, Reprobus was a dog-headed man who converted to Christianity and found his way to the city of Antioch.  Upon his conversion he took the name Christopher (now St. Christopher), but swiftly ran into trouble with the dastardly Emperor Decius and his henchman Baceus.

There came a certain Baceus to him and struck him. “You may do so”, said Christopher, “for I will not strike you in return, but I forgive you, for forgiveness is the new law.” 3. Baceus went to the king, and said: “Hail O King, I have news for you. I have seen a man with a dog’s head on him, and long hair, and eyes glittering like the morning star in his head, and his teeth were like the tusks of a wild boar. I struck him for he was cursing the gods; but he did not strike me, and said it was for the sake of God that he refrained.

- from the Irish Passion of St. Christopher, presented by David Woods of University College Cork on his website

After this episode, Decius summons Reprobus and tries to force him to sacrifice to the gods of the city.  When Reprobus refuses, Decius employs hooks, burning lamps and – most feared of all by the church at the time – pretty women, to try to break his resolve.  Although Reprobus never made the sacrifice, by the end of the story he has had enough of turning the other cheek.  Decius is worn out too, and has Reprobus beheaded, but not before the saint invokes an angel to, ‘give to Decius a devil to compel him to gnaw his own flesh and so die.’  And so, nobody lives happily ever after.

A disclaimer – this is not the version of St. Christopher’s story that most present-day Catholics would recognise.  At some point in history, the legends surrounding Christopher and those of the dog-headed people became entangled.  Since then the two have been separated, and  Reprobus cut loose as an unwanted anomaly of religious history.  Perhaps it is fitting, after all.  The name Reprobus translates as Outcast.

For in his path he sees a monstrous birth,
The Borametz arises from the earth
Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,
A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit,
…It is an animal that sleeps by day
And wakes at night, though rooted in the ground,
To feed on grass within its reach around.

- Dr. De la Croix, in Connubia Florum, Latino Carmine Demonstrata (1791)

This plant bears a crop of cute little lambs.  It is therefore the go-to fruit tree for hungry wolves.  Sadly, in order to survive, the lambs need to remain attached to the umbilical stems of the plant and this means that, once they have nibbled away all the grass within reach, they starve to death.  It’s an unfortunate and fleeting existence, belonging to one of the most absurd creatures ever invented.

The Vegetable Lamb’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the Golden Chicken Fern may have provided the basis for the Barometz, but I expect that this one is just too far-fetched to have any grounding in reality.

In the splendid book Beasts! Kaela Graham contributed a fantastic illustration of the Barometz.  Also check out his unpublished version.

If you haven’t got Beasts! or Beasts! Book Two, I’d highly recommend that you rectify the situation.  They’re collections of, well, beasts, as depicted by various comic book artists and collected by Jacob Covey for Fantagraphics.  Each picture comes at its subject from a fresh angle, and nothing is depicted in the way you might expect (the mermaid in the second volume springs to mind).

Jorge Luis Borges included the Barometz in his Book of Imaginary Beings, where he referenced other plants that behave like animals, namely a bird-eating plant imagined by G K Chesterton, the trees in Dante’s forest of self-murderers, and the crying mandrake, as recently seen in Guillermo Del Toro’s masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth (here shown relaxing between takes).

In the ocean there is a creature that really is a plant-animal hybrid.  Whereas leaf insects, stick insects, and these fern-like creatures found in the Antarctic merely look like plants, the Green Sea Slug has performed the trick of the Barometz in reverse, and become part-vegetable.