The Beasts that Hide from Man (25 page)

When the Yoshii Municipal Government heard about this, it dispatched some officials who located the creature’s burial site and dug up its remains, forwarding them to Prof. Kuniyasu Satoh at Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare to examine and identify. Meanwhile,
tzuchinoko
fever hit Yoshii in a big way. Its mayor, Ryuichi Arashima, announced that he had no doubts of this mystery species’ existence here, claiming that many sightings had been reported locally in the past. Accordingly, he offered a reward of 20 million yen to anyone who caught a live specimen, and even promised to increase the prize by a million yen a year until one was captured. Predictably, Yoshii was soon awash in bounty-hunting tourists, anxious to bag one of these elusive beasts. But even if they didn’t (which they didn’t), they could console themselves with a bottle of
tzuchinoko
wine, a
tzuchinoko
rice cake, or even a
tzuchinoko
pastry, courtesy of some decidedly enterprising local enterprises.

Even the municipal government lost no time in entering the fray—by formally launching a project team. Resplendently outfitted in special
“tzuchinoko
hunter” caps and uniforms, the team duly interviewed any elderly Yoshii citizens claiming to have seen
tzuchinokos
in their youth, and patrolled the town hoping for fresh sightings.

One of the most memorable testimonies to emerge from this investigation was that of 82-year-old Yoshii resident Mitsuko Arima, who allegedly sighted a
tzuchinoko
as recently as the morning of June 15, swimming along a river:

By September, however, the great
tzuchinoko
hunt was quietly petering out. Moreover, the final news reports stated that the dead specimen had merely been identified as “a kind of snake”—a typically vague, inconclusive end to another crypto-case. Yet as far as I could see, this entire episode had had little if anything to do with the “real”
tzuchinoko
anyway. After all, the recent eyewitness descriptions given here bear scant resemblance to the classic
tzuchinoko
description cited at the beginning of this article. They report a creature with a round face instead of a triangular one, large eyes instead of small ones, and include no mention whatsoever of any of the
tzuchinoko’s
most characteristic features—horns, triangular cross-sectional shape, distinct neck, flattened underside, and short thick body.

If only a more detailed account of the dead specimen examined by Prof. Satoh could be obtained, to clarify this much-muddled situation. Happily, such an account was indeed obtained, by Gavin Joth, who succeeded in contacting Satoh, and kindly presented his informative reply online to fellow members of the [email protected] discussion group.

Satoh revealed that he had been able to reconstruct the dead snake’s bone structure from its remains, and he estimated its total length at 120 cm (four feet). Its largest ventral scales were 49.5 mm (roughly two inches) across, and the morphology of its dorsal scales corresponded with those of Japan’s tiger water snake
Rhabdophis tigrinus
. Also consistent with this species was a small fang found on the dead snake’s maxillae. Thus Satoh concluded that this was indeed the identity of the latter specimen (though conceding that it was a notably large one).

As this species is very visibly dissimilar from the classic
tzuchinoko
description, which is much closer to that of pit vipers, the good citizens of Yoshii were presumably led astray in their assumptions that they had sighted
tzuchinokos
in 2000—seemingly by a snake in the grass that proved to be a serpent of the water, and not a tobleronic
tzuchinoko
after all.

When is an eel not just an eel? When it is a mysterious Scottish snake, or the Loch Ness monster, or a bottled sea serpent, or a giant blue worm from India, or…

Monstrous eels far greater in size than any officially recorded by science have been offered at one time or another as a favored identity for a wide range of cryptozoological creatures still awaiting formal discovery. Take, for instance, the
beithir
.

One of Britain’s lesser-known mystery beasts, the
beithir
is said to resemble a giant water snake, and reputedly inhabits the dark caves and waters of the Scottish Highlands’ more remote, secluded areas. A correspondent in the English magazine
Athene
recalled meeting a fisherman near Inverness in 1975 who claimed that he and four others had once seen a
beithir
lying coiled in shallow water close to the edge of a deep gorge upstream of the Falls of Kilmorack. When the creature spied them, however, it began to thrash violently, and then swam up the gorge near Beaufort Castle, eventually vanishing from sight. They estimated it to have been “a good three paces or more” long, i.e. nine to ten feet.

Equally intriguing is the testimony of a Strathmore gamekeeper who alleged that his wife’s parents had spied
beithirs
moving
on land
during the 1930s at Loch a’ Mhuillidh, near Glen Strathfarrar and the mountain of Squrr na Lapaich. Could these elongate enigmas be over-sized (or over-estimated) specimens of the grass snake
Natrix natrix
, a species equally at home on land and in the water? Or is it possible that they are unusually large eels, whose abilities to migrate considerable distances overland are well known?

Any contemplation of mysterious water beasts in Scotland leads inevitably to Nessie—the famously elusive monster of Loch Ness. And this too has been provisionally identified by some zoological authorities, notably the late Dr. Maurice Burton, as a giant eel, possibly up to 30 feet in total length. Normally, of course, the common European eel
Anguilla anguilla
does not exceed five to six feet, and the conger eel
Conger conger
seldom exceeds nine to ten feet. Nevertheless, ichthyological researchers have revealed that growth in eels is more rapid in confined bodies of water (such as a loch), in water that is not subjected to seasonal temperature changes (a condition met with in the deeper portions of a deep lake, like Loch Ness), and is not uniform (some specimens grow much faster than others belonging to the same species).

Collectively, therefore, these factors support the possibility that abnormally large eels do indeed exist in Loch Ness. Also of significance is the fact that eels will sometimes swim on their side at or near the water surface, yielding the familiar humped profile described by Nessie eyewitnesses, and a 20-foot or 30-foot eel could certainly produce the sizeable wakes and other water disturbances often reported for this most celebrated of all aquatic monsters.

Even so, independent sightings of the beast seen in its entirely, i.e. on land, have repeatedly featured a creature possessing distinctive flipper-shaped limbs, a well-delineated neck, a burly body, and a long tail. This description is far removed indeed from that of any eel, but is strikingly reminiscent of a supposedly long-extinct type of aquatic reptile known as a plesiosaur—which remains the most popular identity among cryptozoologists for the Loch Ness monster. Yet even if Nessie is a plesiosaur, there is no reason why Loch Ness could not
also
harbor some extra-large eels. After all, any loch that can boast a volume of roughly
263 billion
cubic feet must surely have room enough for more than one monster!

Immense landlocked eels supposedly inhabit a number of deep pools in the Mascarene island of Reunion, near Mauritius. In a letter to
The Field
(February 10,1934), Courtenay Bennett recalled seeing in the 1890s a dead specimen that had been caught in one such pool, the Mare à Poule d’Eaux, and from which “steaks as thick as a man’s thigh were cut.”

Some cryptozoologists believe that certain extremely elongate sea monsters sporadically reported over the years may comprise a hitherto-undiscovered species of gigantic eel. Indeed, it has even been given a name, the super-eel—and for many years, scientists were convinced that a young super-eel had actually been captured and preserved.

The curious case of the bottled sea serpent began on January 31, 1930, when the Danish research vessel
Dana
caught a truly extraordinary juvenile eel (leptocephalus) at a depth of about 900 feet, south of the Cape of Good Hope. What made this specimen so astonishing was its size. In contrast to the common eel’s leptocephalus, which is no more than three inches long (even the conger eel’s is only four inches long), this colossal leptocephalus measured six feet, one and a half inches!

Bearing in mind that during its metamorphosis from leptocephalus to adult, the common eel becomes 18 times longer (and the conger can become as much as 30 times longer), bemused ichthyologists estimated that the still-unknown adult version of the mysterious species represented by the
Dana
leptocephalus could be anything between 108 and 180 feet long! A veritable super-eel in every sense. Accordingly, this highly significant leptocephalus was duly preserved in alcohol, and is now housed within Copenhagen University’s Zoological Museum. Meanwhile, the zoological world anxiously awaited the capture of an adult super-eel.

Alas, it was not to be. In 1970, Miami University ichthyologist Dr. David G. Smith conclusively identified the giant leptocephalus’s species as a spiny eel or notacanthid. Despite their name, spiny eels are not true eels; moreover, unlike true eels, which undergo most of their growth
during
metamorphosis, spiny eels undergo most of theirs
prior to
metamorphosis. Consequently, had it lived and transformed into an adult, the six-foot-long
Dana
leptocephalus would not have greatly increased in size—thus sweeping aside earlier speculations that it could have become a 100-foot-plus monster adult eel.

Having said that, it is by no means impossible that a gigantic species of true eel does indeed await formal scientific discovery; the ocean depths are far too immense for even the most conservative opinion to dismiss such a prospect out of hand. At present, however, there is only tantalizing anecdotal evidence for the existence of such creatures.

And what can be said about the giant worm-like eels (or eellike worms?) with vivid blue bodies that reputedly lurk amid the dank riverbed ooze of the Ganges? This, at least, is what Aelian, Ctesias, Solinus, and a number of other celebrated scholars from the ancient world once claimed. According to Solinus, these amazing creatures were 30 feet long, but their dimensions grew ever greater with repeated retellings by subsequent writers until they eventually attained sufficient stature to emerge from their muddy hideaways at night and devour unwary camels and cattle! Not surprisingly, this incredible species of eel has never been brought to scientific attention—a classic example, presumably, of the one that got away!

In Hindu and Buddhist mythology, a
naga
is an ancient serpentine deity, sometimes portrayed as an entity combining the body of a huge snake with the head (and sometimes the torso too) of a human, and an erectile scaly crest resembling the hood of a great cobra. In cryptozoology, however,
“naga”
has a rather different meaning as the name given to an alleged giant water snake that inhabits the Mekong River constituting the northeastern border of Thailand with Laos. In October 2000, British cryptozoologist Richard Freeman visited Thailand with a film crew to seek, and, if possible, spy or even film this mysterious beast.

Sadly, neither a film nor any firsthand sightings materialized, but Richard did succeed in collecting some very interesting eyewitness accounts and information about the cryptozoological
naga
that had not previously been made available to Western researchers.

One such eyewitness was none other than the chief of police in Phon Pisai village, Officer Suphat. In 1997, he and a group of thirty people had been walking along some cliffs overlooking the Mekong when, looking down, they saw what at first seemed to be flotsam, floating on the river. Peering closer, however, they were shocked to discover that this “flotsam” was actually a truly immense black snake, swimming against the river’s current via a series of powerful horizontal body undulations. Officer Suphat estimated that it measured no less than 70 meters, i.e. 230 feet! Even allowing very generously for exaggeration or poor estimation of length, this creature was clearly of very considerable size. Alternatively, part of what seemed to be the creature may in reality have been its wake, or perhaps the creature was actually a composite—several smaller snakes swimming in a line. When the officer described their sighting to a monk, however, the latter told him that it was indeed a
naga
.

Back in 1992, workmen attempted to demolish an old dilapidated abandoned temple in Phon Pisai, planning to replace it with a new one. Each time they approached this temple, however, a huge black thick-bodied snake partially emerged from it and reared up at them. Not only the workmen but also the village’s Buddhist abbot saw it clearly. Only after an offering was left for it did the
naga
finally depart, enabling the workmen to demolish the old temple and replace it with the ornate modern version standing there today. Fable or fact?

Hope of examining tangible evidence for the
nagas
existence was raised when Richard learned of a purported
naga
bone, preserved inside a silver chalice as a holy relic and retained in Phon Pisai. Disappointingly, however, when he was granted permission to view the bone and the chalice was opened, all that it contained was a clearly identifiable elephant tooth!