Varmints is the latest in Chad Arment’s series of works collecting media reports of North American cryptids – “hidden” or unexpected animals reported throughout history, collectively the subject matter of cryptozoology. His previous volumes mined newspaper archives for accounts of “wildmen” (The Historical Bigfoot 2006) and huge serpents (Boss Snakes 2008). Varmints eclipses both of its predecessors in scope, collecting 600 reports of mystery maulers at large throughout the United States and Canada, spanning 240 years from 1770 to early 2010.
Some of the tales collected in this massive work will be familiar to anyone conversant with the literature of cryptozoology – North Carolina’s ‘Santer’ and ‘Beast of Bladenboro’, Connecticut’s ‘Glawakus’ – but most are gathered here for the first time and will be new to readers who lack access to newspaper morgues nationwide.
As in prior works, Arment eschews proselytising for cryptozoology. He is no credulous ‘believer’, bent on peddling fantasy or wishful thinking in the guise of fact. Varmints acknowledges hoaxing – though it’s less common in the present field than in regard to Bigfoot or reports of giant snakes – and proceeds to survey likely suspects from domestic species (cougars, bears, wolves and coyotes, wolverines and foxes, to pets and farm animals) and those exotics found from coast to coast, often in negligent and reckless hands. The first case offered, involving a fugitive “black panther” hunted by Los Angeles police in 1954, provides a cautionary tale where private ownership of big cats is concerned.
And yet, when the police withdraw their dragnets, when the crack dealer who let his tiger slip away has been identified and punished with a wrist-slap, when the vigilante posse kills a bear or cougar blamed for savaging livestock, it still appears that “something else” is happening. In every US state and Canadian province, mystery maulers have dined on pets, farm animals and the occasional unlucky human. Witnesses continue to report sightings of ‘extinct’ Eastern cougars, unidentified ‘black panthers’, and nondescript beasts that leave strange tracks and mangled carcasses in their wake.
Those prowlers don’t always escape, nor can we attribute all sightings to fantasy or mistaken identity. Among the cases compiled in Varmints, we find still-unidentified predators shot and killed near Benton, Oregon, in 1870; at Fosteria, Ohio, in 1884; in North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, in 1885; near Winslow, Arizona, in 1888; at Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1929; and at Taunton, New York, in 1946. In each case, veteran hunters and forestry officers confessed themselves baffled. The mystery remains.
Were predators from Africa and Asia – lions, tigers, leopards, or hyenas, take your pick – transported to the New World aboard slave ships or cargo vessels in colonial times, as some researchers speculate? Are jaguars, like the ‘last’ specimen trapped by Arizona’s Game and Fish Department in February 2008, returning to their ancestral ranges? And when escapees from private menageries have been accounted for, what else remains?
Arment cautions against a gullible belief “that any and all mystery animals must have their roots in as yet undescribed creatures”, while pressing the point that “too many people write off North America as unable to produce significant new species.”
If the anecdotal evidence compiled in Varmints fails to prove that case beyond all doubt, it clearly indicates the need for further study.
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