The Squonk: The Weeping Creature That Dissolves in Its Own Tears
The hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania, in the great logging days a century and more ago, were as full of invented monsters as any medieval bestiary — and the men who invented them knew exactly what they were doing. Around the bunkhouse stoves of the lumber camps, veterans solemnly instructed greenhorns in the local fauna: the hodag with its spearhead tail; the hidebehind, which no man has ever seen because it is always, precisely, behind you; the axehandle hound, which eats axe handles. These were the fearsome critters — the tall-tale zoology of the American woods, half practical joke and half genuine folklore — and most of them were engines of comedy or of hazing. But one of them was something else. One of them, told at the right hour in the right voice, made the bunkhouse go quiet. In the dark stands of hemlock, the old hands said, there lives a creature that no one wants to be: the squonk — the ugliest animal in the world, so ashamed of itself that it weeps continually — an...