The Whowie: The Devourer the River Tribes Smoked Out Together
Most monster-tales end with a hero. The peoples of the Murray River country of southeastern Australia — the nations of the Riverina, whose traditions the collectors set down early in the last century — kept a great tale that ends with something rarer and, on reflection, far more instructive: a committee . It concerns the Whowie, the terror of the river's bends in the deep story-time: a creature the tellings describe with an anatomist's relish — twenty feet and more of him, built low like a monstrous goanna, with six legs , a huge head like a frog's swollen to nightmare gauge, and a mouth that could take a child at one movement, which is precisely what it was for. The Whowie was slow — the tale is honest about its monster's limits: nothing about him could chase down a healthy adult in daylight — but he was silent , uncannily silent for his tonnage, and he hunted accordingly: by night, at a crawl, into the camps along the river, where he took the sleeping — a child here,...