The Ahuizotl: The Aztec Water Monster That Cries Like a Baby
The Florentine Codex — that immense encyclopedia of Aztec life compiled in the sixteenth century by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún from the testimony of Nahua elders — devotes some of its most vivid pages to the fauna of the lakes of Mexico. Among the herons, the axolotls, and the water-serpents, the elders described to the friar a creature they discussed not as myth but as zoology: the ahuizotl , "the spiny one of the water," or as the name is often rendered, the water-thorn beast. It was, they said, the size of a small dog, with slick dark fur that bunched into points when it emerged; small pointed ears; the hands of a monkey or a raccoon — and, at the end of its long tail, another hand, a grasping human-like hand with which it seized its prey and dragged them under. It hunted, the elders explained, by weeping. From the reeds at dusk came the sound of a human infant crying — and whoever waded toward the sound to save the child was taken by the hand that waited beneath the...