Beast of All Hearts

So, I’m in one of my moods...specifically, one in which I'm feeling like I should give you an introduction to the sort of cryptozoological knowledge I'm familiar with by way of summarization of a legend-case known as the Beast of Gèvauden. Quite interesting, if you ask me, and please keep in mind this is all off the top of my head, so feel free to fact check me or cross reference in Wikipedia (which started this whole thing in the first place, actually), it has a very good article talking about it.

Anyways, the Beast of Gèvauden was an animal supposedly at fault for killing about 120 people and injuring about another 20 in France during the…well, specific times elude me, but it was back when France still had royalty, if that’s any help. It was sighted on multiple occasions, and was known not only for the savagery of it’s attacks, but also the fact it was virtually unstoppable (it had taken arquebus shots many times, and while it would be the sort of shots that would supposedly drop any other animal, in this case it merely wounded it and it seemed to recover fully from the shots within the period of a couple of days).

Ladies and peeps, this was the Great White Buffalo of werewolf stories. Specifically, there were countless reports and eyewitnesses to collaborate information, so the odds of this thing being completely mythical are virtually zero…there was something out there, and hoax or not, people were dying. It had all of the elements of a classic werewolf, in that it was a) had incredible strength and appeared to be completely implacable, b) seemed to regenerate from basically mortal wounds at an incredible rate, c) had a tendency to attack humans on sight in preference to any other prey (so even shepherds with a flock of sheep were preferable to the Beast over any of the smaller, slower prey), and also to gruesomely sit and eat its kills immediately after slaying them, and d) was completely undetectable outside of when it decided to hunt. You could think of it like an ancestor of Jack the Ripper, except involving an unidentified animal and a larger body count (I’m sure there were probably a couple of prostitutes involved, it was France back in the middle ages/dark ages/enlightenment/god I wish I could accurately pin this date down without compromising the freestyling of this off the top of my head).

So, we have a homicidal wolf thing (though it differed in a few key characteristics, such as supposedly having a tail as long as itself, and a large, rounded, feline-ish head rather than an elongated, canine one, upping the body count, with no stop in sight. What’s a peasant to do? Apparently, keep dying until the King of France gets irritated/scared enough to put his top two hunters on it, where they promptly fail to capture or kill it. Ticked off, the king sends out his personal arquebussist (think “ye olden bodyguard”) to try and finish what the hunters couldn’t, and in an almost “too-good-to-be-true” twist, he and a mob of local rifle hunters were able to bring down an absolutely huge (150 lb) wolf that was the biggest on record up until then, and after stuffing and shipping the thing back to the king’s court, the threat was considered over…until a couple of weeks later, when the killings resumed. At this point, the king didn’t want anything to do with it, so instead of sending someone else out, he simply passed an edict that severely punished whoever spoke aloud of the killings from then on out. Finally, a local hunter who had fallen out of favor was able to bring down a separate creature, this one being decidedly different from a wolf, but unidentifiable otherwise. The killings, though, were over once and for all, so mission accomplished.

Well, the question still remains...what the heck was that thing that did all of that? No one was able to figure it out, and though the beast was stuffed and sent to a museum, there was no records as to what happened to it after it was received; for all intents and purposes, it had disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, there were three major theories at play that I knew about, and now there's a new (and interesting one). The three that I knew of were that the Beast could have been a) a werewolf (pretty unlikely), b) a big, mean regular wolf (possible, but only in the most threadbare sense), or c) a dog-wolf hybrid (accounts for more peculiarities, but still kinda iffy). See, while we don't have any physical evidence of the Beast at this point, we do have very detailed, collaborated descriptions, including a tail almost as long as it, 42 teeth, a squarish head, and the ability to shear off limbs in a single bite. Each of those characteristics is right out for basically any kind of wolf, mutant or not, and other than the teeth and tail, for pretty much any dog-wolf hybrid, too. However, the new hypothesis put forth after the investigations by a cryptozoologist (at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I love those guys: they're like parapsychologists of biology, frontier scientists at their best!) and a forensics expert, they concluded that it was probably an especially large Asiatic hyena.

Now, that seems a little anticlimactic, but come on. A hyena in Europe would still be pretty cool. First, no one would know how to describe it, so they'd default to "wolf" due to it's predations and activities (which convergently evolved to have equivalently canid tendencies, even though it's more closely related to felines). They can get up to around 200 lbs. They have all the physical attributes described of the Beast, including the ability to shear bone and attack humans (the second is uncommon, but it happens). Everything seems to check out, even the backstory they pieced together on it.

Anyways, there wasn't a whole lot of point to this post, I just wanted to talk about werewolves for some reason...probably a conversation I had earlier this evening may have something to do with that. Take away the fact that you've probably never heard of this incident, but even so, mysterious, dreadful things have happened and continue to happen all around us, as long as we care to keep our eyes open. It seems like legends and myths have an uncanny habit of becoming real in the most inconvenient ways, so in my opinion it's better to study the little we think we know now and never need it than to simply stand in fear when the unexplained does occur (because it will). Because, if the Beast of Gèvauden teaches us nothing else, it's that the world was (and still is) much darker than we care to realize, and our ability to understand and control it is the arguably greatest myth of all.

Sweet dreams :)