The Fearsome Critters Stalk The Pines

Based on characters from the book “Fearsome Critters,” drawn from U.S. logging-camp folkloreFolklore encompasses myths, legends, jokes, proverbs, rituals, and customs shared within communities, conveying history, morals, and identity. Coined by William Thoms in 1846, it spans verbal, material, and customary forms. Dynamic, folklore adapts through migration,... More.

The First Night

They told me about the Fearsome Critters, especially the Gumberoo, on my first night in the redwood camp, when the stove crackled like a breaking limb and the bunkhouse smelled of wet wool and pitch. The old-timers were not given to frightening greenhorns—thirty-inch saws and springboards taught enough on their own—but when the wind came down off the clear-cut and made the lanterns wink, someone always said the name. Gumberoo. Said softly, as if the thing had ears in every hollow stump.

I had seen a woodcut of it in the battered camp copy of Fearsome Critters—bear-shaped, they said, if a bear were dipped in tar and shaved slick as a stovepipe. Its hide was black and rubbery, tight as a drumhead, without a hair on it. Bullets could not pierce it. Shot would skip and whine like bees off a pane of glass. Fire, the book said. Fire is the only medicine for a Gumberoo.

By then I knew the hills around camp wore their own scars—burned-over tracts where cedar ghosts stood silver against the sky, slash piles still breathing smoke, the ground slick with ash that took the print of your boot like warm wax. That was where the old hands said it lived, in hollow stumps along the coast, coming out at dusk with a belly that could swallow a snowshoe hare or a lunch pail or a length of rope without chewing. It was not mean from malice, they told me, only from hunger. But hunger can be cruel enough.

The night I learned whether to believe them, we were heading back from a line of fire—the boss had ordered a burn to clear the slash, and we had ringed it like a prayer, kerosene cans singing as we walked. I kept behind Jim, whose shoulders had turned to timber in their own right; a man like him had a way of stealing fear from the air. The flames were low and steady, banked in the fern-choked draws, throwing a dull orange against the trunks. We had one lantern left between us and the dark.

Fearsome Critters Are Real! The Gumberoo Arrives

It came into that light like a shadow refusing to stay flat. A round muzzle first, then a glistening hide that reflected the fire in dull ripples, as if it were made of raincoats sewn together. No hair, no ruff, no guard—just a sheen, and eyes that took in the light and made it smaller. It waddled, almost comical until you saw the width of its chest, the slack of its jaw. It breathed wetly. The air smelled of scorched sap.

“Back,” Jim said, but his voice slipped in the ash. The creature’s lips peeled back in a grin that was not a grin. It put its nose to a glowing knot, snuffed, and leaned as if to eat the heat.

Someone behind us panicked and fired into the night. The crack ached in my teeth. I saw the spark jump from the beast’s shoulder and skate away through the brush. The bullet never bit. Two more shots rang out and were flung aside like marbles on a tin roof, ricochets ringing down the line. The Gumberoo flinched once, more from inconvenience than pain, and then it came.

I do not know what made me think of the old book, of the margin notes in a dead man’s hand—Fire only. I grabbed the lantern and ran, the sloshing kerosene licking at the globe, the handle hot enough to blister. I did not feel it. I knew only the sound behind me, the rubbery slap of feet, the intake of breath that smelled like standing at the mouth of a culvert in a flood.

“Here!” Jim roared, as if he had read my thought. He shouldered me aside with a strength that woke my teeth and sent the lantern flying. It broke on a rotten stump, glass ringing like bells, fire splashing up the punky wood and taking it like a promise. Jim’s cap went with it, and then his arm as he hurled a burlap sack into the bloom. The pitch underfoot went whoof. The brush took the tongue and gave it a throat.

Fearsome Critters Burn

That fearsome critter, the Gumberoo, stepped into the flame the way a bishop steps into a church. No fear. It leaned and opened and breathed, and every breath drew the flame deeper, as if it had been starving not for meat but for heat. The hide shone. The air grew tight. I felt the hairs on my arms crinkle, heard resin popping in the pitch. The beast swelled, belly rounding, the skin stretching until it played a note—the high, thin whine a saw makes when it binds. Its eyes went huge and colorless.

“Down!” Jim said, and I did, cheek to cinders.

The sound that followed had no name. It was not thunder, though the ground lifted. It was not gunfire, though shards of something hard and hot pattered through the brush. It was the sound of something full of trapped breath giving it all back at once. Light ran up the trunks and then folded down again. When I lifted my head, smoke held the place where the creature had been, a column that smelled of burned rubber and wet night.

We were quiet for a long time. Then the men began to speak in low voices, not to me or even to Jim, but to one another, passing a story from hand to hand so it would cool evenly. Someone pressed a canteen into my fingers. I drank and found my mouth tasted of sap and iron and something else—fear turned mineral.

The next day the boss said we would keep the line watch for another night. Jim made me a fusee of rag and resin and put it in my pocket like a charm. “You keep matches,” he said. “Do not waste bullets.” He smiled a little, and the firelight had written new lines in his face.

The Fearsome Critters Message

Years later, I still see the way that fearsome critter’s hide took the light and refused to give it back. In every burned-over hollow, in every stump big enough to hide a child, I look for the glint of something that should not shine. I tell the greenhorns what the old book told us and what the hills proved: the Gumberoo is no lumberjack’s prank. Bullets only make it laugh. It wears the night like oilskin and eats what it can reach. If fire is a church in the woods, then the Gumberoo is the reason a man learns to pray.

And if you hear your shot come singing home, remember—there are things in these camps older and fiercer than your courage. Strike a match. Hold fast. Let the flame do the talking.