When I Met the Hodag: A First-Hand North Woods Encounter

I never planned to meet the Hodag. Honestly, I only planned to stretch my legs on a damp trail behind Rhinelander, take a few photos of moss on rotting logs, and call it a day. But the north woods have a habit of turning a quiet afternoon into a campfire story you swear you’ll tell straight—until you hear yourself dressing it with adjectives. If you’ve never heard of the Hodag, you will in Rhinelander. Folks talk about it like they talk about weather: part nuisance, part icon, always looming. They’ll tell you about Gene Shepard, the old lumber crews, and the spines down its back sharp enough to rake a pine into firewood. They’ll tell you it hates laughter, that lemons undo it, and that its tears look like amber—until you are careless with a Tom Collins. I thought those were tourist trimmings. That was before dusk, when the frogs chorused and the trail dipped toward a patch of swamp that smelled like secrets and sap.

The trail that led me in… to the Hodag

I had followed a logging road that softened into duff and roots and then a ribbon of deer prints. The day leaned toward evening. Sunlight turned copper in the jack pines, and the mosquitoes were out with their paperwork and tiny stamps. Every few minutes, I paused and listened to the hush that sits on old forest, the kind that doesn’t need you for anything. Rhinelander lore had been stuck in my head all morning: how E. S. “Gene” Shepard made headlines in 1895, how he claimed a Black Hodag—Bovinus spiritualis, if you want the mock-Latin from the old raconteurs—had been captured and displayed at the Oneida County fair. Over the years I had read the contradictions, too: Hodags reported in Maine, Hodags that never lay down, Hodags that sleep leaning against trees, Hodags with spade-noses that can only see straight up. It’s the sort of 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 that spreads like pine smoke, and I was just there to breathe it in.

Then the air changed.

It was the kind of funk you don’t mistake: a wet, sour murk that reminded me of turned marsh water and old critter dens. There’s a sentence you won’t find in a field guide—but I’ll stand by it. I set my pack down, listened, and felt the timber under my boots give a slow, nervous sigh.

First Glimpse: Eyes, Horns, and a Hooked Tail

He was there, between two tornado-felled cedars, propped like a bad idea that had decided to live. Not a bear. Not a moose. Not any known something minding its own business. Knobbly head. Prominent, bulb-swollen eyes that caught the last light like wet pebbles. Two heavy horns sprawling out and slightly forward, beetle-proud. A tail that ended in a hook, swaying with the slow menace of a pendulum that has learned patience. From shoulder to tailstock ran a row of jagged dorsal spines—stegosaurian, if I’m allowed the drama—each toothy plate notched as if it had brawled with a sawmill and won. The body itself was mottled, striped, checked in patterns so odd I thought of Mackinaw coats: the kind the old lumberjacks wore when a winter was a winter and men were their own legends.

The beast stood squat and muscled, claws thick and curved into the loam. It didn’t charge. It didn’t blink much, either. It regarded me with the sort of long, irritated appraisal a bouncer gives a college kid trying to talk his way into a bar with a fake ID. I remember a ridiculous string of thoughts: Did I bring bear spray? Would bear spray matter? Why hadn’t I bought lemons like that guy at the bait shop joked about? My heartbeat, meanwhile, had queued up a marching band in my chest.

What I Knew, and What I Felt Anyway

Look, I read the clippings. Shepard, by many accounts, staged that 1895 capture with chloroform and theater—told folks he found a Hodag’s cave, blocked it with rocks, poked in a sponge on a pole, and hauled out the trophy to exhibit for a fee. Later, it is said, he admitted the hoax and carried on spinning. That might be the clean historical truth. But here, in the damp hush, I could taste the part of a story that outlives the teller, the part you don’t settle with an archive. The woods had a witness stare. It’s a feeling that runs gooseflesh along your forearms and tells you something bigger than your cleverness is weighing you for consequence.

In Rhinelander, they add flourishes with a wink: Deformis corniger lacrimans, the “horned, deformed, weeping” creature that hates laughter. Some say Hodags feast on muskrats, water snakes, and mud turtles; others insist porcupines are their fate and favorite snack. One grisly manual of lore has the Hodag blinking its eyes, licking its chops, spading at roots with a shovel-stiff nose until a spruce goes down, popping the breath out of a rolled-up porcupine before swallowing it headfirst down the log. A few old-timers swear it never lies down, ever, but sleeps leaning against trees, and that you can catch one by cutting deeply into the trunks it favors, then stepping back and letting gravity—and stubborn habit—do the rest. You hear all that and you laugh. Until something in a swamp doing exactly that… stares back.

A conversation I didn’t expect to have

He made a sound that started low and went lower, a kind of furnace hum that vibrated the trees. You don’t think, with noise like that. Your body makes decisions for you. I did the only thing that felt vaguely reasonable: I slid my pack backward with a toe, freed my hands, and spoke like a person trying to negotiate with a storm. “Easy,” I said—ridiculous, I know. “I’m not here to laugh.” The Hodag’s eyes wet-shined and I swear—go ahead and call me fanciful—one trembled with a tear that clung, gathered, and fell like resin. It hit a fern and hardened in seconds, amber-bright and tiny as a bead.

“Hodags and citrus fruits are in the same ratio as werewolves and wolfbane—probably more so,” an old pamphlet had joked. I’d rolled my eyes at that. Now I wanted a lemon like a lifeline.

North woods handout, remembered under duress

That single bead steadied me. The woods can terrify—but also gift you a job to do. I crouched, hands open, and waited while the creature leaned its horned head slightly, as if trying to place me in a catalog of irritants. And then the breeze shifted and carried him a hint of river, a whisper of town, and whatever he sorted in that brain—intelligent, if the old notes were right—he sorted enough to keep the distance open.

Lemons, laughter, and the line you don’t cross

I’m not proud to admit I’d stuffed my jacket pocket with what a friend had jokingly called “hodag insurance”: two small lemons I’d meant to slice into camp tea later. It was the sort of gag you share at the bar and tuck away in your pack because why not. In that moment, though, feeling like a punchline in hiking boots, I palmed one and held it so he could smell the tart. The creature’s nostrils flared once. Twice. He scowled—yes, scowled—and backed a heavy step. Here’s where I made my mistake: a laugh bubbled up, sheer nerves, and scraped out before I could swallow it. He stiffened as if I’d flipped a switch. The next growl had edges.

Everything in those tales snapped into focus: the weeping when mocked, the furious pride of a face built for frightening. My hands went up, fingers spread in apology. “I’m sorry,” I said, because contrition sometimes lives where rationality doesn’t. I set the lemon gently on a stump between us like a treaty coin. He lowered his head toward it and huffed, backing again with a deliberate, offended dignity. Truce accepted, if conditionally.

The chase that didn’t happen

So many Hodag stories hinge on a sprint: a desperate ox thundering toward a trap, a beast closing the distance with jaws rasping, the earth torn into gashes. In my version, the drama folded inward. No scramble, no crash, no pitfall swallowing a legend for the price of admission at the fair. The Hodag turned, shivered the plates down his back, and moved through the trees with a deliberation that shook the last nights rain from needles. When he pushed between two red pines, I saw why people believed he slept standing: the bulk of him fit the trunks like a yoke, as if the forest had grown around his habits. I followed, yes—two steps’ courage, three steps’ caution—until he paused by a spruce. He blinked twice, licked those thick chops, and shoveled his forehead into the leaf mold with a motion that suggested the rumor about the spade-nose had been misremembered or mis-seen into poetry, but not entirely wrong. Lore, I’ve decided, is right enough when it needs to be.

A porcupine rustled, tucked tight as a spiky apostrophe on a branch. The spruce creaked, thought hard about balance, and then kept its footing. The porcupine huffed and shuffled higher, unimpressed. The Hodag considered the geometry, snorted that swamp-stink sigh, and gave up the math. He had the mass for mayhem, sure, but not the mood for it. Not tonight.

History walks beside you in Rhinelander

By the time we angled toward a stand of birch, I had a parade of old accounts marching through my head. Shepard finding a cave and doping the beast with chloroform; Shepard later admitting the trick; Shepard doubling down with tales of a female Hodag and thirteen eggs that all hatched; a traveling show’s worth of young Hodags trained for profit. So many details refuse to die: crystallized tears mistaken for amber and strung as a necklace; a spill of lemony cocktail turning them to nothing; the careful note that a pair of lemons is ample protection against a whole herd. Even the silhouette changes depending on who you ask: sometimes rhinoceros-sized and hairless, sometimes furred and shaggy, sometimes carrying the patterns that inspired a flannel revolution. I don’t have to reconcile all of that. I only have to tell you that when the creature moved, the hush moved with it, and I felt like a boy again, trying not to spook a miracle.

“The hodag never lay down. It slept leaning against the trunks of trees. It could only be captured by cutting deeply into the trunks of its favorite trees.”

Lunch-pail lore, passed along on a tailgate

Did my Hodag match every description? Of course not. That’s not how legends behave. But the horns, the eyes, the terminal hook of the tail, and those jagged dorsal spines—all there, and more than enough to make a believer of my cautious, skeptical heart.

Field notes I jotted after the fact

Back in my cabin, hands still shaking over a notebook, I wrote what I could remember cleanly. Not measurements—nothing so tidy—but impressions stacked like cordwood.

• Odor: Obnoxious and marshy, like old tannin and something carnivorous that missed its last bath by a decade.
• Disposition: Intelligent, deliberate, offended by mockery; calmed by space and, curiously, discouraged by citrus.
• Gait: Short, powerful steps; not fast in my presence, but you could feel the power coil.
• Armor: Dorsal spines like broken sawteeth; thick claws that spoke of digging or wrestling with stubborn roots.
• Tears: One observed, resinous in behavior, hardening quickly; vanished completely when I later touched it with lemon residue from my fingers.

Call the taxonomy a carnival—Nasobatilus hystrivoratus, Bovinus spiritualis, Deformis corniger lacrimans. The Latin is a wink, a choir of invented gravitas for a creature born from the imaginations of men who chopped timber by day and told stories by night. And yet, those names feel right in the mouth: the nose-beater, the spiritual cow, the horned deformity that cries. Talk long enough after dark and you start to understand why working folks build cathedrals of myth.

The moment with the lemons

I don’t know why I kept both lemons in my pocket after he retreated, but I did. Habit, maybe. A ridiculous talisman against something older than my cleverness. On the way back, I passed through a patch where the understory thinned and moonlight began to matter. I heard him again—rattle of brush, small, careful chuff—keeping a loose, lateral pace with me. I lobbed the second lemon gently into the ferns. A boundary line, a symbol he seemed to understand. The sound stopped. Then came a single, begrudging exhale, like a foreman who agrees to end a shift five minutes early, and the forest swallowed the moment.

If you’re wondering whether I felt silly carrying citrus on a hike, the honest answer is yes. And also no. It’s easy to laugh at old superstitions in daylight. It’s harder to humiliate another living thing on purpose when you’ve looked into its runny eyes. I learned, out there, that jokes can be weapons, and some creatures know it better than we do.

What the Hodag taught me about stories

On paper, the Hodag is a trickster’s pet. Shepard’s showmanship, the fair, the postcards—colored photographs you can still find in Rhinelander—these are the bones of a classic American hoax. But when you step beyond the exhibits and walk into the tamarack gloom, you meet the muscle that keeps a legend warm: grief, pride, the need to name the shadows at the edge of the campfire. When the men of the old logging camps cremated their oxen—seven years to burn away all the profanity their drivers had poured into their hides, so the story goes—it made a kind of rough spiritual sense that something crawled up from those ashes with horns and a headache. We invent monsters to carry what we can’t.

I don’t buy every flourish. I doubt thirteen eggs hatched under anyone’s watch, and I’m not training a juvenile Hodag to roll over for tourists. But the north woods encourage you to suspend disbelief just enough to hear what a myth is trying to say. And on that night, it said: Be careful what you mock. Be slower to point. Carry a lemon if it helps you remember your manners.

For anyone who goes looking

It’s not my job to hunt legends for you, and I’d rather not draw a map. But if you find yourself near Rhinelander with fog on the low places and patience in your pockets, take a walk. Listen for the far-off clack of something heavy moving carefully. Don’t bring jokes you can’t afford. Do bring a small kindness or two, and maybe, if the old barroom advice tickles you, a lemon.

• Tell someone where you’re going; the swamp doesn’t care about your cell coverage.
• Tread soft; if there is a Hodag, it’s been here longer than your boots have.
• If you see crystallized droplets stuck to fern tips, treat them like glass—beautiful, fragile, and not yours to pocket.
• And if you feel laughter rise mean and sharp, let it pass. The forest has no patience for cheap superiority.

Leaving The North Woods, Still Listening

I left the trail under a sky the color of pondwater and pewter, crickets flowing like static. Back at the cabin, I sliced my last lemon into a cup, the knife whispering through the rind, and watched the pale juice cloud the water. On a whim, I touched the tip of my finger—still carrying that faint citrus ghost—to the tiny bead I’d brought back, stuck to the rim of my notebook like a trophy I shouldn’t keep. It vanished, melted to nothing the instant the lemon found it. I sat there with my mouth open like I’d just been told a punchline with teeth.

I don’t pretend to have proof for you. No photographs, no measurements, no lab notes from a field kit I don’t own. Just this: a meeting that felt like a warning delivered with bone and breath; a creature that carries a century of jokes on its back and still won’t tolerate your ridicule; a pair of lemons that turned out to be more than a gag; and a small mercy that I hope I earned by lowering my voice. If you want Rhinelander’s Hodag in a frame, go buy a postcard. If you want it in your ribs where the good stories live, take a walk at dusk and keep your hands open. Some truths are too wild for display cases. They have to be met halfway, between the cedars, with all the listening you can bear.