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As a boy, I spent three years as a member of the Cub Scouts (the junior organization to the Boy Scouts of America). This afforded me many opportunities to be deep in the woods with large groups of other young boys. And thus I was able to observe the tendency of young boys, when deep in the woods, to become convinced that said woods were populated by animals that were, shall we say, not entirely accepted by conventional science.

One such animal – and I use the term rather loosely – was the Bull Weevil. The Bull Weevil, I was told with great gravitas at the beginning of one camping trip, was a horrible, maneating beast; it had eerie, luminescent red eyes, and terrible, hideous fangs and talons. Apart from these features, however, it was essentially humanoid. It was therefore, basically, an ogre, a bogeyman of the forest, just waiting for its opportunity to turn a rather commonplace scout camping trip into a morbid, supernatural tragedy.

I was skeptical. Science-minded lad that I was, I was aware that there existed in the world of fact an animal called the Boll Weevil, this being a sort of small beetle with a long, proboscis-like “snout.” I pointed this out to my compatriots – who seemed to be gripped by fear of the Bull Weevil down to the last man – and suggested that perhaps a mistake had been made. I was met only with howls of derision. (To this day, I have not unraveled the origin of the obvious etymological relation between their troll and this variety of beetle.) I pressed the point, stating that all of biology contained absolutely nothing even faintly resembling the hominid/carnivore that they described. Still I won no sympathy. The Bull Weevils were out there, and they would slaughter us like pigs if we weren’t careful, and only a fool believed otherwise. After a few days, even I came to believe in the monster, if only in order to stop getting into arguments about it. This “belief” faded quickly after the trip ended, of course, and nobody would ever mention the Bull Weevil again.

On another trip, with a different group of children, the shoe was on the other foot. A large group of boys were planning on going on a late-night hike, of which I had opted out. Instead, around the time that the hike was scheduled to begin, I was wandering alone in some tall bushes that lay across a clearing from the large cabin that we all shared. Suddenly, I stumbled upon one of the parents that had come on the trip as an escort; he was hidden in the bushes, hunched over and facing towards the cabin. I asked him what he was doing; he put a finger to his lips, hissed “Shh!” and beckoned me closer. When I drew near, he whispered his plan to me. He intended to give the kids a little scare; when they all came out to go on their hike, he was going to start howling. I asked if I could join; he said that I could, so long as I kept the secret. And so we stood in hiding and waited for the scouts to emerge. Soon enough, they did, a huge mass of them, armed with flashlights. My co-conspirator told me to wait for his cue. And once the children were all out of the cabin and beginning on their way, the cue came; he began howling like a wolf, over and over again, and I joined right in. We were met by a single, cacophonous, choral shriek from the hiking-party; flashlight-beams swung wildly about, and the hikers swept back into the cabin as though they were being sucked into it. The adult and I had a good laugh, and I went back to my wandering around. I discovered later that the whole hike had been canceled on account of Werewolves.

It was the third forest-monster – and my single solo hoax – which was the most cryptozoological. It was yet another outing, with yet another group of scouts, and again I was wandering about on my own in the evening. I saw from a distance a small group of kids having a mini-barbecue, some distance from the main group. Down a steep incline from the clearing where they were gathered, the forest was very thick, and I slipped into the trees and approached the barbecuers. Once I’d come within about 100 feet of them, I began leaping about and grunting and hooting. This got their attention soon enough. They began yelling at me and searching for me with their flashlights. Happily, the forest was sufficiently thick that I was quite capable of evading the lights, and my observers never ventured to come into the forest. I continued my thrashing and making of vague, general animal noises. I was, to be perfectly specific, impersonating my conception of Bigfoot: a strange but unthreatening woodland simian. This went on for about 15 or 20 minutes, until it began to get old and I departed back into the woods.

By the next morning, the experience that some of the scouts had had with a horrifying forest creature had made the rounds pretty thoroughly, had become common knowledge. So I sought out the kids who’d had the sighting, and asked them to describe what it was that they saw. They had, it turned out, got a very clear view of the forest creature: It was seven or eight feet tall, I was told, and covered with thick, dark fur, and possessed of red, glowing eyes and fearsome teeth and claws (again!). Truly, they were brave children to have faced such a thing. Still and all, allow me to assure the reader that I am not actually eight feet tall, or covered in fur, nor am I possessed of gruesome natural weaponry. Nor was I when I was a Cub Scout. It seemed that I had been embellished.

Now, there are those who might say that the experiences and observations of young boys are inherently untrustworthy, and not comparable to those of adults. There are also those, however, who would say that children are more intelligent than they’re normally credited with being, and that, conversely, adults are all too often much less mature than they ought to be. And that, therefore, the experiences related here may well be almost typical.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under The Kessen Run. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.