What Vance Randolph wrote down

In 1951 Randolph published We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks. Chapter 3 is “Fabulous Monsters.” He did not invent a zoo. He sat on porches and wrote the lies the hills already told. The pictured plates now live on The Arkatype Farms Bestiary.

Squarefolk still hear them as jokes. Cloverfolk keep the same names as a field ledger. On this farm the old company already lives in the faces of the one gift and goes in and out at will. Dolly and Charlotte do not collect them. The caboose fetches ordinary critters. This page is a naming, not a trap.

Brief farm-voiced notes only. The sentences in Randolph’s book stay in Randolph’s book. Read him at the library. The Night Porter will not charge a ticket.

Already walking this hill

Four of the old names have doors on the farm now. The rest keep a face until the mist is honest.

• The Snawfus — see Who Lives Here and Dolly and the Gift of the Snawfus.
• The Jimplicute — timber helper. Filmed 2026–2028 in the valley reels. Portrait on Who Lives Here. Story: Blue Mist in the Valley, page 7.
• Wampus Cat — six-legged speed on a rescue. The Story of the Rescue.
• Hinge-Tailed Bing Buffer — rock-and-tail defender. Same rescue.

The lizard faces

• Snawfus — Albino or pearl-white deer of the pineries. Some tellers give it quiet leaps into the treetops; some give it soft spray-like wings; some give flowering dogwood or plum instead of points. It breathes the Blue Mist. Randolph wrote it as a haze-deer. On this hill it spoke in feeling and left Dolly the dodecahedron. Not hunted. Not bottled.
• Gowrow — Cave saurian, said to run twenty feet. Green scales, short webbed claws, a row of short horns down the back, two tusks, a long thin tail with a blade at the tip. Soft keg-sized eggs; the mother may pouch the young like a possum. Named for the sound of the roar. Randolph’s sources put it in remote caverns (Devil’s Hole among them). On this hill it is a separate face from the Jimplicute — a guardian of a dark mouth, watched from the path. Never baited with dried apples for a quarter.
• Jimplicute — Randolph’s tellers called it a ghostly dinosaur or night-lizard that walked the roads and grabbed throats. Squarefolk used it as a scare. On this hill it is bark-colored and bipedal among the pines, or a running black silhouette with a white pin-prick eye. Kin to highbehind, hidebehind, and gowrow. Comes out when the mist is honest. Goes home the same door.
• High-behind / Hidebehind — Lizard as big as a bull in some lies; hind legs said to be many times the forelegs. Waits on a trail and is gone when you turn. Other tellers say it sucks itself thin enough to stand behind a tree. The farm keeps no portrait. That is the point of the name. Useful for teaching a camera to wait.
• Kingdoodle (also whangdoodle) — Giant wood-lizard, “longer’n a well-rope” and fourteen hands high in the old comparison. Strong enough, in the lie, to pull a sapling or a rail fence. Not told as bloodthirsty. Some say it is only a mountain boomer that grew opinions. A face that has not opened on camera yet.
• Gollywog — Giant mudpuppy / waterdog — which in Ozark speech means salamander. Eight or ten feet in the lie, night-water, wrecker of trotlines and small boats. A creek face, not a timber one.

The hill-walkers

• Side-Hill Hoofer (also slicker, walloper) — Ungulate of the steep ground. Legs on one side shorter than the other, so it can only circle a hill in one direction. Helpless on the square. Some tellers give it bucket-sized eggs and a grab-hook tail to hang on a ridge while it rests. Clockwise and anti-clockwise kinds fight when they meet, because neither can step aside. Leave him to his circle.
• Hinge-Tailed Bing Buffer (Randolph’s bingbuffer) — Hippo-shaped, short-legged, larger than it has any right to be. A pouch under the jaw holds a bushel of stones. The tail is long, flat, hinged — up to forty feet in the wilder lies — and throws those stones a foolish distance. On this farm the same defender walks a rescue when a robot dog will not take a hint. Comic until it is not.

What the ridges scream

• Painter — The real mountain lion, already rare when Randolph was writing. The other cat-lies grow out of this fear.
• Wowzer / Woozer — Super-painter. Five or six times a lion in the tale. Kills stock the way a polecat kills chickens. Dislikes the smell of people and, in the kinder versions, only harms them by accident.
• Gally-wampus — Amphibious panther. Leaps into water and swims like a colossal mink. Kills livestock; does not bother a person unless some fool crowds it. Randolph’s river-bottom cousin of the ridge cat.
• Wampus / Wampus-cat — The name slides. Some hollers use it for a bobcat with a temper. Some use it for the swimming panther. On this farm the Wampus Cat is the six-legged speed helper of the rescue tale — one face, already spoken for. Do not split it into a second beast.
• Whistling Wampus / Whistler — Immense black cat of more-than-animal sense. Whistles from a cedar thicket and leads a woodsman off his own path. Lumber-camp joke and omen in the same breath.
• Hickelsnoopus and Ring-tailed Tooter — Night-screamers of the same cat family. Randolph admitted he had no good description. The ledger keeps the names so the ridges are not emptied of their noise.

What will not stay in a tree or a cave

• Giasticutus — Prodigious hawk. Wingspread told at fifty feet. Said to lift a calf. A feather the size of a fence rail turns up in the lie.
• Booger-owl — Horned owl grown to a ten- or twelve-foot spread. Bold enough, in Hemmed-In Holler talk, to try a lamb or a dog.
• Baldknob Buzzard — Vulture larger than the common turkey-buzzard. One working wing, so it can only circle a knob in one direction — the air’s answer to the Side-Hill Hoofer.
• Galooous — Big black eagle. Lays square eggs so they will not roll off a ledge. Its shadow is said to wear a trail in the dirt.
• Whiffle-bird / Guffel-bird / Bogie-bird / Fillyloo crane — The backward flock. They fly the wrong way to keep dust out of their eyes, or to see where they have been, or upside-down so the eggs rise like balloons. Randolph stacked the names because the tellers did. One face is enough for the whole joke.
• Clew-bird / milermore bird — Crane-shaped. Sticks its bill in the gravel and whistles through the other end. Heard a mile off, hence the second name.
• Noon-bird — Kiamichi Mountain timepiece. Whistles like a fire engine at noon. Cousin names (waw-waw, yow-ho, toodalong buzzard) are kept as aliases, not extra animals.
• Fish Hound — Fur-and-feather hybrid: otter crossed with a diving bird, or mink with a di-dapper. Cleans a hole of fish and is neither a dog nor a person. Some tellers fold it into a “bastard cat.”
• Taneycomo Turtle — Lake turtle so large its breathing raises and lowers the water.
• White River Behemoth — Slimy, legless, boxcar-big. 1937 river talk. Someone tried to charge admission. The hill does not.
• Camden County Sea-serpent — Snakelike neck, one green eye like a punchbowl, a tongue that crackles, knobs like basketballs. Churns a hole of water like a steamboat. A water face. Not Jimplicute.

Names that were never a body

• Willipus-wallipus — In Randolph this is first a steam road-machine, then a word for anything you have no name for. Not a creature. Do not give it a stall.
• Whistling Whoo-hoo — A gaseous cyclone-demon in the telling, not a cat.
• Chaw-green, Bear-behind, Cross-eyed Crud, Darby-hicks, Moogies, Geek-squaw — Joke-bag names Randolph listed with a grin and almost no description. The farm does not staff a face for a punchline.
• Ozark Howler — Later tourist stock. Not in Randolph’s chapter. Not on this ledger.

How to read the list

Randolph called the chapter what it is. The tellers were lying to strangers and telling the truth to the hill at the same time. Cloverfolk do not have to choose. The gift already keeps the company. A face opens. A face closes. No crates. No bottles of blue haze. No quarter to see a swollen gowrow.

Source for the names: Vance Randolph, We Always Lie to Strangers (Columbia University Press, 1951), chapter “Fabulous Monsters.” Portraits of the listener hang on The County. The rule of the engine is on The Gift.