THE LEPROCAUN

In the early days of Upper Canada, before the land became the Province of Ontario, a logging camp along the Madawaska River received a curious shipment from the north of Ireland: several young leprocauns. Even then the beast was scarce, and before long famine drove the last of its kind from Ireland, where desperate men ate what few remained.

In its homeland bogs the leprocaun was a harmless creature, remembered for its lively pranks and comical stunts. It would bound across peatlands, somersault over hillocks, and sometimes dive headlong into a drying stack of turf, springing out again with such vigor that the clods flew skyward like a miniature cyclone. What was harmless mischief in Ireland, however, turned to menace in the Canadian wilderness. Once escaped into the tamarack swamps, the leprocauns multiplied and spread, soon sighted as far as the upper Ottawa and even northern Michigan.

In this new land the animal grew fierce. Hunters and teamsters told of its ghostly leaps through cedar thickets and muskegs, its teeth snapping and claws reaching for whatever it fancied. Drivers hauling supplies across swamp roads dreaded its sudden appearance. With a bound it might clear the wagon entirely, striking at the man on the seat while leaving horses and load to scatter in terror. Only a panicked dash into the deep timber could save a driver, and more than one survivor counted himself lucky that even a leprocaun could not match a frightened man weaving through tangled tamarack.