THE ROPERITE

In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, among the groves of Digger pines, lives one of the strangest and most elusive creatures said to inhabit North America. Nothing is certain about its life cycle—whether it is born in the usual way, hatched from eggs, or somehow springs into being from the dark caverns of the mountains. The Digger Indians claim that roperites are the restless spirits of early Spanish ranchers, and they tell grim tales of travelers ensnared by the beast’s rope-like beak and dragged to their deaths through thickets of thorn and chaparral.

Outrunning a roperite is said to be impossible. It tramples road-runners underfoot, kicks aside anything that stands in its path, and sweeps across the rough country in long, bounding strides that seem part flight, part leap. Its hide, tough as leather, turns aside every thorn, while its flipper-like legs take no injury from sharp stone. A. B. Patterson of Hot Springs, California, who is credited with seeing the last authenticated specimen, described it as bearing a great set of rattles on its tail. When the creature pursues prey, it shakes them furiously, filling the air with a dreadful whirring like a monstrous rattlesnake. The panic this sound inspires in its quarry can well be imagined.

Lumbermen working between the Pitt River and the southern Sierra are urged to keep watch and, if fortune allows, to capture a living roperite—an achievement that would at last give science a glimpse of this bizarre and fearsome animal.