Boathound. - [Fearsome Critter]

Boathound. - [Fearsome Critter 1922]

• About this critter: An amphibious creature with a long body, resembling a boat with a toothy grin like a gator, four small ears that face forwards and back to help it hear in both directions, it has frog-like feet to help it swim! - Nocturnal, it lives at the bottom of lakes. it comes out at night to eat untied boats & rafts that careless tenderfoot forget to tie up, consuming the boats greedily in a single bite. t– Truly, you are what you eat!!!

... Apparently, They also enjoy eating cactus roots and mulberry leaves. Female boat hounds have brown stripes running up their legs whilst male boat hounds have the opposite (though the legs usually submerged and thus are rarely seen.) - The legs are also the only 'living' part of the creature, when they wish to do so, dissect themselves from one boat and move to another, very much like a hermit crab.

• History: Yet another silly Yarn included in 1922's "Yarns of the Big Woods" by Art  Childs. - it includes a very simple short story about a Scout who forgot to tie up a boat after fishing. So to teach him a lesson, the guide invents a 'Boogey man-esc" critter on the spot to remind the scout not to forget to tie up the boat next time or else it will go missing. – Simply put, If there's a monster that eats boats, you certainly won't forget to tie it up!! – its not very deep, but the story stands as a good example of how similar aquatic folkloric monsters might’ve come to be.

– The boat hound was then further elaborated on by readers-submitted columns in "Tenderfoot tales" which ran in the Idaho statesmen 1922.

[Source newpapers.com: yarns of the big woods Sept 16th 1922]

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