Sidehill gouger
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Sidehill Gougers are fictional creatures, jokingly said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan. The legs on one side of their body are significantly shorter than the legs on the other side of their body, because they spend all their time eating grasses and other vegetation on mountain slopes.
The notion of imaginary animals with one pair of legs longer than the other in order to exist on mountainsides is popular: others include the Wild Haggis, the Sidehill Dodge Hodag, the Dahu. A similar creature in Vermont is known as the Wampahoofus. Similar animals are part of Appalachian folklore, sometimes in the form of a breed of cow with mismatched legs.
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[edit] Attributes
Sidehill Gougers are said to come in two main varieties, the left-handed Sidehill Gouger and the right-handed Sidehill Gouger (see: chirality). The two varieties are sometimes known as clockwise and counterclockwise Gougers.
Note that these two varieties are not necessarily separate species; stories persist of rare offspring between left-handed and right-handed Gougers. Since these hybrids have awkwardly mismatched leg-lengths and usually do not survive to adulthood, however, it is not known if they are sterile mules.
Some sources indicate that they are no larger than mountain goats, whereas others attribute major landslides to Sidehill Gougers that become turned around from their usual orientation and dig their feet into the ground for stability. It is this belief that gives the species its name.
[edit] Sidehill Gulcher
In North-Eastern Ontario, there is a distant cousin of the Sidehill Gouger called the Sidehill Gulcher. The Gulcher evolved in a much different fashion compared to its Western relative. They run on two legs, with one much longer than the other and are similar to humans in many respects except their average size. Gulchers range in height from six feet to seven feet tall and weigh nearly three hundred pounds.
Gulchers are carnivores, usually feeding on anything from Red Squirrels to unlucky Deer. They employ an ambush technique where the Gulcher waits for hours on end in a heavily overgrown area for potential prey. When the prey happens by, Gulchers will leave their hiding place to stalk the animal. Once within range the Gulcher will put on a burst of speed and attack. The key to escaping a Gulcher is to simply run up or down the hill the Gulcher inhabits. Since it only has two legs and not four, the Gulcher will be unable to follow you at any great speed.
[edit] Resources
- Cox, William T.; Illustrated by Coert Du Bois. With Latin Classifications by George B. Sudworth (1910). Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods- With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts. Washington, D.C.: Press of Judd & Detweiler Inc.
- Dill, Lawrence M. (1983). "Behavioral Genetics of the Sidehill Gouger", in George H. Scherr, editor; Richard Liebmann-Smith, associate editor: The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. New York: Workman, 9-10. ISBN 0-89480-595-9.
