Creature Feature Friday: The Hugag
Is the Hugag the world’s silliest looking-moose, a leftover dinosaur, or something else entirely? Learn more about this Lumberwoods cryptid legend - like why it cannot lie down - in today’s Creature Feature, excerpted from our blog 9 Cryptids That Are (Probably) Too Absurd To Be Real:
Image from Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods.
1) Ranging from western Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, and up into the Canadian wilds towards Hudson Bay is the absurdly designed Hugag, a thirteen-foot-tall creature with the inability to lie down. The hugag probably most closely resembles an antler-less moose, but possesses long jointless legs that cannot bend, rendering the creature unable to sit or lay on the ground, meaning it has to lean against trees in order to get any rest from its constant walking.
2) It’s probably just as well for the hugag that it cannot lower itself, however, because its upper lip is so ridiculously long that it trips over it whenever it gets too close to the ground. This large cryptid is also described as having a prehistoric appearance composed of a leathery, hairless head and neck, floppy corrugated ears, four-toed feet, and a bushy tail.
Image from Cryptid Wiki.
3) Allegedly, hunters have successfully hunted the hugag by sawing trees nearly to their breaking point, and lying in wait for the animal. When the hapless hugag leaned against the broken tree for a rest, the tree would snap, the hugag would fall over, and the hunters would have a weird new trophy. The book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910) even claims that a Mike Flynn of Cass Lake felled the last known hugag on Turtle River in Minnesota. Flynn encountered a young, 1,800-pound hugag floundering in the mud, and ever the good sportsman, he hit it in the head.
4) Although claims cannot be substantiated, the theory has been posed that the hugag is actually a surviving group of paraceratherium, even though they are believed to have gone extinct 11 to 23 million years ago.
Have you ever heard of the Hugag before? What do you think it really is? Share your theories in the comments!
