The Quagnojitrops - Jamey Hecht

The newspaper told our City that, somewhere between the Outer Gates and the surrounding villages, a certain Shepherd had succeeded in capturing an unusual animal, very large, that had been preying on his flocks. For the time being, nobody had any more information. At first, a big cat was expected, or perhaps a wolf from a remnant pack had somehow survived higher up in the hills, and ventured down for a meal. But the offending animal turned out to be a reptile – a sort of miniature dragon, hardly bigger than a pair of horses. It was alone. Its injuries had not healed quite properly, and the animal’s gait was irregular. Little else was known at that time, and the facts emerged only slowly.

Its peculiar, lengthy name, too, emerged into the public mind only later, and that quite briefly, so that today no mention is made of the Quagnojitrops in the social and professional circles where discussion of this animal was once common. Fashion is fickle, and the public has a short memory for sad cases and freaks of nature, especially when they have no economic significance, which this one certainly did not. Needless to say, the journals of zoology remain innocent of this species; its name does not grace their pages. This is because the Quagnojitrops remains, to the limits of human knowledge, a single individual. It has no known family; there is no continuous breeding population in existence, captive nor wild. No fossils have emerged that might provide the Quagnojitrops with an ancestry. Nobody knows how it got here, but there is no shortage of self-appointed experts in cryptozoology who are certain they can tell the rest of us where it came from. At the opposite extreme are those real researchers whose knowledge of the Quagnojitrops, its origins and its fate, far exceeds my own – which is indirect, incomplete, and faded after many years. To the wise judgment of these researchers I commend my humble efforts, the present little heap of scraps gleaned from newspapers, interviews with locals, and my own best guesses at what seems to have occurred in the matter.

One Melvin Shepherd had been high in the foothills of the mountain when he saw a splash of bright yellow behind a thicket of dogwood saplings. At first he thought it was something much smaller and closer, a canary struggling among the twigs – but no, it was further off and bigger. Here was a scaly, brilliantly golden and gracile animal, dragon-like but much smaller than a dragon, about the size of a grand piano. Though it was lying right where he had been walking with the sheep a moment before, it was uninterested in them. It seemed to have fallen out of the sky. One of its wings looked broken, and the creature’s face – remarkably like a cat’s face, but reptilian, with a beard of skin like that of a horned gecko – expressed pain, along with a mostly successful effort to master it. Shepherd stared at the animal as it woke. Its great head hove up into view, and their gazes met. 

It appeared the animal would die if left to itself. The man ran back home and returned with a few local lads and a pair of wagons with two horses each (to everyone’s surprise, the horses were in no way upset by the scaly stranger). Shepherd was able to yoke them in such a way, that with a series of maneuvers they managed to bring the bizarre animal in from the hillside to the yard, where it could be chained up and fed until its release.  The feedings made it more tractable; though it was never very aggressive, it usually refused to cooperate with any idea that wasn’t its own. Its face was disarmingly expressive, even giving the impression that it knew what was in your mind when you looked at it. In the local dialect, they named it “Yellow-Fire-Head-Bird,” or Quagnojitrops. 

Apparently, the Shepherd family had kept the animal confined for many years. They gave it table scraps; they fed it the runts of each new litter, and the ewes and rams too ill or old for much more wool. They let it catch raccoons and chipmunks by the woodpile, where it gnawed through vines and, with its long, forked tongue, sucked grubs from under the bark of rotting logs. It drank from the creek, out back. Turnips and yams, it clawed-up and ate from the ground. 

The dogs respected the Quagnojitrops; instead of just barking at it, they maintained a friendly vigilance about this large, furless colleague whom they found they could neither trust, nor dislike. It was not, after all, any sort of a dog, nor another work animal like the horses; but neither was it livestock. It was an involuntary guest, utterly singular, stuck there awhile, getting half its needs met fully and without effort, while the other half burned with invisible yearning, year after year. The dogs had long since forgotten whatever it was that their wolf ancestors had traded-away in the eventual bargain with humanity. This small dragon had forgotten nothing, and had made no bargain at all. So the dogs loved the silent, carnivorous, reptilian  Quagnojitrops, even though it kept to itself and was no mammal. They protected it when teenagers or crazy people came to harass it, knowing its chain was just 200 meters long, so that it seemed all one need do was chuck a dirt-clod or a stone at the big mute thing and watch it scream. This, the dogs prevented; they were proud to do so.

Any signs of the beast’s aging disappeared when, one autumn day, it rather suddenly shed its entire skin. The shepherd’s children, having grown up with it, had no fear of the Quagnojitrops. Their own little ones played inside the big empty skin for a week, running along the animal’s iridescent length as if it were a tunnel made just to shelter them. Of course, the dead scales soon fell apart, like paper. But the children’s sense of having been quite literally inside someone else’s skin, walking around in it—that was the strange thing, and that lasted some time. 

But nothing lasts forever, and though Melvin Shepherd and his family endured much and lived long, he died, and the last of his grandchildren moved out of the countryside and into the big city at the end of the last war. This left the animal confined and in some danger of starvation. Now the last of the Shepherd grandchildren had sold the estate to new owners, but these had changed their plans and postponed their arrival by a week or two, so that the Quagnojitrops began slowly to starve. Soon, villagers as far as forty miles away could hear its howls at night, and the Mayor was contacted with a request that he see to the situation.

At first, he doubted there was any such animal, hoping instead that the messenger was deceiving or deceived. But the request had come from a respected source, even an esteemed one. It was the Mayor’s own nephew’s very wife, a shrewd businesswoman with her own shop on Drapery Row and a giant red hairdo that sat on her head like a cat. She still had family in the village, and they had called her in desperation; could she do anything about the noise? All night the Quagnojitrops emitted a honking, wailing howl that haunted the dreams of a few hundred people. So the Mayor reassured her, and she reassured the exasperated villagers. First, he would dispatch a Commissioner out to the village, with a special camera that could create a cinematograph of the Quagnojitrops. This cinematograph, once developed, could show the Mayor and his ministers that the animal indeed existed, and give an idea of how it moved and what it might want from them or how they might best be rid of it. 

She sent her husband, and out to the village he went: Bill Bipp, nephew of the Mayor of the city, in a stagecoach carrying a trunk full of photography equipment. Soon under its wheels crunched the gravel of the great yard where the Quagnojitrops lay resting, chained to the trunk of a large oak tree, surrounded by the bones of his last few rabbits. Here was an abandoned woodstove, cast iron and robust, rusting to oblivion. Cinderblocks. A peach tree unpollinated by any neighbor, fruitless in full flower. In the dry grass a child’s shoe, a few toy soldiers, a doll’s white arm in a shrub’s roots, relics of brighter days. Bill stared at the big animal, and it stared back at him without moving. For hours he set up the equipment, and just as he draped himself in the black cloth to operate the camera, the Quagnojitrops burst into motion and shuffled its wings against the ground, whipping up a great cloud of the dusty brown powder that was the soil of the place, and then just as suddenly went motionless once again. Bill, the camera, and the Quagnojitrops were completely covered in this ultralightweight dirt, and despite his best efforts the eventual film showed the animal only through a cloud of it, standing as still as it possibly could (being a reptile, this was very still indeed), like a statue caked with soot. When the Mayor saw the film, he dispatched a crew with instructions to feed the beast a series of goats while the Council debated the question of what to do with the Quagnojitrops. 

Some were in favor of simply releasing the Quagnojitrops. Others held it to be too dangerous to roam free, but advocated its upkeep at public expense, provided it be permitted to “add value” by appearing in the Zoological Garden on permanent display. A small caucus seemed committed to the animal’s swift destruction, but these were unlikely to carry the day, having already alienated their colleagues in other affairs. One newspaper after another became interested in these proceedings, until the minutes were being published in all the major dailies. Intrepid junior reporters lit out for the countryside to take more pictures and gawk at the creature, their enthusiasm quickly chastened by the Quagnojitrops’ unmistakably sorrowful demeanor. Crowds gathered in the city’s Central Plaza, and soon a boycott of the Zoological Garden was organized by some university students. “Release the Quagnojitrops!” went the cry, from campus to campus, all term long. Its name went to a drink, a dance craze, and a sports car. But it was still in chains.

One sweltering August morning, while the deliberations proceeded, one of those Model-T’s full of undergraduates appeared in the dusty yard. They had driven all night for this, stopping to make out and get coffee and pie every few hours. Now it lay before them, lolling its head from side to side, a few stray lentils crusting in its beard and twin trails of salty calcium down its cheeks where the tears had been flowing. Quietly it sighed, and a pair of faint blue flames whispered wordless from its nose. A young woman in a cotton print sundress held out the offer of beef jerkey and a carrot, which was accepted with evident relief. Her hand was brushed by the smooth lip of the Quagnojitrops as it lifted out her gift and went about eating. Only after a further hour—spent in vexed discussion of the state of the talks back in the City Council—did her fellow Sophomore ease up to the vigilant, now slightly sleepy creature with a skeleton key and a pic, which he wielded to such good effect that presently the lock sprang open. 
 
At this point, my narrative descends into speculation. It appears the Quagnojitrops remained in place until nightfall, then began a flight of its own, the first of nearly a century, into the City where it had never been before. The left wing had healed amiss, and the flight cost far more energy than expected. In the midmorning, an exhausted Quagnojitrops touched down eighty yards south of the clocktower, having survived an awkward journey in some pain. The horses of the constables shrank out of its way as it walked on its great taloned feet, like a wading man, across the Square and up to the second-story balcony of the Statehouse. There, behind a vast bay window chased with silver filagree embellishments that defined a pair of French folding doors in the glass, the Council was even then deliberating the fate of its strange visitor. 

The face of the Quagnojitrops loomed into view, and the room rippled with gasps and shouts. Its size was impressive, provided one put aside any thought of dragons, which it resembled in all but build (being far more gracile, as I said), coloration (being favored with a yellow-white, saturated hue like sunshine on metal), and size (dragons being lengthy as grown trees are tall, whereas the only known Quagnojitrops is some three-halves the size of the largest horse). They stuttered, they dropped their sherry glasses, they spilt their cream as they poured it. They knocked a few inkwells all over the cummerbunds of their morning-suits. One minister promptly fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts and a tincture of camphor. But before long the business at hand reasserted itself, despite the fresh urgency imparted by the entirely unexpected presence of its object, peering at them in the very conduct of what they called their jurisprudence. It held its head in such a way that it seemed somehow older and more responsible than they, and they were more disconcerted by this air of silent wisdom than by their momentary fear that the Quagnojitrops might eat them the way it had eaten the goats they had so often voted to feed it. After a luncheon of duck with poached pears, a plurality moved that the Zoological Garden be advanced a large sum with which to develop an expanded preserve. This was done. But the Quagnojitrops never appeared in its confines, and was exhibited to the public at no time, except during this utterly unexpected visit from what was now, once again, a wild animal.

We have the minutes of the Hearing, with its frankly implausible description of events. We have all thirty-eight Councilmembers on record, under oath, affirming that they remember nothing of the Hearing; that they saw the creature, but only for a moment and only in complete silence; and that, to a fellow, they do not believe the depiction of events found in the minutes. We have the Stenographer and his priest, together with the results of a complete phrenological examination of both men, indicating their honesty. The reader will kindly excuse that part of my depiction of events which has been extrapolated from the established facts, without, I hope, dismissing the possibility that I may be right, though this cannot be proven.

During these events I was a child in short pants, stuffing my scrapbook with clippings about the Quagnojitrops; today I am an octogenarian, and much of the time in between I have spent in contemplation of this enigma. It seems to me quite possible that the placement of the Stenographer’s booth at the end of the nave of the Chamber may have protected it from the release of some hypno-active gas in the breath of the animal, or put him out of range of some more subtle, immaterial means of deep persuasion that wiped the whole experience from their minds. For the account (however unbelievable it must appear) has it that the Quagnojitrops opened its lips and began, in a voice like velvet: “Gentlemen…”
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It proceeded to explain that it had lingered on the estate voluntarily so long as the Shepherd had been kind; that it had been held miserably captive by the third generation of these people; and that it had arrived there because of a lovelorn grief that had driven the Quagnojitrops out of its ever-so-distant home on a flight of despair, intended to end in exhaustion and death by a fall from the sky. Instead it survived its terrifying drop to Earth, and now dejection had brought it to the world of men and women, and the pasture and the yard, the dogs and the children and the dusty dirt below their barefoot traffic to and from the schoolhouse, church, orchard, and dancing-floor. It spoke no word; it watched and learned, and read the minds of those it came to know. After the flickering joys of that communal life it had endured some decades of sadness in captivity, lonely among mean people, with an iron collar on. But that had ended when the kids went down to free the Quagnojitrops, restoring its faith in humanity. The Councilmembers were free to do as they liked; the Quagnojitrops was going home to the mountains now. The Councilmembers were free to forget everything they had seen and heard that morning as they liked; the Quagnojitrops was going home to the mountains now. And so the Quagnojitrops turned away, bending its head to one side in sorrow about old loss. It walked away from the Statehouse and rolled its head to the other side for a new thought, this one about the peace of mourning done, and hefted up its wings, and tugged against the rising air, and flew home to the sky. 




Jamey Hecht is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn, NY, with a PhD in Literature from Brandeis University (1995) and a PsyD from the New Center for Psychoanalysis (2019). He's published over a dozen scholarly articles in journals, and is the author of five books: Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999); a translation, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus (Wordsworth Editions, 2005); How To Write About Homer (Chelsea, 2010); and two books of poetry: Limousine, Midnight Blue (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989 - 2019 (IPB, 2019). www.jameyhechtauthor.com