“A goat-like beast with legs shorter on one side, doomed to circle the mountain forever in a single direction.”
The dahu is the Alps' most successful animal that never existed: a mountain goat, near cousin to the chamois and the ibex, whose legs are shorter on one side of its body than on the other. The adaptation is perfect and perfectly absurd — it stands level on the steepest slopes, but it can only walk around the mountain in one direction, forever. Turn a dahu around and it topples over. That, as generations of straight-faced mountain guides have explained, is exactly how you catch one.
The joke is the point. The dahu belongs to folklore's small genus of trap-legends — the snipe hunt, the wild haggis, the sidehill gouger — invented not to frighten but to initiate. The 'chasse au dahu' flourished wherever knowing locals met credulous outsiders, from the Swiss and French Alps and the Jura to Italy's Aosta Valley, and it worked so well for so long that the creature has since earned museums, official sanctuaries and a permanent place in Alpine identity.
The Legend
As the lore has it, the dahu comes in two immiscible varieties: the laevogyrous dahu, left legs shorter, circling the mountain counter-clockwise, and the dextrogyre dahu, right legs shorter, circling clockwise. The two can only ever meet face to face and — the barstool zoologists add gravely — cannot interbreed. The young is called a dahuot. Regional cousins fill the map: the dahut and dairi of the Jura, the darou of the Vosges, the tamarou of the Aubrac, the tamarro of Catalonia and Andorra.
The hunt is a two-man job, as the newcomer is solemnly instructed. One hunter waits downslope holding a sack open; the other climbs above the beast and startles it from behind. The dahu turns, its short legs land on the downhill side, and it tumbles helplessly off balance into the bag. All the victim has to do is hold the sack and wait — silent, motionless, alone, on a cold mountainside, at night. The hunters go home to the fire. The dahu, of course, never comes.
The Record
The prank's documented heyday came at the end of the nineteenth century, when the new tourism industry delivered wealthy city visitors — long on confidence, short on mountain sense — into the hands of local guides, who invented an errand worthy of them. When that supply of naive hunters thinned in the twentieth century, the chasse au dahu found a second life as a summer-camp initiation, passed down among French and Swiss children like a folk song with a punchline.
The dahu has since been institutionalised with a completely straight face. On April 1, 1967, the town of Reignier in Haute-Savoie was designated a 'Dahu Sanctuary'; on April 1, 1995, Marcel Jacquat opened a dahu exhibition at the natural history museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; and the Alps Museum at Bard Fort in the Aosta Valley keeps a permanent dahu display. The dates of these solemn proceedings are, naturally, no accident.
The Lore
Folklorists class the dahu hunt with the snipe hunt of North America and the wild haggis of Scotland: fool's-errand legends engineered to sort insiders from outsiders. The creature borrows its plausibility from real mountain fauna — the chamois and ibex that genuinely stand at impossible angles on Alpine walls — and merely extends the adaptation one deadpan step too far. It is a parody of natural selection, told by the people who live inside the terrain the joke depends on.
In the French-speaking Alps the dahu long ago outgrew the prank. It headlines recreational hunts, festivals and souvenir shelves, and sending someone 'to hunt the dahu' survives as an idiom for a fool's errand. The beast even does quiet cultural work — a reminder, delivered with a straight face at two thousand metres, that the mountains belong to those who know them, and that the surest mark of an outsider is believing everything a local tells you after dark.
Field Notes
- ✦ Comes in laevogyrous and dextrogyre varieties — mirror-legged, and unable to interbreed.
- ✦ Classic prank on tourists and newcomers: the victim holds the sack, alone, all night.
- ✦ Known across the Swiss, French and Italian Alps; the young is called a dahuot.
- ✦ Reignier in Haute-Savoie was declared a 'Dahu Sanctuary' on April 1, 1967.
- ✦ Kin to the snipe hunt, the sidehill gouger and Scotland's wild haggis.
Case File
- Classification
- Mountain quadruped (joke cryptid)
- Category
- Beast/Hybrid
- Territory
- The Alps
- First Sighted
- Alpine folklore
- Habitat
- Steep Alpine slopes
- Reported Size
- Goat- or chamois-sized
- Also Known As
- Dahut · Dairi