Jackalope

Every cowboy who ever wintered in Wyoming has a Jackalope story, and not one of them will admit it isn't true. They'll tell you the milk, taken from a Jackalope by moonlight, is a folk remedy good for whatever ails you — though milking one requires more nerve than sense, since the bull Jackalope guards his does with those antlers lowered. They'll tell you it can imitate a man's voice so well that whole posses have chased their own echoes across the flats until sunup.

Best of all, they'll tell you about its singing. A Jackalope, the story goes, can't resist a tune, and on a clear night around the chuckwagon fire a lonesome ballad will draw them in from the dark to sing along — a ghostly chorus rising out of the sage that no man has ever quite been able to record. Believe as much of it as you like. The teller surely does.

The Jackalope's birthday is a matter of record. In 1932, two brothers, Douglas and Ralph Herrick of Douglas, Wyoming — young taxidermists fresh from a hunting trip — tossed a dead jackrabbit on the floor of their shop next to a pair of deer antlers, and the happy accident gave one of them an idea. They mounted the antlers on the rabbit, sold the result to a local hotel, and a legend was born. That first mount hung for decades, and the Herricks turned out many more.

Douglas leaned into the fame with both boots. The town declared itself the Jackalope Capital of the World, erected an eight-foot Jackalope statue downtown, and the city issues official Jackalope hunting licenses — valid, by ordinance, only for the brief annual season around midnight on June 31st, a date that conveniently never arrives. The state of Wyoming has flirted more than once with naming the Jackalope its official mythological creature.

The killjoys will point out, correctly, that real rabbits sometimes grow horn-like growths from a virus, and that this may have planted the seed of the legend long before the Herricks ever picked up a needle. They'll add that the antlered-hare tall tale is older than Wyoming, with cousins in European bestiaries going back centuries. All of which is fine company for a good story, and changes nothing about how the thing sings.

What the Jackalope really is, of course, is the perfect Western yarn made flesh — a souvenir, a postcard, a campfire dare, the kind of harmless whopper a Wyoming old-timer tells a wide-eyed tourist with a perfectly straight face. It has never hurt a living soul, unless you count the pride of the city fellers sent out 'snipe hunting' for one after dark. Buy a license. Bring your singing voice. And don't tell anyone back home you believed it.