Bob Hamm

OLE TIGER AND THE SWAMP HORROR

Looking back on it, I realize now it never was nothing but me and old Tiger chasing cars. Or, more accurately, pickup trucks. That's about all that runs the lonely roads in the swamp during winter time. And damned few pickup trucks, even.

Anyhow, it was us all the time, but I didn't come to realize that until it was already a full-blown legend. And folks in the Atchafalaya Swamp aren't going to part with their legend even after this honest effort at confession. They likely wouldn't give it up even if old Tiger wrote this confession.

A swamp the size of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin, the world's largest river bottom swamp, needs a legend. wants a legend, you might say. And, unknowingly and without malice aforethought, me and old Tiger gave it one.

I had suffered a mild heart attack in 1965, and the doctor told me to get out of the rat race or get my will drafted. I had come into a little money when Aunt Maggie died, so what with selling the cafe I was able to retire and buy a cabin at Butte La Rose, a little settlement which sits on a bend in the Atchafalaya River in the heart of the Atchafalaya Swamp. At that time, it was pretty primitive, but close enough to Interstate 10 that you didn't feel absolutely alone.

The fellow I bought it from asked me to keep old Tiger, because the dog had lived there all his life and might pine away and die if he were moved. I know now that he asked me to keep Tiger because the 101st Airborne Division and six Marine Battalions couldn't have moved him. The camp belongs to Tiger, and I'll always be grateful to him for letting he share it.

Best I can judge, Tiger is a cross between a German Shepherd and maybe a grizzly bear. Once when a dog at the next camp down the bayou came in season and all the male dogs in the swamp gathered outside the fence where she was kept, Tiger trotted down there and systematically whipped hell out of all of them. The owner of the female was so impressed that he opened the gate for Tiger, and Tiger still had strength left to go in and enjoy the spoils of war.

That was an uncommon amount of excitement. Ordinarily, the swamp was serene and beautiful and until they came with their giant oil field equipment, men were unable to leave much of a mark on her natural splendor. I found the peace I was looking for. The freedom from stress. Threw away the cigarettes and breathed the wonderful clean air.

The doctor was impressed when I showed up six months later for a check-up. But he told me I had to lose weight and get more exercise than dangling a cricket in a bream hole. Well, I got a bargain at a second hand store on a fire-engine red jogging suit, almost exactly the color of my hair and beard (which were both hanging nearly to my waist by then) and took up jogging. Damn, that's boring. I did it, but I didn't like it. I even moved up from jogging to running. After a few months I was in uncommonly good physical condition. I got down to 220 pounds, which was lean enough for a man that stands six feet, six inches tall, and could run for miles along the levee--going like a bat out of hell--without even breathing hard. But, truly, it was just boring as hell.

One night it dawned on me that old Tiger was getting just as much exercise, and having a damned site more fun, chasing pickup trucks. They say running can give you a natural high, and maybe I was in one of those euphoric states the first time I did it, but me and old Tiger ran a pickup truck from Butte La Rose to the Henderson guide levee that first night, and I never had so much fun in my life. I discovered I could bark pretty good too, with all that lung power I had developed.

Like I say, there's not much traffic in the swamp on winter nights, and sometimes we didn't get to run a car or truck more than two or three nights a week. But I guess that was enough for the legend to start.

About six weeks after we started chasing cars and trucks, I found an old copy of a Lafayette newspaper somebody had left at the boat landing, and there was a story about some folks who had encountered a monster in the swamp. They had about a dozen eyewitness accounts from motorists who "deep in the bowels of the Great Basin," as the newspaper story said, "had been terrified to see a gigantic creature covered with red fur leap from the marshy woods and pursue them down the eerie, winding roads of the mysterious swamp."

I tell you, it scared me. Especially the part about the great, hairy, four-footed creature that accompanied "the ferocious, two-footed giant with the scarlet fur"--both of them "snarling, barking and howling." For awhile, me and old Tiger stayed inside the fence at night. During the day, we scouted the area around the cabin for footprints left by what the newspapers by then were calling "The Swamp Horror."

The only footprints we ever found were our own, and after the only radio station we could pick up dropped the story, we went back to chasing cars and trucks. Right away, The Swamp Horror was back on the radio newscasts. Besides motorists being chased and terrified, there was a story about a troop of Explorer Scouts who had come upon The Horror and its companion, "with their heads tilted back, wailing and shrieking in a mad, half-human way."

That really shook me up, because it happened in an area near Bayou Benoit where me and old Tiger were camping that same night. I remember it well. We weren't too sleepy that night, so when a full moon came out, me'n Tiger commenced to howling at it, just for the hell of it. I recall trying to teach Tiger to howl to the tune of "The Orange Blossom Special," but he never could get it just right.

Anyhow, we were right there in the area where those Scouts came upon The Horror, "shrieking and wailing," according to the news report. I decided to stay close to the cabin after that, and give up camping out in the swamp. The next thing we heard, a couple of hunters reported spotting The Horror and shooting at it. The radio said they were making their way through the swamp when it rose up in the air about fifty feet in front of them. The reporter had a tape recorded interview with one of the hunters:

"It just seemed to float up out of nowhere," he said. "We could see it plain through the trees. It was waving and snapping at us like a red ghost, and it was floating on the air. It's feet didn't even touch the ground. Joe blasted the son of a bitch with his .12 gauge, and I know he hit it. But it just kept floating there above the ground, twisting and waving its arms at us. We cut and run. That ain't no human thing down there."

I remember that day well. It was real breezy and I had washed my red sweat suit and hung it up on a limb to let the wind blow it dry.

While me and old Tiger were out checking a trot line, something got hold of the sweat suit and made a hole in the seat of the pants the size of a cannon ball. I figured maybe The Horror had come right up to the camp and took a bite out of my britches.

I thought about reporting that to the radio station, but they seemed to have enough news about the subject. There was what they called a traiteur, a faith healer, that the Cajun people there in the swamp believed in without reservation, and he had begun to give interviews to the radio station. He explained that the red thing and the big hairy four-footed thing were undoubtedly "loup garous," which is a kind of Cajun werewolf that roams at night, stealing souls and other valuables and making cows' milk go sour. According to the traiteur, a loup garou can change its shape into anything it wants to be.

He said the only protection against it was some kind of powder that he made up from a secret recipe passed down to him from his father who got it from his father and so on and so on. Me 'n old Tiger slipped over to his cabin one night and there was a gang of people there. He seemed to be doing a brisk business in loup garou powder.

Well, I figured the powder was doing the trick, because pretty soon the news about The Horror died down again, and before too long, me 'n old Tiger got back to running cars. And that's when the realization came. One night, we set in behind a pickup truck that was weaving pretty bad down the swamp road, and when the driver looked in the rear view mirror and saw us, he ran the pickup half way up a cypress tree.

He jumped out, looked right at me and old Tiger and hollered, "It's The Swamp Horror," then he threw a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam at us and took off down the road, running like a spotted-assed ape. Old Tiger inspired him to an impressive pace, snarling and nipping at his butt as he ran. I called the dog back and we went home to the cabin. There, sipping on the remainder of that Jim Beam and reviewing in my mind all that had transpired, it came to me clear as a bell that The Swamp Horror never was nothing but me and old Tiger chasing cars.

So we stopped that, and after about a month or so the scare died out. But the Swamp had its legend, and I guess it will live on forever. Now they've even added a new one, about fishermen seeing something in Bayou Peyronnet that could have been the Loch Ness Monster or worse.

Me and old Tiger are not contributing to that one. We never did intend to scare people and just to avoid the possibility of it happening again, we gave up running and have taken to swimming for exercise. As a matter of fact, we swim in Bayou Peyronnet two, three times a week, and I've never seen anything that resembles a monster.