Pinnacle Grouse

Also Known As: recorded under that name and no other; Charles E. Brown files it among the birds of Paul Bunyan’s country, beside the Gillygaloo and the Phillyloo Bird, and Borges later carried it into the fauna of the United States
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore, Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A single wing, which commits the bird to one direction of travel around the top of a cone-shaped hill and to no other course at all.
Role in Mythos: It is one of the impossible birds of the Great Lakes logging camps, produced in the bunkhouse at night and described with a straight face to whoever was new.
Relation to Humans: Nothing in the record has it attacking, robbing, or frightening anybody, which makes it mild company among critters that ate axe handles and dropped timber on men. The one trick it plays is aimed at the person watching rather than at the woods, since its colours are said to shift with the season and with the state the observer is in.

Somewhere in the cutover pine country there is a hill shaped like a haystack, and a bird that has been going round it the same way since it hatched. The whole record of that bird runs to four sentences. Charles E. Brown, who ran the Wisconsin Historical Society’s museum in Madison and spent roughly forty years writing down what old loggers told him, printed them in a stapled pamphlet called Paul Bunyan Natural History in 1935. The Pinnacle Grouse had only one wing. This enabled it to fly in only one direction about the top of a conical hill. The colour of its plumage changed with the seasons, and with the condition of the observer. That is everything anybody wrote down.

The last clause is where the bird actually lives. Seasonal plumage is ordinary enough, and any woodsman who had watched a ptarmigan go white in November would nod along to it without thinking. Then the sentence keeps going and puts the change inside the man’s head instead of on the bird’s back. It is a small, cheerful piece of cruelty, and it turns a piece of nonsense natural history into a comment on how the witness had spent his evening.

Brown gives no size, no weight, no colouring, no voice, no nest and no egg. He does not even say which wing the bird kept. The gap is not an oversight. A grouse in the Great Lakes camps was a known thing, brown and heavy and good in a pan, so the joke only needs the one deviation from a bird everybody already carried in their head. Subtract a wing, and the rest builds itself.

Picture the consequence and it is a strange, patient sort of life. The bird has full use of the air and no use at all for a straight line. It leaves the crown of the hill, falls into the bank its anatomy insists on, and comes back to where it started, over pines that smell of hot resin in August and are stiff with frost by the time it has circled into winter. It cannot cross a valley. It cannot answer a bird on the next ridge. Everything it will ever see is the same slope from the same angle, at a slightly different height.

The telling belonged to the bunkhouse. Brown’s own framing of these animals is plain about it: the tall tales went round at night to raise a laugh or to work on a greenhorn, in a room of wet wool and stove smoke, with men on the deacon seat waiting to see whether the new hand would ask a follow-up question. The Pinnacle Grouse is built for exactly that moment. It survives one question, which is how it flies, and dies on the second, which is how it lands.

Its neighbours in the same pamphlet work the same way, and the family resemblance is worth naming as long as it is not mistaken for the bird’s own signature. The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Bunyan’s Pyramid Forty and laid square eggs so they would not roll off, and the jacks hardboiled them and shot dice with them. The Phillyloo Bird flew upside down to keep warm and to spare its long legs the rheumatism. The Goofus Bird flew backwards, on the grounds that it did not care where it was going and wanted only to know where it had been. Each is one absurd fact with a bird attached. The Pinnacle Grouse is the most economical of the set, because its one fact is a missing part rather than an added one.

It has had one unlikely promotion since. Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero swept the American logging-camp beasts into El libro de los seres imaginarios, and the Pinnacle Grouse went in with them, filed under the fauna of the United States; the Borges Center’s index at the University of Pittsburgh places it at page 631 of the collaborative works. A bunkhouse joke about a drunk man’s eyesight ended up shelved with the basilisk and the golem.

Whatever powers it has are negative ones. It flies, which is not nothing, and it can hold its circle for as long as the hill stands. Set against that is a limitation so total it amounts to a sentence: no reversal, no departure, no second hill. The plumage that shifts with the observer is the sharper handicap, because it means the bird cannot be reliably described even by the man looking straight at it, and a creature nobody can describe twice the same way is one that never quite gets confirmed.

Four sentences, and one of them is about how drunk you are. Nobody recorded a hunt, a shot, a nest, a chick, a call, or the name of the hill. No teller claimed to have seen one. The silence around it is not a gap in the story; past a certain point it is the story, because a bird that can only be met going away from you in a circle was never going to be caught standing still.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Pinnacle Grouse?

The Pinnacle Grouse is a one-winged bird from North American logging-camp folklore, able to fly in only one direction around the top of a cone-shaped hill. It was recorded by the Wisconsin folklore collector Charles E. Brown in his 1935 pamphlet Paul Bunyan Natural History. It belongs to the joke bestiary of the Great Lakes lumber camps rather than to any belief anybody held.

Why does the Pinnacle Grouse only have one wing?

No source explains it. Brown states the single wing as a fact of the bird’s anatomy and gives no origin, no injury and no curse to account for it. The missing wing is the entire premise of the creature, and the tellers were not interested in where it came from.

What does the Pinnacle Grouse look like?

Almost nothing is recorded. Brown gives it one wing and plumage that changes with the seasons and with the condition of the observer, and supplies no size, colour, call or nest. The joke in that last detail is that the bird’s appearance depends partly on how much the man watching it has had to drink.

Is the Pinnacle Grouse dangerous?

No. Nothing in the record has it harming, chasing or stealing from anyone, which sets it apart from lumberwoods creatures like the Hodag or the Agropelter. Its only function was to be described convincingly to a newcomer in a bunkhouse and see whether he believed it.

Where does the Pinnacle Grouse story come from?

It comes from the tall tales of the Great Lakes logging camps, written down by Charles E. Brown, who directed the Wisconsin Historical Society’s museum and collected Paul Bunyan material from veteran loggers for about forty years. It does not appear in the two other standard critter books, William T. Cox’s Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910) or Henry H. Tryon’s Fearsome Critters (1939). Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero later included it in The Book of Imaginary Beings.