Rumtifusel

Also Known As: the spelling of Henry H. Tryon’s Fearsome Critters, 1939, which also gives the mock-Latin name Villosus sumptuosus; Charles E. Brown’s Paul Bunyan Natural History, 1935, prints it Rumptifusel
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore, Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A flat, flexible body under a thick mink-like pelt lets it pass for an expensive fur coat, and the underside is lined with tiny sucking pores that strip a victim to the bone.
Role in Mythos: It is one of the fearsome critters of the North American logging camps, a bunkhouse tale told to amuse the crew and to rattle the newcomer.
Relation to Humans: It feeds on lumberjacks, and only on the ones who walk over to claim a fur robe that seems to have been dropped by the road. The men who leave the coat alone have nothing to fear from it, because the animal is too slow to chase anybody.

A fur robe lies over a stump beside the tote-road, dark and glossy as mink, the kind of thing no lumberjack could buy with a whole season’s pay. Nobody is anywhere near it. The cold air smells of pitch and woodsmoke from the camp down the hill, and the coat just lies there, waiting for someone to decide that finders are keepers. The man who crosses the ruts to pick it up is the entire cast of this story, and he does not come back.

The Rumtifusel has two written homes, four years apart. Charles E. Brown, who directed the Wisconsin Historical Society’s museum in Madison, gave it three sentences in his 1935 pamphlet Paul Bunyan Natural History, spelling it Rumptifusel: a very ferocious animal of large size and great strength, which rests with its thin body wrapped around a tree trunk, is taken by a lumberjack for a fur robe, and after that the lumberjack is missing. In 1939 Henry H. Tryon, a forester at Cornwall, New York, gave it a full page in Fearsome Critters, illustrated by his wife Margaret, and supplied the mock-Latin name Villosus sumptuosus, roughly the shaggy and sumptuous one. Almost everything later retellings repeat about the creature comes from Tryon’s page and not from Brown’s. It is absent from William T. Cox’s Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods of 1910, the oldest of the critter books.

Tryon’s animal is large, strong and ferocious, with a pelt that is fine, long and thick and a rich colour like a mink. The body is strangely flattened. Tryon explains the shape by way of old Hank McGinnis, who rolled off a porch roof after the annual firemen’s dinner and spread himself out so flat that his friends slid him edgeways between a pair of shed doors for a coffin. That joke sets the register of the whole book. Neither writer gives the Rumtifusel a head, eyes, teeth, legs or a size in feet. It is a pelt with an appetite, and that is all the description it ever got.

It hunts by being mistaken for something else. Tryon says it is slow-gaited, so it has to fall back on low cunning, and he credits it with one of the oldest tricks there is: working on the greed of its prey. It drapes itself close over a stump, or around the butt of a tree standing near a tote-road, so neatly that it looks exactly like a high-grade fur coat or robe that somebody has dropped. Brown’s version wraps it around a standing trunk instead, which he calls a clever stratagem for securing its prey. In both books it is perfectly still, and the stillness is the whole weapon.

The passer-by comes over for a closer look. With a lightning-fast flick of its blanket-like body the Rumtifusel folds over him completely, and the numerous minute sucking pores that line its inner underside go to work. In no time at all, Tryon says, the bones are sucked clean. What remains is the part that made the whole thing a joke: small balls of fur and cloth left lying beside old stumps.

Tryon’s last lines go after the experts. Some high-ginger scientists, he writes, claim that those little balls by the stump were coughed up by owls, and a sensible man should not swallow it. Owls really do bring up compact pellets of fur and bone, and a woodsman would have found them at the foot of trees all his working life. The Rumtifusel takes something real, small and faintly grisly that anybody could pick up and turn over, and hands it a far worse explanation. The pellet is a greenhorn’s clothes.

That target matters. Brown opens his pamphlet by saying these beasts were described in the bunkhouse at night to raise a laugh or to impress and frighten the greenhorns, and that his information came from reliable as well as unreliable and doubtful sources. The Rumtifusel is aimed squarely at the new man. In both versions its victim is the fellow who thinks a fine coat can lie unclaimed in the woods and is his for the taking. The listener who laughs has been told, without anyone saying it, not to help himself to other people’s things in camp.

Brown’s pamphlet puts a quieter neighbour on the same road, and the pairing belongs here as context rather than as part of the Rumtifusel’s own record. His Tote-Road Shagamaw prowls the tote-roads eating any coats or other clothing the lumberjacks leave hung on trees or logs, and for all its fierce looks it is shy and harmless. One animal eats the coat. The other one is the coat.

Nothing is recorded about where the Rumtifusel comes from. No telling gives it a birth, a mate, young, a den or a death, and Brown names no teller and no camp. Tryon wrote that a great deal of real folklore was born, lived and died without ever reaching a permanent record, and the Rumtifusel very nearly went the same way: two short entries in two small books, printed in Madison and in Cornwall, and no field text behind either one.

Its powers all follow from the disguise. The pelt is so convincing that it needs no speed, the grip of that flat body cannot be broken once it closes, and the pores finish the job without any need for teeth. Its weaknesses follow just as neatly. It cannot run anything down, so it can only take a man who walks up to it. It has to lie still in plain sight near a road and wait, and it will starve among people who mind their own business. Leave the coat where it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Rumtifusel?

The Rumtifusel is a fearsome critter of North American lumberjack folklore, a large, flat, fur-covered predator that disguises itself as a dropped fur coat. It was first printed by Charles E. Brown in Paul Bunyan Natural History (1935), spelled Rumptifusel, and described in more detail by Henry H. Tryon in Fearsome Critters (1939). It belongs to the tall tales told in logging camps rather than to any belief people held.

How does the Rumtifusel catch its prey?

The Rumtifusel drapes its flattened body over a stump or around a tree near a logging road so that it looks like an expensive fur coat or robe somebody has lost. When a greedy passer-by comes to pick it up, it wraps around him in a single fast movement. In Tryon’s account, tiny sucking pores on the underside of its body then strip the victim’s bones clean.

What does the Rumtifusel look like?

Henry H. Tryon describes the Rumtifusel as large, strong and oddly flattened, with a fine, long, thick pelt the rich colour of mink. Neither Tryon nor Charles E. Brown describes its head, eyes, legs or exact size. The creature is defined almost entirely by its resemblance to a fur coat.

What do owl pellets have to do with the Rumtifusel?

Tryon ends his entry by claiming that the little balls of fur found beside old stumps, which scientists say are coughed up by owls, are really the leftover clothing of greenhorns eaten by a Rumtifusel. Owl pellets are real, so the joke gives an everyday woodland object a grisly alternative explanation.

How do you avoid a Rumtifusel?

The safe course is to leave any fur coat found lying in the woods alone. Tryon calls the Rumtifusel a slow-gaited animal that can only catch prey by luring it close, so it has no way of pursuing someone who walks past. The tale works as a warning against greed as much as a monster story.