Boobrie
MJ Munn
Copyright 2012 MJ Munn
The handsome man in the mack had a warm and weathered gaze that pierced the camera’s lens. The thin crinkles around his eyes and mouth betrayed four decades that culminated in his presence here on this dismal brown plain. And his rugged baritone voice, calling out to speak over the wind, lent authority and credibility to every word:
“The Scottish Highlands are one of a decreasing amount of lands largely unaffected by the march of time. The inhabitants, mostly farmers, are willing members of the 21st century—in technology, in cultural awareness, in education—but there is a heritage that is a vital and unchanging facet of their daily lives. As the 20th century laid waste to the superstitions of the Western world, the new millennium has continued that crusade against what the technological elite has dismissively labeled, Ignorance.
“But here, Gaelic is still spoken by a diminishing number of Scots who consider it their legacy. And investigation of this region, long famous for their legends of the Fair Folk and other fantastic creatures, reveals a persistence of the folklore, implicitly believed in by the Highlanders who share the land with them. The men, women and children of this area live in harmony with the leprechauns and fairies of their forefathers in a mutually beneficial relationship. A relationship that stresses an almost religious environmentalism—caring for and about this lush, green land—above all.
“The advantages of such a relationship, whether based on truth or superstition, are obvious: an essential codependence with the land that they rely on to feed and to clothe them. Yet among the elves and gnomes that require respect for the Earth, there are those less well-known and more ill-defined creatures whose benefits are not so obvious.
“One such creature is the boobrie.”
Ted Moran, cloaked against the unbridled rural wind on Rannoch Moor, felt very exposed. The made-for-TV features of his intelligent, rugged and slightly gaunt face failed entirely to suppress that feeling.
“Um, cut.” Leroy Mankiewicz, the director. “That was great, Ted. You really nailed it on ‘religious environmentalism.’ Uh, but you made that face on ‘boobrie.’”
That face. Ted had been making that face since leaving New York with the other members of this five-man production crew. He had been hand-picked for this trip based on his voice-over work on the documentary, “Cat Whisperer.” He had difficulty reminding himself that this job was a step up.
Ted was tall, six-two, with sandy hair and a well-maintained physique. At 42, he still looked to be in the physical prime of his life. Yet now he savored the residue of an antacid tablet in his teeth. “I feel like I’m destroying my career, Leroy. This is me holding a gun to my future.”
Ted’s voice remained calm and pleasant, but his anxiety was elevating. He had come a long way from the pig farm outside Dayton, but not nearly far enough.
The director paused to clean his glasses. Ted thought he heard him counting to ten. “Yeah, this isn’t the time for doubt, Ted. The time for doubt was four days and three thousand miles ago.”
Leroy was a few years younger and a couple of inches shorter than Ted, but his presence was undeniable. Where Ted was charismatic, Leroy was commanding. He had auburn hair, dark brown eyes, and stubble that somehow always looked about two days old. He appeared forever in a hurry, and his smile barely belied his contempt for prima donnas. “I know the boobrie is ludicrous. We all know we’re chasing our tails pretending to look for the ridiculous thing. That’s kind of the point, so you’re just going to have to get over it. The word is ‘boobrie.’ Get used to saying it.
“Okay everyone. Let’s take it from ‘the advantages.’”
Ted could fake a smile like a consummate professional, and he flashed one of his finest at the director. “Sure, Leroy. You’re right. That’s the whole point.” He walked back up the hill to find his mark. “Bang,” he whispered.
“Uh, Ted?” Ted turned again to face Jerry, the heavyset production assistant and sound engineer, early twenties, with eternally unkempt blonde hair. He was pointing up above the host’s head. At the boom mic.
****
“Nae, I hae niverr seen thi Boibhre masel.” Ted sat off-camera, watching the old sheep farmer, Calum Mac-an-t-sagairt, and giving him someone to make eye contact with. He could feel himself dying inside. “But ma coson wes upt in the mur sexti yoirr ago. Niverr he cam back.”
The farmer sitting at his kitchen table was a square-shaped man, short but almost as wide as Jerry. His deep-set eyes were cloudy blue; probably once piercing, but now cataracts began to dull them. His skin was pale, but for the bulbous red nose. Yet for his antiquity, the man was hard, sinewy. And intimidating. He now stared down Ted through those intense and overcast eyes with a somehow disapproving look. Ted checked himself to be sure he wasn’t making the face again. No, it was his “I’m deeply interested in whatever it is you’re going on about” smile. He perceived that the man was expecting some reply. “Uh….”
“I kin gae wi ye gif ye win me tae.”
****
Outside, Leroy was the first to speak. “That was no joke about these people speaking Gaelic. We find one English-speaking peasant up here and his brogue is so bad we need subtitles. He had a great look, though. Real Scotland. But the audio is useless.”
Jerry was pumped. “Dude, what did he say? Has he seen the boobrie or what?”
Leroy ignored him, but Ted was still in false-compassion mode. “No one has seen the boobrie, Jerry. It’s a myth.” Even now the word made him cringe. He still wasn’t comfortable saying it, but he was practicing trying to sound convincing. Andy, the screenwriter, rolled his pale blue eyes behind his thick round glasses. Ted told himself he was rolling his eyes at Jerry, but didn’t dare ask.
Jerry wandered off to feed the birds in Mac-an-t-sagairt’s pond. The cameraman, Derrick, filmed an establishing shot of the farmer’s house, spotlighting the bagpipes left out on his porch. The old man had brought them out on request of the production crew. He had said something that resembled an offer to play them, but Leroy had declined politely.
The director now continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “It’s okay. We’ll find some intelligible Scot in Bridge-of-Orchy to dub him. Hey where does he keep his sheep? Let’s get a shot of those before we go, Derrick. Man, that constipated expression on his face was priceless. Old farmers take themselves so seriously.”
****
“‘A wearier looking desert a man never saw.’ With these words, Robert Louis Stevenson summed up Rannoch Moor. It’s a harsh terrain, unwelcoming and unforgiving to humans. Protective, perhaps, of the many indigenous birds and mammals that have adapted comfortably to the brutal wilderness.
“There is no devilish mystery regarding the disappearances that have taken numerous travelers in Rannoch Moor over the years. It is 50 square miles of lochs, large rocks, and innumerable peat bogs; 10 miles across and nearly unnavigable except on foot. One thousand feet above sea level, but surrounded by mountains up to three thousand feet high on all sides. Behind me, to the west, Stob Ghabhar reaches greater than 3500 feet at its summit. Rannoch Moor is an isolated wasteland.
“Residents are well aware of the danger of becoming disoriented and lost in this flat wilderness, or of simply being trapped, drowned and buried in any of its countless streams or bogs. Many have wandered into this ‘weary-looking desert’ and have never wandered out.”
The moor reminded Ted of the lush but culturally desolate countryside he had been raised in. He thought back to growing up on his father’s farm and identified with those trapped, drowned and buried souls. The haunted look in Ted’s eyes captured Leroy’s vision perfectly, pleasing the director immensely.
****
“Yes, this is working mu
ch better.” Leroy was feeling optimistic again. He had decided to hire Sarah Gibb, a Gaelic-English translator from Glasgow, and to just interview the Gaelic-speaking farmers through her. Sarah’s accent was crisp and clear—much more articulate, in fact, than any in the documentary party. In this way, they interviewed not less than five separate homesteaders in the moor, each one claiming at least anecdotal knowledge of the boobrie.
Sarah and Andy were now transcribing the Gaelic farmers’ answers into English, to be dubbed in later. As they watched the tapes, Sarah translated while Andy transcribed on his laptop. “The Boibhre I saw was like a lúma—a diver—but 10 to 12 feet tall it was. All black with a white breast. Webbed feet it had, but like a man’s gnarled hands, with sharp claws. And it roared like a mad bull!”
“Yeah,” Leroy interjected, smile spreading, “and here we’ll put that psychoanalyst we interviewed in London. The one who talks about the effects of stress on triggering archetypes in the collective unconscious or whatever.”
Jerry apparently thought this was an excellent idea. “Right! Like point-counterpoint. This old guy, he’s saying, ‘I saw a big monster! It was 12 feet tall and I was like, Aaaah!’ and then, bam!, cut to the psychiatrist, and he’s all, ‘These old farts get lost in their own backyards and freak out at their own loserness and start jumping at shadows of ducks and imagine giant, man-eating ducks chasing them through the swamp.’ That’s gonna be awesome!”
Andy leaned back from his laptop. “Why am I even here when we’ve got you to sum things up so neatly? Jerry, have the production assistant write down everything you say.”
“Leroy, can I talk to you?” Ted took his director aside. “I’m thinking of riding with Sarah back to Glasgow and taking a flight back to the States. I hate to abandon you, but this is ridiculous. This is worse than that thing I did with Carrot Top on body dysmorphic disorder. I’ve been sick to my stomach since we got here.”
Leroy dropped his appease-the-talent smile. “Grow up, Ted. We all pay our dues. You think F. Murray Abraham started out in Scarface? He played a head of lettuce in an underwear commercial for crying out loud!”
Ted was embarrassed. “I just keep thinking about what happened to Shirley MacLaine and John Keel.”
“John who?”
“Keel. He was a wunderkind journalist who became obsessed in the Mothman, and then only wrote about UFOs and paranormal phenomena. My point is, they were promising young talents whose legacies became tainted by their eccentric beliefs.”
Leroy assumed a deeply irritated grin. “Ted, your problem is, you keep confusing this with NOVA, and that you have star bargaining power. This isn’t some cryptozoological expedition. We aren’t actually looking for the stinking boobrie, Ted. The stinking boobrie isn’t what this documentary is about!
“This is a show about the people who believe with all their hearts in something too ridiculous to exist. The kind of inane, Ripley’s believe-it-or-not stuff they eat up on Nature: Western-world rubes who still believe in man-eating loons. This will be the next ‘The Family That Walks On All Fours!’”
“You’re comparing ignorant hicks to people with a congenital syndrome.”
“Ted, if the people are willing to pay to see it, it’s sideshow territory no matter what channel you’re watching. And the Emmys still love sideshows.”
****
Ian Launce, Ph.D., Psychoanalyst, The C. G. Jung Clinic. “There is, in every Animal Form, the potential for horror and grotesquery. An object’s Ideal Form—that which makes a thing recognizable no matter what appearance it takes—allows for a vast range of shapes within that definition. This is a natural and unconscious process, most clearly visible in American and Japanese cinema. King Kong, Them!, Anaconda, Mothra and The Killer Shrews demonstrate a universal obsession with vilifying and exaggerating God’s creatures into bizarre and terrifying monsters. They are fanged caricatures, but still very recognizable at the conscious level.
“The basis for this defamation of nature is akin to the morbid, inflated fear that defines the phobia. The agitated state that accompanies fright—even, or especially, irrational fright—triggers these grotesque archetypes as a ‘fight or flight’ response. Specifically, flight. The unconscious mind draws this misshapen form from the collective subconscious, to compel the observer to distance himself from that which is perceived as a threat. Even something so objectively innocuous as a log in a lake, say.
“This is why people will ‘see’ a Loch Ness monster, or a Sasquatch, or any of hundreds of creatures of folklores throughout the world. There is a high, perhaps inevitable, potential for panic when one is alone in the wilderness. It is part of the body’s and mind’s survival instinct. A superperceptive state of stress that occurs when one’s life is literally in one’s own hands. Thus, a man alone in the Himalayas—fighting gravity, hypothermia, starvation and isolation—will perceive threats he cannot articulate, nor spare precious time investigating. It is immediate, and the unconscious mind says, ‘Get out. It’s a monster, a yeti, whatever. Get away.’”
****
“Boobrie. Boo-brie. One such creature is the boobrie.
“One such creature (pause for dramatic effect) is the boobrie. The boobrie. The (arch eyebrow, turn head fifteen degrees) boobrie. One such creature”
“Where are the birds? This travel guide says there are thousands of birds.” Leroy appeared to be addressing his guidebook, which he then held up for all to bear witness. “See?” he said, pointing at the page. “‘Thousands of geese.’ Did any of you see any geese? I didn’t see any geese.”
Leroy didn’t wait for comments. He was already pulling the map out of his jacket pocket. “Okay. In the morning we hike southwest, back toward Loch Tulla. It’s just a couple of miles over that hill. Derrick needs to find some decent bird footage. Ted, have you looked over the stuff Andy wrote about the birds?”
“Boo—byeah. The loon stuff. ‘There are three-hundred-something species of birds living in the lochs and lochans of Argyll and Bute.’”
Jerry interrupted Ted with a surprised laugh. He was bewildered to see everyone looking at him. “What? Argyle and Boot. That’s funny, right? Like, they named their town after footwear.” He laughed again, alone.
“Actually, it’s a council formed from two counties,” Andy said, having already turned back to his notepad. He scratched his head through thinning, graying hair. “We’ve been in Argyll and Bute over a week already and you’re just now getting it. But great joke. I’ll work it into the script.”
“Whatever,” said Jerry, the underappreciated wit. He shook his head with a jerk, less in resignation and more in contempt, as if he were shaking the experience off. “You guys are just…” The jerky head-shake again. If he finished the sentence, it was inaudible to anyone else.
“This map is all but worthless. Wait.” Leroy began crumpling the sides of the map in frustration. “This is Lochan Coire na Meinne. But…isn’t it? No no, we were at Loch Nah-Achlaise over…that hill this morning.” He threw the map into the air. “I refuse to get lost within 50 square miles because some Scots map makers wouldn’t be caught dead in a swamp in the middle of their own country.”
Someone chuckled and said, “Lock necklace.” It sounded like Jerry, but he was refolding the map, looking very hard like he hadn’t said anything.
****
“There are 314 species of birds, excluding the boobrie, living among the lochs and lochans of Argyll and Bute. This number includes four of the five known species of loon, called divers in the United Kingdom. The great northern diver, or common loon, is the bird most closely associated with the boobrie. By most accounts, the boobrie resembles this bird over all others, with some glaring differences.
“The common loon’s black head, black-and-white checkerboard plumage and white breast and belly contrast with the boobrie, which is all black but with a white throat and breast. The loon is at home in the water, as graceful as any waterbird, but becomes terribly awkward on land, owed to the
position of its legs toward the rear of its body, behind its center of gravity. Notably, many accounts of the boobrie feature an inability of the creature to leave the water at all. Those that do walk ashore, however, are described as having webbed feet that more closely resemble twisted fingers than toes.
“Other differences are less subtle.”
****
Trevor Carswell, Folklorist, Edinburgh. “Most myths, and especially mythological creatures, are really the brainchildren of pathological liars.
“Oh yes. From the first time someone explained lightning phenomena as ‘thunderbolts hurled from a god on Mount Olympus,’ to the latest UFO abduction, man has been prevaricating just to make himself seem better than he really is. He may appear to possess secret knowledge, or cosmically significant enough to be singled out by space aliens. We all wish to cast ourselves in the best possible light, and once we discover that the facts are merely holding us back, the lid is off completely.
“Thus, we now possess a wealth of folklore that serves best to document man’s questionable self esteem and overcompensation for thousands of years. Every tale of the Kraken or mermaid probably began as ‘the one that got away.’ And for every close encounter with a troll or Each Uisge or dragon, likely there was an injury or a fright that was too bloody embarrassing for the teller to explain with the truth.”
****
The five men collapsed into Mac-an-t-sagairt’s front yard. They had hiked four miles across the rocky, boggy moor, toting all of their equipment and wearing completely inappropriate shoes.
“I get it now,” said Andy, who had never hiked in his life before this job. He gingerly pulled off his Gola sneakers and surveyed the soles destroyed by a week and a half in Rannoch Moor. “Argyle and Boot. It’s not a joke; it’s a warning.”
Fortunately for Andy’s pride, Jerry was out of earshot, across the yard and standing at the edge of the farmer’s pond. “Here, see? Geese, lots of ’em!”
Derrick hauled up his camera and began filming the birds. Andy hobbled over to them in his bare feet and shot Jerry a derisive look before watching the waterfowl. “You did it, Jerry. But they’re not geese, you moron. They’re loons.”