LIVING LANDSLIDES

According to legends written down in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, the slide-rock bolter is a species of alpine whale that anchors itself high in the Rocky Mountains by its tail flukes, only to luge down the slope with an open maw, consuming everything in the path of the landslide that forms around its torpedo-like body. After such a feast, it sleeps for whole seasons on end, slowly digesting whatever it devoured beneath a tangle of stone and spruce. Outdoorsmen unfamiliar with the horrors of Colorado's interior are encouraged to keep their eyes high, lest they find their trail's end in something else's sunless stomach.

While there is at present no physical evidence of such a beast existing, narrative paleontology tells another story. Antofacetus, a predecessor of modern orcas that lived in what is now Chile around forty-million years ago, used sea cliffs to slide or dive towards penguin-like prey from above in addition to attacking from below. The greater size it obtained through adapting to largely aquatic life also allowed it to compete with other megafauna for resources on land, creating a novel and divergent survival strategy to that of other protocetidae. It is at this point that the bolter's hypothetical ancestors likely emerged, using their sheer bulk and mastery of gaining vertical advantage to carve out a secure niche in mountainous climates. Thick blubber to handle colder air and high-efficiency respiration would have allowed such odd cetaceans to easily propagate north along the entire American Cordillera, with virtually no impediment to their spread beyond a lack of long limbs. Scholars at the University Beneath Denver have come to call this forthcoming discovery Aspencetus, and fully expect to find an intact specimen for the Linnaean record within the next decade.

Even if the slide-rock bolter does not exist exactly as described in the tales of old lumberjacks and mountainmen, something like it assuredly does. Hikers always ought to take precautions on poorly-marked Coloradan trails, for even when they lack digestive organs of their own, landslides are an ever-present danger.