Episode 39H – Hide and Seek – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 39H Show Notes

Source: French Folklore

This week on MYTH, Belle is going to play some high-stakes hide and seek. This is the eighth episode in our telling of the classic French tale, Beauty and the Beast. You’ll learn why you should always believe in your dreams, that bowls hold water better than your hands, and that love is really, really complicated. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll head up into the Alps to hunt a mysterious goat. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 39H, “Hide and Seek”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
When we last left our story, we met a rich merchant in a city in France whose wife had probably died, but not before having six sons and six daughters with him. Things had gone pretty well until an unlucky fire had burned everything the merchant had owned, and a series of accidents on the high seas had destroyed his business dealings. Broke and bereft, he was forced to move his family out to a tiny cottage several hundred miles away from the city that he had managed to hang on to by his fingernails. The dozen children had settled into their new routine of being poor and abandoned by everyone who had previously wanted to either flirt, befriend, or fuck them, although all but the youngest had done so with bad grace. That young woman, nicknamed Belle (or Beauty) because of her incredible looks and even better personality, had been the only one to try and make the best of the situation. Two years into this Purgatory, a message had come that one ship full of goods had arrived at port unexpectedly. The merchant had rushed off to the city to try and get some of his previously vast wealth back, but he was cheated out of everything by his former partners and found himself having to head back in defeat six months later only to get lost in a blizzard. He wandered into a magical seeming castle full of weird shit but no people and, for reasons unknown, decided that fate wanted him to have it. He had plucked a rose for his beloved Belle, the only thing she had asked for while he was gone, only to be confronted by a horrible, hideous beast enraged at the merchant for ripping him off. The Beast demanded the merchant’s life, but offered to take one of his daughters in his stead, but only if she came to the castle willingly and in full knowledge of what awaited her. He warned the merchant that if he tried to flee or break the bargain, the Beast would hunt down everyone he ever loved. Then, he sent the man home for a month to say his goodbyes. When his children learn what happened, the sons offer to fight the Beast, and the daughters offer up Belle as a sacrifice. The merchant doesn’t want to accept this bargain, but Belle is insistent. At the end of the allotted month, the Beast’s horse arrived as promised to take them back to the castle and their certain doom. We then took a detour out to a neighboring kingdom to meet a Prince who’s father had been killed around the time he was born. A neighboring king decided that a widowed single mother with a newborn infant would make an easy target and invaded, forcing the Queen to ride off into battle with her army. Before leaving, she entrusted her son to the care of an old, ugly, mean-spirited but very powerful fairy to raise until the war was over. This she did for around 15 years, during which time she went all creeptown on the Prince and decided that she wanted to be his wife instead of his mother and began pressuring him to marry her. They rode out together to meet the Queen, since the Prince insisted he couldn’t wed without his mother’s blessing, and he took up arms for the final battle of the war. Victory achieved (although with the villain still alive against the advice of the Queen’s generals because she feared for the safety of her son), they began the long ride back home. Once there, the Fairy almost immediately tells the Queen of her desire to marry the Prince. The Queen, quite reasonably, is horrified by the idea and, exhausted from nearly two decades in the field, she tells the Fairy exactly what she thinks. The Fairy doesn’t take rejection well, and vows vengeance, leaving the mother and son writhing in pain on the palace floor. Back at the Beast’s castle, Belle and her father finally arrive to a huge celebration, with music and fireworks, much to their surprise. The Beast is polite about receiving his victim and offers her father two trunks full of whatever treasure he likes from the closet in payment for his daughter. He can’t exactly refuse, and so on Belle’s advice, he fills them up with gold, jewels, and dresses for his other daughters with the intention of keeping his new wealth secret from his children to keep them from getting greedy. They share one last meal together and, in the morning, the merchant rides off on the magical horse once more leaving Belle alone and in the clutches of a horrid monster. Belle takes a depression nap and meets a sweet, handsome, sexy man in her dreams who sweeps her off her feet. She wakes up and puts her dream lover out of her brain to go explore her prison. While wandering, she finds several portraits of the man from her dreams, and she decides that he must be a real person also kept prisoner by the Beast. At dinner, the Beast asks Belle to fuck him, she says no, and they both go to bed (where she spends more time with her dream Prince, who turns out to be the Prince from our aside, being punished by the wicked Fairy). She discovers wonders in the palace, including birds that sing opera and monkeys that perform theater. Days pass, weeks, and Belle explores more of the castle, discovering secret rooms with magical mirrors that let her spy on things happening far from the castle. She has more conversations with her dream lover and debates letting the Beast have sex with her just to get it over with. As he always does, her Prince just asks for her to help him escape his prison and the Beast. She has a nightmare of the Beast and the Prince fighting to the death, wrestling over control of a throne, but she doesn’t understand it. She finally got up the nerve to ask the Beast whether there were any other people in the castle,and he tells her no, so she now knows that the Prince is being imprisoned on the grounds outside of the castle somewhere. The thought of this place becoming her tomb depresses her. When her Prince finds her that night, she is weeping, and he asks her what’s wrong, did the Beast do something? He swears to kill the creature. A dagger appeared in his hand and the Beast appeared before him, offering no resistance as the Prince begins to stab him over and over and over again. Belle intervenes, begging the Prince to spare the Beast, which angers the human. He declares that she must not really love him before the whole scene dissolved. The loneliness is starting to make her physically ill, and even the stupid Beast notices how shitty she looks. He asks her what would make her feel better, and she says she misses her family and would like to see them again. The Beast flies into a bitter rage at her words, but is talked into letting Belle go home for two months. He warns her that if she doesn’t come back in two months, she shouldn’t bother coming back at all because all she’ll find is his withered, rotting corpse. She asks her Prince to come with her, but he tells her he can’t unless she promises to leave and never come back, dooming the Beast to death, which she won’t do. The Prince is an asshole about it, and Belle wakes from the dream in her father’s new home. Her sisters are as bitchy as ever towards her, but her father and brothers are glad to see her. The merchant advises Belle to marry the Beast, but she tells him she loves the Prince. Her sisters have new suitors who want to marry them, and they decide to hold the weddings while Belle is in town, only all of the men decide they actually love Belle instead and compete with each other to win her hand. Trying to talk them out of it only makes them more determined to love her, pissing off her sisters farther. Belle has a nightmare where the Beast asks why she has abandoned him, and she wakes realizing that she’s lost track of time and her two months is up. She has to go back today if she’s going to save the Beast.
Belle raced out of her bedroom to tell her family that it was time: she had to go back to the castle. Her father wept openly, unable to speak, but his tears speaking volumes on his behalf. Her brothers tried to argue, saying they would never allow her to put herself back in that horrid monster’s clutches again. Her sister’s suitors (who now thought of themselves as Belle’s suitors) despaired at the news, swearing that they would refuse to leave her house until she agreed to stay. Her sisters applauded Belle’s sense of duty and encouraged her to go back as soon as possible, maybe right the fuck now? True hypocritical assholes, they claimed that if they had been the ones to promise the Beast (which they had worked very hard to ensure hadn’t happened), they would never allow the Beast’s ugliness to get in the way of their word of honor. In fact, they would have returned to him weeks ago, so she should really get going.
Belle didn’t see the jealousy and hate in their response, and agreed with their arguments, using them to try and convince everyone else. She failed. Her brothers hadn’t forgiven themselves for not stopping her the first time, and her admirers were far too besotted with her to entertain the thought of her leaving them forever (and forcing them to court her heinous sisters again). They decided that there were enough of them to physically keep Belle from leaving the house to return to the castle. They hadn’t seen her arrive two months ago, but they assumed that she had ridden here on the horse that had brought their father to and from the castle each time; it would be a simple matter to surround the house and make sure the horse couldn’t get close enough to Belle for her to mount and leave.
Belle shook her head at their loving foolishness – they didn’t see the irony in trying to make her a prisoner in her home to prevent her from going to be a prisoner in her castle home. She told them that, while she appreciated their affection, nothing they were doing would be able to stop her. She would wake up in the Beast’s castle in the morning no matter what. She ignored the ring of men surrounding her home and went to bed, turning her ring as she had been instructed before falling asleep.
Belle slept a long time, waking around midday as the clock chimed her name. She smiled as she sat up in bed; she knew that clock. She was back in the castle. She was home. She moved to get out of bed when she noticed for the first time that her room was full of all the animals that had befriended her. They made known their excitement at her return and their eagerness to begin serving her again, and they told her of the sorrow her long absence had caused.
That day seemed one of the longest Belle had ever experienced. She had loved seeing her family again, to be sure, and she already missed them, but she found that she had also missed the Beast and was looking forward to seeing him again. She hadn’t meant to be gone so long, and she wanted to do whatever she could to make it up to him. She was also looking forward to falling asleep that night and finally getting to see her Prince again after being separated from the magic of the castle that let them share a dreamscape for two months.
By turns, these two figures occupied her thoughts the whole day. One moment, she would be cursing herself for having slept so late and thus delaying being able to fall asleep again to meet her Prince; the next, she was angry with herself for not being able to return the love of the Beast, who was a good if ugly and stupid creature; the next, she was despondent that she had fallen in love with someone she could only ever see in her dreams and wondered if she would ever find him in the waking world. She was beginning to doubt whether it was better for her to spurn the affection of the real, physical Beast for the love of the man of her dreams, whom she could never touch or hold or fuck. Her dreams always warned her not to be fooled by her eyes, and she feared that this was her mind’s way of warning her that the Prince wasn’t actually real, just a figment of the castle’s magic. She feared that she loved a ghost.
Her thoughts were driving her mad, and Belle decided that what she really needed was some diversion until the evening could come for her. She tried the French comedy theater first, but found it dull and uninspired. She shut the window abruptly and switched to the Opera: the music was terrible, and the actors wooden and boring. She gave it up as a bad job and tried wandering the gardens, but they held no allure today. Her merry animals did their best to cheer her up and distract her from her worries, but not even their lovely song or amusing antics could make any headway against her anxiety and boredom. She was just too impatient to see the Beast and to see her Prince in her dreams after.
The day dragged on forever, but dinnertime finally rolled around. Belle went to the dining room, waiting expectantly for the heavy, thudding footfalls that presaged the Beast’s arrival, but the hallway was silent. That had never happened before. Belle found herself torn between anger and fear at his absence, and her mind raced through all of the possibilities she could think of to explain it. She wasn’t hungry, or at least, not hungry enough to try and eat in the face of the Beast’s unexpected absence, and so she left the dining room and went back to the gardens, determined not to return to the castle until she found the Beast.
She searched the grounds thoroughly, looking in every likely and unlikely spot, calling his name until her throat ached, but only her own echo answered. Three hours passed this way, with Belle getting more and more frantic as she kept failing to find the lumbering creature. She finally sat down on a bench, exhausted and despondent. She hadn’t found him during her wanderings during the day (and had never found where he kept himself during the day, in fact), and now she had failed to find him in the gardens. She began to weep quietly, certain that he had either abandoned her and the castle in anger at her tardiness or else fulfilled his threat to her and killed himself. She was now truly alone in the palace.
She thought back over her many almost-identical conversations with the Beast and, dull as they had all been, she found herself longing to have that same discussion with the Beast right now; she wished to hear his gruff voice ask her the same questions he always asked and give him the answers she always did. Belle was surprised at how much she missed him, and at how tender her feelings towards him had become. “Daddy was right – I should have agreed to marry the Beast. I wouldn’t be alone now, and he would be here, alive and healthy.” She cursed herself for killing the dear, sweet creature (for she had become certain that he had died because she had been gone too long). She looked up, eyes filled with tears, and she noticed something that stopped her weeping in an instant: she knew this place. There, directly in front of her, was the path she had seen in her dream on the last night she slept in her father’s house. In the dream, it had led to a deep, dark cave where she had found the Beast dying and cursing her name.
Belle knew the power of dreams in this place and so she stood and rushed along the path, struggling not to trip over any unseen roots in the feeble light of the waning moon. At the end of the path, she found a thicket of brambles, solid and imposing. She didn’t care – she was going in. From her dream, she knew there was a path, painful though it would be, and she took it. She scratched her fair skin in several places, drawing blood, but she didn’t care; she was through. It was pitch black inside the cave, so Belle sent several of her monkey pages back to the castle for torches. Taking as many as she could hold, Belle went inside.
As she had hoped and feared, she found the Beast lying deep inside the cave. He was stretched out upon the ground, unmoving, and Belle wasn’t sure if he was asleep or dead. Far from being afraid of his horrifying visage, Belle was just glad to have found him. She rushed over to his still form and placed her tiny hand on his massive head, calling his name. Nothing happened. He lay there, cold and motionless, and Belle knew now that he was certainly dead. Even so, she had to be sure, and so she felt for a pulse. It was there. Faint, weak, but it was there. His heart beat still. The Beast lived!
She wasted no time at this discovery and rushed back out of the cave to a spring she knew was close by. She carried as much water as she could in her cupped hands (which wasn’t much by the end of her frantic sprint) and sprinkled it over him. Given how much she lost on each trip, this whole effort would have been in vain if the monkeys had not rushed back to the castle to fetch a bowl for her, as well as a bottle of wine to fortify his spirit and some smelling salts.
Belle sprinkled a lot more water on him from the bowl (which made things much easier), placed the salts under his nose, and forced wine slowly down his throat, careful not to choke him, and eventually, he began to stir. She spoke to him then, and caressed his fur and hide, until he finally regained consciousness.
She smiled when he finally opened his eyes. “You gave me quite a fright there, Beast! I didn’t know just much I loved you until I found you here, still and cold. The fear I felt proved to me that I am bound to you by stronger ties than mere gratitude: honestly, I had made up my mind to kill myself if I wasn’t able to save you.” The Beast’s voice was weak when he answered. “It is good of you, Belle, to love a monster who is so ugly. You matter more to me than life itself. I thought you weren’t coming back, and that would have been my death. If you love me, though, I promise that I will live. Go back to the castle and rest, sweet Belle. Be assured that you will be as happy as your kind heart deserves.”
This was by far the most words the Beast had ever strung together before. It wasn’t exactly eloquent, but it was gentle and sincere. She could work with gentle and sincere. She had expected anger or hurt, or at least to be chastised for being late, but he had just been happy she was back. Her opinion of the Beast’s character rose even higher in her estimation. Maybe his short answers were not stupidity, but prudence and brevity. Happier than she had been in some time, Belle went to her own room and collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
For the first time in two months, she dreamed herself into the dreamscape castle, and her handsome Prince was there waiting for her. He was overjoyed at seeing her again after so long, and he spent a long time telling her how much he had missed her and how glad he was for her return. He promised her that she would be happy, and that all she had to do was follow the guide of her good heart. Belle was delighted to hear such lovely, tender words from the lips of the one she loved, but she also knew that she should listen to her father’s advice, which left her in a pickle. “And does my happiness depend on my marrying the Beast, my prince?” “It does; in fact, it can be secured in no other way.”
Belle was confused. I mean, it was nice that he hadn’t gotten cross and jealous, but she didn’t understand why her lover would advice her to do something that would benefit his rival, who he had fought and even tried to kill in her dreams before. She looked up to ask him why, but he was gone, replaced with the still, dead form of the Beast stretched out on the ground. Then that was gone and her Prince was back, then gone again and replaced by the dead Beast. Somewhere off it the distance, she heard the woman’s voice telling her to be true to her heart and she would find her happiness.
Ignoring the sight of the Beast and the Prince, who were now changing so fast it was dizzying to try and watch, Belle considered her own feelings. For the Prince, she felt love, lust, and physical attraction; for the Beast, she still felt mild repugnance. He was a nice enough dude, but he was really, truly hideous in ways Quasimodo could only have nightmares about. The strange woman smiled (Belle wasn’t sure how she managed that with no physical form, but dreams are some weird shit) and told her that it was fine that she didn’t want a piece of that Beast ass – it wouldn’t affect her ability to do her duty and wed the Beast.
Belle woke earlier than she would have expected and considered her dream. It was weird in the way only dreams can be, no doubt, but it was also a lot more coherent and clear in her mind, even after waking, than dreams usually were. She decided that her dream was a sign and decided that the advice her sleeping mind had given her was good – she would marry the Beast. That thought was immediately followed by sorrow at the image of her Prince, who she could not be with, and fresh doubt assailed her. She decided to head to the Opera to clear her thoughts, but it was no use. Her emotions were still as tangled as a ball of yard after a kitten gets done with it, so she sighed and went to dinner, still uncertain.
She heard the Beast’s thudding footfalls almost as soon as she sat down, and he entered the room. Again, she expected him to ask why she had taken so long to come back, or to tell her how much her absence had hurt him (he’d almost died, after all), but instead he asked her how her day had been, how her trip home had gone, how she was feeling, the usual. She answered all of his answers as completely as she could, and even added that she had paid dearly for all of the fun and joy she’d had at home with the pain she’d felt upon finding what she thought was his corpse.
The Beast thanked her, paused awkwardly, then asked his usual final question: “Will you let me fuck you, Belle?” For the first time ever, she paused before answering, thinking it over. “Yes, Beast, I think I will, but only if we are wed.” The Beast froze. “There’s no one else here who can marry us, but we can make our vows and I think it will work just as well. What do you say, Beast? Will you marry me?” “I swear that I will love you forever, and have no other wife nor woman but you for the rest of my life.” Belle trembled slightly, but her voice was firm as she responded: “Then I accept you as my husband, and swear to be faithful and loving to you forever and always. I guess that makes us husband and wife, my Beast.”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the thunder of artillery fire could be heard from the courtyard. Running to the window, Belle saw that the sky was ablaze with multicolored light as cannons roared in celebration between twenty thousand different kinds of fireworks. The castle was clearly rejoicing the news of their simple wedding. She and the Beast stood there for three hours until the celebration finally wound down, and Beast suggested that it was time for them to go to their marital bed.
She was still worried and confused as to exactly how this was going to work (if his dick was on scale with the rest of him, this could be a very uncomfortable night), but she still took his hand/paw/claw/whatever and followed him to bed. As soon as she crawled beneath the covers, every light went out of its own accord. She braced herself for the Beast to crawl on top of her and, for a terrifying moment, she wondered if she would be crushed to death beneath him.
The bed creaked beneath the Beast’s weight but, to her surprise, he was able to climb into bed quite nimbly, barely disturbing her beside him. Even more surprising, rather than climbing on her or feeling her up, he lay down beside her and promptly began to snore. She waited, but the Beast just snored. Huh. Maybe he wasn’t all that interested in actually having sex so much as in her willingness to go to bed with him. Weird.
Reassured, Belle too quickly fell asleep and entered the dreamscape castle. Her Prince was waiting for her, a huge smile on his face. He was dressed in rich, extravagant clothes, more luxurious than anything she had seen him in before. “You did it, Belle! You freed me from my dreadful prison! Your marriage to the Beast will restore a king to his subjects, a son to his mother, and renewed life and prosperity to a kingdom. We’re going to be so very happy!”
Belle was confused and hurt. She hadn’t wanted to hurt the Prince, sure, but she’d hoped he’d be at least a little upset that she was marrying someone else. He’d said he loved her, but it seemed he’d lied. She opened her mouth to tell the Prince how deeply he had wounded her when the woman appeared before her.
“Thank you, Belle! You have been so brave and you have let your good heart triumph over your doubt. No one else would have had the courage to do what you’ve done. You’ve sacrificed your own life to save your father’s and your heart’s desire to keep your word. I promise you, no one will ever be as happy as you will be, my dear. You know only the smallest part of it tonight. In the morning, you will know all.”
The lady vanished, replaced with the dead body of her Prince, stretched out and lifeless on the ground. That shook her, and she stayed with him throughout the dream (although she was getting used to weird prophetic visions by now) and woke late in the morning. The sunlight streamed merrily into the room, and she realized that the monkey servants had neglected to close the shutters. She turned to look at the Beast – at her husband – and what she saw was impossible. She had to still be dreaming.
The night before, she had lay as close as possible to the edge of the bed to make room for her large, unwieldy mate. He had snored when he’d first fallen asleep, but he’d stopped at some point just before she’d fallen asleep. The lack of snores in the room had made her think that he must have risen and left already, but a form was lying there beside her under the covers. It was the Prince. Her dream Prince was somehow in bed with her.
He was a thousand times more handsome now than he had ever been in her dreams. She thought she was going mad, or maybe that some stranger had snuck into bed with her and she was just telling herself that it was the Prince, so she went to her vanity to fetch the small portrait she usually wore on her wrist. There was no doubt – the beautiful, sexy, naked man in her bed was her dream lover.
She tried telling him to wake up, then tried shaking him, but he stayed fast asleep. “This is bizarre, but not really any weirder than anything else I’ve seen here. He must be under some kind of spell (this is a magic castle, after all), so maybe I can just wait for it to be over?” Her Prince was here, and the Beast was gone, but surely he couldn’t have left the bed without waking her, which meant…Belle gasped and ran through the logic again, but she found no flaws. The Beast must have been the Prince, trapped by some terrible curse! And that meant that this sexy, naked man in her bed was her husband, and she had every right to run her hands along his body and feel him under her skin in the waking world as she had always dreamed. There was no one here to be scandalized by the apparent switcheroo anyway, so fuck it.
She was overjoyed to discover that she didn’t have to choose between her affection for the Beast and her love of the Prince – they were the same person. Plus, this explained the Prince’s weird reaction to finding out that she was marrying the Beast. Now if that asshole would just wake up so that she could jump his bones!
She went to breakfast and ate a little something to tide her over, but he still hadn’t awakened by the time she returned. She decided that there wasn’t much point in sitting her and watching him sleep, so she might as well wander the castle and try to distract herself until he woke. Unfortunately, nothing appealed to her; everything paled next to the excitement of finally speaking with her beloved husband in the light of day. Deciding that making music would at least force her to pay attention to something, she began to sing, and her birds joined her in a chorus. Part of her had hoped that some magic inherent to music might serve to wake her sleeping love, but she slept on.
As the song finished, she heard the sound of a carriage from outside, followed by the sounds of voices. The ape who served as captain of the guard approached and announced (by way of his parrot) the visit of several ladies. As she waited for them, she examined the carriage through her window. It was like nothing she had ever seen, unrivaled in beauty. It was drawn by four white stags with golden horns, trapped in finery. Whoever owned this must be very rich and very powerful, and Belle was even more excited than she had been to meet them.
It seems that Belle has nearly won her heart’s desire, but she just can’t seem to make that lazy asshole wake up, so we’re going to save the end of this story for one last episode, which means it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s strange creature is the dahu.
Evolution can be a cruel mistress, giving rise to some truly strange creatures, so it’s not a huge surprise that stories of the cryptid known as the dahu arose (with numerous similar regional variations). The dahu was a small animal similar to a chamois or an ibex, which basically means it’s a small goat-antelope hybrid with curled, spiral horns and brown and white fur. These creatures could be found in the highest parts of the French Alps (as well as the francophone parts of Switzerland and Italy), for which they were specifically and oddly suited: you see, the dahu is said to have legs that are shorter on one side of its body than the other, allowing it to easily stand and walk on the steep mountain slopes near the peaks of the Alps.
But wait, there’s more. Because of the odd asymmetric legs, the dahu could only walk around the mountain in one direction (or else it would fall the fuck off), giving rise to two distinct subgroups: the male dextrogyre dahu has shorter legs on its right side and walks clockwise around the mountain, while the female laevogyrus dahu has shorter legs on its left side and walks counterclockwise around the mountain.
But wait, you say: how do these two sexes ever meet and breed if they can only walk in opposite directions around the mountain? Good question, and I have a batshit answer for you – the male dahu’s testicles drag on the ground, leaving a scent trail for the female dahu to trace in spirals around the peak until they manage to meet. The stories don’t explain how they manage to fuck each other while facing in opposite directions, but I’m sure that isn’t important, right? Male dahu have also been known to follow the scent trails of rivals and molest one another to assert dominance.
Somehow, it still gets weirder. Some sources claim there is a third variation, known as the dead dahu, which cannot walk at all. It’s rare that these dahu interbreed with the other species, but when they do, it can result in dahus with variations in leg length across the diagonal (such as a long front right and back left leg or vice versa), which honestly doesn’t do anybody any good.
The story goes that the dahu were hunted into extinction because they are so easy to catch and kill, but let’s be honest, there’s very little chance that this batshit crazy creature ever existed anywhere but French imaginations. That hasn’t stopped tour guides from offering dahu hunting trips to gullible tourists, which was especially popular at the end of the 19th Century, which saw the beginning of the tourist industry in France. The stories said that it took two people to catch a dahu, which was said to be very rare and very valuable: one person to wait at the bottom of the mountain with a bag, and one to sneak up behind the dahu and either imitate it’s bleet, whistle, or call ‘dahu, dahu, dahu’. In all cases, the dahu will turn around to see the source of the sound. With its weird-ass legs, turning around meant it immediately rolled down the mountain where it was easy pickings for the hunter with the bag. The unlucky tourist would spend a futile night wandering the freezing peak of the mountain while the unscrupulous tour guide would be at the bar spending his money and laughing at his idiocy.
Today, it only exists as a summer camp prank, not unlike the American snipe hunt, although it also lives on in a few surprising places. The Alps Museum in Bard Fort, Aosta Valley in northern Italy has dedicated a part of its permanent exhibit to the dahu. The Prefect of Haute-Savoie in France officially created a Dahu Sanctuary in the mountainous suburbs of the small town of Reigner, prohibiting hunting and photography, on April 1, 1967 as an April Fool’s joke. Likewise, the retired director of the National Science Museum of Switzerland, La Chaux-de-Fonds, wrote an article and opened an exhibit dedicated to the dahu on April 1, 1995. So if you’re vacationing in the Alps and someone offers to go dahu hunting with you, make sure that you get to be the one holding the bag at the bottom of the mountain.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you like what you’ve heard, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. These reviews really help increase the show’s standing and let more people know it exists. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll see the end to this bizarre tale. You’ll see that everything is always connected, that turning into a snake is the worst fate possible, and that fairies have some weird ass rules. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll be ill met by moonlight, proud Titania! That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.