Every author, when writing a book, digs out stories that don’t quite fit with the text they are writing but stay in their archives because they are just too good to delete. The Nandi Bear is just such a story; I came across the creature in the classic Bernard Heuvelmans book On the Track of Unknown Animals while researching Mysteries in the Mist. Some of the witness accounts included mist, but I felt that this was good old ground fog and not the paranormal precursor that I was writing about.
The Nandi Bear did not fit into that text, but it is a story worth telling and one that does not seem to have a lot of purchase in the Sasquatch-obsessed cryptozoological world. Heuvelmans, whom many consider to be the father of modern cryptozoology, tells us that the creature is native to Kenya, where it is known as the chemosit. The beast has a very distinctive and unforgettable cry, according to the witnesses that Heuvelmans quotes, and appears to be a sort of bear. This despite the fact that there are no known bear species in Africa.
Heuvelmans notes that there is no guarantee that the animal is a bear but that the indigenous people of the region use a Swahili word for bear, duba, to describe the creature. An Arabic word, dubb, which refers to a bear, supposedly gave rise to the Swahili word.
The most detailed story given by Heuvelmans comes from a witness named Geoffrey Williams, who encountered the Nandi Bear in the Uasin Gishu region of Kenya. Mr. Williams and his cousin were on safari with a single guide. The day had been misty but, when the mist suddenly cleared, Williams’ cousin spotted an animal and asked what it was.
Williams stated:
Looking in the direction to which he pointed, I saw a large animal sitting up on its haunches not more than 30 yards away. Its attitude was just that of a bear at the ‘Zoo’ asking for buns, and I should say it must have been nearly 5 feet high. It is extremely hard to estimate height in a case of this kind; but it seemed to both of us that it was very nearly, if not quite, as tall as we were.
Before the pair could react, the animal dropped down and began to move away from them in what the cousin described as a peculiar “sideways canter”. The grass in the area had been recently burnt, so the two men had a clear view of the creature. Williams took a quick shot at the animal and, though he missed, the beast turned and looked at him, giving Williams a further opportunity to describe the “bear”.
In size it was, I should say, larger than the bear that lives in the pit at the ‘Zoo’ and it was quite as heavily built. The forequarters were very thickly furred, as were all four legs, but the hindquarters were comparatively speaking smooth or bare. This distinction was very definite indeed and was the first thing that struck us both. The head was long and pointed and exactly like that of a bear, as indeed was the whole animal. I have not a very clear recollection of the ears beyond the fact that they were small, and the tail, if any, was very small and practically unnoticeable. The colour was dark and left us both with the impression that it was more or less of a brindle …
Williams likened the colouring to that of a wildebeest and, since he did not have a second cartridge ready to hand, the creature escaped unharmed. Williams and his party tried to track the animal, but the soil was too dry and hard for the “bear” to leave distinctive tracks.
Heuvelmans tells us that tales of the Nandi Bear from Kenya could fill a book but only gives us one other example, the story of Charles T. Stoneham. One night, while camped near the Lumbwa reserve in the Rift Valley province of Kenya, Stoneham had the following strange encounter:
One night, thinking I heard a noise, I sneaked quietly from my hut and stood against the wall of it, shaded by the thatched eaves. . . . I saw some beast travelling towards me through the mist, and I could not think what creature it could be. . . . Slowly and quietly it approached, and I waited, intensely interested, knowing it could neither smell nor see me. The moon passed behind a cloud; the animal became indistinct in the mist. When within a dozen paces it stopped, and at that moment the moon shone out again clear and brilliant.
I received a dreadful shock. The beast was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. It had a huge square head, and the snout of a pig; its eyes, two black spots, were fixed upon me in an observant stare. Large circular ears, the size of plates, stood up from its head, and they were transparent – I could see the grass through them. The creature’s body was covered with coarse brown hair; its tail was the size of a tree trunk.
While the Williams’ creature certainly sounds like a bear of some stripe, the Stoneham account describes a beast that the witness characterized as a “weird, hybrid ant-eater”. In reading these descriptions, I am reminded of the variety of descriptions given for the notorious Beast of Gevaudan, a man-eater that brought terror to an entire region of France from 1764 to 1767.
So, what are we dealing with here? The so-called skeptics will instantly pull out one of their favourite tools and posit misidentification (or outright hoax). While it is certainly possible that the white Europeans who claimed to see the creature could have been mistaken, I would point out that the natives of the region knew of the animal and even had a name for it. Indigenous people know the wildlife of their area, so there is almost no question of misidentification on their part.
Perhaps, Africa actually does have an undiscovered bear species, but some cryptozoologists have surmised that the Nandi Bear might be an example of a supposedly extinct creature called the Chalicothere. This animal was a large, slope backed predator that appeared to combine elements of a horse and a giant ground sloth. I can see why people, both indigenous and European, who saw something that looked like a Chalicothere might equate it with a bear.
The Chalicothere is the leading contender for an “explanation” of the Nandi Bear, but others have proposed everything from an unknown species of aardvark to a giant baboon, which was known, from the fossil record to roam that area. As with all things cryptozoological, in the end, we do not know what people are seeing.
I was a big fan of the BBC show Primeval and its spin-off that was set in Canada. In that show, “anomalies” opened and creatures from the past and the future made their way into our present time and space. In my research, I have come across tales of dire wolves and dinosaurs in far northern Canada, mini-woolly mammoths appearing and disappearing in Alaska and sightings the world over of flying creatures that look like the ancient pteradons. Whether you call them anomalies, portals or time slips, I wonder if “anomalies” might not explain some of the sightings of creatures that that appear to come from our distant past … and then disappear just as quickly.