El Chupacabra

Imagine: You have a milk pail slung in the crook of an elbow and the tropic sun is just melting the chill from the night away. A faint mist hangs in the air and you can hear the cluck of chickens, the lowing of the cow in the barn. But wait, something isn't quite right. There is a tension in that shifting, a shrillness to the clucking. Blatting sheep. Panicked sheep. The mist hides the ground of the sheep pen. You walk toward the pen, toward the strange silence of it. Then you see strange hills in the mists, like foreign snow drifts. You walk closer and wonder why all the sheep are sleeping. But they're not sleeping. They're dead. You drop the milk pail, hurtle the fence, and find eight of your flock is dead. And each dead sheep as three puncture wounds in the chest. You look at the ground, and through the ever thinning mist you see no blood. Just a tiny dot of spilled crimson on the old ewe's chest. A spot a scarlet in this white morning. You look over your shoulder and see something dart behind the barn. Blue-gray. A ridge of hair on the spine and a whip like tail. Claws. Eyes the color of blood.

So it may have happened in March of 1995 in Puerto Rico. That was the first sighting of el Chupacabra (meaning Goat Sucker, which, despite the first incident, seems to be it's favorite snack). Sightings and animal exsanguinations were reported solely in the Americas for the next ten years or so. Farm animals and pets were reported to have been exsanguinated through one-three holes in the chest or neck, as well as the corpses of what are believed to be el Chupacabra. The nasty little critter migrated, apparently, for Chupacabras where reported in Russian-Mar '05-and the Philippines-Jan '08. In August of 2007, however, Phylis Canion brought our buddy Chupa to the international limelight when claiming to have a dead specimin in her possession. DNA testing revealed this, and most others, to be a mangy-ass coyote with deformed teeth (or a Chow mix, as the case in Maine). This makes sense, the dead coyotes being mostly hairless but for a ridge along the spine with gray blue skin. The things were probably horrendously sick with mange, as well as not quite sane. But the exsanguination still peaks my interest.
But let's just put it down to mange ridden coyotes and Satanists, hm? Satanists make wonderful patsies.
I think that the coyote connection is the most interesting. In Native American and Mexican mythology, the coyote is a wily trickster, both hero and villain. A powerful critter, either way. He made man, was tricked by hens, slew monsters, and bedeviled mankind. Yet, in our technological age, there is no room for Coyote. He has been replaced by logic and reason and science. Just as the Age of Miracles has passed. Yet today we have Stigmatics (is that what one would call them?) and visions of the Virgin at the bottom of our teacups and alien abduction. Modern life denies mythology and faith, but does not eradicate-or fill-the need. Where coyote used to be a God, he is now relegated to the status of minor monster, terrorizing livestock and livelihood. I think too much denial of our interior lives has made it get our attention in a rather gruesome fashion.
That, and mange.