What is it about big, white animals that makes them more beautiful and more terrifying than big, normally-colored animals? Herman Melvile pontificated at length about that very subject in the forty-second chapter of Moby Dick. Since Mr. Melville covered the psychology of big, white, scary things so throughly, I’ll just guess that it’s probably because they look like ghosts or, at least, what we think ghosts should look like. It was Mike Casey, in Chinchuba, who introduced me to the flesh and blood animals that might lie behind some of the legends.
Leucistic animals are not ghosts, and they’re not albinos, but their condition does render them mostly colorless. Their eyes, unlike those of albinos, are blue rather than pink. My own experiences with leucitic animals are limited to my encounters with white alligators in New Orleans’ aquarium and, last spring, in the Audubon Zoo. (Follow this link to read about the white alligators there: https://audubonnatureinstitute.org/meet-the-animals-zoo/167-white-alligator.)
How would the ancient tribes have reacted to a white alligator? Might they have taken it for a god, perhaps, or an avenging spirit? According to the guide at the aquarium, flesh and blood white alligators do not have the invulnerability of gods. They have a hard time surviving infancy in the brown waters of the Louisiana bayous where the lack of protective coloring attracts large predators like a neon sign would. White alligators are hard to breed too. At one time, all of the white gators known to the aquarium had come from a single nest and they were all males. Alligators that come from the same nest, it turns out, are all the same gender. Crossing white alligators with regular brown alligators, it turned out, only yielded brown alligators The last time I was at the aquarium, though, I noticed they did have some young leucistic gators, so apparently they found a way around their problem.
What does any of this have to do with the terrifying Chinchuba in Mike Casey’s novel? Maybe nothing. Maybe I’m just pontificating like Herman Melville. Then again….
P.S. If you’re dying to read Chinchuba now that you’ve read about it, this is the link to the Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Chinchuba-Kevin-Michael-Casey/dp/0972554963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508861594&sr=8-1&keywords=chinchuba