The Immortal Naturalist's Guide to Cryptic Creatures: The Mud Guzzler

This post is part of the Immortal Naturalist's Guide series. The explanation for that series can be found in this post.

    When wandering parts of the bog lands of Squee at night, one may hear a strange sound. This sound is something like that of a howling wind in the distance, although I have personally only ever heard the sound when the air is calm. Local folklore suggests that this sound is produced by some kind of massive, deadly creature that one ought to move away from, but having followed the sound, I can tell you that it is produced by the harmless Mud Guzzler. Standing about ten feet tall at the shoulder, the Mud Guzzler is a nocturnal creature that feeds by sucking mud up through its trunk and filtering out all of the insects, rodents, and bits of organic matter to be digested while the inedible parts are expelled immediately. This feeding method is what produces the terrifying sound that most know the Mud Guzzler by. Although it is generally peaceful, the creature is able to defend itself by blasting mud out of its trunk at assailants. 

    Something about the Mud Guzzler's mud filtering must be magical. This is because the filtered mud that it excretes is lacking in any organic material at all and has the ability reverse the aging process in other animals. I do not know why the beast would grant this effect to mud, but any creature who finds themselves submerged in the filtered mud will rejuvenate at a rate of one year for every hour submerged. In order to produce this magic mud, the Mud Guzzler seems to prefer mud with very few rocks in it. After noticing this, I did a few experiments and found that the creature will generally avoid rocky areas, allowing me to start influencing its direction of travel by putting rocks in areas I did not want the Mud Guzzler to go. Given no choice in the matter, the creature will cease feeding to go find a less rocky area, but only after it has exhausted its nearest supplies of non-rocky mud.

    Even after a few weeks of observing, I never saw the Mud Guzzler return to any one spot to sleep. Rather than maintain a nest, the creature seems perfectly happy to burrow into the mud and sleep wherever it is when the sun comes up in the morning. While this can make finding the creature somewhat difficult until you get close enough to hear it, the magical filtered mud it produces is probably worth more than gold. Unless one provokes the Mud Guzzler, collecting its magical mud should be as easy as following it around and waiting. I think the only reason this resource isn't being exploited is that most people choose to believe local legends when they hear the horrible noise produced by the Mud Guzzler and run away. Simply put, everyone is too scared to go look and find out the truth, which I suppose is a good thing if you're the Mud Guzzler.