Dahu

The dahu is the animal at the end of a French practical joke: a newcomer is taken out after dark, posted with an open sack between his knees, and left there while the rest of the party goes off, supposedly to drive the beast towards him. Nobody presents it as real, so the question worth asking is not whether it exists but where the story comes from — and the paper trail does not begin in the Alps. The oldest dated printed account we have been able to find is an article headed “La chasse au Dahu” in L'Abeille de Fontainebleau of Sunday 27 October 1867: the scene is a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, the victim is a grocer up from Paris, and no animal is described at all. The word first reaches a dictionary in 1882, in four villages of the Yonne, meaning “a fantastic, imaginary being; a thing impossible to find” — while the two reference dictionaries of Savoyard patois, of 1883 and 1902, do not record it, and keep only its cousin dâro, “simpleton”. The goat with uneven legs, its Latin name and its two mirror subspecies came much later, and came from a museum.

The dahu is not a cryptid with witnesses. It is the animal at the end of a practical joke, and the joke is the part that can be documented. The oldest dated printed account of it we have been able to find is not alpine. On Sunday 27 October 1867, page three of L'Abeille de Fontainebleau — the local paper of a town on the edge of a royal forest 60 km from Paris — carried an unsigned piece headed "LA CHASSE AU DAHU". It begins: "Si vous ne connaissez pas la chasse au Dahu, permettez-moi de vous narrer une histoire qui vous instruira plus à ce sujet que toutes les explications techniques que je pourrais donner." A Paris grocer comes to visit two childhood friends in a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau — "Marlotte, Barbizon, ou By, si vous le désirez" — and after a good deal of wine they offer him a dahu hunt in the woods, promising a splendid haul of rabbits, pheasants and hares. The article explains the equipment with a straight face: "la seule arme offensive dans ce genre de chasse est un sac en bonne et solide toile." At eleven at night, in the dark, they post their victim almost on his knees with the sack gaping between his legs so that the rabbits will pour into it, then leave him "soi-disant pour faire le rabat" — supposedly to drive the game towards him — and walk home laughing. The whole modern prank is there. What is not there is the animal: the piece never describes a dahu at all. The word reaches a dictionary fifteen years later, and again nowhere near a mountain. In 1882 the Bulletin de la Société des sciences historiques et naturelles de l'Yonne printed S. Jossier's Dictionnaire des patois de l'Yonne, compiled by a commission of five members from lists sent in by village schoolmasters. On page 72 the entry reads in full: "DAHU. s. m. Être fantastique, imaginaire; chose impossible à trouver. Chercher le dahu. Aller à la chasse au dahu. (Bléneau, Rogny, Champcevrais, Sommecaise)." Jossier adds that the word looks to him like the Berry dâlu, the personification of numbed fingers used to frighten children in winter — "V'là le dâlu qui vient, cachez ben vous mains" — and that is the whole of it. The four villages are in the Puisaye, low wooded country in the north of Burgundy, some 400 km from Mont Blanc. Search where the alpine dahu ought to be and it is not there. Two dictionaries cover the Savoyard patois of exactly the region this file is filed under: François Brachet's Dictionnaire du patois savoyard for the canton of Albertville (1883) and the Dictionnaire savoyard published under the auspices of the Société florimontane by Aimé Constantin and Joseph Désormaux (Paris and Annecy, 1902). Full-text searches of both return nothing for dahu, dahut or daru, twice over, while control searches in the same volumes return chamois in both and 48 hits for chèvre in the 1902. What the 1902 dictionary does record is the cognate: on page 283, under the headword Nénŏ, "nigaud" — simpleton — the synonyms listed include dâro and dârou. In Savoy the word named the man who was fooled, not the beast he was sent to catch. Behind all of this stands a poem that has been badly summarised for a century. Claude Gauchet, chaplain to Charles IX and Henri III, published Le Plaisir des champs in 1583; its winter section contains a passage titled "La Darue ou le Boullot". It describes a real hunt: a black winter night, limed branches called brilloërs whose glue is warmed with goose grease or walnut oil, a lantern, a fire of straw, and blackbirds, thrushes and greenfinches beaten out of the bushes and into the lime. The party is named — Gauchet himself, Chambonnière, Popot, Jean Thibault beating the bushes, Jean Loys, Beaurepas carrying "un petit sac / Pour par compte y serrer les oiseaux mis à sac", and Jessé, who carries a pot of embers and is terrified of being left behind: "Jessé qui meurt de peur qu'aux champs on ne le laisse". So they finish the evening at his expense. "Nous luy mettons en main la lanterne escleirante / Pour l'oster de soupçon" — they put the lit lantern into his hand precisely so that he will suspect nothing — and then, in the wood, "chacun en un moment / Luy tourne aussy le cul et fuit legierement." He shouts; nobody answers; he blunders about in the cold while the rest walk on laughing "à gorge pleine". The mechanism of the chasse au dahu — the object pressed into the victim's hands to keep him still, the silent withdrawal, the laughter — is in print in 1583. The imaginary animal is not. The animal, with its Latin name and its two mirror subspecies, is recent and its most institutional moment can be dated to the day. On 1 April 1995 the Musée d'histoire naturelle de La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss Jura, opened an exhibition devoted to Dahutus montanus and published Marcel S. Jacquat's monograph as Cahiers du MHN no 2. By the museum's own account the exhibition and the correspondence it attracted produced a substantial documentary collection and gave rise to a "Laboratoire international de dahutologie systématique et fonctionnelle". The museum is now called MUZOO, and its postal address is Replat du Dahu 1. The folklorist Fabio Armand, writing in La Beidana in 2020, reads the current alpine dahu as a tourist revival that fixes a fluid oral joke into a marketable image: a "Dahù" cheese with a deliberately slanted shape made in the val Chisone and val Germanasca, "Les crottes du Dahu" biscuits at Mont-Dauphin.

There is no dahu site in Haute-Savoie, and no monument, trail or festival there that this file can honestly send you to. The places worth the journey are two museums and a forest, and none of them will show you an animal. MUZOO, in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura, is the natural history museum that made the modern dahu into a subject. Its address is Replat du Dahu 1, CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds, +41 (0)32 967 65 00. As advertised in August 2026, the museum, vivarium, shop and cafeteria open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:45 in summer and to 16:45 in winter, with last admission half an hour before closing; it is closed on Mondays except Easter and Whit Monday, and on 24, 25 and 31 December and 1 January. Admission to the museum and vivarium is CHF 12 full, CHF 8 reduced, CHF 6 for ages 12 to 16, free under 12, CHF 24 for a family of up to two adults and five children; the adjoining zoo is free to everyone. Buses 304 and 310 (and 352 on Sundays and holidays) stop at MUZOO; the nearest covered car parks are Espacité, ten minutes' walk away, and Métropole-Centre, fifteen. There is one accessible parking space east of the building and a ramped entrance at Replat du Dahu 1a, reached by intercom or by calling +41 (0)32 967 65 01 in advance. Do not go expecting a mounted dahu: the museum's published collections list mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, minerals and fossils, and nothing else. The Museo delle Alpi, inside the Forte di Bard in the Aosta Valley, does show one. Its permanent exhibition includes a reconstruction of the dahu in the part devoted to biodiversity, used to introduce what slope does to life in the mountains. In August 2026 the museum opens Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 18:00 and Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10:00 to 19:00, with the ticket office closing 45 minutes earlier; the ticket is 15 euros, 12 reduced for ages 19 to 25, over-65s and students, 24 euros for the pass covering all the fort's museums and exhibitions, and free for under-18s and for disabled visitors with a companion. The third place is free, open and unsigned. The 1867 account is set on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and names Marlotte, Barbizon and By: all three are real villages, all three are an hour from Paris by train and bus, and the forest around them is public and open at all hours. There is nothing there to commemorate the joke — which is the point. Anyone who wants to understand the story should walk one of the sandy tracks between Barbizon and the Gorges d'Apremont after dark, with a sack, and think about the grocer.