The Speckled Bipolar Hyanerous, a species only recently discovered on the icy fields of Southern Zanatonia, is the largest member of Hyaenidae family, which also includes the Hyanerous’s much smaller cousins, the hyena and aardwolf.

Ranging in size from 10 to 12 feet long and 6 to 8 feet tall, an adult hyanerous can reach up to one-half ton, particularly after its Beltane feast. The hyanerous fur, while purple at birth, lightens to white with an ample speckling of sky-blue mottles—a pelt that allows it to blend into the glaciers upon which it spends most of its life.

Due to a mutated primitive streak polarity in the early embryonic hyanerous, this creature does not have a “head” and “tail” per se, so much as two underdeveloped faces that grow on the tips of long bushy protrusions resembling tails on both ends of creature’s torso. One of these faces lacks a nose, whereas the other, which is the dominant face and acts as the “front” of the hyanerous, has only a nose. The alpha-tail, as scientist Dudley Norton dubbed the benosed face, leads the bifurcated creature through the icy land entirely depending on its large olfactories. The beta-tail appears to function as a lookout, and although it has no esophageal pathway, its mouth is capable of making popping and clicking noises if ever it sees a danger. As the hyanerous is the largest creature in Southern Zanatonia, this is limited to avalanches, sudden iceberg formation, and an occasional enraged pygmy land-dolphin, which has no capacity to judge size and thus often ends up an aberrant meal for a bemused hyanerous.

The brain of the hyanerous is as doubled as its body, and although the hyanerous received its Latin genus and species (Hyanerous bipolarinia) due to its unusual bilateral symmetry, the description seems unexpectedly apt for the hyanerous’s personality as well. Occasionally the beta-tail appears to gain some cerebral leverage over the body and runs the hyanerous backwards while making disturbing clicking echoes and scratching at the glacier’s surface with its claws. French animal-psychoanalyst Androgena Breton has suggested this is not unlike the human condition of snow-blindness combined with an acute ennui.

The hyaneri social structure seems to closely resemble that of its relative, the hyena. The female is the dominant sex, and is female pseudo-hermaphroditic. Giving birth through the clitoris, the female understandably wants to abandon its pups at birth, and unlike its more patient cousin the hyena, gives over the job of raising its litters to the male members of it species. In contrast to the nomadic female, the genial and much smaller males live and raise young inside igloos, which they make by biting snow with the beta-tail, making round icicle-drops insides its cold fake mouth, and then depositing the snow into piles that gradually gather into an igloo. The younger members of the tribe appear to curry favor with their elders by burying penguin heads in the snow so that the beaks point upwards in a circle around the hyanerous igloos.

Emperor Penguins are the primary staple of the hyanerous’s diet. The hyaneri capture the penguins by stalking them on their monthly migrations, and then netting them in their large ejected stomach bladders. They will then carry the penguins, already digesting, back to the dens in these hardy waterproof bladders, which spring forth from their midsection whenever the beta-tail sees black and white. Unfortunately for the aberrant pygmy land-dolphin, it is also black and white, although considerably more bitter than emperor penguins.

This is currently all that is known about the speckled bipolar hyanerous, as they are cagey and wily in addition to being a new discovery. As a species, the hyaneri live up to their ferocious mien; old Zanatonia myths once disparaged by the Scientific Community held that a creature both wise and stupid liked to morph into crevasses to hide. As often turns out to be the case, perhaps these myths refer to an actual creature: “Whollie intrigued with its nostriles, the Zamata child lookied closier, hearied but a whooshe and a blow, and then simplie was disappearied.”

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For my lovely Surrealism class (Surrealisma saica)