Unicorns (3 page)

In the Middle Ages, people worried a lot about poison. It was an easy way for someone to hurt his enemies. How could a person tell if his food was poisoned?

The best way was with a unicorn horn. When poison was nearby, the horn started to sweat. At meals, rich people would put a unicorn horn in the middle of the table. If
a person couldn’t afford a whole horn, he used a little piece of one.

Doctors made unicorn-horn medicine. They scraped tiny bits off a horn and mixed them with water. Then they gave the mixture to a sick person to drink. This was a powerful cure for many sicknesses. In fact, if a few grains of horn were put on a person’s tongue right after he died, it sometimes brought him back to life!

Unicorn horns cost a lot of money. Some people tried to sell fake ones. But there were ways to tell if a unicorn horn was real. If you dropped a piece of it into water, it sent up bubbles. If you burned a
piece, it made a sweet scent. But the best test was to try it out with poison.

A king paid a fortune for a unicorn horn. To make sure it was real, he dipped it in poisoned water. Then he told one of his servants to drink the water.

The servant drank it and died right away. The king was angry! He had been sold a fake unicorn horn!

A unicorn horn could do more than check for poison and cure diseases. It helped people’s memory. It even kept them young. So of course everyone wanted one. And in the 1200s, sailors began bringing horns to Europe from faraway places.

The horns were real. But did they come from real unicorns?

A long time ago, people believed that for every animal that lived on land a similar animal lived in the sea. Horses, for example, lived on land and sea horses lived in the sea.

What about unicorns? In the Middle Ages, people began hearing reports of a sea unicorn. Hardly anybody had seen one. Sea unicorns lived in the freezing ocean near the North Pole. They died if they were taken away from their home.

The sea unicorn is actually a kind of whale called a narwhal (NAR-wall).

Narwhals are huge. They have eight-foot-long horns sticking out of their heads. The horns are pure ivory and grow in a spiral—just like a unicorn horn!

But are narwhals really sea unicorns? Sailors thought they knew how to find out.

First they cut off a horn. It was hollow inside. They put poisonous spiders into it and sealed it shut.

When they opened it, the spiders were
dead. They had died from lack of air. But the sailors didn’t know that. They thought the horn had killed the spiders because they were poisonous. So the sea unicorn must be real!

Still, a sea unicorn wasn’t the same as a land unicorn. And people who had paid a fortune for
real
unicorn horns began to worry. What if their horns came from sea unicorns? What if sea unicorn horns didn’t have the same magical powers?

And then they began to wonder. Were land unicorn horns fake, too?

As the years went by, scientists stopped believing in unicorns. Doctors stopped using unicorn-horn medicine. Hardly anyone went searching for unicorns.

“Come see the living unicorn!”

In the 1980s, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus showed off a new animal to the world. A living unicorn! It was pure white, with a long, fluffy mane and tail. A single horn stuck out of its forehead.

Everyone who saw it was thrilled.

A couple that lived in California had made it from a baby Angora goat. They never told anyone how they did it. But it wasn’t the first time it had been done. People had “made” unicorns before.

Thousands of years ago, Roman farmers twisted the soft horns of young rams together. The horns joined together and became one horn.

In Sudan, Dinka tribesmen operated on large baby bulls so that they had only one horn. They trained the one-horned bulls to be the leaders of their herds.

Why would anyone do that?

Just as in the legends, an animal with one horn is a good fighter. Other animals run away when they see a sharp horn pointed at them. If a one-horned bull has to fight, it can put all its weight behind its horn. Animals with two horns have to turn
their heads from side to side to fight.

In 1933, Dr. W. Franklin Dove decided to make a unicorn bull. He picked a male calf that was one day old. Dr. Dove knew that horns grow from tissue on each side of a calf’s skull. These bits of tissue are called “horn buds.”

Dr. Dove moved the horn buds to the front of the calf’s skull above its eyes. He put the two buds right next to each other. Then he waited and watched. As the calf grew, the buds joined into one horn.

Dr. Dove’s bull was the strongest animal in the herd. It was also the gentlest. Just like a unicorn in stories and myths.

Some people get angry about these kinds of unicorns. They think it is mean to the goats, rams, and bulls. And they say these animals are not
real
unicorns.

Other people wonder whether real unicorns are still living in faraway places. Do they exist today? Did these fabulous creatures ever exist?

What do
you
think?