In Christian bestiaries, such as The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, by  Edward Topsell, from 1607, a fairly late era compendium of earlier monstrosities, the cacarphane is allegorically employed as sin; its saw-like teeth cut down a tree to capture its prey, much as sin can cause a fall into darkness.  Though few in Europe had ever seen a carcaphane, and indeed no physical evidence was ever brought of one from ‘Tartary', it was included, alongside the lion, elephants and hyenas, in the debate over the manner of reproduction.  Whether it did so backward or forward being the subject of dispute, with Sir Thomas Browne, in Vulgar Errors, Bk. 3, supporting the backward ‘pizel', whereas in Horwart von Hohenburg's Thesaurus, from 1628, the point is made against.  Such theoretical and theological debates, however, did little to clarify the nature of the cacarphane, which was little more then a legend to most Europeans.
      The carcaphane is generally considered a creature native to the Russian steppe and to Siberia, and yet very little is accurately known from that quarter, either.  Cossacks are said to have feared the cacarphane, when they feared little else, and thus had little contact with it, a beast known for its relative speed, cunning and resilience; Yermak Timofeyevich, who first crossed the Urals, reportedly sought in vain for it, but always the Tartars said the animal had moved on, always ahead of the explorers, always elusive, always farther east.  Amongst some Altai tribes, the teeth of dead cacarphanes were used as shears.  Almost certainly, carcaphanes was worshipped and feared by the Kalmyk, Omiak, Telengits, Chelkans, Khants and Mansi, among many others, showing up as a fearsome devil in many religious rites, though this is hard to confirm because of the spread of Orthdox Christianity in the wake of the Cossack settlers.  The carcaphane seems to have avoided the Russian camps and town spreading across Siberia, to the point that it all but disappeared from the Steppe by the late 17th century.   Yerofey Khabarov is said to have sighted several solitary cacarphanes along the Amur in the 1650's, though Bering eighty years later was to sight none of the creatures from his ships, and despair of them as merely as legend.   The story was everywhere the same: as civilisation spread across Siberia, the cacarphanes retreated.
     One abberant case is related by the French encyclopedist Diderot, who during a visit to the court of Catherine the Great, during the fall and winter of 1773, remarked in his journal on a story then current in St. Petersburg society, relating that "un bette terrible, possessé des griffes comme epée et un machoire comme une scie ... terrorise les inhabitants d'un village Siberienne, mais n'aucun person pouvez l'attrapé."  Though too ill to travel, Diderot studied any rumour and report about the creature, compiling anecdotal evidence that indicated a large, heavy carnivore, clearly not similar to a bear and much fleeter of foot, with very heavy teeth and a thick body, was responsible for the attacks, which soon subsided. Nikolay Muravyov, in his memoirs, wrote that as governor of Siberia, he received occasional reports of cacarphane sightings, and some trappers even attempted to sell pelts of the predator, short-furred, stiff, too inflexible, and prone to rotting away even when properly cured.  Bronislaw Piotr Pilsudski, a Polish scientist exiled to Sakhalin Island in the late 1890's by the Tsarist government, reputedly observed carcaphanes at close proximity, but as he drown in the Seine in 1918, the report was never compiled, and all his papers were lost. The only definite evidence of a, regrettably slain, cacarphane was reported in early 1904, when one Captain Feodor Kruzych shot and killed one in northern Manchuria.  The sketches and pelt survived the Russo-Japanese War, though he did not; the pelt, later photographed and put on display in the Far Eastern State University, was completely lost during the Russian Revolution.  It is entirely possible that carcaphanes still exist in the wilds of eastern Siberia, but no sightings have been reported in the last hundred years, meaning that for all intents and purposes, the carcaphane has disappeared.