“This is a sacred fool seized by holy madness,” said the chief. “His powers are great, his anger terrifying. We must humor him and do as he says.”
The Indians furnished horses and ropes. They followed Jacob into the swamp. Their wonder and awe were great when they beheld the Gormagunt. Three heads, two male members, and three female pudenda! This was a beast beyond their wildest imagination. They prostrated themselves before the one who had found it. Twelve horses were harnessed to the Gormagunt. The huge beast was at first unwilling to cooperate, but it was docile and let itself be dragged along. It took over two months and the labor of the whole tribe to pull the creature to the nearest settlement and beyond to the town of Lancaster, where Jacob swapped some of his store of pelts for beads, mirrors, vermilion paint, and much brandy, which he handed over to the Eries as their well-earned reward. To the townspeople Jacob said, “Feed this Gormagunt, feed it water plants and swamp plants, and things that grow along streams and ponds. Give him lots of it!”
He left the bewildered Gormagunt standing in the marketplace. The good Dutch folk did not know what to do. Two enterprising Yankees took the beast off their hands, exhibiting it across the land, at the Crown and Eagle, at the Bull’s Head, at the Royal George, at the Red Lion, for one shilling per spectator. They printed and distributed handbills:
Whereas a surprizing MONSTER was caught in the wilds of NEW FRANCE, and has with great difficulty been tamed, this is to inform the discerning, scientifick PUBLICK that it will be exhibited in this towne. The Monster is of uncommon Shape, having three Heads, six Legs, three fundaments, two male and three female genitories. It is of various Colours, very beautiful, and makes a noise like the conjunction of three or four different noises. Nobody knew its name until an old Indian SACHEM said HE remembered that, when he was a boy, his Father told him that it was called a GORMAGUNT!
The exhibitors got rich. Jacob Schutz took no interest in the matter but went on living in his usual hermit way. “The Gormagunt was nothing,” he was heard to say, “now for the Great White Hart, the Weisse Hirsch!” Winter was near. It was too late to start on another expedition. Again the huntsman hibernated. But this time he was fidgety, talking to himself: “The Hart is mine! Mein, mein! Der Hirsch gehört mir. Lieber Gott, please let no one else have him. Das Geweih, those big antlers. I must have them. For the Great White Hart I would give my soul to the devil, dem Teufel. No, no, no, I did not mean that. But I must have him. Blitz und Donner!”
Thus he kept muttering, scratching himself, pacing to and fro, drinking more branntwein than he was used to.
Spring came, eagerly awaited. Jacob could only think of the Hart and nothing else. But first he had to get provisions for a long journey. Again he brought his furs to town.
The preacher hailed him: “How goes it, Jacob?”
“I am after the White Hart this time. After the big antlers. I must have them.”
“No, no, Jacob,” said the parson, “do not wallow in sinful pride. The White Hart is for no man. God does not mean you to have it. It is sure death to chase after him.”
“Und solls mein Leben kosten! Even at the cost of my life!” exclaimed the hunter.
This time he traveled where no white man had been before. Everywhere among the tribes he inquired in word and sign language: “Where is the White Hart? Who has seen him?”
Indians did not answer him. To speak about the White Hart was bad medicine, very bad.
He chanced upon a half-breed voyageur: “Où est le Grand Cerf Blanc?”
“Speak not of him, mon vieux, it is sure death. C’est la mort.”
After months of wandering, man, horse, and dog had been reduced to skin and bones, worn out by their exertions. Still Jacob doggedly pursued his quest. At last, he fell in with a French coureur de bois, a man not unlike himself.
“Tell me, where can I find the White Hart? You must tell me!”
“I once thought to run him down myself, mon ami. I was young and foolish then. I know better now. None who have hunted the White Hart ever returned.”
“Verdammter Franzose! Damn frog-eater! Villain! Tell me, tell me!”
“Eh bien,” sighed the coureur de bois, “if nothing will persuade you, I will show you the way, or rather the spot where the path begins. Naturellement, I will not go with you farther than that, as I intend to live a little while longer.”
He led Jacob to a seemingly endless rock ledge, stretching as far as the eye could see along the side of a forbidding mountain of black granite, devoid of vegetation except for some lichens and a few tufts of moss here and there. On one side of the ledge rose a sheer rock wall, on the other yawned a dreadful, seemingly bottomless abyss. The ledge was barely wide enough for a horse and rider.
“Voilà, mon pauvre chasseur,” said the voyageur, pointing ahead, “there it is. Ride on as your evil genius bids you. I shall never see you again.”
At the sight of the dreadful ledge Raven reared up. His eyes rolled in fright. With whip and curses Jacob forced him along. Once on the ledge, peering down into the abyss, Jacob could not discern its bottom, which was lost in darkness far, far below. At last, the ledge broadened, leading into a forest. Never had Jacob seen such trees! They seemed to rise into the sky. Their canopy formed a solid roof leaving only a few patches for light to filter through. Moss dangled from dripping branches. There was little underbrush, only a carpet of ferns. Riding between the majestic trunks was easy. At eventide Jacob came to a clearing, a small open space in the gloom. There he and his animals rested. Suddenly, Jacob awoke. A pale moon was shining. He heard a deep rumbling in the clouds. Flashes of lightning lit up the sky, but there was no rain. And then Jacob saw them, ghostly huntsmen galloping in the clouds after a ghostly White Hart—a diabolic crew, a fear-inspiring sight.
“Gott steh mir bei!” Jacob exclaimed. “It is the wild hunt, die wilde Jagd!” He trembled and his teeth chattered. He watched the phantom host, the spectral horses, the Ratchet Hounds pursuing their ghostly prey amid thunder and the wind’s howling. The appearance of the Wild Hunt meant bad luck. Everyone but Jacob would have given up, but he had gone too far to relinquish his quest.
For weeks Jacob searched the forest for his elusive prey. In vain. Everywhere he saw the tracks of a giant stag, but never a glimpse of the Great White Hart himself.
“I’ve seen his imprint, I know he is here, know that he is watching me!” Jacob was turning into a specter, his eyes glowing with fever, his hands trembling. And then one day he saw the stag in the distance, far away. Digging his heels into the Raven’s flanks, he rode like the wind. But no matter how fast he rode, he could never come nearer. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, the stag seemed to float before him, always at the same distance. Jacob blew his horn, but no sound emerged from it. Wacker barked, but his barking was mute. Raven neighed soundlessly. Jacob loaded his rifle with one of his three silver bullets. He aimed, he fired. There was a flash in the pan but no report. Again and again Jacob sharpened the flint, measured out the exact amount of powder, and rammed down another silver bullet, but twice more the gun misfired with inaudible report.
All of a sudden, the stag turned around and came to Jacob. The Great Hart was so beautiful, such a perfect example of the Creator’s art, that Jacob fell to his knees and burst into tears. When he dared to look up, Jacob perceived that the stag was even larger than he had ever dreamed. He towered over his pursuer, his mammoth antlers spread out like the branches of an oak tree. His body seemed to be covered with fine, glistening silk. His eyes shone like two large sparkling rubies; a golden cross was imbedded in his forehead. Jacob could only gaze in awe and wonder.
“It is true,” he said at last, “you were never meant for me. You belong to God.”
The hunter turned back, searching a long time for the ledge. It was already growing dark when he finally found it, but he was now in a desperate hurry to get away from that place, to get home. He rode out onto the ledge, trusting his horse and his own skill. Coal black night overtook them.
A storm rose. Wind tugged at his rawhide shirt and at his hair. He was only halfway up the ledge. He could not see his hand before his eyes. He became aware of an unseen, evil presence. He could feel it, sense it. Jacob’s hair stood on end, Raven shuddered, Wacker growled and howled woefully. The dog seemed to struggle against something trying to pull him off the ledge. Jacob heard a frightful, anguished howling growing fainter and fainter below him.
“The dog is gone,” cried Jacob. “God have mercy on me!”
Jacob felt a violent tugging, a pulling at his clothes, his arm, his horse’s body. It was not the wind. Raven screamed in terror. A furious jerk almost tore the reins from Jacob’s hands. He realized that an evil spirit was trying to pull him and his horse off the ledge and down into the abyss to their doom. The pull became stronger, irresistible. Already the stallion was about to go over the edge. Already one of his hooves was frantically groping in thin air. Quick as a flash, Jacob drew his hirschfänger, desperately slashing with its heavy blade alongside his horse’s neck and head. At once the pulling ceased. Raven regained his footing. Silently, numbed, Jacob rode on. He regained the land beyond the ledge. He slid down from his saddle in utter exhaustion. For hours he lay as if dead. When he awoke, it was daylight. Raven was grazing. Then Jacob saw it and trembled—a skeleton hand, a hand of bleached bones still clutching the reins.
Jacob had been away for a whole year. He had set out on his last hunt as a vigorous forty-year-old man. He returned as a babbling dotard. His long hair and beard had turned snow white. His eyes were rheumy, his limbs shaky. He was no longer able to care for himself. Some relatives in the settlement took Jacob in. They hardly knew him and had little chance of getting acquainted now. He never spoke again, just mumbled something nobody could understand. During the day he huddled near the fireplace. At night he slept on an old bearskin. Silently, he ate and drank what was set before him. His eyes kept wandering, gazing at something that was not there. Thus he lived a few years longer. One evening, as the candles were lit, Jacob suddenly cried out loud, “The stag is calling me,” closed his eyes, and was dead.
The Wild Hunter of the Juniata
The skeleton of history wrapped in the flesh of legend.
At the time of the French and Indian Wars, when the land west of the Susquehanna was a forbidding wilderness, fought over by English soldiers, American settlers, French regulars, Canadian coureurs de bois, and a host of Indian tribes, there lived on the banks of the Juniata River, deep inside the disputed territory, a man whose name might have been Bell or Reilly, but who was known far and wide as Captain Jack, the Wild Hunter of the Juniata. Some called him the Half-Indian on account of his dress and manners. He was also known as the Black Rifle. The Indians had their own name for him—Stalking Death.
Captain Jack was a frontier pioneer of herculean stature, swarthy and keen-eyed. Land-hungry, he had taken his family where land could be had for the taking, provided one was either overbold or mad enough to make one’s home in the country of the Crimson Tomahawk. Captain Jack was a dead shot, the finest marksman in the territory. He could hit the eye of a squirrel at a hundred paces and once, on a bet, had suspended a walnut by a string from a branch, shattering it at his first shot at 150 paces.
The chase was Captain Jack’s delight, the country a huntsman’s paradise, “aswarm with Turkee, Deere, Elke, Beare, Woolfe, Catamount,” and, beyond the Monongahela, with an occasional “Buffaloe.” That the hunter could become the hunted in the twinkling of an eye only added spice to the sport. Captain Jack was inured to the horrors of border warfare, as well as to heat and cold, hunger and thirst. He was also a patriot.
To help his people in their war against the French, he organized a company of hunter-rangers, skilled in woodcraft, expert in Indian fighting, clad like their leader in fringed buckskin. Armed with skinning knife and tomahawk, besides their long rifles, they were as ready to scalp a Mingo or Shawanoe as to be scalped themselves. They neither asked nor expected mercy. Neither did they expect pay. Whatever they could take from the French and Indians was all the reward they asked. They insisted, however, to be allowed to dress, march, and fight as they pleased without being subject to army discipline. General Braddock refused to have them take part in his expedition against Fort Duquesne, calling them the “damndest set of rogues and gallowsbirds, the most insolent, disobeying, curseing and swearing rascals in the world, worse than the most depraved savages.”
They only grinned, calling him a damn fool to his face, and went home to their rude cabins to fight their own private war in defense of their homes and families. In his hour of need the general might have wished them back.
Ornery as a wolverine and unsociable to the extreme, Captain Jack was yet a caring husband and doting father, loving his family “as bread and meat loves salt.”
One evening, Captain Jack came in from the forest and found his cabin burnt, his wife and children murdered. As he looked at the ruin, a tempest of fire swept through his being. In a moment the waving foliage of hopes, of sympathies and compassion were burnt out, leaving his nature like the charred trunks of trees through which has passed a roaring forest fire. A demon entered into and possessed him. As he walked to and fro before the heap of ashes which had borne the precious name of home, his clenched fist was shaken against the surrounding forest. His teeth were gnashed together. A storm came up. The rains of heaven beat down unnoticed upon his unprotected head. The crack of the thunderbolt, the flash of the forked lightning alike failed to attract his attention.
It was midnight. By the dull glow of the cabin embers the man could be seen, still walking backward and forward. The storm ceased, but not the walker. At last, morning dawned. A bird caroled its early song from the leafy branches of a mighty tree. The man paused. He looked around with a bewildered air. At a distance, in a puddle of water, lay his hat, where it had fallen the night before. He picked it up. As he did so his eye fell upon the corpse of his child. With heavy heart he dug a grave and reverently laid to rest the bodies of the dead. One mighty burst of tears and he was gone. Henceforth all aims, all hopes and affections were fused into one overmastering passion—Revenge. Caves and mountains became his dwelling-place.
Thus spake the oldtime chronicler.
The real man was turned into the ogre of legend. Pioneers and pathfinders came upon the corpses of Indians, left to the wolves and birds of prey. That they were invariably scalped was not remarkable but, horrible to relate, their hearts had been torn from their bodies to be devoured by Him, as some said, or to be carried dried in a satchel on his person as mementos or talismans. When a man chanced upon the mutilated body of an Indian, he said, “He has been here.” They heard the crack of a rifle at midnight and said: “It is He.” One night a settler heard a shot near his cabin and opened the door. A dead Mingoe lay before it and from the woods beyond a hollow voice sounded: “I have saved your lives!”
The German settlers called him the Rächer, the Dark Avenger, and feared him almost more than they feared the hostile Indians, even though they were thankful for his sometimes spooky protection. One settler swore that, when attacked by an Indian, a huge wolf had leaped at the warrior, tearing out his throat. The wolf then assumed the shape of Captain Jack, blood trickling down his chin. The specter grinned horribly, waved his farewell, turning back into a wolf once more. Another frontiersman related that he had seen Captain Jack face-to-face with a fierce catamount. “Come on, friend,” the wild hunter had challenged the beast, “let’s fight, bare fist against claw, tooth for tooth. I need the practice.” The panther cowered and slunk away.
Once Captain Jack fought four Indians at one and the same time. He dispatched the first three, one after the other. One was a lithe, brawny warrior who grappled the Avenger, and a long, bloody fight with knives ensued. It ceased only when both were exhausted by loss of blood. The warrior got away, leaving Captain Jack the victor on the field of battle. Weak and faint as he was, Captain Jack proceeded to scalp the three dead Indians. He then worked his w
ay back to the settlement to have his many stab wounds dressed. This was the one and only time a victim escaped him.
The Wild Hunter of the Juniata had killed more than a hundred Indians, but his thirst for revenge had not been assuaged. There lived in a native village deep in the wilderness a mighty chief, the terrible Cotties. In the space of one single day Cotties had taken the scalps of no less than sixteen settlers to prove himself worthy of his chieftainship. It was Cotties and his band who had burnt Captain Jack’s cabin and murdered his family. For years the Indian Killer had searched for him in vain. Cotties was unaware of this. The burning of a single log cabin, the wiping out of a single family, was not worthy of remembrance. The event had simply slipped the chief’s mind. But when Cotties was told of a man called Stalking Death, he was seized with a fierce desire to fight him, to match strength against strength, guile against guile. With both men determined to find each other, the fatal meeting would not be delayed for long.
They came face-to-face in a dark forest clearing. “Are you the one they call Stalking Death?” asked the Indian. “Are you Cotties the Terrible?” asked the white man. “Enough words,” was Cotties’ answer. They fought hand-to-hand for three days. Every morning they got up to renew their battle, stabbing, hacking, dodging, advancing, and retreating. Every evening they fell to the ground, bloody and exhausted. Came morning and, at daybreak, they were at each other’s throat again. While the Kilkenny cats had fought until only their claws and tails were left, nothing at all remained of either Cotties or Captain Jack except a hatchet and a crimsoned knife. This an old pioneer woman told her grandchildren. The same woman would frighten the little ones whenever they were naughty: “Cotties the Terrible or Captain Jack will get you if you don’t behave yourselves.”
After his epic battle with Cotties, Captain Jack vanished, never to be seen again in the flesh. Grateful settlers named a towering eminence, “Jack’s Mountain,” after him. At its base, some said, the Wild Hunter of the Juniata was buried in 1772. “Not so,” protested others, “he simply went West.” On one point all agreed: every night, at the stroke of twelve, Captain Jack’s ghost revisited a favorite spring to drink from its clear depths and then dissolved into nothingness. For many years, respectable, sober-minded farmers maintained that they had seen the spirits of Captain Jack and Cotties renewing their terrible fight in the clouds among thunder and lightning. Who is there that can say it was not so?
Legends and Tales of the American West Page 4