Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  THE MONSTER BEAR

  Most feared of beasts in the magical Iroquois zoo is this big, devilish-looking critter. He isn’t even built like a natural bear. Sometimes the alternative form of a wizard, he loves running contests, luring men and swift boys to bet their lives on a race. These marathons last from sunrise to sunset, and second place for the mortal means dinner.

  Like Achilles, this demon bear has a weak spot on the pad of a foot. A spike or arrow here can kill him. In a tale or two the Little People take him down when they pity his human quarry, as does the right tricky hero with red willow weapons. Others whip him with wits or magic and maybe talk him out of a couple of his teeth—the bounty of generations. His bones are medicine. Just the powder in a potion makes a human unbeatable as a runner. Such a heavy totem is the monster bear that he’s the focus of a whole dance society, one of the few mythic animals so used.

  We don’t know any Iroquoians who claim to have met the demon bear in our woods. There are enough Bigfoot reports to make you wonder if people are taking one for the other. There are those who think all myths are distortions of real events. Some suggest that Australia’s dawn beasts live on in the dreamtime images of its own native peoples. Could the demon bear be a memory? Was there a natural parallel in the northeastern woods?

  In his dreams, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) raved that the Atlanteans shunned North America because its mammal predators were so nasty. Archaeology half supports the twentieth century’s “sleeping prophet”: The ice age’s meat eaters were dreadful. There was the American lion, Panthera leo atrox, much bigger than lions of our day. There was Canis dirus, a loping assassin we call the dire wolf. The saber-toothed tiger was an ambush-slasher, and outsized hyenas and wolverines were stalking terrors. The top killer, though, seems to have been Arctodus, the giant short-faced bear, a rangy goon that ate not a thing but flesh and marrow.

  Nicknamed the bulldog bear for its strange, pushed-in face packing so mighty a bite, Arctodus could run forty miles an hour. Its five-foot limbs and eight-inch claws could rake or club any foe. When it stood on two legs, its stubby chin would have rested on a basketball rim. The first Americans had to face it. Was this the demon bear?

  Zoologists note the curiosity that big cats are spooked by the bark of dogs. It’s not the dogs they dread; it’s the sound, evidently like that of a once-real animal so fearsome that its chuffing cough resonates in the ancestral memory and sets generations of tigers a-quake. Some think it could only have been the short-faced bear. Little wonder if the Iroquois remember.

  HIGH HAT

  Many Native Americans testify without hesitation that there is some large, humanoid critter on the prowl in our wooded regions. Most of us have heard of the giant apelike being, variously named Bigfoot, Skunk Ape, or Sasquatch, that’s been reported all over the United States. While its SAT scores may not get it into Duke, to the Iroquois it’s no simple brute. To them, it is a very old, august being with the wisdom of the woods within it. Its power makes it capable of being dangerous.

  Iroquois country has a surprising number of sightings, and a few beings in Iroquois folklore might be the same thing. The last of the Stone Giants fled to the Allegheny hills, and there may be some connection to High Hat, a bogie of the same region memorialized in the tales of Seneca storyteller DuWayne Bowen.

  High Hat is a giant, bestial humanoid fond of the taste of human children. We seldom hear of him far from his swampy haunts. His oddest feature is a stovepipe hat that reminds people of Uncle Sam, Abe Lincoln, or the archetypal image of a white undertaker (tall, craggy, and lank). Not only Native Americans see him.

  White construction workers spotted him at dawn and twilight during construction of the Kinzua Dam, usually at the edge of bodies of water. Abe Lincoln, they nicknamed him because of the hat. We wonder how old he is.

  This man-animal morph makes us think of other shapeshifting beings, including witches, shamans, and even the Christian Devil. Around the year 2000, reports started surfacing from the Tuscarora Reservation about some big, speedy beastie they called Tall Man. It played high-speed hide-and-seek with reservation kids on ATVs, which calls for some pretty slick running. It also takes a lot to spook the Tuscarora.

  “There’s definitely something out there that can kill us,” says Michael Bastine. “If you decide to take a shot at one of those, you better be sure it’s a good one.”

  THE LEGS

  One of the oddest bogies in the New York forest was this critter called the Legs. There may be no more descriptive term in the Iroquois psychic lexicon.

  These legs are described as a body-sized pair of human gams with just a bit of torso visible. They may have an eye or two on them toward the hip or one apiece on each upper thigh. Sometimes there is just a single big eye, presumably at the navel. This cyclopean single orb sometimes bulges in and out as it studies its much-amazed humans. Other witnesses notice no eyes at all, just . . . legs.

  It—or they—show up only after dark, typically running by you in the woods. Normally that’s the end of it, but sometimes they drive you crazy running circles around you until you try to get away from them, collapse exhausted, and—more on that later.

  In the early 1900s, Parker interviewed people who claimed to have seen the bogie in action. No one has ever been hurt by the Legs, but things don’t usually work out too well for people who see them. It’s often a forecaster of disaster.

  While the Legs could probably clean up at the Special Supernatural Olympics, it’s questionable exactly what their purpose may be. To many who have spotted them aimlessly running, the only point would seem to be getting a workout.

  In reservation circles, Michael Bastine has heard a bit about these critters, and some of it is for adults only. It seems that a female version of these legs stalks philandering men on their way home, scares the devil out of them, catches up to them, and lays a big wet one on them in a way that must be imagined. This kiss holds its own distinctive, lingering redolence. Ahem. The wife will have no doubt about where he has been—for the last time.

  Maybe this was part of the original picture of the Legs, and turn-of-the-century commenters were too prudish to say it. Maybe the spooky stems have a variety of pursuits. Forgive us for uncertainty on this point. As Arthur Parker observed sagely of the bogie, “No one has ever made a complete examination of one.”

  THE MISCHIEF MAKER

  Like the shaman, the image of the Native American trickster has been immensely captivating to contemporary whites. Figures more or less like the trickster are found in literature and folklore all over the world, but the character seems nowhere as important as it is in Africa and North America.

  The Iroquois have their own trickster-figure. His Seneca name is Shodisko, and he’s a lower-level deity. Sometimes called “the Brother of Death,” this Iroquois Loki loves playing practical jokes on people, not always caring if they do harm. He has a vast array of tricks and can turn himself into many different forms.

  While Coyote, the animal-like trickster, stars in cycles of tales among southwestern Native Americans, this figure seems of far less importance to the Iroquois. Even near neighbors the Algonquin make a lot more out of their own tricksters.

  LONGNOSE

  Many of the bogies of the Iroquois woods come with some lesson to teach. This seems to be a major point of some of the tales, maybe none more so than with Longnose.

  Longnose is a humanoid critter whose tapir-style snout and other head-borne appendages—nozzles, tubes, and tentacles—remind us of fantastic, ornamental Aztec drawings. In some tales, this Longnose is a simple monster, a stalking nocturnal predator. One of the most terrifying sounds in the northeastern woods would be his snuffling calls behind you on the trail or around you in the trees. Thankfully, there might be only one of him, so he can do only so much damage. He’s not often described as being above human size, but he’s at home in the dark woods, and he’s got some way of getting you if you’re out alone.

  In other tales, though, Longnose�
��s terrible reputation is only for show, a game of adult storytellers. Longnose needs this reputation, since his main job seems to be to scare rebel teens and wayward drunks back to their homes at night. They get out and think about mischief, and then—the sounds drive them home.

  DuWayne Bowen told a number of stories about Longnose. He felt them pretty strongly since he was nurtured on them in his own Allegany Reservation childhood.

  THE GIANT MOSQUITO

  Once upstate New York had formidable marshes. They sent up such hordes of mosquitoes that malaria was a serious plague, even for the incoming whites. Not until the nineteenth century were most of the marshes drained and managed.

  In one of his occasional helpful moves, the trickster set up a smudge to get rid of the mosquitoes. All it did was tick them off. The whole swamp full of them pulled together into the form of one gigantic mosquito. The trickster made tracks. The beastie stayed behind, terrorizing the village nearby. It could drain a man with a single sting.

  There are a couple of stories about the critter’s demise, including enchanted arrows launched by inspired boys or girls. In one variant, the Creator sends one of his mighty eagles, which so shreds the brute that it reverts again to the hordes of tiny bugs that had made it. This story has many settings, including ones near Batavia, Syracuse, and Conesus Lake.

  THE WITCH HAWK

  While the cloud eagle of the Great Spirit is one of the most admired of supernaturals, the legends are full of big wingers neither noble nor good tempered. Some hover over swamps and lead hunters to doom. Some whip packs of warriors into a battle frenzy. Others circle fields and snatch babies from the backs of mothers. Some take the forms of gorgeous people and win love only to crush it.

  This Witch Hawk is one of these shape-shifting figures. His namesake form is that of a huge raptor. Don’t trust him, though. A pitiless fate alterer, he plays with lives.

  Once he appeared as a young chief to a sultry Iroquois woman. Something otherwordly in him both charmed and repelled her, and she wedded a man of her nation. For years the Witch Hawk bided. When the woman gave birth, he snatched her child and left her to die. Nurtured in the wild by the animals, the girl grew to be as lovely as the mother. Then the Witch Hawk came to her, too, in his mortal form. He took her back to her village where he knew she would launch a new cycle of love and disaster, thus doubling his revenge on her mother.

  Fey and otherworldly as she was by then, cursed with this life between the worlds, she hurt so many others.

  THE SERVERS

  In Harriett Maxwell Converse’s rendition of the Iroquois creation myth, two mighty, primal spirit beings dueled for the rights to rule the world. It’s the Evil-Minded Spirit who wanted the fight, and the Good-Minded One wasn’t silly enough to fall for the choice of weapons. The Good One pitched the Evil One into a cave deep in the earth, where he has to stay through all eternity. Only in spirit form can the Evil One return. He can do a surprising amount of damage that way, alas. And he has servants.

  These emissaries of the Evil One are called the Servers, and they remain on Earth, in all its quarters. When they rise up to do the Evil One’s bidding, it can be at any time and in any place. When they report for duty, they show themselves as mixed human and beast.

  One wonders if American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) might not have heard about these Servers. His tales featured echelons of morphing beings, all working for a common goal. It’s another reason to be suspicious of altered animals.

  THE EVIL-SOUL GATHERER

  We can tell from their stories that the old Iroquois believed in several components to the psyche, the immaterial part of a human. The good and bad parts were detachable and given different destinations. Somebody needs to separate them.

  Like many Iroquois supernaturals, Dehohniot—Seneca for “evil-soul gatherer”—is a zoomorph. He has human and animal forms. He’s here to gather the evil parts of souls. One of death’s emissaries, most of the time he courses the Milky Way, the pathway of spirits. You can’t see him on the wing when he comes to Earth; from below, he’s the color of the sky. When he settles outside a longhouse door, he has a wolf face, a panther’s body, and a vulture’s wings and talons.

  The sick and the dying hear him clawing. He whines like a cat when the spirit is on its way. He snarls like a wolf when it makes him wait too long. But the Evil-Soul Gatherer can seize only the spirits of evil-hearted people, and most human souls have protectors. Even if the evil of a soul is overpowering, just a bit of good might be enough to save it—if it puts up a hell of a struggle as Dehohniot carries it across the skies. Once out of his clutches, other invisibles guard the path of the soul, guiding it to its future home.

  THE UNDERGROUND BUFFALO

  The center of the earth was thought to be a vast cave full of winding chambers, surging rivers, bottomless troughs, deadly gases, and steaming springs. By the time of the Iroquois, the Great Spirit had penned there many of the creations of the Evil-Minded Spirit. Banished, too, were evildoing mortal creatures: greedy beasts, venomous serpents, poisonous insects, and noxious weeds. The most dangerous of all the critters here were the great white underground buffalo. They are forces of primal chaos.

  Little would be left of the upper world if these titans got loose from under it. The main duty of the mighty and elusive third tribe of Little People, the Hunters, was to guard the doors of this underworld.

  Once in a while, a couple of these mammoth buffalo-beasts stormed out, and a mad pursuit commenced. Some underearth elves tried to hunt or herd them. Others raised the alarm to the clouds, a sunset so red and unique that all Hunter fays in the world were put on guard. Whenever you see one of those faerie skies, you know somewhere the chase is on.

  Late one afternoon in June 2010, I looked to the south outside my East Aurora house and saw one of those odd, mixed skies. Clouds coursed the watery horizon like icebergs in the North Atlantic. All above hurled into the gray of coming night, but out of the turquoise bed and miles-distant whiteness forged one truculent cumulus, striding like a promontory that dared the waves to beat. A stray beam from a sun in some quarter of the sky hit him and lit him such a martial pink that he stood alone in the billows and aerial waves. I wondered if the underground buffalo were at their game in the Alleghenies.

  WHITE DEER OF THE GENESEE

  In his code, Prophet Handsome Lake mentions a pair of deer representing a new species. The buck is spotted white and the doe so striped all over her back. These deer are the sacred creations of the Creator. Not only is it commanded that these animals are not to be killed, but no “pale invader,” no white, will ever see them. Cornplanter says these deer were killed by one of the prophet’s jealous rivals. Maybe so, but a few of the faithful have reported seeing them at night in the woods.

  There may be a place you can see these deer today, on an old army base along Canandaigua Lake. The white deer are interpreted as a pair of albinos that miraculously survived and reproduced. Maybe so. Fenced in as they are, they are far safer from predators of all types. Or else maybe the times are changing. When the whites start to value the teachings of the Native Americans, the world may be entering a new phase.

  9

  Talking Animals

  This whole day have I followed in the rocks, And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape . . .

  W. B. YEATS, “FERGUS AND THE DRUID” (1893)

  SPECIAL ANIMALS

  There are stories about talking animals in many world cultures. The ones we encounter in European tradition are diverse as you might gather, but they are almost exclusively folkloric and literary. No one runs into them anymore, at least that I’ve heard of. And when they appear in a tale or story, the narrative almost always bears an explanation for them: They are enchanted people, much of the time, or even supernatural beings who can take many a form. Sometimes they’re just special or magical animals.

  We come to other talking animals in twentieth-century reservation stories and recent paranormal reports. T
hese have a distinctly unnatural cast; they are curiously animal-like humans or the reverse. They play things a lot closer to the vest. They don’t stop and explain themselves.

  Few upstate Iroquois doubt that talking animals like these can still be encountered from time to time. Now and then we may catch them at it. Some of them are familiar horses and cattle, maybe even beloved dogs and cats. Always their speech is in the native lingo, never any European tongue. You doubt us?

  If you walk by a pasture at night and see farm animals that don’t appear to have noticed you, be still. You might see something that astounds you.

  Keep an eye on your cats sometime when they don’t know they are being watched. Do they look like they are having a conversation?

  Keep a window open as you let your dog out at night; see if another is waiting, and look and listen as quietly as you can. Do they draw close and nuzzle like they are conversing?