Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  These southwestern chindi can be dispatched for personal reasons, but they seem to be impersonal beings, however sinister they might be to their targets. They go where they’re sent; they address matters of balance, and they have in some sense the force of nature behind them. This outline is similar to some Iroquois beliefs. I’ve asked my confidants if the Iroquois have a supernatural assassin like that animal filled with the chindi. Occasionally there’s been a telling look, but no one has wanted to talk.

  Once I brought the subject up to Duce Bowen, and he didn’t say much. He did look at me like I’d come across something I wasn’t supposed to know. Even Michael Bastine got a little terse. “Yeah, they got . . . something like that.”

  The last story of my second book A Ghosthunter’s Journal is “A Question of Levels,” a tale about the curses that accompany reservation politics and the altered animals that sometimes embody them. It reminded a fellow I know of something he’d experienced.

  When this gent was a kid, he used to play at a hill in the village of East Aurora called Old Baldy. Not far from a known ancient Native American settlement and the site of reputed earthworks, this was a hill whose prehistory is incalculable. He and a few other kids encountered some kind of animal that seemed put together out of many others. It probably weighed forty or so pounds, but it was a platypus of the Northeast Woodlands, an interspecies Frankenstein composed of impractical and unrelated parts. Even its behavior was unnatural. It scared the kids. One of the mothers arrived by surprise and shepherded them all away. They talk about a mother’s instinct; this one was in no mood to analyze the situation years later.

  When the same witness was in his twenties, he was hunting with some buddies about two miles from the former site. Again they encountered an altered animal, one whose actions were incomprehensible. It danced, it pranced, it frolicked. Its gestures made no sense along any patterns of animal behavior, and something about the encounter spooked the hunters. Afraid even to shoot at it, they withdrew in a hurry, leaving the animal to its distempered celebration.

  The Big Dog Changeling

  These days, the Iroquois do most of their infighting over “gas and gambling,” in the words of a Seneca friend. On one of the reservations north of Buffalo, a woman got uppity in council. While hanging laundry later that week, she noticed a big dog in her yard. Its profile was strange, and when it turned to look at her, it had partly human features. Its face was that of a Native American man, with long droopy ears.

  She ran in the house, locked the doors, and pulled the shades. She thought it might be a changeling, a shape-shifter who had chosen to come in this form. One thing was sure: It was a dangerous situation. These things had been known to haunt people until they died.

  She stayed inside all night. She waited till afternoon before looking out. The monstrosity was gone. She almost doubted herself, but the neighbors reported hearing a godless howling all that night, like that of a soul so tortured that it turned angry. The sound had no parallel in anyone’s memory, though the elders didn’t seem to be saying all they thought. Maybe this was one of their changelings, sent on another mission.

  The Horse on the Roof

  On the night before they moved out of their trailer on the Tuscarora Reservation, a family of women—two sisters and their daughters—heard some terrible banging on the roof. It sounded like a heavy being crashing and rolling from one end of the metal surface to the other. The mother leaped up, grabbed her .22, and came out shooting. Nothing was found, but the next day some neighbor boys who had heard about the ruckus came over and inspected the roof. On it were the prints of horses’ hooves. No one let the little girls look up there.

  The Strange Old Man

  (Early Twentieth Century)

  When they were boys on the Allegany Reservation, Duce Bowen’s uncles were always getting into trouble. Their neighbor was a solitary old man many suspected of being a power person. The boys set out to goad him into a display.

  They played pranks on him all summer. They were peeping toms, hoping to catch him in some magical practice. They threw rocks at his house at night, hoping to make him steam out after them in an altered form.

  One night, they looked in the old man’s windows and saw him asleep in a chair, the paper folded across his lap and his lower body in shadow. One of the boys swore his legs were hairy, the feet hoofed like those of a goat. They left him alone for a few weeks.

  One night shortly after they’d started back at it, they heard a big racket behind their house. They ran out expecting anything, but found only a little black-and-white dog poking around the back porch. They shooed it off and thought little more of it.

  A few nights later, they heard their neighbor’s screen door open and figured it might be something too good to miss. They snuck through the trees and saw the old fellow come out, stretching as if he’d got up from a nap, and head toward the outhouse. It seemed a golden opportunity to throw rocks at the roof or lock him in with a stick across the latch. They watched him pass by the structure as if he were going in. They crept to it.

  They were just by the door when the black-and-white dog they’d seen the night before tore around the little building. It was tiny, but its fury was terrifying. It had the eyes of a devil! Before they could think, they were scampering home in a fright, the little demon snapping at their ankles. They were out of breath when they got inside.

  “Come to the window,” their mother said. They saw the form of their aged neighbor strolling back up the path toward his house, smoking his pipe. In a minute, his lights came on.

  The boys learned a lesson. They started to look at people with new respect, even outcasts who seemed powerless. They were also good friends to their old neighbor in the coming years, showing as much energy to help him as they had formerly spent teasing him. Duce Bowen always wondered if this scare was what straightened them out.

  DuWayne Bowen heard this tale from the grandmother of the girl who would become his wife.

  A Walk Home

  (Mid-Twentieth Century)

  A Seneca soldier came home after World War II. He’d seen some of the hottest action of the Pacific. Friends had fallen all around him, and he hadn’t been scratched. His first night in Salamanca started a party that wasn’t done till every one of his relatives had him over for dinner. The first week was for brothers, sisters, and grandparents. By the second week, he was visiting cousins. He was a hero to the kids and couldn’t leave without playing with them. After that, he told the elders all about the war and the Pacific. It was almost midnight when he started for home.

  His cousins urged him to stay the night. His route home would take him through Witches’ Walk, they said. But he laughed. Salamanca held nothing to scare anyone who’d been through the war. He put on his army coat and started walking.

  In a few yards, he was wondering if there could be anything to worry about. The neighborhood was dark, as if the Seneca knew a witching night. But it was warm and still, and the moon was bright. The young veteran kept walking.

  At one point on a dirt road near the Allegheny River, he heard voices from a pasture, speaking in Seneca. He heard the word for apple. He kept still and heard a phrase that sounded like Ak hide nay (“Be quiet!”), and then in Seneca, “There’s someone on the road.” He froze.

  “Let’s go to the other end of the field,” another voice said.

  “OK,” said the first. “The apples are better there, anyway.” Out of the darkness behind the trees came two horses. They walked peacefully across the pasture.

  The soldier ran home. His parents had forgotten to leave the porch light on. He was in such a hurry to get in that he banged his head on the door.

  One of our favorite characters from the tales of DuWayne Bowen is this “man the animals talked to.” Bowen always said that the fellow had been real and that he had known him.

  The Man the Animals Talked To

  (Early Twentieth Century)

  In the 1930s an old Seneca man moved to Salamanca from
one of the other reservations. He made his way doing odd jobs for a few bucks and the occasional meal. People got to know him through the work he did. He spent most of his time with his animals, several cats, and a pack of dogs. He was a curious character.

  He walked wherever he went, a couple of dogs always with him. The understanding between them was uncanny. In his presence, these pets seemed more composed than typical animals. There wasn’t the frisking, the sniffing, the reflexive behavior common to cats and dogs. There was a sense of mission about them.

  People passing his house often saw him in his rocker on the porch, animals always near. Sometimes he spoke to them, always in Seneca. It scared people more to hear that he paused to listen. Others swore they saw the other animals lean in when a single one had its say. People wondered if these were witch animals, but there was no report of trouble from them, and when the old man wasn’t around they acted like well-mannered pets, not wizards in disguise. Word got out that he could talk to animals and that he was the man to call whenever an animal was sick.

  Many could recall him leaning near the head of an ailing horse or cow as if conversing with a patient. He usually made up a potion, and most often the animal got well. He never accepted a fee for work like this.

  People never visited him after sundown. The lights in his house were never on at night as if he could see in the dark like an animal.

  The Dark Gray Stallion

  One summer in the 1930s trouble came to the houses on the hill.

  At all hours of the night people heard horses’ hooves on the roads and on the wooded paths behind the houses. Soon they started seeing a strange horse. One old woman reported coming out on her porch at night to find a well-groomed, dark gray stallion, standing still and looking at her with a more-than-natural focus. She screamed, and it trotted into the woods.

  Her husband came out a night or two later for a pail of water and saw the same horse staring at him. The night after, he looked out and saw it stalking the house. He shined a flashlight through the window at it and it took off.

  The community was worried. The old-timers considered this a witch that had come among them in the form of a horse. They were about to call a council of the elders when the man with the dogs paid a visit to the old couple. Some of the neighbors joined in. Everyone told him what they had seen and heard. When they were through, he told them they might see the horse again and that it would be bolder. He didn’t say much when they asked him how he knew.

  Two nights later, a loud thump on the side of the house woke the old couple who had first seen the horse. The woman looked out the kitchen window to see the critter looking in, a foot or two away. She let out a yell and it vanished. The next morning, the man with the dogs came back, heard them out, and decided to stay with them that night.

  Around sunset he and four of his big dogs came back. He carried a bag, a walking stick, and a hunting knife. He and his dogs sat on the dim back porch and waited.

  Around midnight, the dogs perked up their ears. Sure enough, it was the sound of hooves coming down the slope on the path that approached the house. The dogs ran out silently in four directions, and soon the man and woman of the house heard a commotion. They came to the door and looked out on the scene.

  Barking, snarling, and snapping from all directions, the dogs had surrounded the horse. It stomped, snorted, and whinnied fiendishly. It reared and lashed out with its hooves, but it could not break away from the dogs. Their owner came out and spoke a single sharp phrase in Seneca, which made the horse stand still and look at him. The man walked into the woods, followed by the horse and its escort of dogs.

  The old couple waited on the porch, the man holding his shotgun. In an hour, the four dogs ran back to the house, quaking and looking back into the woods as if they had seen something terrifying. The couple worried that the witch horse would be coming back to finish whatever work it had with them. Then the dogs perked up their ears again as if they had heard something and ran back into the woods. The exhausted old pair went to sleep, hoping for the best.

  At the end of the next day, the man who talked to animals was on his porch as always, smoking his pipe and rocking in his chair, animal friends beside him. He never said anything about his night in the woods. No one saw or heard the witch horse again.

  A neighbor, though, recalled something strange on the morning after the incident. He had been driving to work and passed by an old church just as the sun was rising. He spotted the man who talked to animals coming out of the woods, four dogs alongside him. A canvas bag on his shoulder held something heavy enough to make him totter as he walked. No one could guess what was in the bag or what the medicine man’s dogs had seen that scared even them.

  The Allegany Seneca still remember the night the dogs cried together. Even Duce Bowen couldn’t give us a date, but it was a cold one in the autumn, most likely in the late 1930s. It was a night when all the dogs of the valley and all the communities around it set up a keening, as if motivated by some collective grief that they could voice in no other way. There had been signs of it the day before.

  The Night the Dogs Cried Together

  The man who talked to animals had been working for a family, and when he was done, he was asked to look at a dog. The inseparable companion of the boys, the big hound had lost interest in anything, as if he were sick to his belly. The animal man spent a few moments near him on the back porch.

  “Something strange could happen tonight,” he said to the family. “I can’t tell you much about it yet.” On his way home, he stopped at other houses. Sure enough, all the dogs had been listless for a couple of days, and some had started to whine with no apparent cause.

  The man who talked to animals had a lot to think about on his walk home. He fixed meals for himself and his animals and sat a long time with them on the porch. Then he took his usual chair, two cats on his lap, the dogs in their spots. He fell asleep that way.

  Two hours after midnight, he jerked awake to the sound of a dog howling somewhere outside the house. He went to the door for a look. All the dogs in the neighborhood, inside or outside, were carrying on just like it. Their varied tones, pitches, distances, and volumes made an awful, surreal sound that absolutely haunted the valley. His own dogs came close to him and commenced their own whining, but they calmed when he spoke to them. He told them in his Seneca tongue that they did not have to cry out to the world, because he knew their hearts already. Soon they were still.

  He put on his coat and went out. The pale moon, the silver clouds, the deepest turquoise sky, all looked down on the valley of crying dogs. Their songs told him a story. Tears were on his cheeks when he turned back into his own house.

  The next morning a group of people sought him out and asked him about the strange night. Tears came to him again when he started to answer. He told them to prepare their hearts, because a big war was coming, bigger than any that had ever been.

  “Somewhere across the seas, events are in motion, and it’s finally too late for them to be turned around. Many of our sons will leave us, and many will not be coming back. The dogs know this, and they cried by the doors and windows because they love their families, especially the sons who ran with them as boys, who will be with their families only a little while longer.”

  The Dogs Who Saw Too Well

  One summer night in 1954, two young men were coon hunting near the Wyoming County town of Gainesville. Both were already veteran woodsmen, and with them were two blueticks—medium-sized hunting dogs.

  The woods were misty after a day of rain, and they felt unsettled. Every snap and click in the glistening trees sounded like something stalking the two youths. Still, they were armed, and perhaps too young to get as scared as they ought to.

  At one point, the dogs tore off howling into the underbrush. The two hunters followed the racket to a medium-sized tree that stood alone in a circular clearing. The dogs thought they had something, almost certainly a raccoon. They were coon dogs, and they were usually right. The a
mple flashlights revealed nothing but branches and leaves.

  In hunting, this experience is called “a false tree.” Old raccoons are good at scooting up one tree and crossing branches into another. The ruse works with dense trees and young dogs.

  The tree was the first problem here. Not even a squirrel could have hidden in that one, and nothing the weight of a raccoon could get out on its thin branches. It stood a long way from any other trees, too. The two friends looked until they were sure the dogs were wrong and hauled them off, by their leashes, still baying for their imagined quarry. They had never seen veteran dogs so sure of themselves at such an obvious false tree.

  A change came over both those dogs almost immediately after that incident. They grew afraid of the woods at night and never hunted again. Our storyteller wondered if the dogs had indeed chased something up that tree that was still there when they left, simply invisible to humans—or whites—and if it had left a parting lesson for the dogs who could see so well.

  ANIMAL CLANS