The injured man thought he was dreaming when he saw some little men come out of the underbrush. They bustled around for a few minutes, communicated with nods and gestures, and took up positions by the mouth of the cave. There they drew their tiny, powerful-looking bows and waited in ambush. The warrior just watched. So the stories about Hunters were true! His last hours on earth would be rewarded with a spectacle if he could only hold on to see it.
He must have fainted. He woke to feel the ground rumbling. Something was shaking the trees near the mouth of the cave. Two enormous, blocky animals burst forth, mowing down the trees with an awful cracking. He could only presume they were the famous Great White Buffalo. Stomping and snorting, they stood, looking with their red-rimmed eyes as if treasuring a moment of anticipation before a charge into a helpless world.
But the massive animals shook their hides and moaned as if attacked by poisonous insects. The man saw the tiny arrows of the Hunters dart in and out of shade toward their targets. In seconds one fell, then the other. The little men came up to the human warrior.
“Thanks for not giving us away,” one said. “Let’s take a look at you.” They sat with him, opened their packs, and shared a meal. He took only a few nibbles of the fairy food but felt full and very quickly better. The chill passed from his bones, and his joints felt as if he’d just come out of a peaceful sleep. His wound was by then only a scab that healed as he watched.
The little men packed up and said their farewells. The warrior made his way back to his village and, after the rejoicing, told his story. A large party of his comrades went with him back to the salt lick where his adventure had taken place. Around it were strewn the giant bones of the animals the little Hunters had killed, already starting to settle into the earth.
The Fairy Healers (Traditional)
One spring day, the members of an Onondaga community were making maple sugar in the woods. The village was empty except for one young man home sick. He stretched out on a couch, hoping to sleep away his aches.
In late morning, he woke to the sensation of something stroking his temples and forehead. He didn’t see anything when he opened his eyes and thought he was dreaming, but the feeling continued. He decided to stay still as if he were sleeping and try to sort the matter out. Soon he was sure of it: these were tiny human hands and fingers, massaging him gently.
The hands worked their way along his neck and head and patted his shoulders. Then they went down his chest, and at last as he rolled his eyes without moving, he could see a small, well-proportioned human arm coming through the wall of the wigwam. His curiosity got the best of him. He grabbed the arm and gave it a tug. It pulled out of his grasp like the tail of a running buffalo. Something hit him on the head, and everything went dark.
He came to in a few hours and noticed that his head and shoulders felt fine, but his torso and legs still ached. Wherever the little hands had touched him, he was a lot better. He told the story to his mother when she came home. She listened sadly. “My boy, I should have told you about this before. You had no way of knowing, but you have offended one of our family’s best friends. I’ll see if I can make things right.”
She took the finest deer hide she had and cut it into pieces for twelve pairs of moccasins. She set them all out in the center of the wigwam with beads, thread, and colored moose hair. “Go to sleep, and lie quietly this time, no matter what happens,” she said.
Around the middle of the night, the boy woke to sounds coming from the direction of the skins. He felt the fingers on him, but this time he let them do their pat-down without moving and fell asleep before they were through. He woke healthy in the morning to find that all the objects were gone. In their place appeared a marvelous pair of moccasins, crafted and ornamented far beyond the skills of the Onondaga. They fit the youth perfectly.
TWO NATIONS
Arthur Parker summarized the three types of Little People as those who deal with hunting, those who work with natural cycles, and those who come most to people. Those categories may have been superseded.
In the 1950s, Edmund Wilson conjectured that only two nations of Little People were appearing in the lore and report of his mostly Tuscarora confidants. Wilson broke them down into Healers and Tricksters.
Without directly confirming these categories, Michael Bastine generally backs the two-tribe impression among today’s reservation folk. One branch of Little People—presumably Wilson’s Healers—has only goodwill. These smallest of the fairy folk, only a few inches high, are preservers of the natural environment and all life in it. They are by far the strongest of the Little People and can protect humans from the others if they choose. Full-sized living people almost never see them any more.
The larger kind—a foot or two in height—are likely to be Wilson’s Tricksters. They are the type people most often report—small enough to be miraculous but too big to be stepped on without notice. You’ll see this kind on the road once in a while and at the edge of the woods. These may be the ones whose artifacts and even body parts are kept in a few very private collections. They are not always goodwilled. These are the ones who come to people in dreams, making their hearts race. They are the ones who come to children.
It’s hard to be sure where the Little People we hear about fit into the classic categories of literature: Hunters, Stone Throwers, and Plant Growers. We don’t seem to be hearing from Hunters anymore. If what’s left are Healers and Tricksters, well and good. But today’s Tricksters are playing rough.
Little Tricksters
(Contemporary)
Mike Bastine and Mad Bear were on one of their cross-country forays in the late 1970s. They stopped somewhere in the Ozarks for dinner, took the leftovers, and set off driving again. At a ridiculously late hour of the evening, they neared a remote motel. Mad Bear told Mike to pull in. “We’ve got to get some sleep.” Mike had trouble understanding that, since Mad Bear had been snoring all night beside him as he drove, but he let it pass.
Mad Bear jumped into the shower. As Mike unloaded the car, he kept hearing an odd sound effect—blurry, abrupt, and melodic. It was half zip, half laugh— zzzzzhee-hee!—like a needle scratched across an LP of the voices of indigenous children. As he settled into the room he could hear them through the windows. He yelled into the bathroom for Mad Bear.
“It’s just the Little People,” yelled Mad Bear back. “They’re as common around here as they are back home. Boy, they’re really out there tonight.”
“Are we in trouble, Bear?” said Mike.
“Mike, take that leftover chicken and biscuits and leave them in that little circle of trees out there. You remember. You saw it when we parked.”
“Uh. . . . Bear, do I really want to go out there?”
“It’ll be all right,” said Mad Bear, sticking his head out the bathroom door. “They really like it when you do that. Just take the tray out there and make the leftovers look nice. Put them in a circle real neat on the napkin and come on back in. And don’t look out there right away.”
Mike did as he was told. Soon the sounds turned steady but softer, like appreciative murmuring. Then they stopped. Mike parted the curtains and looked out. Sure enough, the vittles were gone. That’s no proof of anything supernatural, of course. A raccoon could have gobbled them as neatly and almost as quickly—if it had been waiting. But it wouldn’t have sounded like that.
Impressions of the Little People
The Tonawanda Reservation has a couple of traditional sledding hills. The most popular is by the Baptist church, but there’s another spot off Sandhill Road. A group of children went there one January afternoon in 2003.
Most of the kids went up and down an open slope, but the youngest hopped on his disc, took off down a wooded trail, and disappeared. Soon the others heard him calling wildly and ran down to look for him.
As they got closer, they heard him yelling something about Little People. Sure enough, when they found him by his saucer in a clump of trees, they saw them, too: hundreds of ti
ny human footprints the size of rabbit feet, making blue shadows in the sunny snow. This grove by a creek must have been a playground for them the night before!
The Fading Light
Abenaki author and teacher Joe Bruchac lives in Greenfield, New York, in the home of his grandparents. He has a marvelous library and bookshop in the house and has turned the land around it into a nature preserve. He taught his children to love the natural environment and not to fear the night or the woods. They spent many hours running, playing, and hiking about the area. They even had a family game, sort of a tag/hide-and-seek/treasure hunt, running through the woods at night.
One night, one of Joe’s boys came home gushing about mystery lights and Little People. “Dad, I followed one of those lights,” he said, breathless. “It came down in a clump of trees. I watched it till it faded out. There were Little People, all around it.” He was five at the time. A few years later, he had no recollection of the event.
An Odd Little Fellow
Indian Hill on the Tuscarora Reservation is a sprawling, wooded area famous for Little People sightings and psychic events of other kinds. Joe Anderson hunted there as a boy and remembers places that were outright spooky. “There were times when my dogs wouldn’t go in a certain direction, and I figured it was time to get out of there.”
An artist friend of his was painting one morning on Indian Hill when he looked up from the easel and saw one of the Little People through the undergrowth from about thirty feet away. He held his breath. The little man was like a tiny Native American, but there was something as primal about him as an animal or the tree beside him. The artist couldn’t see him closely enough to notice clothing or other particulars.
The optical conditions were queer. The exact spot in which the Jungie appeared was just a foot or so from the base of a big maple, in the slanting fall of a sunbeam. The artist moved his head as stealthily as he could, hoping for a better look, but the Jungie was invisible from other positions, even ones not blinded by foliage. Only when the man looked at him just so where the sunlight became visible in the shimmering dust motes could he see anything of him at all.
The merry little fellow stood and basked in the light, preening in its warmth, like a groundhog on its hind legs, as if he could taste every second of existence. He was visible for fifteen minutes before he started to fade. He may not have moved, but the beam changed its fall around him, and he was soon gone.
No wonder so few of us see them.
THE FAIRY FISHERS
Eleazar Williams was one of the great Tuscarora medicine men. It was widely said that he had good friends among the Djogao. This magical friendship has parallels in other traditions.
In Celtic legend, an acquaintance with the fairies can bestow great powers upon a lucky human. Scotsman Thomas the Rhymer or True Thomas (1220–1297) was thought gifted with prophecy and poetry due his seven-year dalliance with the fairy queen. Blind Irish harpist Anthony Raftery (1780–1835) was suspected of having midnight tutorials with the Fair Folk. Legendary King Daniel O’Donohue even joined them at the end of his life.
In Celtic tradition, the fairies disliked being seen, even by those to whom they wished well. They often communicated and even played pranks by tossing tiny flint shards nicknamed elf shot or fairy shot. One historic witness reported a gentle rain of pebbles on the roof and windows of an old house that troubled people’s sleep all night. In the morning, piles of tiny Neolithic arrowheads and chippings were found beneath the windows, suggesting that some mysterious pranksters had gathered these obscure objects and used them as projectiles. Where did the Little People—if such they were—find piles of these impossibly ancient artifacts? Maybe the fairies do know the dead. Something of the sort in both senses may be going on in Iroquois tradition.
The Sound of Pebbles Tossing
One dim night, Eleazar Williams and his young son Ted were spearfishing along the Niagara River not far from Lewiston. An eddy formed a pool a few feet from a feeder stream, creating a fine place to look for lake sturgeon. These fish could be big, and if one were taken that had a bit of roe in it, it could fetch a good price. It had to come in pretty close to the spearfisher, and he would have to know just when to launch.
“How are you going to see a fish?” said young Ted. It would have been hard enough to see anything under this water in full daylight.
“Just wait and you’ll learn something,” said Eleazar. “I’ve got some helpers.”
“If you catch a sturgeon on this kind of night, I’ll carry it home myself.”
“Watch what you wish for,” said the father, standing poised with raised spear. He stood that way a long time.
Ted started to notice some faint noises in the brush around them at the edge of the creek mouth. Soon, little ticks came to his hearing as though drops of rain were falling, but there was no rain, and the sound came from objects softly striking the metal point of the spear. The tone of these impacts was more like the friendly tap of little flecks of stone. It sounded exactly as though someone with an uncanny aim was tossing pebbles at the tip of the spear. The healer held his pose. Almost like the code of a ticking Geiger counter, the rhythm of the percussion changed. Eleazar made a sudden rush and a lunge into the water. The pitchfork spear came back out with a squirming, flapping critter that gleamed in the dim moonlight. It was a sturgeon! It weighed over a hundred pounds.
Ted’s father helped him carry the monster, but this event remained a curiosity in Ted’s memory to the end of his days. What or who had been throwing those tiny stones?
The 1927 dam on Caneadea Creek created Rushford Lake, a summer boating and resort community off Route 243 in Allegany County. It also flooded two tiny villages, East Rushford and Kelloggville.
Every winter, they drain the lake, aiming for an ideal depth. Once in a while they go too far, and if you’re there at just the right time, what’s left of the buildings comes into view. It has to look pretty eerie, and clearly someone agrees. Ghost Lake was filmed here in 2004. This is also hilly country. It feels strange, as you drive through it, to look for a lake.
The Boys and Girls Got Me Out . . .
(1976)
A friend of ours and her family often visited Rushford Lake in the summer, staying with a cottage owner. When she was seven, they paid a winter visit. The point of the out-of-season trip was to get a look at the odd lake emptied. She’s sure of the date: December 21, 1976. Thick snow was everywhere.
Our storyteller, her brother, the son of the cottage owner, and his cousin were inseparable summer companions. They dedicated the bright December afternoon to sledding on a hill they had only heard about, somewhere above the highest cottage. As they set out, the only girl tore off ahead of them, calling back a promise to beat them all to the top of the destined hill.
She crossed a creek on a makeshift bridge, a thin wood panel. She cut through a stretch of woods, a cornfield, and a clearing. Then she stood before it. She waited at the bottom for a quick, admiring rest. Then up she ran.
She remembers getting to the top and simply staring. This hill was like a plateau, its summit high enough to be scary. She could see into the valley below. She could see to all the four quarters. The sun, the clouds, the other hills. It was intoxicating. All she had to do for a whole new look at the world was run to another side of the hilltop and gaze! The slopes fell below. Which would they be sledding first? When the boys arrived, she wanted to show them the best. From one side to the other she ran.
She got a jolt. The snow fell through under her. She felt icy water coursing over her ankles and sloshing between her toes. She must have stepped into a puddle hidden by the snow. She hurried to get over it.
Then she heard something she’d never heard before, a loud cracking sound muffled by snow. She foundered, knee deep. She kept going.
Next she was in up to her waist. The best course seemed to be to go forward. She’d learned to swim the summer before and wasn’t afraid to test her new skill. She went under, snow spilling down aroun
d her.
She came up, but the billows came in on her as she tried to swim. It was as much a barrier as the ice at her chest. The ground under her was rising, though. Soon her upper body rested against a bank, but she stalled trying to climb out. Rubber boots slid on sloping, underwater rocks. The snow on the bank choked and chilled her as she tried to grip it. And that full-body snowsuit, logged with stinging water, doubled her weight. She struggled until she was exhausted. Ice daggers went into her legs.
She called out, but, ringed with snowbanks, her cries went nowhere. The boys could have been ten feet away and not seen or heard her. Were they still coming? The sky above her was desperately bright.
Her trunk under water, her head on her arm, she collapsed and sobbed. Soon her legs didn’t hurt. But she couldn’t lift her head! Her cheek had frozen to her sleeve. Where were the boys? They’d played other jokes before. She was so tired she could sleep forever. Then something happened.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 33