In a few days, a call came to his home. A woman with the accent of the reservation was on the line. She seemed uncomfortable, as if she’d made the call only to repay a debt. She asked my friend what was wrong, listened to his answer, and waited before she spoke.
“We Seneca people have legends about things like these,” she said, “these Little People. I’m not sure anybody really knows what they are. Sometimes they show themselves to children like this, though, and then we think they’re up to no good.” She hesitated before she spoke again.
“There’s nothing you and your wife can do but wait. Some children stop seeing these things as they grow, and these children are OK. Some children don’t stop seeing them, and . . .” She paused and took a breath. “I hope your boy is one of the lucky ones.”
As if an afterthought, she spoke again. “Oh, and one more thing. Be sure to watch your boy. Never leave him alone outside. Never let him out of your sight, especially near woods or bushes or trees—at least until he stops seeing these things.”
Within a few months, the boy stopped mentioning these visits from Little People, and the case seemed closed. What happens to the children who aren’t so lucky?
The Seneca language reminds us of Latin in some regards. It’s a subtle, complex, old tongue that only a handful of people speak any more. One does not learn Seneca in a long weekend. Like Latin has become to Christians, Seneca is a language of traditional spirituality, used mostly in reservation rites, dances, and prayers by people who cannot always converse in it. Due to its use in the incantations and spells of reservation power people, Seneca, like Latin, could be considered the voice of magic, of supernatural beings.
The Children Who Came Back
(Seneca, Contemporary)
In the late spring of 2005, a young white man, his Seneca wife, and their two children were at a family gathering on the Tonawanda Reservation. After dinner, the couple’s boy and girl, then six and four, played with some reservation kids. The husband lounged outside, keeping half an eye on the brood. When the mass of them headed off for the railroad trestle, he saw no reason to object. The tracks were unused, and they were in clear sight, one hundred yards away. He relaxed, enjoying the slow merge of day into night.
He found himself studying some odd lights by the overgrown tracks at which he’d last seen the children. They were delicate, fist-size, and incandescent, sashaying a foot or so off the ground in open spaces, moving as seamlessly through the patches of brush as if they could both fly and climb lightly. He realized that he had been seeing them for some time without noticing. Did the children have flashlights?
But this was a different form of light. Their texture was odd. They were light spheres, too diffuse to be man-made, but too big and steady to be fireflies. They stayed mighty low to the ground, too. They lasted as long as he looked and drifted off into denser wood. He could think of no natural explanation for them.
Just before full dark, his two children came back. The four-year-old didn’t have much to say for herself, seeming bemused, even a little sly, as if holding a secret she needn’t share, but the boy was beside himself. “Dad! Dad! There are Little People that live by those tracks! Little People!” For his age, he was quite descriptive. Wonderful friends, they were full of tricks and fun. They told him about the sounds the animals made and what they were saying by them. They made life in the woods seem like a never-ending amusement ride. He was also amazed. He was old enough to have a picture of reality and to fall into wonder atthe violations of it. No one at school had told him that the world held anything like Little People.
The boy’s Seneca grandmother came out in the middle of this conversation and caught the drift instantly. She scolded both children harshly and told them not to be playing with Little People. Her attitude was as if “they ought to know,” as if she might have told them this before. Then she turned to the parents. “Take them home, and don’t say any more about this,” she said. “Call me if anything strange happens.” The white father found it all puzzling. It was just children telling tall tales.
A dozen miles away, the dad spent one of the worst nights of his life. Every five minutes he jump-started. It wasn’t exactly material sounds that woke him, just the sense that something was in the driveway. Time after time he got up to peer out the broad second-floor window. He never saw anything. Another room overlooked the spot: the one in which the children slept.
In the morning, the six-year-old described a remarkable night of his own. “Dad! Dad! You know who came to see us last night? It was the Little People from Gramma’s! They were outside all night in the driveway! They were trying to get us to come out and play! I really wanted to, but I was good. I remembered what Grammy told us. I didn’t think you wanted us to go out there, either, Dad.”
The father called his wife’s mother and gave her all this. She told him to leave the house quickly with his wife and children and not to return before the end of the day. When they came back, something about the apartment felt different, and a faint, natural fragrance lingered in the air. The couple
