Mad Bear also wore a tiny sack on a cord about his neck. This was the immediate line of personal defense. He never took it off in public, and the one time he did so for a dip in a swimming hole, he was struck almost immediately by the bite of a strange-looking insect, one that sent him to a hospital and seriously weakened him thereafter.
From the fact that there was a daypack and a tweener, we deduce that Mad Bear had a master collection, possibly even a cauldron-sized power cache that would have been kept somewhere quite safe, possibly even buried. The concatenation of it all in one place probably made it an orenda-emanator that could work medicine long-range.
We’ve heard of these medicine kettles being unearthed around New York state. We’ve mentioned the one in Buffalo at the center of a ring of bodies, and it may not have been a holy one. One wonders if someday someone will find the major storehouse of Mad Bear’s medicine under equally cryptic circumstances.
SABAEL AND THE MEDICINE BEADS
The variously named Sabael (Sabile, Sebele) Benedict was probably an Abenaki born in western Maine. At twelve, he ended up fighting at the Battle of Quebec and ever after figured his age based on that 1759 clash. He needed to have some benchmark because he lived a good long life in Mohawk country in the undeveloped Adirondacks.
In his late teens, he’d had enough of white men’s wars and ducked out of it all to be the first settler of Indian Lake, seventy miles northwest of Saratoga Springs. He was a legend around Hamilton County, liked and trusted by the whites who came in later. Not all was due to the good in white hearts. Sabael sold the rights to a valuable iron mine at Keesville for a bushel of corn and a dollar. Other decisions went his way. So well regarded was Sabael Benedict that a settler offered his own red-haired daughter as a bride. From what we hear, this was a fine long marriage.
Sabael was a medicine man. Where he got his training is anyone’s guess. Maybe he was one of those naturals. Maybe it was all in the medicine necklace he wore. This string of beads was good against many a complaint.
If he was in a canoe when a storm rolled in, all he had to do was drop a bead in the water and the lake would stay at peace. On land, just hanging this necklace on a tree would guarantee that no lightning would strike anyone under it. When the heebie-jeebies came on him in the woods, he took the necklace out of his pouch and held it before him like a torch. The chepi—“hostile spirits” in an Algonquin tongue—cleared before him like schools of fish before a skin diver. Something kept him alive over a century.
One night at the end of his very long life, Sabael went on his last ramble, trudging into the trees and elements he had lived among. Maybe the Great Spirit was calling. His body was never found. His worried wife went looking for him, and she was found, frozen and buried in snow, on a small island in Indian Lake. Her apparition has been reported on this island, as well as the sound of his voice calling her.
FOR THE UNBORN CHILDREN
Early in July 1998, I called Mike Bastine to go over a certain story I had heard him tell a couple times. “Heck, there’s a guy in town that tells the story a lot better,” he said. “Ted Williams. He’s who I heard it from. I’m going up to Lewiston to see him tomorrow. Why don’t you come on up and meet him?”
Nobody was around when I got to the meeting spot. I set up with my laptop under a tree. In half an hour, a car pulled up and parked beside mine. Pam Bastine, Mike’s wife, got out with a long-haired gentleman built like many Tuscaroras—big chested and middle sized. The pair had just returned from lunch, and Michael had gone back to work.
Ted was then in his late sixties. He was a handsome, photogenic man with a still mostly black mane. Pam told him about my work, which didn’t knock him over. He was the most naturally short-spoken author I’d ever met. Even his syllables were clipped. He kept his teeth close together when he talked, as if he were determined to hold on to a piece of hide in his molars and someone were tugging on it as he spoke. I wasn’t sure he liked me. I was planning the next move of my day when the old healer came up with a small, dense plastic disc. “How about a little game?” he said with a gleam in his eyes.
“Ultimate Frisbee?” I had played that active sport in my teacher days. It also took a team.
“Disc golf,” said the healer with a huff.
“Ted’s the national champion,” said Pam.
“That’s really something,” I said. “National champion.”
“The sixty-fives,” said Ted. “Couple years ago. Course I won’t win again till I’m seventy and this one guy gets out of the age group. He’s one year younger. Then I won’t win till I’m seventy-five.”
“National champion at anything,” I said. “That’s something.”
“The guys in the fifties are a throw a hole better,” he said.
“Just think if they were sixty-five,” I said. “You’d get ’em.”
“It’d be the same,” he said. “I’d be eighty then.”
We played nine holes on the state park course, firing the long-soaring discs to the distant, metal-chained baskets on poles. The green was so thick that I could hardly see what we were aiming at. Ted was way ahead at the end.
We sat again back at the start. Ted was curious how the research that became this book was going to go. I started in on the subjects: medicine people,
