Mad Bear often forgot the details of even his most electrifying readings. It frustrated Mike, who had been raised off the reservation. When he first started meeting with Mad Bear, he searched for a Western-style understanding. Time and again he tried to ask Mad Bear about old cases, reminding him of particulars. “Do you remember that reading? You can’t forget that one?” It was hard bringing Mad Bear to admit that he remembered.
This amnesia may well have been sincere. The healing work had to be an exhausting art demanding total immersion, and Mad Bear did so much of it. Once he said that he deliberately put old cases out of thought because he didn’t want them clouding up his mind and getting in the way of new ones. But one of the things about Mad Bear that Mike never really got was how he could let such marvelous experiences completely slip from his consciousness. Maybe they weren’t marvels to Mad Bear, to the medicine people.
Mad Bear’s home region of western New York is known as a cultural melting pot, and he had become a great favorite of its ethnic and immigrant communities. He had come into contact this way with many world traditions and had learned to be respectful of them all. He had also picked up a number of keepsakes, and his cabin had become a den of crazy objects and artifacts. One day when Mike Bastine was helping Mad Bear move, a ragged doll caught his attention. His mentor told him its strange history.
The Devil Doll
Sometime in the late 1970s, a family from a Caribbean island was having some difficulties that they sensed might have a supernatural root. The mother and father came to Mad Bear for a reading, which he commenced in his usual way. He looked in his glass of water and tobacco and studied it hard. “Somebody’s jealous of you,” he told the couple. “And I bet it’s got something to do with where you came from. Have you had any visitors recently?”
They had: people they knew back in the islands.
“Well, they brought a little surprise for you,” said Mad Bear. “Knowing what I do about those islands and the way people from there operate, I might guess they left a doll for you. It’s most likely somewhere where it’ll be close, probably somewhere in your house. These are the early stages, where nothing much is happening, but pretty soon it’s going to start interfering in your daily life. You have to go home and see if you can find it. Let me see if I can help you.”
Mad Bear looked harder into his glass and tried to visualize the doll’s location. As if looking off through his own walls, he spoke out loud about the images that were coming to him. He talked about walls, paintings, and furniture and seemed to be describing a room in a house.
“The object those people left behind will resonate,” Mad Bear explained to the couple. “It contains basically the same energy as a good thing. But it’s powerful, and people will put their own twist on it in order to interfere with people’s lives.”
Within days, they found the doll behind a dresser in a bedroom and brought it to Mad Bear. “Those people had it in their luggage,” he told the couple. “I’m not sure they were determined to hurt you, and they may have been in the process of deciding whether or not to leave it when something else happened. Or maybe it came out of the luggage by itself. These things have a tendency to work on their own.”
Mad Bear conducted a ceremony to reroute the force of the devil doll, and he held on to it after the ceremony was over.
The doll was a rough thing, a human effigy made mostly of the leaves of a plant or tree that was not native to the Great Lakes region. It was likely that its leaves were from a palm tree. The doll had been dyed in some places to make it look more like a person. Ribbons had been tied onto it to simulate clothes, and it had a bit of a headdress. Eyes and features had been drawn onto it, and symbols burned in. Mad Bear recognized the marks designed to make people suffer.
The doll didn’t, however, have needles stuck in it. This was no surprise to Mad Bear. “They don’t need the needles,” he told Mike. “That’s for tourists. This doll was designed to hold an energy, and that energy would drain people and create a discomfort that would just get worse. When they make the charms, they put the person’s name right into it. It knows who it’s supposed to act on.
“We all have days when we’re just not feeling up to things. If that lasts too long, you always have to get suspicious. It could be something other than just having a down day. If something lingers a while, you need to go talk to somebody. Geez, there’s not too many people left you can go to anymore.”
Medicated Goo
One afternoon in the 1950s, our late confidant Bill Bowen was helping two young friends work on a car in a garage along Buffalo Creek in Elma. One boy had an accident with the blowtorch that dealt a sickly wound to the back of his hand. The nearest adult was an old Seneca who lived within walking distance. The three of them rushed over, hoping he would call the hospital.
The old man came out, looked at the hand, then rummaged around his cabin and emerged with a small tin holding a homemade potion—a strange pale green goo. He spread a bit of this fibrous ointment all over the wound.
