Mad Bear looked at the drawing for a minute and asked about the part of the sky in which Joe had seen the star cluster. In a few seconds, something registered. “Wow, it’s farther along now than I thought,” he said. “When that figure’s done, it’s the next purification for the world.”
Swiftie at Yaddo
In some circles it’s thought that most medicine people have psychic powers that they never use for show. A display of prophecy and spirit-talking like those of today’s TV mediums is presumed child’s play to many of them.
Abenaki author Joe Bruchac’s late 1990s circle of friends included Swift Eagle, a seventy-year-old southwestern Native American everybody just called Swiftie. To some, he seemed a lighthearted soul. Others sensed that Swiftie was an elder who may have been trained in Pueblo and Apache spirituality. Most Native North Americans tip their hats to the Southwest as the source of the continent’s oldest traditions.
One afternoon, Joe, Swift Eagle, and other friends were visiting Linda Hogan and Lewis Elder, Native authors in residence at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat just eastof the village of Saratoga Springs, New York. It was Swiftie’s first visit to the former Trask estate. He marveled at the mansion, the grounds, the setup, and the people. As others talked, the bemused Swiftie went on his own little tour.
After an hour had passed, someone wondered about him, and the group set out in search of him. They found Swiftie by one of the lakes in rapt conversation with a woman, pointing to spots in the trees, the creeks, the lakes, and the mansion itself. The guest, a newcomer to Yaddo, had mistaken him for one of the old-timers and asked him about the spirits of the place. As naturally as discussing the weather of the past week, Swiftie started walking her around, telling her the history of certain spots according to the spirit personalities he encountered. As his friends came up, he was just finishing a tale about the pair of invisible women he detected.
Joe Bruchac recalled author David Pitkin’s accounts of Yaddo and suspected that Swiftie had discovered two of its most commonly reported haunters, both twentieth-century women. Joe has learned to expect the miraculous among Native elders, but this was still remarkable. Everyone looked at Swiftie with a new regard.
Ted’s Dream Healing
Twice a year in April and October, Native elders lead a conference at a camp in Jackson, Ohio. Ted Williams and Mike Bastine were the speakers in April 2005. My then domestic partner and I had spent a couple weeks in the Carolinas. We timed our return trip to western New York to catch Mike and Ted in action. We drove all one Friday from North Carolina and arrived in early evening. While she took our scrappy, forty-pound polar bear of a dog for a long walk on the grounds, I sought out the two stars and found them tucking into a potluck buffet.
Mike and Ted sat opposite each other at the end of a cafeteria table. Nearby diners craned their necks to catch their conversation. A seat next to Ted had been respectfully left vacant. He motioned to it when I greeted him, and I took it.
I was surprised at how much private talk I was able to have with them both in this public setting. Ted told me some wonderful stories, such as the one about Bluedog, and he told me tales about the False Faces and the Fairy Tree. But this visit was just a greeting. My friend and I had to get to nearby Chillicothe and find an inn that would take us and our quirky cub.
That night I had a terrible dream. My mother had fallen out of her hospitalbed, and I had to drive over and help the nurses pick her up. As I was starting to lift her the nurses suddenly disappeared. Her rag-doll body and the rails of the bed made the task impossible. I lifted limb and torso, but her core weight shifted like sand in a sack. A shoulder went over, a hip came back down. I was so busy trying to do it all so gently that I failed to notice, at first, that she had taken on the hide and tawny hair of a big cat, a lion or puma. She was still limp and vulnerable in her new shape, though, and trapped within her declining mind. She chuckled impishly at everything as though it were all funny. Shocked, repelled, terrified, I kept to my task with exquisite care. It was endless.
I woke with a start and sat straight up in the bed.
Like everyone, I’ve had the occasional nightmare. Most often I conjure a weapon and strike back at whatever the menace is, or I shape-shift and become the bigger predator. My dream mind is good at that. Once I took on a werewolf by becoming one. Another time I launched bolts from my eyes at a T-Rex like Cyclops the X-man.
I’ve never had a dream whose affect on me was as creepy as that one. It touched every nerve in my body. I had no idea why I had had it then. I couldn’t track its occurrence to anything that had happened that day.
My mother’s decline had affected me. I was at her side as she passed over. But many people go through much worse, and she had been gone for two years.
Where do these dreams come from? I think some of them are backdated flowerings of old incidents, eruptions of things that have been brewing in the mind for years. Maybe these turmoils seethe in us every night, and only once in a while project themselves into dreams that we remember. The effect of this one was awful. I said nothing about it to my companion.
We went to the morning session of the conference. When Ted was done talking, he ducked out somewhere and no one could find him. My companion
