DuWayne Bowen told a number of stories about Longnose. He felt them pretty strongly since he was nurtured on them in his own Allegany Reservation childhood.
THE GIANT MOSQUITO
Once upstate New York had formidable marshes. They sent up such hordes of mosquitoes that malaria was a serious plague, even for the incoming whites. Not until the nineteenth century were most of the marshes drained and managed.
In one of his occasional helpful moves, the trickster set up a smudge to get rid of the mosquitoes. All it did was tick them off. The whole swamp full of them pulled together into the form of one gigantic mosquito. The trickster made tracks. The beastie stayed behind, terrorizing the village nearby. It could drain a man with a single sting.
There are a couple of stories about the critter’s demise, including enchanted arrows launched by inspired boys or girls. In one variant, the Creator sends one of his mighty eagles, which so shreds the brute that it reverts again to the hordes of tiny bugs that had made it. This story has many settings, including ones near Batavia, Syracuse, and Conesus Lake.
THE WITCH HAWK
While the cloud eagle of the Great Spirit is one of the most admired of supernaturals, the legends are full of big wingers neither noble nor good tempered. Some hover over swamps and lead hunters to doom. Some whip packs of warriors into a battle frenzy. Others circle fields and snatch babies from the backs of mothers. Some take the forms of gorgeous people and win love only to crush it.
This Witch Hawk is one of these shape-shifting figures. His namesake form is that of a huge raptor. Don’t trust him, though. A pitiless fate alterer, he plays with lives.
Once he appeared as a young chief to a sultry Iroquois woman. Something otherwordly in him both charmed and repelled her, and she wedded a man of her nation. For years the Witch Hawk bided. When the woman gave birth, he snatched her child and left her to die. Nurtured in the wild by the animals, the girl grew to be as lovely as the mother. Then the Witch Hawk came to her, too, in his mortal form. He took her back to her village where he knew she would launch a new cycle of love and disaster, thus doubling his revenge on her mother.
Fey and otherworldly as she was by then, cursed with this life between the worlds, she hurt so many others.
THE SERVERS
In Harriett Maxwell Converse’s rendition of the Iroquois creation myth, two mighty, primal spirit beings dueled for the rights to rule the world. It’s the Evil-Minded Spirit who wanted the fight, and the Good-Minded One wasn’t silly enough to fall for the choice of weapons. The Good One pitched the Evil One into a cave deep in the earth, where he has to stay through all eternity. Only in spirit form can the Evil One return. He can do a surprising amount of damage that way, alas. And he has servants.
These emissaries of the Evil One are called the Servers, and they remain on Earth, in all its quarters. When they rise up to do the Evil One’s bidding, it can be at any time and in any place. When they report for duty, they show themselves as mixed human and beast.
One wonders if American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) might not have heard about these Servers. His tales featured echelons of morphing beings, all working for a common goal. It’s another reason to be suspicious of altered animals.
THE EVIL-SOUL GATHERER
We can tell from their stories that the old Iroquois believed in several components to the psyche, the immaterial part of a human. The good and bad parts were detachable and given different destinations. Somebody needs to separate them.
Like many Iroquois supernaturals, Dehohniot—Seneca for “evil-soul gatherer”—is a zoomorph. He has human and animal forms. He’s here to gather the evil parts of souls. One of death’s emissaries, most of the time he courses the Milky Way, the pathway of spirits. You can’t see him on the wing when he comes to Earth; from below, he’s the color of the sky. When he settles outside a longhouse door, he has a wolf face, a panther’s body, and a vulture’s wings and talons.
The sick and the dying hear him clawing. He whines like a cat when the spirit is on its way. He snarls like a wolf when it makes him wait too long. But the Evil-Soul Gatherer can seize only the spirits of evil-hearted people, and most human souls have protectors. Even if the evil of a soul is overpowering, just a bit of good might be enough to save it—if it puts up a hell of a struggle as Dehohniot carries it across the skies. Once out of his clutches, other invisibles guard the path of the soul, guiding it to its future home.
THE UNDERGROUND BUFFALO
The center of the earth was thought to be a vast cave full of winding chambers, surging rivers, bottomless troughs, deadly gases, and steaming springs. By the time of the Iroquois, the Great Spirit had penned there many of the creations of the Evil-Minded Spirit. Banished, too, were evildoing mortal creatures: greedy beasts, venomous serpents, poisonous insects, and noxious weeds. The most dangerous of all the critters here were the great white underground buffalo. They are forces of primal chaos.
Little would be left of the upper world if these titans got loose from under it. The main duty of the mighty and elusive third tribe of Little People, the Hunters, was to guard the doors of this underworld.
Once in a while, a couple of these mammoth buffalo-beasts stormed out, and
