Late one afternoon in June 2010, I looked to the south outside my East Aurora house and saw one of those odd, mixed skies. Clouds coursed the watery horizon like icebergs in the North Atlantic. All above hurled into the gray of coming night, but out of the turquoise bed and miles-distant whiteness forged one truculent cumulus, striding like a promontory that dared the waves to beat. A stray beam from a sun in some quarter of the sky hit him and lit him such a martial pink that he stood alone in the billows and aerial waves. I wondered if the underground buffalo were at their game in the Alleghenies.
WHITE DEER OF THE GENESEE
In his code, Prophet Handsome Lake mentions a pair of deer representing a new species. The buck is spotted white and the doe so striped all over her back. These deer are the sacred creations of the Creator. Not only is it commanded that these animals are not to be killed, but no “pale invader,” no white, will ever see them. Cornplanter says these deer were killed by one of the prophet’s jealous rivals. Maybe so, but a few of the faithful have reported seeing them at night in the woods.
There may be a place you can see these deer today, on an old army base along Canandaigua Lake. The white deer are interpreted as a pair of albinos that miraculously survived and reproduced. Maybe so. Fenced in as they are, they are far safer from predators of all types. Or else maybe the times are changing. When the whites start to value the teachings of the Native Americans, the world may be entering a new phase.
9
Talking Animals
This whole day have I followed in the rocks, And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape . . .
W. B. YEATS, “FERGUS AND THE DRUID” (1893)
SPECIAL ANIMALS
There are stories about talking animals in many world cultures. The ones we encounter in European tradition are diverse as you might gather, but they are almost exclusively folkloric and literary. No one runs into them anymore, at least that I’ve heard of. And when they appear in a tale or story, the narrative almost always bears an explanation for them: They are enchanted people, much of the time, or even supernatural beings who can take many a form. Sometimes they’re just special or magical animals.
We come to other talking animals in twentieth-century reservation stories and recent paranormal reports. These have a distinctly unnatural cast; they are curiously animal-like humans or the reverse. They play things a lot closer to the vest. They don’t stop and explain themselves.
Few upstate Iroquois doubt that talking animals like these can still be encountered from time to time. Now and then we may catch them at it. Some of them are familiar horses and cattle, maybe even beloved dogs and cats. Always their speech is in the native lingo, never any European tongue. You doubt us?
If you walk by a pasture at night and see farm animals that don’t appear to have noticed you, be still. You might see something that astounds you.
Keep an eye on your cats sometime when they don’t know they are being watched. Do they look like they are having a conversation?
Keep a window open as you let your dog out at night; see if another is waiting, and look and listen as quietly as you can. Do they draw close and nuzzle like they are conversing?
Maybe a witch or wizard is disguised among your trusted animals. Maybe your pets had hidden talents all along. But if you live in the Northeast and like those long nightly hikes, even around your own village, be courteous to whatever approaches you.
“You don’t want to walk by and see two horses talking to each other,” said Seneca storyteller Duce Bowen. “You don’t want to have an animal ask you why you’re out and invite itself home with you.” Decline courteously, we suggest. Better yet, stay in on those nights that don’t feel just right.
WITCH AND SHAPE-SHIFTER
As with Celtic wizards, one of the distinctive powers of the master witch was shape-shifting: the ability to become another being, usually an animal, and continue to think as a human. Most of the wacked-out animal forms we encounter in Iroquois story and report were thought to be dangerous. When they weren’t apparitions projected by the witches or the back-off signs of a negative site, they were thought the alternate forms of great witches, most of whom had a favored critter into which to shift.
“Spirit of Victory” by Tom Mullany (1989) in Joseph Davis State Park, Lewiston, New York
Still, tradition doesn’t give us a reason to presume that witch and shape-shifter are one. For one thing, there are shape-shifters who aren’t witches. For another, there are witches who don’t shape-shift. The occasional worker of a love charm or a hex may be technically a witch, but no metamorphosis is involved.
Some good power people can be shifters, too. The shamans, forerunners of the great medicine people, were thought to take animal form. The most exceptional contemporary medicine people are thought to do it, too, but the transformation could be psychic. (The material body lies at rest; the astral form’s at work.)
But you can spot a shifter. One of the oldest pan-Amerindian strictures concerning these people-animal forms is that they can never fully hide what they are. A shape-shifted animal will always show some feature of what it used to be. Even the ancient rock art of the American Southwest depicts animal forms with human feet. You just need to look closely enough.
The morphed human will have an animal tooth, ear,
