But these altered animals don’t stop and explain themselves. All you can know for sure about them is that the matter is wondrous strange. And people still say they see them, all over upstate New York.
The Witch Dog
(Late Nineteenth Century)
A woman suffering with a wasting disease told her family that every night something peered in her window. Some thought it was just the delirium of her ailment, but often when the ground was soft her husband found big dog tracks outside. Once after a snowfall, he followed them to the dirt road where they got lost in other tracks.
The morning after that, an old woman was among the friends who called. She lived in a little house near the creek and asked about the wife so suspiciously that the husband wondered how she knew so much. When she left, his wife was worse.
That night his wife screamed in her sleep: “She is looking at me!” The husband jumped up, saw nothing, and thought it was another vision. Outside, though, he saw widely spaced dog tracks under the window, as if the animal that made them had run away. A neighbor saw a dark, fast-moving form leap a fence and run into the trees toward the creek.
In the morning, the husband followed the tracks of a big dog to the creek. On the other side were human footprints, leading to the house of the old woman. That afternoon, the old woman came again, and the husband accused her of witchcraft. She acted shocked, but her performance fell flat. No member of any Iroquois nation would be that surprised by the idea of witchcraft. “Stop witching my wife,” the husband finished. “I’ll fix you if you don’t.”
That night, the husband camped in the woodshed. Sometime after midnight he heard an ominous huffing and dog feet coming from the trees. He looked through a crack in the shed and saw a huge hound looking in on his sleeping wife, its paws on the windowsill. Its snout glowed in the glare that pulsed from its jowls with every breath; its spittle lit like molten metal. It had picked a bad night to come witching. The husband had his rifle.
It was sleighing time, and the moon was out. Lots of people saw the witchdog hurdle the fence as the husband fired. They heard a yelp and the sound of a tumble on the other side. They saw something taller and two legged run to the nearest cabin and jump through the window. In the morning, they saw blood spatters in the snow.
Three days later, the old woman was found dead in her bed from a bullet wound. Everybody was sure she had been a witch. Her intended target recovered.
The Twilight Walker of Marble Hill
(Late Nineteenth Century)
Between Syracuse and Utica is the town of Oneida where utopian socialist John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) set up the first of his alternative perfectionist communities in 1848. Ever after called the Oneida Community, it thrived for three decades and was the flagship of a handful of others in North America. Noyes was far from the only white to find inspiration on Iroquois ground. The small bit of Indian land he picked had an otherworldly rap sheet before he got there.
A short walk east of Noyes’s massive mansion is a high ridge called Marble Hill. It’s just south of the eastern edge of the village called Oneida Castle, named for the fort once here. In the late 1800s, the area of Marble Hill was awash with reports of a strange twilight walker. Tall and slender, he carried a satchel and wore a stovepipe hat. That chapeau makes him sound suspiciously like a bogie the Allegany Seneca personify as High Hat.
Anyone walking about at night might see him, though they might not hear him. He walked noiselessly. Few got close to him, probably for the good. Those who did saw the two big animal ears partly covered by the hat. Some noticed one normal foot, in a walking shoe or boot. The other was the hoof of an animal. If Iroquois tradition surely held an indigenous devil, this might be one sign of him.
An Oneida farmer on Marble Hill had a bit more of this character than he wanted. His cows were developing an unwelcome habit of wandering off at the end of every day. One dusk, their owner was looking for them when he met a tall longhair who could only have been another form of this stranger. The minute the pair met, the twilight walker commenced launching such verbal abuse that the two fell into a terrible fistfight. They clinched, and the sturdy farmer got the edge, twisting one hand solidly into the stranger’s mane and, like a hockey fight, using the leverage to belabor him with the other. Suddenly, as if bespelled, he fell asleep.
He woke by daylight, his joints stiff and his clothes wet with the dew. He noticed, though, that his hand was firmly tangled in a patch of the coarse marsh grass the Oneida call the devil’s hair.
CHANGELINGS
Some reservation folk talk these days about changelings. They seem to be using this old European word to mean shape-shifters, shamans or witches who take on animal forms, but with an odd twist. These changelings seem never to be a single whole critter. They are either animals that are complete morphs of others or people with critter features: fox tails, bear ears, horse hooves. We keep open the possibility that they could be shape-shifters, spotted in the process of shifting into shape or careless about shifting back.
We’d like to know how long this word changeling has been in use among the Iroquois. We can’t tell if it’s an English word being used for an old Iroquois folkloric critter or if the
