“I knew an Indian fellow who took a girl to a dance who was not his regular girl,” said Hill. On the way home, he and the girl were following a path along the top of a ridge when a galloping horse came up behind them. It nearly ran them over. As it went by, the lad shot it in the shoulder. It whinnied and ran into the woods. Soon after, his regular girl’s mother died. When they laid her out for burial, they found a bullet wound in her shoulder. No one knew how it got there.
The notes of Irving historian Everett Burmaster tell us of one early twentieth-century witch who lived on the Cattaraugus Reservation. She could transform herself and spent much of her time in a pond as the consort of a huge black snake. This reminds us of the Olympian Zeus who amused himself by getting it on with his conquests—usually mortal stunners—in the forms of different animals, sometimes even transforming them as well so as to deceive his jealous wife Hera. The Greeks didn’t tell us which animal does it better, but in Seneca country the snakes must have had the mojo. As if a testament to the witch’s eternal flame, when she finally died and was buried, a witch light or ga’hai was seen over this pond. I think I know where that pond is, or at least used to be. It’s not far from Irving, New York, and on a point always reputed to be haunted. It was her house in which Burmaster found his witch bag.
ALTERED ANIMALS
On October 12, 1870, the Livingston Republican ran an article about a strange beast seen by several different people. It was large, bipedal, and, from the description, a bit like a crazed kangaroo. The residents of Livingston County would have recognized such a beast, though, and this one’s temper was hardly that of a vegetarian. It attacked a number of dogs, rearing on its back legs and striking out with its forepaws. A few weeks later, another article claimed that the beast “literally tore the feet and ears” off the hound of a doctor in the Livingston County town of Moscow (now the village of Leicester). On the last day of 1870, the Nunda News reported what had to be the same strange animal, spotted again outside Moscow. The accounts make no mention of critical details: its skull size and shape, its tail or lack thereof. They describe its motion as virtual hopping and its paw prints like those of a dog.
In 2003, there was a flap in Niagara County. Near the Tuscarora Reservation is a campground around which people reported seeing bizarre animals, including deer walking on their hind legs. The white folkloric imagination latched on to the idea of radioactive waste dumps and mutating wildlife. There has been some deplorable contamination at many points along the Niagara and radiation has been the deus ex machina—sudden artificial plot device—for movie monsters like Godzilla. But the critters have parallels.
They see things like this on Ga’hai Hill near Salamanca, where images of deer—sometimes gutted—have been reported, rearing up like people and walking on their spindly rear legs. Are these the altered animal forms of the Iroquois variety?
One of our favorite Native American bogies is a sinister, silent little devil from the lore of the American Southwest. Hillerman skillfully retells the stories of these critters, assassins from the spirit world who take over the bodies of animals and can appear in any natural form. The favored ones seem to be small, like owls, rabbits, and foxes. Killing the animal will only kill the host, and the bogie will show up in an equivalent version soon enough. Though they terrorize through their inexorable stalking, they usually kill through simple bad fate: accidents, sickness, and the like. They may walk on their hind legs like humans, and it’s no good sign if you see that. The only sure way to tell them is by the eyes, flat and unreflective like those of dead fish. It’s presumed they are animated by the chindi, malevolent spirits of dead humans.
There was the story of a rich Navajo family that had asked a heavy favor from an old shaman and crassly refused payment. He set this sort of altered-animal demon on them. At first, only the old and sick died. Then accidents and ailments struck the middle-aged. The young ones met with the shaman. He agreed to think things over but died before he had a chance to undo his work. Most of the family was gone by the time the story was recorded.
These southwestern chindi can be dispatched for personal reasons, but they seem to be impersonal beings, however sinister they might be to their targets. They go where they’re sent; they address matters of balance, and they have in some sense the force of nature behind them. This outline is similar to some Iroquois beliefs. I’ve asked my confidants if the Iroquois have a supernatural assassin like that animal filled with the chindi. Occasionally there’s been a telling look, but no one has wanted to talk.
Once I brought the subject up to Duce Bowen, and he didn’t say much. He did look at me like I’d come across something I wasn’t supposed to know. Even Michael Bastine got a little terse. “Yeah, they got . . . something like that.”
The last story of my second book A Ghosthunter’s Journal is “A Question of Levels,” a tale about the curses that accompany reservation politics and the altered animals that sometimes embody them. It reminded a fellow I know of something he’d experienced.
When this gent was a kid, he used to play at a hill in the village of East Aurora called Old Baldy. Not far from a known ancient
