At the end of the next day, the man who talked to animals was on his porch as always, smoking his pipe and rocking in his chair, animal friends beside him. He never said anything about his night in the woods. No one saw or heard the witch horse again.
A neighbor, though, recalled something strange on the morning after the incident. He had been driving to work and passed by an old church just as the sun was rising. He spotted the man who talked to animals coming out of the woods, four dogs alongside him. A canvas bag on his shoulder held something heavy enough to make him totter as he walked. No one could guess what was in the bag or what the medicine man’s dogs had seen that scared even them.
The Allegany Seneca still remember the night the dogs cried together. Even Duce Bowen couldn’t give us a date, but it was a cold one in the autumn, most likely in the late 1930s. It was a night when all the dogs of the valley and all the communities around it set up a keening, as if motivated by some collective grief that they could voice in no other way. There had been signs of it the day before.
The Night the Dogs Cried Together
The man who talked to animals had been working for a family, and when he was done, he was asked to look at a dog. The inseparable companion of the boys, the big hound had lost interest in anything, as if he were sick to his belly. The animal man spent a few moments near him on the back porch.
“Something strange could happen tonight,” he said to the family. “I can’t tell you much about it yet.” On his way home, he stopped at other houses. Sure enough, all the dogs had been listless for a couple of days, and some had started to whine with no apparent cause.
The man who talked to animals had a lot to think about on his walk home. He fixed meals for himself and his animals and sat a long time with them on the porch. Then he took his usual chair, two cats on his lap, the dogs in their spots. He fell asleep that way.
Two hours after midnight, he jerked awake to the sound of a dog howling somewhere outside the house. He went to the door for a look. All the dogs in the neighborhood, inside or outside, were carrying on just like it. Their varied tones, pitches, distances, and volumes made an awful, surreal sound that absolutely haunted the valley. His own dogs came close to him and commenced their own whining, but they calmed when he spoke to them. He told them in his Seneca tongue that they did not have to cry out to the world, because he knew their hearts already. Soon they were still.
He put on his coat and went out. The pale moon, the silver clouds, the deepest turquoise sky, all looked down on the valley of crying dogs. Their songs told him a story. Tears were on his cheeks when he turned back into his own house.
The next morning a group of people sought him out and asked him about the strange night. Tears came to him again when he started to answer. He told them to prepare their hearts, because a big war was coming, bigger than any that had ever been.
“Somewhere across the seas, events are in motion, and it’s finally too late forthem to be turned around. Many of our sons will leave us, and many will not be coming back. The dogs know this, and they cried by the doors and windows because they love their families, especially the sons who ran with them as boys, who will be with their families only a little while longer.”
The Dogs Who Saw Too Well
One summer night in 1954, two young men were coon hunting near the Wyoming County town of Gainesville. Both were already veteran woodsmen, and with them were two blueticks—medium-sized hunting dogs.
The woods were misty after a day of rain, and they felt unsettled. Every snap and click in the glistening trees sounded like something stalking the two youths. Still, they were armed, and perhaps too young to get as scared as they ought to.
At one point, the dogs tore off howling into the underbrush. The two hunters followed the racket to a medium-sized tree that stood alone in a circular clearing. The dogs thought they had something, almost certainly a raccoon. They were coon dogs, and they were usually right. The ample flashlights revealed nothing but branches and leaves.
In hunting, this experience is called “a false tree.” Old raccoons are good at scooting up one tree and crossing branches into another. The ruse works with dense trees and young dogs.
The tree was the first problem here. Not even a squirrel could have hidden in that one, and nothing the weight of a raccoon could get out on its thin branches. It stood a long way from any other trees, too. The two friends looked until they were sure the dogs were wrong and hauled them off, by their leashes, still baying for their imagined quarry. They had never seen veteran dogs so sure of themselves at such an obvious false tree.
A change came over both those dogs almost immediately after that incident. They grew afraid of the woods at night and never hunted again. Our storyteller wondered if the dogs had indeed chased something up that tree that was still there when they left, simply invisible to humans—or whites—and if it had left a parting lesson for the dogs who could see
