“It kind of started with the geese,” he commenced in a recent talk. “When I grew up, in the spring and the fall you’d hear them migrating. You’d look up in the sky and they were the tiniest little dots. So high up in the air. Now they’re flying just over the tree line. And they’re everywhere. Those Canada geese, they’re a nuisance. You can walk right up to them.
“It surprises most people to find out that coyotes live around us almost everywhere. They are the shyest, most secretive animals. You only see them when they get hit by a car or when they’re mangy and they’re almost dead. Even then you might not know it. They look so much like dogs. Coyotes are getting aggressive out West. I’ve heard of it happening around here.
“And there’s the red-tailed hawk. When I was a kid, if I heard the whistle of one of those, I’d run out and try to find it. You couldn’t get within half a mile of one. Today, they just perch there on a telephone pole and look at you. You can get right under one.
“There’s the blue heron. It used to be that as soon as you saw one, he’d fly away to a point so far off that he couldn’t see you. Pam and Bailey and I were by this farm pond, and five feet behind them there was a blue heron standing in the water. I don’t believe this, I said to Pam. I had to get our camera out and take a picture.
“One time we were on our way to Springville. There was this pasture behind a little fence with thirty turkey vultures on it. We pulled over and turned the car off. Pam said, ‘What were those?’
“I said, ‘Turkey vultures.’
“She said, ‘What are they doing?’
“‘Waiting.’
“‘What for?’
“‘Dinner.’”
He turned to his audience. “What do seagulls eat? Coyotes? Vultures? What do they eat? They’re scavengers. Their assignment in life is to clean nature up. Nature isn’t preparing—making their presence so well known—for no reason. If things don’t start to change, I’m kind of thinking there’s going to be a major die-off. That’s what they’re saying to us. That’s what they’re here for. They’re going to clean up all the stuff.
“If I repeated to you what Mad Bear said to me toward the end of his life, some of you wouldn’t be feeling so comfortable. He wrote a poem, A Warning to White-eyes.
“There are too many levels, too many indicators. . . . What they’re all saying is that we humans better pay attention. We better start watching. The stuff we’re doing to the world, it’s not going to be sustainable for very much longer.”
The Altered Beasts
It could be that all the mythology of the psychic zoo is based on fleeting paranormal encounters, seasoned richly by storytelling. But I think these critters exist. I am pretty sure I saw one.
It was a gaudy dusk in September 1995. I was driving from the bike trails at Allegany State Park down into Salamanca. I was where the road curves downhill and to the right, just before the hill falls away, throws open the river valley, and lays Salamanca across it. On the right twilights at this point, the lights spread out and shine the whole city up. On that one, the sky arched before me with a low red-gold gleam like a segmental pediment, etched and burnished over the entrance to a temple. As if the shield of Achilles lay behind the horizon and tossed its rim behind the sun’s corona, I might have visualized creation and prophecy had I stayed long enough to catch the moment. By the road I saw a strange animal.
On my left between the road and tree line was a critter about the size of an adult groundhog. I gave it a hard look in the clear twilight. It had the features of many other animals, and its eyes were drilled at some spot on my side of the road.
It stood comfortably on its hind legs like a bear, and its ears, eyes, and snout were bearlike. It was too small, though, for even a cub. Its dangling, shriveled front paws were those of a dog or rabbit. Its chest and skull were flat like a badger’s. My best guess was that it was a morphed woodchuck, with pert bearlike ears. Its stare was the giveaway, trained with human focus across the road and right through the mountain. I’d never seen a look like that, and I drove through its laser gaze as if I didn’t exist to it. I even looked into the trees on my right to see what it could be watching.
I considered turning back for another look but saw in my mirrors that it was already gone. I filed it as a simple curiosity. Any natural animal could disappear quickly. It was only when I considered where I was—a haunted region in Seneca country—and thought of the legends that it occurred to me that I might have seen one of the alter-beasts.
I’m not a naturalist, but I know the animals of the Northeast and have an excellent visual memory. This image is in my mind. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen an animal like it.
The Choirs of the Shape-Shifters
An East Aurora woman spent childhood time on the Tonawanda Reservation in the 1980s. Her mother worked up there in some capacity that called for her to be “adopted” into one of the Seneca clans, which put her into a position of special trust. When the woman I interviewed was a young girl, she and her family spent a lot of social time up there, too, not all to her liking.
“Why do I have to come up here and spend the whole day at a festival?” she always used to ask. “I want to stay home with my friends. I don’t even
