One evening a clan mother drew a number of her guests together outside her house, including the young woman’s family. “It’s time for you all to go,” she said.
The East Aurora woman, then a girl, remembers asking why. “The shapeshifters are out tonight,” she was told.
Their hostess cautioned them to walk only in the light between the buildings and their cars, and not for any reason to walk into the woods or off any road. From there they were to drive safely and not to stop or get out for any reason until they were off the reservation.
This was so different from anything she was taught in school. The girl was ready to laugh. “How do you know they’re out?”
“We can hear them. Listen.” Everyone fell silent and strained their ears into the wooded land around them. To this day, the woman swears she remembers the sound of the shape-shifters howling, the eeriest thing she has ever heard.
I’m always fascinated to talk to nonpsychic people about paranormal experiences they’ve had. I take them down to the last details. “What did it sound like?” I asked her.
“It was like . . . a choir. Choirs. In the night.”
“Choirs?” I said, I’m sure with a wrinkle of the brow.
“Yeah. Choirs of people, all howling together like wolves. Like fifteen human voices. Mostly human voices.”
THE SONGS OF THE DOGS
Some readers might find it silly to think that human speech could reach any animal. They did not see Michael Bastine set our newly rescued West Highland terrier onto his lap and talk to her, an hour after my companion and I had adopted her. Michael had dropped in on us by surprise. He tends to show up when he’s most needed or can do the most good.
After years as a breeder, this dog had been discarded after dropping her last litter. Her belly was still distended. She was also undernourished and had no trust for human beings. “You’re going to have a nice home here,” Michael finished up. She had kept up eye contact with him as if every syllable registered. It may have been the first tenderness she had received in her life.
The dog was the only animal domesticated by the old Iroquois. They lived with dogs and had mixed attitudes to them. The dog was an animal that would work with humans to hunt other animals, a little bit of a traitor in that sense. It was also dependent on people. Bears, deer, and other forest animals needed nothing from people. To some Iroquois, it seemed shameful to see the village dogs snarl and worry among themselves over bones and body parts, the remains of noble animals who gave their lives after struggle so that people might live. There was no dog clan.
But no other animal was this kind of messenger between the worlds of men and of animals, between village and forest. It would be natural to think of dogs as intermediaries of worlds in other senses, between the earthly and the spiritual. It may also be natural to think of them as human companions, after the life of the world.
The Iroquois sensed, as do we, that the bond between a human and a dog can be something marvelous. It’s thought that for most of the Iroquois, dogs were regarded as psychopomps, guides for human spirits to the afterworld. Other Iroquoians like the Huron may have believed that, when dogs died, their souls’ course was alongside that of the human souls, the Milky Way.
The Onondaga, oldest of the Iroquois, have a tradition about their dogs. If it’s true, we may see our own again after they have passed.
For the Onondaga, at least in one traditional tale, the human soul after death undergoes a period of wandering in a stormy night world. After passing through a hazardous forest, he or she comes to a vast abyss, the last barrier to the grounds of the Happy Hunting, the land of the ever blessed. For the soul fortunate enough to get this far, the only passage is across a massive log, which two gigantic doglike beings hold steady at each end in their teeth and claws. The bridge is easy footing if they keep their hold, but their focus is wobbly. It’s then that the voices start to chime and call. They are the souls of the dogs the humans knew in their lives.
If these souls say things like, “He loved us, he fed us, he sheltered us,” the mighty beings grip the log hard, holding it steady for the passage to the Land of Souls.
But if the voices say, “He starved us, he beat us, he drove us away,” the mighty beings lose their attention. The log teeters, and the human soul tumbles into confusion.
If you cannot find it in you for the sake of the world to be kind to all life, be kind for your own sake to your animals. You never know when they will be speaking for you.
10
The Little People
He used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists but normal men like peasants, who have born witness a thousand times to such things; “ it is the farmers who see the fairies.”
G. K. CHESTERTON, CONCERNING AN INTERVIEW WITH W. B. YEATS
THE WEE FOLK
Traditions of diminutive, magically powerful human beings are found in many parts of the world. The wee folk that come first to the mind of the average American are certainly the fairies of Celtic tradition, but many Native American societies had ancient, elaborate, and apparently indigenous traditions about their own Little People—as did the Iroquois.
In the colonial period, the Iroquois Little People were thought to be powerful and real. Culture keepers—elders, storytellers, historians, and medicine people—revered them as forces of the natural world. They were envisioned as humanlike devas somewhere between the status of human beings and
