She took the finest deer hide she had and cut it into pieces for twelve pairs of moccasins. She set them all out in the center of the wigwam with beads, thread, and colored moose hair. “Go to sleep, and lie quietly this time, no matter what happens,” she said.
Around the middle of the night, the boy woke to sounds coming from the direction of the skins. He felt the fingers on him, but this time he let them do their pat-down without moving and fell asleep before they were through. He woke healthy in the morning to find that all the objects were gone. In their place appeared a marvelous pair of moccasins, crafted and ornamented far beyond the skills of the Onondaga. They fit the youth perfectly.
TWO NATIONS
Arthur Parker summarized the three types of Little People as those who deal with hunting, those who work with natural cycles, and those who come most to people. Those categories may have been superseded.
In the 1950s, Edmund Wilson conjectured that only two nations of Little People were appearing in the lore and report of his mostly Tuscarora confidants. Wilson broke them down into Healers and Tricksters.
Without directly confirming these categories, Michael Bastine generally backs the two-tribe impression among today’s reservation folk. One branch of Little People—presumably Wilson’s Healers—has only goodwill. These smallest of the fairy folk, only a few inches high, are preservers of the natural environment and all life in it. They are by far the strongest of the Little People and can protect humans from the others if they choose. Full-sized living people almost never see them any more.
The larger kind—a foot or two in height—are likely to be Wilson’s Tricksters. They are the type people most often report—small enough to be miraculous but too big to be stepped on without notice. You’ll see this kind on the road once in a while and at the edge of the woods. These may be the ones whose artifacts and even body parts are kept in a few very private collections. They are not always goodwilled. These are the ones who come to people in dreams, making their hearts race. They are the ones who come to children.
It’s hard to be sure where the Little People we hear about fit into the classic categories of literature: Hunters, Stone Throwers, and Plant Growers. We don’t seem to be hearing from Hunters anymore. If what’s left are Healers and Tricksters, well and good. But today’s Tricksters are playing rough.
Little Tricksters
(Contemporary)
Mike Bastine and Mad Bear were on one of their cross-country forays in the late 1970s. They stopped somewhere in the Ozarks for dinner, took the leftovers, and set off driving again. At a ridiculously late hour of the evening, they neared a remote motel. Mad Bear told Mike to pull in. “We’ve got to get some sleep.” Mike had trouble understanding that, since Mad Bear had been snoring all night beside him as he drove, but he let it pass.
Mad Bear jumped into the shower. As Mike unloaded the car, he kept hearingan odd sound effect—blurry, abrupt, and melodic. It was half zip, half laugh— zzzzzhee-hee!—like a needle scratched across an LP of the voices of indigenous children. As he settled into the room he could hear them through the windows. He yelled into the bathroom for Mad Bear.
“It’s just the Little People,” yelled Mad Bear back. “They’re as common around here as they are back home. Boy, they’re really out there tonight.”
“Are we in trouble, Bear?” said Mike.
“Mike, take that leftover chicken and biscuits and leave them in that little circle of trees out there. You remember. You saw it when we parked.”
“Uh. . . . Bear, do I really want to go out there?”
“It’ll be all right,” said Mad Bear, sticking his head out the bathroom door. “They really like it when you do that. Just take the tray out there and make the leftovers look nice. Put them in a circle real neat on the napkin and come on back in. And don’t look out there right away.”
Mike did as he was told. Soon the sounds turned steady but softer, like appreciative murmuring. Then they stopped. Mike parted the curtains and looked out. Sure enough, the vittles were gone. That’s no proof of anything supernatural, of course. A raccoon could have gobbled them as neatly and almost as quickly—if it had been waiting. But it wouldn’t have sounded like that.
Impressions of the Little People
The Tonawanda Reservation has a couple of traditional sledding hills. The most popular is by the Baptist church, but there’s another spot off Sandhill Road. A group of children went there one January afternoon in 2003.
Most of the kids went up and down an open slope, but the youngest hopped on his disc, took off down a wooded trail, and disappeared. Soon the others heard him calling wildly and ran down to look for him.
As they got closer, they heard him yelling something about Little People. Sure enough, when they found him by his saucer in a clump of trees, they saw them, too: hundreds of tiny human footprints the size of rabbit feet, making blue shadows in the sunny snow. This grove by a creek must have been a playground for them the night before!
The Fading Light
Abenaki author and teacher Joe Bruchac lives in Greenfield, New York, in the home of his grandparents. He has a marvelous library and bookshop in the house and has turned the land around it into a nature preserve. He taught his children to love the natural environment and not to fear the night or the woods. They spent many hours running, playing, and hiking about the area. They even had a family game, sort of a tag/hide-and-seek/treasure hunt, running through the woods at night.
One night, one of Joe’s boys came home gushing about mystery lights and Little People. “Dad, I followed
