Not many of the stories about birds now or formerly current among the American aborigines are of a pleasing character. They are fantastic myths for the most part, as appears from many of the incidents given elsewhere in this book; and often they are so wildly improbable, incoherent, and unbirdlike as to disgust rather than interest us. That is partly owing, no doubt, to our difficulty in taking the native point of view, and our ignorance of the significance the half-animal, half-human characters in the tales have to the redmen, with whom, in most cases, the startling narratives pass for veritable tribal history. Their stories are as foreign to our minds as is their “tum-tum” music to our ears. Now and then, however, we come across an understanding and pleasing legend, of purely native origin, and touched with poetic feeling.

A favorite story among the central Eskimos, for instance, is that of their race-mother Sedna, who was the daughter of a chief, and was wooed by a fulmar (a kind of northern petrel) who promised her, if she would marry him, a delightful life in his distant home. So she went away with him. But she had been ruefully deceived, and was cruelly mistreated. A year later her father went to pay her a visit; and discovering her misery he killed her husband and took his repentant daughter home. The other fulmars in the village followed them, mourning and crying for their murdered fellow, and fulmars continue to utter doleful cries to this day.

Another Eskimo tale relates that a loon told a poor blind boy that he could cure him of his affliction. So the boy crept after the bird to a lake, where the loon took him and dived with him into the water. Three times they repeated their submergence, the last time staying a long time under the water, but when the boy came to the surface after the third diving he had good eyesight. This seems one of the rare examples of a tale told simply for its own sake, and free of any esoteric significance.

A very pretty legend, current among the Eskimos of western Alaska, has been preserved for us by Edward W. Nelson,^[101] who spent several years, late in the 19th century, in studying the ornithology and ethnology of the Bering Sea region. It relates to the redpolls, the most abundant and entertaining land-birds of Alaska, where it would be a surprisingly hard heart that was not touched by their companionship as winter closes down on a dreary landscape of snow-drifts. Let me quote Mr. Nelson’s words:

At this season the stars seem each to hang from the firmament by an invisible cord, and twinkle clear and bright overhead. The sharp, querulous yelp of the white fox alone breaks the intense stillness. A white, frosty fog hangs in the air—the chilled breath of nature—which falls silently to the ground in the lovely crystal handiwork of northern genii. In the north a pale auroral arch moves its mysterious banners, and the rounding bosom of the earth, chill under its white mantle, looks dreary and sad. After such a night the sun seems to creep reluctantly above the horizon, as though loath to face the bitter cold. The smoke rises slowly and heavily in the fixed atmosphere, and warm rooms are doubly appreciated.

Soon small troops of these little redpolls come ... flitting about the houses on all sides, examining the bare spots on the ground, searching the old weeds and fences, clinging to the eaves, and even coming to the window-sills, whence they peer saucily in, making themselves continually at home, and receiving a hearty welcome for their cheering presence. The breast is now a beautiful peach-blossom pink, and the crown shining scarlet. How this bird came to bear these beautiful colors is told in one of the Indian myths ... which begins thus:

Very long ago the whole of mankind was living in cheerless obscurity. Endless night hid the face of the world, and men were without the power of making a fire, as all the fire of the world was in the possession of a ferocious bear living in a far-off country to the north. The bear guarded his charge with unceasing vigilance, and so frightful was his appearance that no man dared attempt to obtain any of the precious substance. While the poor Indians were sorrowing over their misfortunes the redpoll, which at that time was a plain little wood-sparrow, dressed in ordinary dull brown, heard their plaint—for in those days men and beasts understood one another,—and his heart was touched. He prepared himself for a long journey and set out toward the lodge of the cruel bear. After many adventures ... he reached the place, and by a successful ruse stole a living ember from the perpetual fire which glowed close under the breast of the savage guardian, and flew away back with it in his beak. The glow of the coal was reflected from his breast and crown, while his forehead became slightly burned. Far away he flew, and finally arrived safely at the home of mankind, and was received with great rejoicing.

He gave the fire to the grateful people and told them to guard it well; and as he did so they noticed the rich glow on his breast and brow, and said: “Kind bird, wear forever that beautiful mark as a memento of what you have done for us;” and to this day the redpoll wears this badge in proof of the legend, as all may see, and mankind has ever since had fire.

One might gather a considerable collection of historical anecdotes relating to birds that in one way or another aided the Indians of old to obtain or to preserve fire, and some of them are noted incidentally elsewhere in this volume; but few are as poetic and entertaining as Mr. Nelson’s contribution.

The late Charles G. Leland found among the Algonkins of Maine and eastward a great number of tales that he put into his books. One or two of them are about birds, and these he threw into verse and published them in a volume entitled Kuloskap the Master.^[91] The longest and most romantic of these is the love-story of the Leaf for the Red Bird (scarlet tanager), quoted in part below:

This unexpected and rather unmaidenly avowal rather startled Mipis, and made him suspicious of some trickery, despite the attraction of her charm; but Squ’tes, “never heeding what the leaf thought,” began again—

One day both go to the Mountain and thank him for their happiness; and in the course of the visit the grandsire warns them not to go away from the Mountain, for dangers fill the outside world, thus:

and—

So they built their nest on the great tree that grew “in the safest place in all the mountain,” and for a time continued in bliss; but Mipis could see from their lofty home a far, beautiful country, and wanted to visit it. So Red Bird took the discontented Little Leaf in her bill and bore him away into the delightful lowland, where again they built a home; but here the Indian boy heard the wonderful singing, and shot the singer, and Little Whirlwind seized Mipis and took him to his grandsire, the Storm, who resolved to keep Mipis as a prisoner. That night the Mountain dreamed of this, and sent his son to demand Mipis, and the Storm gave him up, so that soon Little Leaf was back on his safe mountain-tree—but he lived in lonely grief.

How then had it fared with the lost Red Bird? When she fell under the boy’s arrow she was not killed but sorely wounded; and when the young Indian carried her home, very proud of his prize, his grandsire said truly that the bird must be kept captive. Red Bird recovered rapidly, and one morning Monimquess was dismayed to hear her singing as loudly as possible, “like a brook to sunshine,” as he thought, for he knew she was trying to make herself heard by the Mountain, and that if she succeeded destruction would be hurled upon the wigwam. At last, wearied with anxious thinking—

So the lovers were reunited. Then

A very curious feature of this delicate romance, which reminds one of the love-story of the Nightingale and the Rose, is the transposition of sex. To our minds it would seem natural that the bird, as the most active of the two characters, should take the male part and the leaf the other; and it is false to fact that Red Bird, as a female, should sing. The Indians must have known that this was unnatural, yet their poetic sense arranged it otherwise, just as the poets have pictured the nightingale pressing her breast against a thorn, yet singing, as only male birds do!

Elsewhere I have shown how important a part the loon plays in the mythology and fireside tales of the redmen of the Northeastern region of our country and that of the Great Lakes. To the Algonkins of Maine and eastward this bird was the messenger of their great hero Glooscap, or Kuloskap, as Leland spells it with careful accuracy when writing in the language of the Pasamaquoddies; and he has told in verse the story of how this service was accepted by the willing bird. One day when Kuloskap was pursuing the gigantic magician, Winpe, his enemy, a flock of loons came circling near him, and to his question to their leader: “What is thy will, O Kwimu?” the loon replied: “I fain would be thy servant, thy servant and thy friend.” Then the Master taught the loons a cry, a strange, prolonged cry, like the howl of a dog when he calls to the moon, or when, far away in the forest, he seeks to find his master; and he instructed them to utter this weird summons whenever they required him.

Leith Adams^[103] says: “Stories are told”—among the Micmacs in New Brunswick—“how the snowy owl still laments the Golden Age when man and all animals lived in perfect amity until it came to pass that they began to quarrel; when the great Glooscap, or Gotescarp, got disgusted and sailed across the seas to return when they made up their differences. So every night the owl repeats to this day his Koo, koo, skoos. ‘Oh, I am sorry, Oh, I am sorry.’”

A quaint little legend comes from the Tillamooks, whose home was formerly on the Oregon coast, where the tides do not rise very much. In the beginning of the world, it teaches, the crow had a voice like that of the thunder-bird, and the thunder-bird the voice of a crow. The latter proposed to exchange voices. The crow agreed to this, but demanded that in return the thunder-bird give her low water along the seashore, so that she might more easily gather the clams and other mussels, which was a part of a Tillamook woman’s daily task. The thunder-bird therefore made the water draw back a very long distance. But when the crow went out on the waste of sea-bottom she saw so many marine monsters that she was frightened, and begged the thunder-bird not to make the waters recede so far; and that is the reason that now but little ocean-bottom is exposed at ebb tide on the Oregon coast.

The Gualala Indians were a tribe of the great Pomo family that half a century ago dwelt happily in the northwestern corner of Sonoma County, California, and their staple food was the flour of crushed and filtered acorns of several kinds of oaks. In their country, as elsewhere in that State, the California woodpecker (Melanerpes) is a very common bird, which has the habit of drilling numerous small holes in pines and other soft-wooded trees, and fixing in each an acorn—a method of storing its favorite food against a time of famine. The Indians understood this very well, and in times of scarcity of food in camp they would cut down the small trees and climb the big ones, and rob the cupboards of the far more provident birds. “And here,” says Powers,^[19] “I will make mention of a kind of sylvan barometer.... These acorns are stored away before the rainy season sets in, sometimes to the amount of a half-bushel, and when they are wetted they presently swell and start out a little. So always, when a rainstorm is brewing, the woodpeckers fall to work with great industry a day or two in advance and hammer them in all tight. During the winter, therefore, whenever the woods are heard rattling with the pecking of these busy little commissary-clerks heading up their barrels of worms, the Indian knows a rainstorm is certain to follow.”

The Chippeway Indians, as Schoolcraft noted, account for the friendly spirit of the robin by relating that he was once a young brave whose father set him a task too cruel for his strength, and made him starve too long when he had reached man’s estate and had to go through the customary initiation-ceremonies. He turned into a robin, and said to his father: “I shall always be the friend of man and keep near their dwellings. I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by songs.”

This pretty fiction is noteworthy, when one recalls the many instances in Greek and European myths and poetry of men and women transforming themselves into birds.

The Cherokees had an interesting story about the wren, always a busybody. She gets up early in the morning, they say, pries into everything, and goes around to every lodge in the settlement to get news for the birds’ council. When a new baby is born she finds out whether it is a boy or a girl, and reports to the council. If it is a boy the birds sing in mournful chorus: “Alas! The whistle of the arrow! My shins will burn,” for the birds know that when the boy grows older he will hunt them with his blowgun and arrows, and roast them on a stick. But if the baby is a girl they are glad, and sing: “Thanks! The sound of the pestle! At her home I shall surely be able to scratch where she sweeps,” because they know that after a while they will be able to pick up stray grains where she beats the corn into meal.^[104]

In the myths or folklore of the Pawnees a character in several tales, as related by Grinnell,^[105] is a little bird, smaller than a pigeon. “Its back is blue, but its breast white, and its head is spotted. It flies swiftly over the water, and when it sees a fish it dives down into the water to catch it. This bird is a servant or a messenger for the Nahurac.” The Nahurac are an assemblage of imaginary animals by whom many wonderful things are done; and it communicates to living men their wishes or orders, and acts as a guide when men are summoned to come or go somewhere. But this is perilously near the purely mythical, and it is mentioned only as an example of the widespread conception of birds as messengers and interpreters.

I hope I may be pardoned if I add to this group of Indian bird-stories one or two told in the Negro cabins of North Carolina, and probably elsewhere, and written down in Volume XI of the American Folk-Lore Journal, among many other tales of the out-door creatures to which the rural darkies like to attribute human attributes, and to use as puppets in their little comedies of animal life, which are likely to be keen satires on humanity. The one to be quoted is a parable of how Ann Nancy (a spider) got caught in a tight place by Mr. Turkey Buzzard, and how she escaped, for Mr. Buzzard was going to eat her.

“But,” says the narrator, “she beg so hard, and compliment his fine presence, and compare how he sail in the clouds while she ’bliged to crawl in the dirt, till he that proudful and set up he feel mighty pardonin’ spirit, and he let her go.”

Ann Nancy, however, did not enjoy the incident, and “jess study constant how she gwine get the best of every creeter,” and particularly of the tormenting bird.

“She knew Mr. Buzzard’s weak point am he stomach, and one day she make it out dat she make a dining, and ’vite Mr. Buzzard an’ Miss Buzzard an’ de chillens. Ann Nancy she know how to set out a dinin’ fo’ sure, and when dey all got sot down to the table, an’ she mighty busy passin’ the hot coffee to Mr. Buzzard an’ the little Buzzards, she have a powerful big pot o’ scalding water ready, and she lip it all over poor ol’ Mr. Buzzard’s haid, and the po’ ol’ man done been baldhaided from that day.

“An’ he don’t forget on Ann Nancy, ’cause you ’serve she de onliest creeter on the topside the earth what Mr. Buzzard don’t eat.”