12 The Colonial and Revolutionary PeriodsStories of love between humans and animals often modulate into stories of love
between humans, one or both of whom may then turn out to be or become animals –
or of animals who may then become human. There is, for instance, the tale told by
the Coos tribe in Oregon about one of their women who married a merman and
gradually turned into a sea creature. “Every summer and winter,” the tale reveals, the
two lovers “would put ashore two whales as a gift to their kinsmen above the sea.” Or
there is the Maidu legend of a woman who pursues a butterfly, falls asleep exhausted
by the pursuit, and awakens to find the butterfly has turned into a man. “You have
followed me this far,” the “butterfly man” tells her, “perhaps you would like to follow
me always.” “If so,” he warns, “you must pass through a lot of my people.” The woman
then chases the man now transformed back into a butterfly again, but, when they
approach a valley filled with his “people,” the butterflies, she becomes distracted,
running after one or other of them, so that she loses the original object of her pur-
suit. So she dies, still chasing after butterflies; “and now when people speak of olden
times,” the legend tells us, “they say this woman lost her lover, and tried to get others
but lost them, and went crazy and died.” These are tales of longing, pursuit of an
elusive object of desire, but there are also more straightforward accounts of desire
satisfied: love and lust coexist easily in Native American legend. One story popular
among the Ponca tribe of South Dakota, for example, plays on the ancient myth of
vagina dentata but opts for a happy consummation. The lover, desperate with desire,
“knocked out the teeth in the girl’s vagina,” the story discloses, “ – except for one
blunt tooth that was very thrilling when making love.”
Native American legend is not unusual in frequently linking love and death. There
are, for instance, several tales that offer variations on the story associated with
Orpheus in western myth. In the variation known among the Zuni people of the
Southwest, a young man follows his wife as she passes to the Land of the Dead but,
when she sinks to “the spirit land at the bottom of the lake,” he is unable to continue.
The young man “buried his face in his hands,” as the legend has it, “and wept.”
Presently, an owl appears and takes him to a cave “full of owl-men and owl-women,”
where he is given sleep medicine which, he is told, will transport him to “some other
place” while he slumbers. “When you awake, you will walk toward the Morning Star,”
the owl advises him. “Following the trail to the middle anthill, you will find your
spirit-wife there.” As always in versions of this legend, along with the advice there is
a warning. “Let not your desire to touch and embrace her get the better of you,” the
young man is told, “for if you touch her before bringing her safely home to the village
of your birth, she will be lost to you forever.” And, as always, the warning is eventually
forgotten, the taboo is momentarily violated. The owls rescue the spirit wife from the
Land of the Dead beneath the lake, bringing her to the appointed place to meet her
husband when he wakes up. “When the husband awoke,” the legend reveals, “he saw
first the Morning Star, then the middle anthill, and his wife at his side, still in deep
slumber.” When she too wakes up, they begin the long journey home; and “on the
fourth day they arrived at Thunder Mountain and came to the river that flows by Salt
Town.” Here, they lie down to rest. And, at that moment, the young man can no
longer control himself. “Gazing at her loveliness,” as his spirit wife sleeps, “desire soGGray_c01.indd 12ray_c 01 .indd 12 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM