A SUPERSTITION ABOUT FLIES.
There was once a species of fly so poisonous that sometimes merely the smell of them would eat the nose from a man's face. A certain species of woodpecker was the only thing that could destroy them. Their homes were in trees, on which their poisonous tracks could be traced. They often entered the horns of a deer; hence, the Indian hunter's first move after shooting a deer was to examine its horns, and if they were infected, the hunter would run away, since he knew that the moment the animal died the fatal insect would emerge from the horn.
Around the trees in which they lived deer ever congregated, seemingly bewitched by these fierce and noxious little flies.
Buckskin and deerskin were used to catch them. The bird that killed them for food was colored black and yellow. In the evening it came forth from its home in a hollow tree and scoured the forests for them.
These birds were caught with buckskin traps and their feathers were used as charms, being fastened to the arrows of the hunter. An arrow thus made potent would surely bring down the deer.
CHAPTER IV.
MYTHOLOGIC EXPLANATION OF PHENOMENA.
The instinctive desire in man to fathom the mystery of human life, to solve the enigma of whence he came and whither he goes, and to account for the marvels ever presented to his senses, has in all times excited the imagination and originated speculation.
To explain the phenomena of life and nature the untutored mind has seized upon every analogy suggesting the slightest clew, and imagination has aided the crude reasoning faculties.
In the numerous Iroquois myths relating to the origin of both animate and inanimate objects in nature there appears a reflex of the Indian's mind as he solves, to his entire satisfaction, mysteries, many of which are the "burning questions" of this enlightened age.
These tales only vary with the temperament of the narrator or the exigencies of the locality. Where oft repeated they have in time been recorded on the hearts and minds of the people either as myths or folk-lore, embodying the fossilized knowledge and ideas of a previous age, misinterpreted, perhaps, by those who have inherited them.
For the ethnologist who would trace in mythology the growth of the human mind, nowhere is the harvest more rich than among the aborigines of our own country; and prominent among these, in this lore of "faded metaphors", are the Iroquois. To what dignity their folk-lore might have attained had they been left to reach a lettered civilization for themselves we cannot know; but, judging from the history of other peoples, their first chroniclers would have accepted many of these oral traditions as facts.
To many from whom the writer received these myths they were realities, for there remain among these forest children those who still cling to their oft-told tales as the only link binding them to a happier past. Nor should they be considered as idle tales by the civilized man, who has not yet rid himself of the shackles of superstition in a thousand forms, and who sees daily his household gods torn down before him by comparative mythology and its allied sciences. Let him rather accept them reverently as the striving of the infant human mind in its search after the unknowable, revealing that inherent something in man which presupposes the existence of hidden forces, powers, or beings in nature. At first, perhaps, this is a mere blind feeling, but as man develops, it becomes an idea, then a recognized possibility; later, an article of religious faith.