Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/271

mouth of Toccoa Creek. Another of these fantastic beings was a great leech or tlanúsi, formerly in Valley River, just above the junction of Hiawassee Creek, at Murphy, North Carolina ; this village was called on that account Tlanusíyi, or "leech-place." A third of these creatures was Ukténa, a huge snake or water-serpent, once holding forth at different places along streams and to be kept distinct from the "great horned ukténa."

The Iroquois people of New York, rich in all kinds of mythic folk-lore, were not delinquent in forming stories about miraculous aquatic beings. The Onyare (in Mohawk, On-yar-he) is their lake serpent, which traversed their country and by coiling up in dominant positions near the pathways or trails interrupted communication between the settlements of the Iroquois. Onyare's breath, diffused through the air, brought on sickness; it was finally with its brood destroyed by thunderbolts, or compelled to retire into deep water. The life of Onyare is in the stories brought into connection with the Stone-Heads or Otneyarhe, and also with the Flying Heads or Konearaunēnē.

The ancient Creek Indians believed in a miraculous horned snake, which at times appeared at the surface of water-holes, and whose horns, used as a war-physic, were prized higher than any other fetish within their knowledge. When the snake was seen in a blue hole filled with deep water, the old men of the tribe sang their incantations, which brought the snake to the surface. They sang again, and it emerged a little from the moving waves. When they sang for the third time, it came ashore and showed its horns, and they sawed one off; again they sang, and it emerged for the fourth time, when they sawed off the other horn. Fragments of the horns were carried along in the warriors' shot-pouches on their expeditions, and the song lines of the horned-snake referred to all the manipulations connected with the capture of the snake's horns or tchito yábi. The refrain was "kitiwaíhi, kitiwáyi, áhayi."

The Káyowe or Kiowa Indians, now settled in Oklahoma, know of Zemo' hgú-ani, a species of horned alligator of extraordinary size found in deep holes in streams, and have named certain places after it. By the Jicarilla Apaches, in the northern part of New Mexico, a great frog is remembered, who lived in a former lake at Taos pueblo, and has been described by J. Mooney in his article on "Jicarilla Genesis," "Amer. Anthropologist," July, 1898, pp. 201, 202.

Especially productive of this class of "miraculous hydrozoölogy" were the nations living on Columbia River and its numerous tributaries. Among the Kalapuya Indians of Willamette River, Oregon, the figure of Amhúluk, a monstrous and nondescript being which lives in a water-basin at the Forked Mountain (tcha Waláktchi améffu)