FABLE AND FOLKLORE 245 



a nest as big as a village, surrounded by the bones and 

 horns of the great animals on which it preyed. Every 

 tribal district seems to have had at least one pair. The 

 Indians about Lake Superior believed that theirs were 

 at home on the beetling heights of that bold promontory 

 on the northern shore of the lake long celebrated as 

 Thunder Cape. This is, for natural reasons, a theatre 

 of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for 

 by the fiction of a magic bird — quite as natural in its 

 way as is the meteorology. At any rate the redmen 

 feared to climb the mountain and prove their theory, for 

 they said men had been struck by lightning there in im- 

 pious attempts at investigating the bird-god — the old 

 story of religious interference with scientific curiosity. 

 These same people held that their thunder-bird sat on 

 her eggs during fair weather, and hatched out her brood 

 in the storm — which hatching was the storm. 



"A place," says the ethnologist Mooney, 77 "known to 

 the Sioux as Waqkina-oye, 'the Thunderer's nest* — 

 . . . is in eastern South Dakota in the neighborhood of 

 Big Stone Lake. At another place, near the summit 

 of the Coteau des Prairies, in eastern South Dakota, a 

 number of large round boulders are pointed out as the 

 eggs of the thunder-bird. According to the Comanches 

 there is a place on upper Red River where the thunder- 

 bird once alighted on the ground. . . . The same people 

 tell how a hunter once shot and wounded a large bird 

 which fell to the ground. Being afraid to attack it alone 

 on account of its size, he returned to camp for help, 

 but on again approaching the spot the hunters heard 

 the thunder rolling and saw flashes of lightning shoot- 

 ing out from the ravine where the bird lay wounded. 

 On coming nearer the lightning blinded them so that they 



