Hare went to visit some of his uncles, but on the way he had to cross a very wide river. So he issued a command: "Crabs, come forward!" Immediately a host of crabs scurried up to him, and he picked up the biggest and said, "Lend me your boat." He took the crab and pulled it out of its shell, which he used for a boat, the tail being turned up as a sail. Then he commanded the wind itself, "Blow me across!" and the wind propelled his boat to the other side. He set aside his crab shell boat and after walking some way, he entered a lodge. Inside were people whose bodies consisted only of their heads. They greeted Hare and said, "Grandson, you must be very hungry." So they fixed him bear ribs and corn, but as he bit into the meat and started to cut it off with the knife they gave him, it slipped and he slit his nose. They gave him another knife, and he seemed not to mind having cut himself. However, when he got home, his grandmother exclaimed, "Grandson, you have disfigured yourself!" Ever after, even to this day, when a person goes to visit his uncles, they say, "He is going out to slit his nose."

Not long afterwards, Hare "went out to slit his nose," as they say. He went to another long lodge of the same bodiless heads, who said to him, "Grandson you must be hungry, let us fix you something to eat." Hare had a really good meal. All this eating was beginning to fatten him up, so the heads said, "Let's eat Hare, he looks delicious!" They rushed to block all the exits, but Hare found a small opening in the wall and ran out that way. The heads rolled after him, forcing Hare to climb a tree to escape. They gnawed that tree down and the next two to which Hare later fled. But the fourth tree tasted so bitter that the heads decided to wait him out at its trunk. Hare was uncertain about what to do next, when he suddenly got an idea and began to sing:

Bodiless heads, I want to go by,
Go to sleep!
Go to sleep!

The heads decided to trick Hare by pretending to sleep, so they said to each other, "Grandson says we should sleep, so let's go to sleep." However, by the time Hare had sung his song four times, they really had fallen asleep. Unfortunately, when Hare touched ground, he made a noise and the heads woke up. The pursuit started all over again, but this time Hare came to a creek which he jumped over in a single bound. The last pursuer yelled, "Jump across after him!" but being heads, they could only manage to roll into the water where every one of them drowned. After Hare went downstream, collected all the heads and set them in a big pile, he burned them down to the bone. Then he pulverized the bones into a powder, which he threw into the water. Hare decreed: "Since you have abused the humans, henceforth you shall exist as 'fast fish' who nibble at people's ankles when they cross a stream." When he got home he said, "My uncles sure must be great." Grandmother replied, "Yes, they are among the great spirits." "Well," said Hare, "that's a bit of an exaggeration, since I turned them all into little fast fish." Grandmother was beside herself, "You big-eyed, big-eared, big-footed, slit-nosed varmint, you have destroyed my brothers!" "Well," answered Hare, "if that's the way you feel about it, I can just as easily make you into a fast fish!" "Oh no, grandson," she said nervously, "I was just joking. Actually you did a good thing as the heads were abusing your uncles and aunts." [1]

Commentary. In Hotcâk, the word translated as "grandson," when the heads address their nephew, also means "nephew." This word is hecútcge.

It's interesting that the heads are also cannibals. Ordinarily, cannibals are Giants. Giants seem to function esoterically as images of enemy aliens. Since the killing of an enemy is ideally followed by the taking of his head, detached heads can stand for enemies. Thus, detached heads and cannibals do in fact go together on a more esoteric level. Ice is also associated with the Giants. It is said that ice in the pit of their stomachs is what makes them eat humans. Here the heads end up embedded in ice, the inverse situation, so to speak, and it is precisely this that prevents them from realizing their cannibal ambitions. In the end, they become harmless cannibals, who exist as fish that merely nibble at people's feet. "Fast fish," could be expressed by the Hotcâk ho sagere. The word hosage, on the other hand, means "trickery, deception, illusion." An interesting convergence. Furthermore, the element of water is one and the same, at some spiritual level, as the Waterspirit, whose name Wak'tcexi, "the Deceiving One," matches it reputation. The heads are taken out of the ice and burned up completely, then their ashes give rise to the fast fish. Ghosts are averse to ashes. Those who are burned completely never come back. Thus the enemy aliens killed in action never come back to life like the Hotcâk killed. They are condemned always to live in water and can never return to land: the same image in different symbolic language.

In Hotcâk symbolism, the tree can stand for a human lineage, a genealogical tree, where the trunk is the ancestor, and the fruit of the many branches are the descendants. The enemy, represented by detached heads, cuts down a tree in which Hare hangs as if he were its fruit. He is, in a sense, the tree on which he sits. When the enemy kills a great spirit who sojourns among the people as a mortal warrior, his soul goes to Earthmaker, who grants him the power to be reborn. Thus jumping from one tree to another describes the process of rebirth of the Hotcâk warrior who is killed in action by the enemy. The stump of the tree is all that is left standing, but that is precisely his immortal soul. As we learn in the Twins Cycle, the older twin, Stump, who stands in contrast to his brother Flesh, is also known as "Ghost." The last "tree" is too strong for them: they cannot devour it, causing the seed (flesh) of the "stump" (soul) to be separated from the stump. Thus they are killed (made to sleep) instead, sleep being in the Twins Cycle a symbol of death.

The Twin called "Stump" or "Ghost" is able to live in water without drowning. This is an image of the way in which the soul subsists in the essentially liquid body. Hare leaps over the water, just as the liberated soul would be imaged as having freed itself from the reach of watery flesh. Thus we find in a number of funerary myths, the task presented to the soul of the departed to leap over a river. No matter how great the river, the soul always manages to land safely on the other side. This jump from land to land over the water is like the jump seen from tree to tree, a description of the reincarnated soul that escapes permanent death. Such is indeed the very mission of Hare, who is the author of the Medicine Rite and the accidental author of death itself. The enemy that follows after drowns in the water: they live but once and never return. The enemy = cannibals can, in the end, never really devour those Hotcâk warriors whom they kill, for such warriors have souls that jump from "tree" to "tree" and leap over the water that is the illusory world of flesh, the world in which the cannibals are mere minnows that can but nibble on the ankles of the immortals. The ankle and foot would correspond to the trunk or stump of a tree. It is they that are under water when the fast fish nibble at them. The feet are the means by which people progress down the path of life and death. The fish cannot stop the feet from crossing through the water to the other side, just like they cannot stop Hare from jumping from one tree to the next. Hare's crossing of the iced river is this image in another symbolic garb, with land symbolizing the abode of flesh, the living; and water symbolizing the abode of the soul and the ghosts of the dead. Water is the opposite of the ash from which the fish arise. So ash is the flesh which is mortal, and it is from the demise of this flesh in the form of ashes and the grave that the soul (the fish) arises, just as it is from the severed tree that the stump comes into existence.

Comparative Material. The theme of escaping from one tree to another as they are being felled, is found among the Chiricahua Apache. "Coyote went on his journey again. He saw a turkey in some pine trees. It was high up there in a tree. I don't know where he got the axe, but he got an axe, and he began to chop on that tree. Just about the time the tree started to fall, the turkey flew to another one. Coyote went to that tree and tried to chop it down. He just kept doing that all day long until he was tired out. He kept chopping and Turkey kept flying to the next tree until Coyote was worn out." [2]

Among the Plains Indians, the hero Blood Clot is often a counterpart to Hare. In an Arapaho tale, Blood Clot visits an old woman who offers him meat. This meat turns out to be human flesh. He kills the old woman, but the kindred cannibals come home and begin to chase Blood Clot Boy. He changes into different animals to escape, his last two forms being varieties of rabbit. Then he comes to a thinly iced river which he can cross as a rabbit, but his pursuers, being men, fall through the ice. Blood Clot Boy causes the ice to freeze back over, killing all the cannibals. [3]

Overcoming the stream in afterlife is a theme in Buddhist thought with the same import: "A bhikkhu by the complete destruction of the three fetters is a stream-winner, one who cannot be reborn in any state of woe, assured, bound for enlightenment." [4] A successful Brahmin is one who crosses over to dry land: "... the arahan ... is here called 'the brahmin [who] crossed over, going beyond, stands on dry land'." [5]

A Buddhist myth relates how one of the wives of the king gave birth to a ball of flesh, which was rejected, put in a box and thrown into a river. It was fished out by a man who discovered that it contained a thousand little boys. They grew up to be great warriors and laid siege to their father's kingdom. [6]

Links: Hare, The Wâkpanîkera, Earth, The Sons of Earthmaker.

Links within the Hare Cycle: §6. Grandmother Packs the Bear Meat, §8. Hare Burns His Buttocks.

Stories: about bodiless heads: The Human Head, The Red Man, Bluehorn's Nephews, The Chief of the Herok'a; featuring Hare as a character: The Hare Cycle, Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, The Necessity for Death, The Mission of the Five Sons of Earthmaker, Hare Acquires His Arrows, Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp, Hare Recruits Game Animals for Humans, Hare Kills Wildcat, The Messengers of Hare, Hare Secures the Creation Lodge, Hare Kills Flint, Hare Kills Sharp Elbow, Hare Visits His Grandfather Bear, Grandmother Packs the Bear Meat, Hare Kills a Man with a Cane, Hare Burns His Buttocks, Hare Gets Swallowed, Hare Establishes Bear Hunting, Grandmother's Gifts, Hare and the Grasshoppers, The Spirit of Gambling, The Red Man, Maize Origin Myth, Hare Steals the Fish, The Animal who would Eat Men, The Gift of Shooting, Hare and the Dangerous Frog, Thunder Cloud is Blessed, The Coughing Up of the Black Hawks, The Animal Spirit Aids of the Medicine Rite, The Petition to Earthmaker; featuring (spirit) fish as characters: The Man who went to the Upper and Lower Worlds, The Were-Fish, The Greedy Woman, Wolves and Humans, River Child and the Waterspirit of Devil's Lake, The Great Fish, The Spirit of Maple Bluff, Lake Wâkcikhomîgra (Mendota): the Origin of Its Name, The King Bird, Fish Clan Origins, The Blessing of a Bear Clansman, Trickster's Adventures in the Ocean, Otter Comes to the Medicine Rite; featuring Grandmother Earth as a character: Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, Maize Origin Myth, Grandmother Packs the Bear Meat, Grandmother's Gifts, Owl Goes Hunting, Hare and the Grasshoppers, Hare Acquires His Arrows, The Plant Blessing of Earth, Hare Visits His Grandfather Bear, Hare Burns His Buttocks, Hare Gets Swallowed, Hare Kills Wildcat, Hare and the Dangerous Frog, Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp, Hare Recruits Game Animals for Humans, The Necessity for Death, Hare Secures the Creation Lodge, Hare Steals the Fish, Hare Kills Sharp Elbow, Hare Kills Flint, The Gift of Shooting, The Creation of the World, The Creation of Man (vv 4, 6), Hare Establishes Bear Hunting, Redhorn's Father (?); mentioning shells: The Gift of Shooting, The Markings on the Moon, The Shell Anklets Origin Myth, The Arrows of the Medicine Rite Men, Otter Comes to the Medicine Rite, The Wild Rose, Young Man Gambles Often (wampum), Wolves and Humans (oyster), Bird Clan Origin Myth, The Lost Child, The Medicine Rite Foundation Myth, V. 2, Turtle's Warparty, The Lost Blanket (mussel), The Annihilation of the Hotcâgara I.

Themes: crossing a river by summoning the aid of water creatures: The Seduction of Redhorn's Son (leeches); crossing a body of water by using a plant or animal as a ship and commanding the wind: The Thunderbird, How the Thunders Met the Nights; crossing a body of water on the back of an animal: The Seduction of Redhorn's Sons (leeches), Ocean Duck (Waterspirit), Hare Retrieves a Stolen Scalp (beaver), The Hotcâk Migration Myth (turtle), cf. The Shaggy Man (bearskin bladders); a spirit causes someone to fall asleep: The Brave Man, Warughapara; hypnotic command for enemies to sleep works on the fourth utterance: The Brave Man; creatures turn into fish: Lake Wâkcikhomîgra (Mendota): the Origin of Its Name, The Were-fish, The Greedy Woman, The King Bird, The Man who went to the Upper and Lower Worlds.

Notes:

[1] Paul Radin, Winnebago Hero Cycles: A Study in Aboriginal Literature (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1948) 100-102.

[2] Morris Edward Opler, Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 [1942]) 41.

[3] Runs in the Water, "Blood-Clot-Boy," in George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1903]) Story 130, p. 302.

[4] Isaline Blew Horner, The Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1975 [1936]) 213.

[5] Anguttara II.133f, quoted in Horner, 1936: 218-219. See page 300 for a fuller discussion.

[6] James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fâ-hien of his Travels in India and Ceylon (A. D. 399-414) in search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886) 72-75.