" Like the wind, the bird sweeps
through the aerial spaces, sings in the forests, and rustles on its
course; like the cloud, it floats in mid-air and casts its shadow on the
earth; like the lightning, it darts from heaven to earth to strike its
unsuspecting prey. These tropes were truths to savage nations, and led
on by that law of language which forced them to conceive everything as
animate or inanimate, itself the product of a deeper law of thought
which urges us to ascribe life to whatever has motion, they found no
animal so appropriate for their purpose here as the bird. Therefore the
Algonkins say that birds always make the winds, that they create the
water spouts, and that the clouds are the spreading and agitation of
their wings;[103-1] the Navajos, that at each cardinal point stands a
white swan, who is the spirit of the blasts which blow from its
dwelling; and the Dakotas, that in the west is the house of the
Wakinyan, the Flyers, the breezes that send the storms. So, also, they
frequently explain the thunder as the sound of the cloud-bird flapping
his wings, and the lightning as the fire that flashes from his tracks,
like the sparks which the buffalo scatters when he scours over a stony
plain.
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