Today's post is shorter than usual, and I'm sorry, but it isn't about Anansi. I had my wisdom teeth out a few days ago, and I appear to have misplaced my reference book that talks about the story I wanted to cover today. Looking for it hurt, so I eventually settled on this story instead. I'll do my best to find the book and have it prepared for next week.
I hope you all are doing well!
Today's story is a short folktale that has similarities to tales told in cultures all over the world. Let me tell you the story, and then I'll look at some others like it.
Once there was a hunter who liked to lurk by a river, knowing that doing so would make the animals come to him. One day he approached his usual territory and hid in the grasses. To the hunter's surprise, he found a large number of people bathing in the water, with not an animal in sight. These people looked a little bit different to him, though - they were big and burly, with dark brown skin. The hunter knew of no such people in any village nearby, and wondered where they had come from.
Then the hunter noticed something. On the banks of the river lay piles of buffalo hides, and very fine ones at that. There were so many that the hunter thought he could take one without being noticed. He snuck down to the river and grabbed a hide - judging from its size, it had come from a female buffalo.
Just then the bathers began to emerge from the river. The hunter darted back into cover.
What he saw next left the hunter flabbergasted. One by one, the bathers left the river and approached the pile of hides. Each picked up a buffalo hide and shrugged it over their shoulders. As they did so, a change occurred. Each human transformed into a buffalo!
The hunter could only stare as a herd of buffalo marched away from him.
But one hide was missing, and so one human was left. It was a female whose skin he had taken. The young woman looked up and down the riverbank, crying when she could not find her skin anywhere.
The hunter fell in love with the buffalo woman. He approached her and soothed her, then asked if she would be his wife. He built her a house, and together they had a son. He was big and brown, like his mother's people.
One day, the buffalo woman found her skin, kept carefully by the hunter for all of their years together. That night she told him that she wanted to return to her people, and that she wanted him to come with her.
(I had a very hard time finding pictures for this story. There's a Native American tale with a similar name, and all the images I could find were for it. Still, this was one of the first pictures to pop up when I searched for "Buffalo Bride". It was too cute to not include!)
The hunter and the buffalo woman had many other children, but all of them were buffalos. Only their first son remained a human. The story goes that he married into a chieftain's family, and that all of his descendants were strong and stubborn...just like the buffalo. To this day, that tribe will not eat buffalo meat.
What do you guys think?
There are a number of stories I can think of in which similar occurrences happen. A female animal sheds its skin and becomes human to bathe. That skin is found by a mortal man, who the woman marries. Eventually, she reclaims her skin and returns to her people. This one is different in that I haven't read many versions where the husband and wife stay together.
What interests me is the disparity between cultures which have this story. This African version has a buffalo. The Scottish Selkie is a seal version. There's a Japanese version involving a crane which I'm very fond of. Several Eastern European countries have variations on the tale with the animal involved being a swan or a dove. It's fascinating to me to see how many cultures have a tale so similar.
I hope you guys were interested too. I'll see you next week!
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