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The Alicanto: The Bird of Metal That Guides the Miner and Ruins the Greedy

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In the mining country of northern Chile — the Atacama, the driest desert on earth, and the great silver and copper and gold camps of the Norte Grande — the miners kept a bird, and the bird kept a secret that could make a man rich or destroy him utterly, according entirely to the man. The alicanto is a bird of the desert night: flightless or nearly so, running rather than flying across the dark ground; and it feeds on metal — it eats gold, or it eats silver, or it eats copper, each alicanto specialized to its one ore — pecking the pure metal from the veins and the ground of the mineral desert. And because it eats metal, it glows : the alicanto that eats gold shines with a golden light; the silver-eater with a silver radiance; a luminous bird running through the desert dark, lit from within by the precious metal it has swallowed, its wings and its whole body glowing with the colour of its ore. And here is the thing the miners knew and staked their fortunes on: the alicanto knows where ...
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The Namorodo: The Dry-Bone Wind-Spirit That Whistles by Night

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Among the oldest continuous traditions on earth — the cultures of the Aboriginal peoples of western Arnhem Land, in Australia's far north, whose ancestors painted the sandstone escarpments tens of thousands of years ago — there is a spirit-being of the night that is drawn, in the rock art and in the telling, as a thing of almost pure dryness : the Namorodo, a skeletal being, all bone and desiccated sinew, its dried-out flesh held to its skeleton by tough strings of ligament, with long claws or bony fingers — a corpse dried to nothing, articulated, walking. It lives among the rocks and the crevices of the escarpment by day, still and hidden in the stone; and it comes out only at night , for it is a creature of the dark and cannot bear the day. And it moves through the night not by walking so much as by flying on the wind — the Namorodo travels on the night air, borne on the breeze, a dry rattling skeletal thing carried on the wind across the dark country, over the escarpment and t...
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The Mishipeshu: The Horned Water-Panther Beneath the Great Lakes

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On a cliff-face at Agawa Rock, where the granite drops sheer into the cold water of Lake Superior, there is painted in red ochre a creature that the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes have honoured and feared for uncounted generations: a great cat-like beast, horned, its back and long tail ridged with spines or plates like a saw, spikes down its spine — the Mishipeshu, the "Great Lynx," the underwater panther, master and monster of the deep waters. It is one of the most important beings in the whole cosmology of the Great Lakes nations, and one of the most precisely conceived. It has the body and snarling head of a cat — a lynx or cougar grown vast — but armoured with the scales of a serpent or fish , crowned with the horns of power, and ridged all down its spine and its enormous tail with copper spines; and it dwells in the deepest and coldest water — the depths of Superior above all, and the dangerous straits and rapids where the lakes pour into one another. It is t...
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The Mngwa: The Grey Cat Larger Than a Lion on the Swahili Coast

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The Swahili coast of Tanzania — the old towns of the mainland shore, Lindi and the villages of the south — keeps a monster that is, uniquely in this chronicle's whole bestiary, attested in both the deep folk tradition and the sober twentieth-century game-warden's report, and the two archives agree with a precision that has never been comfortably explained. The mngwa — the name means simply "the strange one," and it is also called the nunda , "the fierce one" — is a cat : but a cat larger than a lion , the size of a donkey, grey (not tawny) with faint dark stripes or brindling like a monstrous tabby, and it hunts, unlike any lion or leopard, human beings by preference, coming into the villages by night to take people from the very doorways and the sleeping-mats, and killing not with a clean lion's method but with a savage tearing of claws that leaves its victims horribly mauled. The mngwa appears in one of the oldest of Swahili poems — the Sultan Majnu...
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The Ghillie Dhu: The Leaf-Clad Wild Man Who Guides Lost Children Home

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This chronicle has run through a great deal of the dark — the drainers, the devourers, the pressers, the takers — and it is worth pausing, near the end of a long road, on one of the gentlest beings in all the world's folklore, from the birch woods of the northwest Scottish Highlands. The Ghillie Dhu — the gille dubh , the "dark-haired lad" or "dark servant" — belonged especially to the woods around Gairloch and Loch a' Druing in Wester Ross, and the tradition drew him with a shy and particular tenderness. He was a solitary wild man of the birch woods: dark-haired (the name says so), and clothed not in any cloth but in leaves and green moss — a suit of foliage, birch-leaves and moss, grown or gathered over his body so that he was the very colour of the wood and half-invisible in it, a man made of the forest's own green. He was shy past all the other fairy-folk: he shunned people, kept to his own trees, was almost never seen, and asked nothing of anyone...
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The Fear Gorta: The Famished Beggar Who Carries Fortune in His Hand

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Ireland — a land that has known real famine to the marrow of its history — keeps a spirit of hunger that is, uniquely among all the terrors of this chronicle, a test of charity , and one that the giver, not the monster, decides the outcome of. The Fear Gorta — the "man of hunger," the hungry man — walks the roads of Ireland in the guise of a beggar : emaciated past belief, skeletal, gray, wasted to nothing, the very image of starvation given legs — and he goes from door to door, in the lean times and the between-times, asking, in a thin voice, for food : a scrap, a crust, an alms of anything at all. And here the legend divides on a single hinge, and the hinge is you . To the household that gives to the Fear Gorta — that answers the famished beggar with food, however little, and a kind word — he brings good fortune : prosperity, plenty, luck for the year, the household that fed hunger blessed with never knowing it. To the household that turns him away — that refuses the starv...
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The Baykok: The Flying Skeleton That Hunts the Great Hunters

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The Anishinaabe peoples of the northern woodlands — the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes country, of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Ontario, the same lake-and-birch world that dreamed the Wendigo of the starving winter — keep a death-spirit of the forest whose horror is drawn with a hunter's precise eye. The baykok (bakaak, paguk, and other spellings) is a skeleton that flies : emaciated past even the skeletal, a thing of nothing but bones and thin translucent skin stretched tight over them, its eye-sockets burning with a red or fiery light in the empty skull; it moves through the night forest with a dreadful screaming cry — the bakaak's thin shriek that freezes the hunter where he stands — and it hunts, invisibly or half-seen among the trees, with a weapon fitting to its world: it strikes its prey with invisible arrows , or beats them down with a club, and then it does the thing that names its whole nature — it takes the liver . The baykok kills, and eats only the liver of its victim...
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