The Thunderbird: The Great Storm Bird of North American Skies
Stand on any open ground in North America — a prairie in Dakota, a beach on Vancouver Island, a granite shore of Lake Superior — and watch a summer storm come in, and you will understand why half a continent agreed on the shape of its greatest spirit. The anvil cloud spreads like a wingspan measured in miles. The first far-off rumble arrives in slow, heavy beats, unmistakably like something enormous flying toward you. Then the eye of the storm opens — one blinding flash — and closes again. The peoples of North America, from the whale-hunters of the Pacific coast to the corn-planters of the Southeast, looked up into that violence and saw not chaos but a creature: a bird beyond all birds, whose wingbeats are the thunder and whose glance is the lightning. They called him, in a hundred languages, some word that the traders eventually rendered into English as Thunderbird . He is one of the very few mythological beings shared across nearly the whole of a continent. The Lakota of the plains...