eland. "The godly hare's house" is at the place of sun-rising; there the souls of good Indians "feed on delicious fruits with that great hare," who is clearly, so far, the Virginian Osiris.[1] Dr. Brinton has written at some length on "this chimerical beast," whose myth prevails, he says, "from the remotest wilds of the North-West to the coast of the Atlantic, from the southern boundary of Carolina to the cheerless swamps of Hudson's Bay. . . . The totem" (totem-kindred probably is meant) "clan which bore his name was looked up to with peculiar respect." From this it would appear that the hare was a totem like another, and had the same origin, whatever that may have been. According to the Père Allouez, the Indians "ont en veneration toute particulière, une certaine beste chimerique, qu'ils n'ont jamais veuë sinon en songe, ils l'appellent Missibizi," which appears to be a form of Michabo and Manibozho.[2]
In 1670 the same Père Allouez gives some myths about Michabo. "C'est-à-dire le grand lièvre," who made the world, and also invented fishing-nets. He is the master of life, and can leap eight leagues at one bound, and is beheld by his servants in dreams. In 1634 Père Paul le Jeune gives a longer account of Messou, "a variation of the same name," according to Dr. Brinton, as Michabo. This Messou reconstructed the drowned world out of a piece of clay brought him by an otter, which succeeded after the
- ↑ History of Travaile, pp. 98–99. This hare we have alluded to in vol. i. p. 184, but it seems worth while again to examine Dr. Brinton's theory more closely.
- ↑ Relations, 1667, p. 12.
