If the reply be “Yes,” all is well, and the Little Deer goes on his way; but if the reply be “No,” he follows on the trail of the hunter, guided by the drops of blood on the ground, until he arrives at his cabin in the settlement, when the Little Deer enters invisibly and strikes the hunter with rheumatism, so that he becomes at once a helpless cripple.
No hunter who has regard for his health ever fails to ask pardon of the Deer for killing it, although some hunters who have not learned the prayer may try to turn aside the Little Deer from his pursuit by building a fire behind them in the trail.
Next came the Fishes and Reptiles, who had their own complaints against Man.
They held their council together and determined to make their victims dream of snakes twining about them in slimy folds and blowing foul breath in their faces, or to make them dream of eating raw or decaying fish, so that they would lose appetite, sicken, and die.
This is why people dream about snakes and fish.
Finally the Birds, Insects, and smaller animals came together for the same purpose, and the Grubworm was chief of the council.
It was decided that each in turn should give an opinion, and then they would vote on the question as to whether or not Man was guilty.
Seven votes should be enough to condemn him.
One after another denounced Man’s cruelty and injustice toward the other animals and voted in favor of his death.
The Frog spoke first, saying: “We must do something to check the increase of the race, or people will become so numerous that we shall be crowded from off the earth.
See how they have kicked me about because I’m ugly, as they say, until my back is covered with sores;” and here he showed the spots on his skin.
Next came the Bird—no one remembers now which one it was—who condemned Man “because he burns my feet off,” meaning the way in which the hunter barbecues birds by impaling them on a stick set over the fire, so that their feathers and tender feet are singed off.
Others followed in the same strain.
The Ground-squirrel alone ventured to say a good word for Man, who seldom hurt him because he was so small, but this made the others so angry that they fell upon the Ground-squirrel and tore him with their claws, and the stripes are on his back to this day.
They began then to devise and name so many new diseases, one after another, that had not their invention at last failed them, no one of the human race would have been able to survive.
The Grubworm grew constantly more pleased as the name of each disease was called off, until at last they reached the end of the list, when some one proposed to make menstruation sometimes fatal to women.
On this he rose up in his place and cried: “ Wadâñ′!
[Thanks!] I’m glad some more of them will die, for they are getting so thick that they tread on me.” The thought fairly made him shake with joy, so that he fell over backward and could not get on his feet again, but had to wriggle off on his back, as the Grubworm has done ever since.
When the Plants, who were friendly to Man, heard what had been done by the animals, they determined to defeat the latters’ evil designs.
Each Tree, Shrub, and Herb, down even to the Grasses and Mosses, agreed to furnish a cure for some one of the diseases named, and each said: “I shall appear to help Man when he calls upon me in his need.” Thus came medicine; and the plants, every one of which has its use if we only knew it, furnish the remedy to counteract the evil wrought by the revengeful animals.
The doctrine and worldview that natural phenomena, places, and objects possess inherent spirit, soul, or personality — and that the cosmos is populated by countless local, plural, embodied divine agents: kami in mountain and tree, sidhe in cairn and well, landwights in field and stone, nymphs in spring and grove, haltija in forest and lake, lares and penates in household and threshold, Iamblichean daemons in element and place. Distinct from monotheism (single transcendent God), pantheism (one underlying substance), and emanation_hierarchy (cascading single source); animism's signature is the plurality, locality, and embodied-in-landscape character of the divine.
The passage is a quintessential example of animism, depicting animals, plants, and natural phenomena as possessing distinct spirits, personalities, and the agency to hold councils, speak, and enact revenge or healing.
Penitential sorrow for sin as the first movement of the soul's healing — Julian's first of three medicines ('by contrition we are made clean'), the Christian compunction tradition, Sufi tawba, Greek metanoia, Hebrew teshuvah; the wound of sorrow that turns bitterness into hope of mercy. Distinct from self_examination (the diagnostic practice), rejection_of_hypocrisy (critique of others' form), and dark_night (imposed aridity): contrition is the soul's own penitent turning.
The text emphasizes the necessity of asking pardon and expressing sorrow for killing the deer to avoid sickness, reflecting a theme of penitential turning.
Direct address to the divine, whether petitionary, contemplative, or liturgical; speech and silence offered upward.
The passage explicitly mentions hunters asking pardon of the Deer through a specific prayer to avoid retribution, establishing direct address to a spiritual entity as a necessary practice.
Hunters are described as building a fire behind them on the trail to turn aside the pursuing spirit, indicating fire's use as a ritual medium for protection.
The doctrine and practice that spoken or sung word carries causal-magical force — that uttering names, formulas, songs, or incantations alters reality directly rather than merely communicating about it. Vainamoinen's runo-songs that move mountains and command iron, Norse galdr, Vedic mantra, Shinto kotodama, the magician's barbarous names in the Greek Magical Papyri, Iamblichean arcane signatures and inexplicable symbols, biblical creation-by-word. Distinct from sacred_names (the ontological power of names themselves) and prayer (address to the divine); word_power_incantation is the magical-causal efficacy of the spoken word as such.
The narrative suggests that specific spoken words (the prayer of pardon) have the power to alter reality by preventing the Little Deer's pursuit.