Cryptos

[Richard L. Dieterle]

First regarding bears: "We had something in our legends that shades between
legend and physical reality.. a story of long-bodied bears." The Winnebago have
"long-legged bears," which seem to be the ursine counterparts of humanoid
giants.  One gets the feeling that they are thought to be extinct.

This is the criterion that you give for culling out legendary animals:

"1. Was the animal thought of as a real PHYSICAL animal? (can be killed, does it
bleed, is similar to other animals)
2. Did people see it recently (not in legendary times) and did it behave like
an animal? (eating, running, having young)"

The problem is that waterspirits (waktcexi) seem to satisfy these criteria.
Waterspirits inhabited lakes and streams rather like the Loch Ness monster,
which one Winnebago told me was just a waterspirit.  These spirits gave people
the right to cut certain tissues from their body to use as medicine.  There are
artifacts that purport to be these medicinal items.  Their bones are
particularly valuable in this respect.

People have claimed to see them on rare occasions.  There are stories that they
have swallowed cervids whole.  There is another story in which a waterspirit
created a whirlpool that sucked down a Dakota warparty that was pursuing the
Winnebago across a lake, etc.

Interestingly, the same is not true of Thunderbirds, perhaps because they are
thought to present themselves in the guise of humans.