black cats and rats de bois

[David Costa]

> A wolverine is to a marten as a tank is to a sportscar, though I'm not sure
> whether this conception would meet with the approval of the taxonomists. In
> northern North America there's an intermediate of sorts, a large, darkish
> marten called variously a fisher or a pekan, or sometimes, a cat.

Actually, 'fisher' is the standard modern English name. The main vernacular
English name I'm aware of is 'black cat' (accent on 'black', like a
compound). 'Pekan' is borrowed from French, which they appear to have gotten
from some northern New England Algonquian language (cf. Micmac /pqamk/,
Maliseet /p at k@mk/, Penobscot /pa'kamke/; '@' = schwa). That's not the
reconstructible Proto-Algonquian name for the animal, though (PA
*/wecye:ka/). The marten and fisher are indeed different animals, tho the
French missionaries sometimes merge them.

> I think that the French in particular called things like raccoons, fishers,
> and skunks chats.

In my experience, the French 'Algonquianist missionaries' called the raccoon
'chat sauvage', and the fisher 'pecan'. They might have been more variable
about skunks, tho the Illinois missionaries at least called them 'be(s)te
puante'. They tended to call the possum 'rat de bois'. Can't recall at the
moment what they called the wolverine, but that's found in Europe as well.
All in all, the French terms for animals that weren't found in Europe
actually seem to be pretty consistent.

> Maybe wolverines, too.  This would seem to underlie the 'wild cat' conception
> in Riggs.  There's a Siouan name in Lewis & Clark that they render 'Black Cat'
> that I think might refer to a skunk or a fisher

If they got the species identification correct (a big if), it's the fisher.
If Lewis and Clark didn't call skunks skunks (a term that's been used in
English a LONG time) they probably would have called it 'pole cat'. That's
only the striped skunk, tho, the spotted skunk is called the 'civet cat' by
almost everyone who knows about them.

Dave