Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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for prey. Those humans and animals who traveled or slept out at night took care to be silent. The howling of wolves was an omnipresent sound of the nocturnal forest—their ostinatos called out the hunt or served as directional locators for the pack in the darkness.25 Animals also listened and responded to human sounds. An early Moravian Church history, George Loskiel’s History of the Mission of the United Brethren, relates the story of a young Native man named Joshua. One summer’s day, as Joshua was traveling in the woods near his community, he surprised a mother bear and cub near their den. With a roar, the mother rushed at him. The terrified Joshua screamed so loudly that the bear was unnerved and “suffered him to escape.”26
Sounded communications between humans and animals were especially critical for those who entered the woods to hunt. Hunters needed to possess inward spiritual knowledge to sing songs and make sounds that would summon prey or appease the spirits of animals killed for food. Often, hunting songs came through dreams produced after fasting or ingesting spiritual medicines called besons. Hunting besons were typically prepared by older men, who may have been too weak to join in the hunt, and consisted of roots, herbs, and seeds. Some were emetic and produced vomiting; but ingested in small doses they could ensure success in hunting. Besons also had the power to yield potent dreams.27 In beson-induced dreams, hunters could learn of the locations of animals or the best methods to appease the wrath of evil spirits. Dreamers especially hoped to encounter the dead and to hear them speak. With the right prayers and sacrifices, an ancestor might guide the hunter to game.28 Young boys were encouraged to solicit dreams of communication by envisioning animals or animal spirits.29 According to Loskiel’s History, dreams of predatory birds and vultures could signal either the success or failure of an upcoming hunt, depending on the nature of the dream. Hunters could also offer a preparatory sacrifice of a deer, divided into many small pieces, so that they could observe the pattern created by carrion birds as they ate the pieces of meat. These patterns possessed symbolic meaning that alerted hunters to the nearby presence of game, or an impending injury or disaster that may occur if they chose to hunt at that particular time. Nocturnal birds such as owls could also serve as an aid to hunters. Those who heard their calls in the woods at night could offer a sacrifice of tobacco to the campfire and expect to receive a blessing in the next day’s hunt.
Hunters also learned to communicate through sound with animals and their spirits by “calling the game”—vocally imitating animal noises, or using natural objects to produce sounds attractive to particular animals. These calls appealed to an animal’s sense of hearing and their instincts. Archaeological finds in various locations throughout Pennsylvania have verified that turkey-wing calls have been used in Pennsylvania for at least the past four thousand years. These small, delicate wing bones could be carefully joined together, and used as a type of mouth organ that produced sounds remarkably similar to a turkey’s call. But mastering the art of communication with animals also required practice and an understanding of the syntax of animal sounds: greeting calls, hailing calls, feeding calls, lonesome calls, and mating calls. Clucks, yelps, quacks, purrs: each animal had a range of sounds embedded within a complex sonic language. Even with the aid of a wing call, learning these animal languages required years of practice.
Boys began to learn the art of hunting in their infancy. Toddlers were encouraged to begin by climbing trees in search of birds. This strengthened their connection with the spirits of birds and honed their eyesight for even the smallest movements in the bushes or trees. Woodlore and hunting lore were skills honed by weeks or months spent in the woods. Many years of a man’s life could be spent in the forest, beginning with a rite of initiation around the age of ten:
At the age of about ten, a boy underwent a test of endurance. He was sent into the woods with bow and arrows and told not to return until he had shot something to eat. Before he set out, his face was blackened with charcoal, a sign to all whom he met that he was on his test and was not to be helped. Little Wildcat Alford, when undergoing this ordeal, was two days alone in the woods without food. He became too weak to shoot straight; but he managed somehow to kill a quail and returned to his family, a man.30
Another important goal of these solitary experiences was to establish lifelong relationships with natural spirits. The forest could be a place of revelatory experiences and visions, an in-between space where one encountered the divine. Listening was central to understanding and mapping these sacred spaces within the forest. The cawing of a raven often preceded a period of religious revelation.31 In pan-Native American lore, even inanimate objects had the potential to speak. According to a Seneca tale, “a young boy, tired from hunt, rested his head against a great stone. The stone began to talk. Tired and hungry as he was, he listened, for every hunter knows that spirits dwell in objects. From the stone he learned the ways of the various game animals.”32
Since the power of spirits could be revealed in the rushing of mountain streams or the roar of waterfalls, the murmur of springs or the groaning of trees as they swayed in the wind, naming these acoustic environments was one important way of claiming their potential for human use.33 For eastern Woodlands cultures, geographic information, and therefore a sense of distance and place, was conveyed through place names that reflected the natural features of the environment: Kighalampegha (Standing Pond), Moghwheston (Worm Town), Sughchaung (Salt Lick), Oghkitawmikaw (White Corn) or Wapwallopen (Where the White Hemp Grows). Each of these place-names represented the plants, insects, animals of the local ecology. The town of Wyoming (Large Plains) was named after a stretch of riparian meadow on the north branch of the Susquehanna River. The Delaware River, whose western branch flowed by the future site of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was sometimes referred to with a name that represented the speed of rushing water: Lenape-whituttuck (Rapid Stream).34 And the people who lived around the river took their name from that place: the Lenape (Delaware). Place-names could sometimes signify two different meanings. The Delaware settlement of Tulpehákink (Turtle Land Place) was named for the Tulpehocken Creek, which once abounded with water turtles, but it also indicated the area’s human inhabitants, members of the Delaware Turtle phratry.35
Areas with notable soundscapes were also named. A place along the banks of the Ohio River populated by toads so loud that travelers reported being unable to sleep received the fitting name Tsquallutene (Town of Toads).36 The name of Sheshequanink (At the Place of the Gourd Rattle), on the north branch of the Susquehanna River reflected the sound of the gourd rattles that accompanied religious ceremonies often conducted in the area. Paupaunoming (Cave of the Winds) in the Kittatinny Mountains resounded with whistling gusts of air from small holes in the cave walls.
Once names were given to places, it was possible to link them into a mental framework for quick reference and travel. This type of mental mapping could be sounded through song or speech for personal or communal use.37
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