The stone giants
At a Glance
- Central figures: The Stone Giants (Ot-ne-yar-heh), massive cannibalistic beings with skin of rock; the Holder of the Heavens (Tharonhiawakon, also called Sapling or the Good Twin), who confronts them; and the people of the longhouse villages who are being hunted.
- Setting: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition - the lands of the Five Nations in what is now upstate New York, during the time after the world was made but before the earth was fully safe for human beings.
- The turn: The Stone Giants, growing bolder and more numerous, begin marching toward the villages of the People, and Tharonhiawakon decides to destroy them before they devour everyone.
- The outcome: Tharonhiawakon drives the Stone Giants into a ravine and destroys them with a great storm, killing all but one who escapes to the north and is never seen among the People again.
- The legacy: The boulders scattered across the hills and ravines of Haudenosaunee country are said to be the remains of the Stone Giants, and among some nations the story of Ot-ne-yar-heh is told as a reminder of the dangers that once walked the earth before the world was made safe.
The ground shook before anyone saw them. The dogs went quiet. Women pulled children inside the longhouses, and the men who had been dressing deer at the edge of the clearing stood up and looked toward the tree line, where something was moving that was taller than the tallest elm.
They came out of the forest walking upright like men but covered in stone. Their skin was rock - grey, ridged, crusted with moss in the joints. Their eyes sat deep in slabs of granite. When they walked, the saplings broke under their feet like dry corn stalks, and the sound of their movement was the sound of a landslide still deciding where to fall.
The Skin That Could Not Be Cut
The Haudenosaunee knew the Stone Giants by the name Ot-ne-yar-heh. They had been in the world a long time. Some said they were once human beings who had wandered so far north and lived so hard and so alone that their skin thickened against the cold until it turned to stone. Others said they were never human at all - that they had come up out of the earth when the world was still being shaped, things left over from the time of making.
What everyone agreed on was this: they ate people. They were always hungry, the way stone is always cold. Their teeth could crack bone. Arrows bounced off their chests. A war club struck against a Stone Giant’s arm would shatter in the warrior’s hand. They could not be cut. They could not be burned - or if fire touched them, they only grew harder, the way rocks pulled from a fire pit are denser than the ones lying in a field.
They lived in the deep places - the gorges, the high rocky ridges where the hemlock grew thick and the sun came through in thin lines. For a while they stayed there, eating deer and elk and whatever wandered close. But the deer learned to avoid the gorges. The elk moved south. The Stone Giants got hungrier.
The March Toward the Villages
The giants began to move. They came down from the high ground in ones and twos at first, then in groups of five and six. Hunters found their tracks in the mud along the creek beds - footprints the length of a canoe paddle, pressed deep enough to hold water. A fishing camp on the eastern shore of one of the finger lakes was found empty, the drying racks knocked flat, the fire still smoking, the people gone.
Word traveled through the longhouse villages. Runners went out on the trails between the nations. The Stone Giants were coming down from the north and the east, and there were more of them than anyone had seen before. They were moving together now, like a war party. The ground trembled at night.
The warriors tried. A party of the best fighters from one of the Seneca villages set an ambush along a creek where the Stone Giants had been seen drinking. They struck with every weapon they had. The Stone Giants brushed them aside the way a man brushes away mosquitoes. Three warriors were killed. The rest came back carrying their dead and said there was nothing to be done with human weapons.
Tharonhiawakon Hears the People
Tharonhiawakon - the Good Twin, the one who had shaped the world and set things in their right places after his brother Flint had made the thorns and the serpents and the cold - was not far away. He heard the People because the People called to him. They said: the Stone Giants are coming. We cannot stop them. Our arrows do not bite. Our clubs break. Our children are being taken.
Tharonhiawakon came. He walked among the villages and saw the damage. He followed the tracks of the Stone Giants north toward the high ridges where they gathered. He did not bring a weapon. He did not need one.
He found them in a great ravine - dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, massed together, their stone bodies grinding against each other as they moved. They were preparing to march south in force. The sound of them filled the ravine like thunder trapped underground.
The Ravine
Tharonhiawakon stood at the head of the ravine and called to them.
Turn back. The People are not yours to eat. This world was not made for you.
The Stone Giants laughed. The sound was boulders rolling downhill. The largest of them stepped forward and said they would eat him first, then go on to the villages, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it.
Tharonhiawakon raised his arms and called the storm.
It came from every direction at once. Not rain - wind. A wind that tore the hemlocks out by their roots and sent them spinning into the ravine. Lightning struck the rock walls and split them. The ground under the Stone Giants cracked open, and they fell into the gaps, clutching at the edges with their massive stone fingers. More lightning. The walls of the ravine collapsed inward. Boulders the size of longhouses came down on the Stone Giants and pinned them. The wind drove them deeper, pressed them into the broken earth.
They screamed. It was the sound of rock splitting in a winter freeze - a sharp, high crack that carried for miles. One by one they went under. The ravine filled with rubble and broken stone and the bodies of the giants, until there was nothing moving.
One escaped. A single Stone Giant at the far end of the ravine scrambled up the north wall and ran. It ran north and kept running, into the cold country beyond the lakes, and was never seen in Haudenosaunee territory again. Some say it is still out there, somewhere in the far north, alone and hungry, the last of its kind.
The Boulders in the Hills
Tharonhiawakon walked back to the villages. He told the People the Stone Giants were finished. The ravine was full of their remains. The earth had taken them back.
After that, the hunters went into the gorges and high ridges again. They found boulders where there had been no boulders before - enormous, strangely shaped, some of them standing upright as if they had been walking when the ground caught them. Moss grew on them quickly. In certain lights, you could see what looked like a face in the stone, or the shape of a bent arm, or a hand still reaching.
The People left those boulders alone. They did not build near them. They did not sit on them. They walked past and remembered what had been there before the world was made safe, and what Tharonhiawakon had done to make it so.
The boulders are still there, scattered across the hills and ravines of the old Haudenosaunee country. Some of them are very large. Some of them, in certain weather, when the wind moves through the gorge a particular way, make a sound like breathing.