Hot Polling Action #3

The idea of skinwalkers has proven a fairly convenient one for residents of small desert towns and wide-open reservations--perfect for blaming for unusual happenings, and to use to ostracize unpopular community members.

For instance, say you don't like your neighbor, and you keep getting sick. Logically then, he must be an evil medicine man, and you must be cursed. Tell everyone of your suspicion, and see how well his standing in this mystically-leaning community fares. This may be an conscious or unconscious form of revenge, but it's certainly effective.

A great book that deals with this subject is "The Navajo Mountain Community: Social Organization and Kinship Terminology," by Mary Shepardson. It's one of the most clear-minded approaches to this topic that I know of, eschewing the supernatural and the mystical in favor of anthropology and real-world social relations.

That said, once, a couple of years ago, I was camped out in the desert near the ghost town of Una de Gato, with my wife and a couple of friends. I was telling skinwalker stories around the campfire, to freak everyone out, and my wife was desperately protesting that I needed to stop talking about it because THEY were drawn to whenever people talked about them, or even thought about them. C'mon, wife....

Anyway, I ignored her protests, and the next morning we woke up to find the juniper tree we had camped near was almost covered in feathers, feathers tied to its every branch with coarse bits of rope. Admittedly, it had been getting dark when we selected our campsite, and we might not have seen them had they already been there, or who knows, maybe my wife (or one of our friends) did it as a completely-out-of-character joke, but wow, that was freaky.

It still makes me a little uneasy, just recalling it, even though I don't believe in the things.

i would opt for

3.) Are you f*ck*ng kidding me?