Safari Ltd. White Buffalo

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Well made

Ah! What a time we live in! Safari Limited has, in the last few years really REALLY upgraded the sculptural quality of their plastic animals, and as a result, many of them grace my own collection. They are beautifully done and realistically painted, making them very appealing as shelf objects, cake toppers, or toybox denizens. One thing in particular that brought me to these particular toys is their occasional albino or leucistic representations. An albino animal is one without any body pigment at all, and thus is white all over with pink eyes. A leucistic animal, however, does have some pigmentation, which shows in the horns, hooves, scales, nose, eyes, etc. They are commonly have a normally pigmented nose, and the eyes are blue or blue greenish. I have several leucistics in my collection, and I look forward to the day they do a nice white whale to coincide with Moby Dick. One point I should make is that the White Buffalo is also a creature of legend/belief of the Native American Lakota people. As I recall the story, there was a divine being known as the "White Buffalo Woman". When seen, she appears as a buffalo that changes colors, going from white to tan, to brown, to black. Uncommonly beautiful, she can also appear as a woman dressed in white buckskins. At one point, two warriors were sent out to seek the White Warrior Woman. When they found her, she was so lovely, one of the men desired to make her his wife. His fellow warrior warned him about being careless, since she was sacred, and to accost her would be an evil thing to do. The first warrior ignored him and went to meet her, taking her in his arms. Seeing the evil in his heart, she allowed a mist to surround them both. As the second warrior watched, the mist slowly cleared, and the woman was still there, but his warrior companion had turned to bones, which all fell to the ground. Then the White Buffalo Woman saw the second warrior, and she bade him to approach. As he walked to her, she could see into his heart, and she found that he had none of the evil the first man had. She went with the warrior to his village, where she gifted them with the Seven Sacred Ceremonies, and she taught them about the ceremonial pipe. This belief persists today, and when a white buffalo (leucistic) calf was born to normal colored parents on a farm in Nebraska some years ago, Native Americans flocked to the farm to pray, and to place small offerings/blessings on the fence nearby.As time passed, the calf grew, and as it did so, its color changed from white to brown, which was very unusual, and viewed as further proof by the Native Americans that the calf was a manifestation of the sacred White Buffalo Woman. Not many toys come with their own special legend, so this one was a Must Have by all accounts!