High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.
if "western" films have any accuracy, you push your horse to lie down, back to the storm, and you lie against him in between his feet, under a buffalo skin
Horses get increasingly skittish the higher the wind gets, even in "normal" conditions - I guess it makes it so they can't smell things downwind of them, so it's an evolutionary thing.
When wind gets high, horses get really spooked.
No way in hell would I put myself between or anywhere near horse legs during a tornado. That's just asking to die. From the horse, not the tornado.
Yeah!
Just meant that inanimate objects, even ones they've seen before, are also sometimes suspect.
That old tractor? The one that's been rusting in the same spot for years? Well TODAY it's spooky, because... no reason.
"What's the best thing about a horse?"
"They taste like chicken."
But I guess you get suddenly kicked, bit, leaned on, etc., you develop strong feelings on the matter.
... oddly enough, he's rather fond of cows.
you don't know it's a hailstorm till you're in it, prior to that it's just a storm you see coming across the plain. And while a singular horse does get skittish, the idea here I think is that the horse finds the calm presence of its owner to be soothing.
(I’ve read that Lucas was extremely influenced by western films, I guess I know where that one came from now).
I've also witnessed two waterspouts: one large, thankfully at a distance, and another at about a half-mile.
They’re scary in theory, and in-fact if you have bad luck, but the acreage directly damaged by a tornado every year just isn’t that big, considering the size of tornado country.
I doubt the natives living here had any particular strategy for avoiding tornados specifically, though they may have had beliefs and practices concerning them and certainly must have had things they did to stay safe in severe thunderstorms more generally. Not because they were incapable of coming up with such (far from it) but because direct experience with a tornado (not just seeing it, but having one come near enough for avoidance or even sheltering strategies to apply, beyond what you’d do for any stormy weather) is fairly rare.
(scroll down to 'storm on the plains')
It does vary by tribe, this is just one I had bookmarked. I researched the topic a few years ago after the Derecho event.
Also, these storms are one of the reasons why a lot of north american tribes didn't really nail down agriculture or settlement-building like the Aztecs did. When you plan on a storm deleting your construction once or twice a year, you optimize for something else.
And because I know there are a ton of coastal US folks here, east-of-Rockies / west-of-Appalachians has storms of a whole different breed. In terms of ferocity and suddenness.
FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to certain folk stories, but you can very successfully navigate a world that simply "is" without all that "what" and "why" business we get intensely caught up in now.
Having some cultural wisdom that reminds you to move camp under certain season, climate, or weather patterns will get your culture through lifetimes of tornadoes without ever spending much thought on "what" tornadoes are (whatever that even means).
(Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)