Light at the Edge of the World (4 page)

Irrespective of lineage, every male of the same age shared the same age set. Each spanned five years, and there were eight in all. Thus, all boys aged five to ten, for example, or men thirty to thirty-five, were united as members of a named age set. Those few who lived beyond the age of forty once again became members of the first cohort. Several times a year, the age sets would divide into two teams for a race, with cohorts 1, 3 , 5 and 7 going up against 2 , 4 , 6 and 8 , an arrangement that ensured that each side would have a similar mix of infants, boys, men and elders. The race itself entailed each side carrying a large and heavy log for long distances across the savannah, a marathon of dust, sweat and endurance that left every participant spent and exhausted.

Maybury-Lewis loved the excitement and avidly took part, though once again he found the ritual confusing. For
one thing, no one was particularly concerned that the logs carried by each side be of similar weight. For another, it was not uncommon for the leading side to pause in the midst of the race, allowing the other to catch up. The first time Maybury-Lewis ran, his team did well, crossing the finishing line hours ahead of the opposition. He revelled in the victory, until he noticed that all of his teammates were downcast. The next time they raced, several weeks later, the other side won decisively, and everyone seemed crestfallen. Totally bewildered, Maybury-Lewis took part in yet a third race. This time, to the disappointment of the competitor in him, the sides approached and crossed the line at the same instant. To his utter surprise, both teams and the entire community erupted in a whirlwind of celebration.

“The goal wasn't to win,” he recalled with a smile, “it was to arrive together.”

All the tensions inherent in three competing lineages, every conflict within the culture, are distilled into two opposing factions, the two teams that give their all in a frenzied effort to reach a tie. Opposition and harmony, the resolution of conflict in ritual balance. It was more complex than Lévi-Strauss had ever imagined. The dualistic notion permeated every aspect of the culture, as did the central quest for resolution and equilibrium.

“What would happen,” Maybury-Lewis asked me, “should the race not occur, or should it never end in a tie?”

I hesitated, uncertain how to answer. Then I heard myself say, “The culture would atrophy.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

To this day, I am not certain how I came up with that answer. Much of the content of what we had been discussing, patterns of kinship and marriage rules, subtleties of social organization, lay beyond me. But the log races I could understand, and intuitively I grasped their significance. For the first time, I understood the lesson of anthropology. I saw that as a people the Akwé-Xavante were profoundly different; but more importantly, I came to understand that those differences held the key to their cultural survival.

 

AS A YOUNG anthropologist I never understood how I was supposed to turn up at some village—perhaps of the Barasana, a people of the Anaconda, who believed that their ancestors had come up the Milk River of the Amazon from the east only to be disgorged from the belly of the snake onto the banks of the upper affluents—and announce that I was staying for a year, and then notify the headman that he and his people were to feed and house me while I studied their lives. If someone that intrusive appeared on our doorsteps, we would call the police.

I learned, instead, to seek the proper conduit to a culture, the most appropriate means or metaphor to break down the inherent barrier that exists between a stranger and a people with whom that outsider finds himself living as a guest. In the Northwest Amazon, for example, and along the eastern flank of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, in the cloud forests of the Kamsa and Inga, and among lowland tropical peoples as diverse as the Chimane and Machiguenga, Kofán and Cubeo, the obvious vehicle was the botanical realm. These, after all, were societies that existed because of their plants. Their basic food was bitter manioc, a poisonous root rendered edible by women using a complex process mediated by ritual and infused with myth. From the astringent bark of lianas, their hunters extracted poisons that could kill, as well as potions and stimulants that conquered sleep, allowing men to move by night in the shadows of jaguar. Their shaman listened and heard voices, plant songs that provided clues to hidden pharmacological properties that, once exploited, allowed them to journey in trance to the stars. Plants fed the children, healed the elders, vanquished enemies. I became an ethnobotanist because I could not imagine any better way of understanding the lives of the people of the forest.

In the Canadian north, by contrast, in a world where animals dominate and the dialogue is between predator
and prey, the central metaphor is the hunt. Unless one is able to follow caribou over the tundra, track moose through the forest, one can never fully embrace the rhythm of the culture. To record the myths of Athabaskan elders, one has to become a hunter, for the myths are an expression of the covenant that exists between men, women and the wild, a way for the Indian people to rationalize the terrible fact that in order to live, they must kill the creatures they love most, the animals upon which they depend. Like so many lessons of anthropology, this was something that I learned through experience, living amongst a people, frequently making mistakes but always paying attention to the consequences.

In northwestern British Columbia, a year or so after graduating from college, I was hired as ranger in the Spatsizi wilderness, a roadless track of some two million acres (800 000 ha) in the remote reaches of the Cassiar Mountains. The job description was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two long seasons, our ranger team, myself and one other, Al Poulsen, a six-foot four (193-cm) vegetarian who grazed through meals and could conjure golden eagles out of the wild, encountered perhaps a dozen visitors. Wilderness assessment was a licence to explore the park at will, tracking game and mapping the horse trails of outfitters, describing routes up
mountains and down rivers, recording what we could of the movements of large populations of caribou and sheep, mountain goats, grizzly bears and wolves.

In the course of these wanderings, we came upon an old Native gravesite on an open bench overlooking Laslui Lake, near the headwaters of the Stikine River. The wooden tombstone read, simply, “Love Old Man Antoine died 1926.” Curious about the grave, I crossed the lake to the mouth of Hotleskwa Creek, where the Collingwood brothers, the outfitters for the Spatsizi, had established a spike camp. There, I found Alex Jack, an old Gitxsan man who had lived in the mountains most of his life. His Native name was Atehena, “he who walks leaving no tracks.” Not only did Alex know of the grave, his own brother-in-law had laid the body to rest in it. Old Man Antoine, it turned out, was a legendary shaman, crippled from birth but possessed of the gift of clairvoyance. Alex had walked overland from his home at Bear Lake in the Skeena, 150 miles (240 km) to the south, in order to meet Antoine, only to arrive on the day of his death.

Intrigued by this link between a living elder, raised in seasonally nomadic encampments, totally dependent on the hunt, and a shaman born in the previous century who read the future in stones cast into water held in baskets woven from roots, I left my job as a park ranger and went
to work with Alex. As we wrangled horses, repaired fences, guided the odd hunter in search of moose or goat, I would ask him to tell me the stories of the old days, the myths of his people and his land. He happily told tales of his youth, of the hunting forays that brought meat to the village and of the winter trading runs by dogsled to the coast, but he never said a word about the legends.

Long after I had given up on hearing the origin myths, I went out one morning to salvage a moose carcass abandoned by a trophy hunter. When I returned after a long day with a canoe full of meat, Alex was waiting for me. As we walked back across the meadow with our loads, he said very quietly that he remembered a story and invited me to drop by his tent later in the evening. To this day I do not know whether Alex had simply achieved a certain level of trust, or whether I had finally inquired about the stories in the correct manner, or whether the gift of meat had some greater significance. But that night, I began to record a long series of creator tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, the trickster/transformer of Gitxsan lore.

They were almost all whimsical stories of moral gratitude played out against and within the backdrop of nature. We-gyet, for example, eager to eat, swims beneath a gathering of swans and greedily grabs their legs, only to be dragged from the water as the flock rises in response, soaring
toward the sun. Stranded in the sky, he lets go and comes crashing back to the earth, the force of the impact imbedding him in granite. A lynx comes by, and We-gyet, using his charm and guile, persuades the cat to lick away the rock. We-gyet rewards his saviour with the tufts of hair that have since that time decorated the ears of every lynx.

To kill a grizzly, We-gyet takes advantage of the creature's pride. Moving with the speed of the wind, he flies past a berry patch, astonishing the bear with his grace and movements. The grizzly looks up, only to see We-gyet race by once more. After three passes, We-gyet stops, breathlessly approaches his prey, and collapses with laughter as he points disparagingly at the bear's testicles. “No wonder you can't run,” he comments, “with those things dangling between your legs. I cut mine off years ago. See?” We-gyet has stained his groin with the blood-red sap of a willow. The grizzly, eager to remain the dominant creature in the forest, slices off his genitals and promptly bleeds to death.

Animals large and small featured in each of Alex's tales. A hunting party away from home for many days grows tired, the young boys restless and bored. To pass the time, they cast a squirrel into their fire, a cruel gesture repeated again and again until the creature, unable to escape, disappears in the flames. The following morning, the hunters awake to find themselves camped in a circle at the
base of an enormous cylinder of rock that reaches to the heavens, bluffs on all sides, no escape. Perplexed, a warrior tosses a pack dog into the fire, and to his surprise, the animal appears at the top of the rock face. One by one, each hunter slips into the flames and materializes alongside the dog, thus miraculously escaping the trap. They head for home, but when they enter their village and approach their loved ones, no one sees them. They reach out and try to touch their wives and mothers. Their hands pass through the bodies, like air. They are all dead, ghosts empty of will, punished for the crime of having, as Alex put it, “suffered that small squirrel.”

Darkness is the time for stories, and in the glow of a kerosene lamp, with wind and rain falling upon the canvas, the tent that first night took on the warmth of a womb. Alex's words themselves had a certain magic, a power to influence not only the listener but the land itself, the very moment in time. When he told a story, he did not, as we might do, recount an anecdote, which by definition is a literary device, an abstraction, the condensation of a memory extracted from the stream of experience, a recollection of facts strung together with words. Alex actually lived the story again and again, returning in body and soul, in physical gesture and nuance, to the very place and time of its origin. At first, I thought this merely charming, and only after
many years of listening, often to the same account told in the same way time and again, did I understand the significance of what he was sharing.

Alex did not come from a tradition of literacy. He had never learned to read or write with any degree of fluency. His soul had not been crushed by the priests in the residential schools. For most of his adult life, he had been a seasonally nomadic hunter, and his very vocabulary was inspired by the sounds of the wild. For him, the sweeping flight of a hawk was the cursive hand of nature, a script written on the wind. As surely as we can hear the voices of characters as we read the pages of a novel, so Alex could hear in his mind the voices of animals, creatures that he both revered and hunted. Their meat kept him alive. Their brains allowed skins to be worked into leather for moccasins and clothes, packsacks and the traces of his sled, the scabbard for his 30.06 rifle. Their blood could be cooked, the marrow of their bones sucked out and fed as a delicacy to children.

When Alex told a story, he did so in such a way that the listener actually witnessed and experienced the essence of the tale, entering the narrative and becoming transfixed by all the syllables of nature. Every telling was a moment of renewal, a chance to engage through repetition in the circular dance of the universe.

Alex never spoke ill of the wind or the cold. When hunting, he never referred to the prey by name until after the kill; then, he spoke directly to the animal with praise and respect, admiration for its strength and cleverness. His grandmother was Cree, people of the medicine power, who believe that language was given to humans by the animals. His mother was Carrier. In 1924 , two years before Alex left Bear Lake to walk overland to the Stikine, an elder from the Bulkley Valley, quite possibly one of Alex's relatives, revealed something of the Carrier world to the anthropologist Diamond Jenness: