The gift of knowledge: a thrice-told tale

(Adapted from Mi'kmaq tales recorded in 1923 on the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia by folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons.)

Long ago, in the time of the people who are gone, life was very difficult. The winters were harsh and long. Food was scarce. The people in those days were lost. They could not trust one another. Feud, hunger and sickness killed many children. The forest was full of witches and cannibals. It was a dark time.

Seven young men decided they must do something. They consulted the elders. The elders told them to go in search of Ugluchopt.

Ugluchopt is wise and as old as the world itself. He lives all alone in his wigwam far away to the north. He is too old to hunt, fish or gather firewood for himself. The witches of the forest bring him the sweet meat of porcupines and tend his fire while Ugluchopt sleeps, dreaming of the time before men and the time after.

The seven young men began their journey at midsummer. They paddled an old skin canoe, following the rivers north. Soon, the land they knew lay far behind them.

As they paddled further and further away from the known world, they saw many strange sights.

They saw two giants fighting.

They saw a boy fishing alongside a sow bear and her cubs, swatting salmon from the river like a bear.

They saw little people pecking pictures in stones along the shore.

They heard the keening of witches in the forest, and saw thunderbirds wheeling and diving in the sky.

At the end of the seventh week of their journey, the young men came to a clearing on the bank where two great rivers meet. There was a long lodge with a door at each end. An old man sat beside it.

The boldest of the young men asked him, 'Grandfather, do you know where we can find Uglochopt?'

The old man shook his head: no. But, he invited the young men to eat with him and his wife and to sleep in their lodge that night.

After they had feasted on spruce grouse and moosemeat and groundnuts and the young men had laid down next to the walls of the lodge, the old man let the fire die down. He began drumming on a piece of bark and singing strangely. As he sang, the bones of the birds and moose they had eaten began to twitch and jump. The young men watched in amazement as the bones danced into the fire.

As they young men watched, a young moose and six spruce grouse appeared in the fire and escaped through the doors of the lodge.

In the morning, the young men wondered if they had been dreaming. The boldest asked their host, 'Grandfather, how should we call you?'

'You may call me Brings-Back-Animals,' the old man replied. 'Every night, I sing the animals back to life from all the bones that are thrown away. That is why when you kill an animal, you must use every part that you can, even the sinew and hair. You must never give the bones to your dogs to gnaw. Anything you cannot use you must bury or return to the water. Only if you do this will the animals come back.'

He led the young men to the river and blew softly on a shell whistle. The waters filled with fish. He blew again and the fish departed. 'This is the only knowledge I can give you: respect the living creatures that you eat, and they will always return to you.'

The young men left Brings-Back-Animals. They paddled for another seven days, and then, when the river became too shallow, they left their canoe and walked. After two weeks, they came to the wigwam of Ugluchopt.

The bark of Ugluchopt's wigwam glistened silver like still water. It was old, old, old. Ugluchopt lay on his side near a fire that was nearly cold. The old man lay so still the young men feared he was dead, but when they spoke his name he opened his eyes and gestured for them to enter.

The young men stayed three days. They brought water to Ugluchopt, gathered wood and stoked the fire. They boiled sweet porcupine meat in a bark dish with heated stones. They held a smaller dish steady while Ugluchopt drank the broth. When they went to turn him over, they saw that his body had rooted into the ground like a tree. Tiny roots covered his side and arms.

On the third day, Ugluchopt lit his pipe, passed it to the young men and sighed.
'I am glad you came so far to visit me,' Ugluchopt said. ' I had been laying on that side for more than 600 years. Now, what can I do for you?'

The boldest young man spoke first, as usual. His father and brothers had been killed in the wars. Since then, he had proven himself to be the fiercest warrior in his village. He was always the first to speak and the first in battle, and gave no quarter to any man.

He looked Ugluchopt in the eye, and said, 'Grandfather, I want to be so tough no man will raise his hand against me. I want to live a long life.'

Ugluchopt looked at him strangely for a long while, then replied, 'Very well. You'll have your wish. Walk out of my wigwam and lift up your arms toward the sun.'

The young man did as he was told, and when he turned to face the sun, he was transformed into a gnarled and twisted cedar tree. He stands there to this day, and if you stop in a cedar swamp and listen, you will hear the scrabbling, scratching, sighing sound he makes as he reaches for the sky.

The second young man swallowed hard. His brothers and sisters had died of sickness. He said to Ugluchopt, 'I want to heal my relations.'

Ugluchopt smiled. 'Take these roots from my side. When someone falls ill, brew a tea from the roots and give it to them to drink.' And so Ugluchopt gave the people medicine.

The third man wanted to be able to run very fast, not like a deer, but like the wind which never tires. Ugluchopt granted his wish, and gave him the knowledge of languages also, for speech goes everywhere at once, like the wind. This man became the first news bearer and the best scout.

The fourth man wanted to be a great hunter. Ugluchopt gave him knowledge of animals, how to track them and how to hide himself from them, how to knap stone and build a twice-bent bow and shoot an arrow straight and true.

The fifth man wanted to be a great trapper and fisherman, and Ugluchopt gave him knowledge of beaver and muskrat and salmon and sturgeon and smelt. He taught him how to make nets and traps and harpoons and how to use them.

The sixth man wanted to be a craftsman, a maker of invaluable things. To him, Ugluchopt gave the skills of a tool maker, a basket maker, a snowshoe and tobaggan maker.

The last man was the best paddler in the canoe; he wanted to be a builder of boats. Ugluchopt gave him a crooked knife made from a beaver's tooth and a drawknife made from a moose's leg bone, and taught him how to build canoes of birch bark that were lighter and faster than those made of hide.

The six men returned to the people, bringing them Ugluchopt's gifts of knowledge and the respect for wild creatures they had learned from Bings-Back-Animals. Their neighbours marvelled at the story of the bold warrior who had become a twisted cedar tree, and reckoned it wiser to live well than to live long.

Ugluchopt could have told them that knowledge is not wisdom. But this is something men and women must learn for themselves. Even so, the dark days and seasons became lighter, and the people prospered.

The music at the edge of sound

By Eric Marks

Alone in the snow I could face for the last time the last question of all. Why, really, had I done it? Why, truly, had I walked from the Camargue to the high Alps? What I sought might have been behind any hedge I walked past, within any clump of trees I glanced at. But I could not believe the universe would play such games. More likely it was still beyond the next mountain; or, if not, the next but one; or, most likely perhaps, behind the one that could not quite be seen, hazy and indistinct on the horizon. And perhaps beyond that there is peace and serenity and understanding, and even the answer to the very last question of all: since we must die, why must we live first?
-Bernard Levin, "In Hannibal's Footsteps"

I have received much sympathy and many letters, but yours is somehow unique in that it speaks of the beauty that is lost rather than condoling with the comparatively useless life that continues on. She was everything you say, and more. She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound.
-Raymond Chandler,on the death of his wife, Cissy

IT'S A WET, quiet night here in the gulf - calm and gentle, elegiac, almost. It suits the season.

With the first anniversary of Sept. 11 just past, we've formally entered the Grieving Season, the remaining points on the calendar being Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en and Nov. 11. If spring builds naturally toward some archetypal celebration of rebirth, be it Easter or May Day, then autumn is one long drawing down of the curtain, and always has been. I'm of the opinion it should be celebrated; that it's healthier, in fact, to pause for reflection on the big question - the only question, when you come right down to it.

Jack Kerouac, that self-consciously morbid sentimentalist who loved the New England autumn so, wrote, "Everyone goes home in October." For Kerouac, this was self-fulfilling prophecy - he checked out Oct. 21, 1969 while watching TV and eating a can of tuna. It must have been anticlimactic, after writing so many lyrical accounts of the terror he endured whenever he thought about his own mortality. Proof that in death, as in so many things, it's not where you arrive at that matters, so much as the journey itself.

Of course, the journey would be easier to undertake if it were better understood.

Centuries ago, the poet Rumi wrote that we are disordered birds, locked in the cages of our bodies, waiting to be let out into the garden again. It's a satisfying metaphor, which is why "I am a bird in God's garden" is almost as well known today as MacBeth's less optimistic observation, "Life's but a walking shadow..."

Art helps us frame the mystery, but it cannot help us fathom it. We speak of "causes of death," but death itself is an effect, just as life is. We might as well shrug and exclaim "so it goes!" like Kurt Vonnegut's affable creation, Kilgore Trout - or perhaps "Croatoan," the word Sir Walter Raleigh's traders found carved into the stockade timbers at Roanoke in 1590 after the settlement's inhabitants had vanished.

Faced with such impenetrability, all we can do is ponder the mystery of being at all and the memory of a harmony that's felt, more than heard - the music at the edge of sound.

THE MUSIC heard faintly at the edge of sound. More than forty years after he wrote it, that casual phrase of Raymond Chandler's still catches the imagination, expressing so emphatically the notion of an order within the chaos of our lives, the order from which Sir Isaac Newton extrapolated the existence of a divine watchmaker, and Rumi, a divine gardener.

It doesn't require any particular faith to accept that we are born into a world we have not made and cannot fully comprehend, but which exhibits certain orderly qualities. To speculate further is to lurch from ontology into theology or cosmology or madness.

What reminded me of Chandler's comment this week was a public radio interview with Adam Goddard. Goddard is a 29-year-old composer and documentarian who lives in Toronto. If you've heard of him, it's likely because of a 60-minute musical feature he wrote entitled "More About Henry."

Goddard's genius is that he can hear the music at the edge of sound and then emphasize it in ways that allow others to hear it, too. To create "More About Henry," he taped interviews with his grandfather, then wrote an upbeat musical score around the subtle tones and cadences of the old man's voice. Listening to it is like watching someone reach out and open a door one never knew existed: it's magical.

For the past year, Adam Goddard has been composing a requiem for the victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Working from audio tapes of people describing their experiences and reactions, Goddard has stitched together a crazy quilt of voices bordered by music that seems to grow organically out of the words being spoken.

It's not a new idea. Istvan Marta did something similar when he used tapes of Romanian refugees to compose "Doom: a Sigh." But whereas Marta's string quartet is an almost unbearably horrifying vignette, Goddard's requiem is searching, quieting and strangely satisfying. It speaks to our desire for order as well as the chaos in our experience of life, and does so without diminishing either. Moreover, it celebrates the fundamental nobility of human beings even in the most ignoble of circumstances. No mean task in this dark season.

IF THE JOURNEY is everything, then how we conduct ourselves must play a large part in determining what we get out of life. Seneca pegged it two millennia ago when he lamented, "Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the power of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long."

Noble is as noble does. Right living is no more nor less than the first principle common to most religions and moral philosophies: "do no harm." It's a precept that can be followed by anyone in any place at any moment, though it is by no means simple.

Perhaps intuiting the right thing to do at any given moment begins with this: learning to listen to the music of what happens. It's in the world around us, in our lives and in our hearts.

How we choose to live answers the question "why live." We climb the mountain not because the mountain is there, but because we are here. And, in the memorable phrase of Richard Brautigan, "so the wind won't blow it all away."

-Eric Marks is a full-time editor and part-time writer whose essays and poems have been published in canada, the U.S. and the U.K. He lives a stone's throw from the Gulf of Maine in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

The colour of autumn

by Eric Marks

IF YOU were to ask my youngest friend what she likes most about September, she would assume a shy, thoughtful air, then brighten immediately. "New clothes!," she'd say, smiling broadly, pronouncing her choice with satisfaction and enthusiasm.

And why not? Before you tsk-tsk this budding consumer, think back to your own days in school. What excited you? Be honest. Maybe the prospect of seeing all your friends, but then they'd been around in the summer, too. With all due respect, it probably wasn't the teachers, at least not until you'd been in school long enough to distinguish the good from the bad. And it certainly wasn't the stale air of classrooms, the smell of Dustbane and chalk and antiseptic mops.

I'd wager it was the stuff of school that set your pulse racing, as much as anything else - the smell of freshly sharpened pencils in pencil cases, the solid slap and scuff of sneakers on polished tile, the comfortable drape of clothes that were new, or at least new to us.

The other day a colleague of mine, who has been out of school more years than she attended, admitted she still feels a powerful urge to buy new clothes in August and early September. This confession was greeted by a chorus of "Yeahs" and "Don't I know it" from everyone else in earshot.

After 13 years of kindergarten and grade school and another four or more of university, it seems preparing for new beginnings in the fall is a habit we just can't shake. And it's a self-perpetuating tradition: parents take vicarious pleasure in outfitting their children for school.

That thwarted passion also has its ugly side. Remember the fashion disasters? The odd, unloved items, like Roch Carrier's detestable Maple Leafs hockey sweater, that were foisted on you by proud, well-meaning parents but set your ears to reddening and tingling with shame? Smart, Sunday-best corduroy slacks and jackets when everyone else was wearing faded denim. Form-fitting velour tops when loose cotton was all the rage.

Styles change, but not the keenly-felt stigma of looking out of step: today's teens cringe at the sight of slim, straight-legged pants, disdaining anything that doesn't look as though it came from a tent-maker's fire sale.

Ah, sweet misery of youth.

THERE IS just one article of clothing I think of now when I feel autumn coming on. It hangs in the closet next to my fishing vest and leather shop apron: an old wool mackinaw, warm and slightly worn with hard use.

I bought it at a thrift store, the kind that buys clothing from charities by the carton or the pound, cleans it and marks it up for resale. It stood out from the other clothes on the rack like a distant relation in a crowd of strangers.

The outside is blanket-weight wool, checkered red and black. The inside is thick blaze orange fleece, reversible, so it can be turned inside-out for October logging or November deer hunts. It is the quintessential yard and bush jacket, the kind you hang on a hook on the back of the kitchen door and reach for as you leave the house.

It had been worn a long time. The fleece cuffs and collar were scuffed threadbare in places, but the shoulders were straight and square as the man who'd filled them. I wondered who he was, and what accident or impulsive act had separated him from his favourite jacket. Most likely he had died, and his clothes had been given away.

The contents of the jacket's pockets told the story of his life, or part of it: there was a packet of artificial sweetener in the left breast pocket for mellowing black tea; a wooden match and long tobacco shreds clinging in a front waist pocket; axe chips of alder and chainsaw chips of birch in the open slash pockets where he'd warmed his gloved hands; a chainsaw gasket, old and weak.

Whatever his other credentials had been, the jacket's owner had been an honour student of woodcraft. If I had found a pipe and a compass, a bone-handled pocketknife sharpened nearly to a nub and a couple of .22 shells, one hollow point, one birdshot, I wouldn't have been surprised.

The jacket reminded me of a child's bookbag, tossed in a closet at the beginning of summer with pencil crayon shavings, scraps of paper and candy wrappers still inside. For months at a time, it had ceased to exist, waiting for autumn to bring it to life again, until, one year, the autumn never came.

I don't know how many seasons have passed since the mackinaw was worn, but it still holds all the promise of the season. And, like a child attired for school in new fall clothes, I look forward to that promise as a challenge.

Now that Labor Day is past and the afternoons and evenings are cooling, I'll wear the jacket berrying and mushroom hunting and fishing for autumn trout in deep, shaded pools where its red and black will not be seen. Soon I'll fill the pockets with wild apples. In hunting season, it will help me slip quietly between snagging branches as I search for grouse and woodcock and deer. And when I chop wood, the chips can fall where they may.

Like the jacket's original owner, I've graduated from the crush and murmur of school to other autumn rituals. The fashions are different, but the feeling of excitement is the same.

-Eric Marks is a full-time editor and part-time writer whose essays and poems have been published in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. He lives a stone's throw from the Gulf of Maine in Saint John, New Brunswick.