Light at the Edge of the World. Wade Davis

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Light at the Edge of the World - Wade  Davis

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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

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