Light at the Edge of the World Read Online Free PDF

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