Light at the Edge of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

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:
    We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has only been a short while in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.
    I did indeed write down Alex’s tales, transcriptions of dozens of hours of conversations recorded intermittently over twenty-five years, committed to paper a few years before his death. Only after it was done did I realize that in a sense I had committed a form of violence, a transgression that bordered on betrayal. Extracted from the theatre of his telling, the landscape of his memory, the sensate land and the sibilant tones of the wild, the stories lost much of their meaning and power. Transposed into two dimensions by ink and paper, trapped on the page, they seemed child-like in their simplicity, even clumsy in their rhetoric.
    But, of course, these stories were not meant to be recorded. They were born of the land and had their origins in another reality. Some time after I first learned of We-gyet from Alex, I asked him how long it took to tell the cycle of tales. He replied that he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they had strapped on their snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, and walked the length of Bear Lake, a distance of some 20 miles (32 km), telling the story as they went along. They reached the far end, turned and walked all the way back home, and the story, Alex recalled, “wasn’t halfway done.”
    In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a