The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America

  I could see the grey, unstable sky. It was either dawn or twilight. I could not turn my head enough to see a horizon. I moved my eyes. Above me a man’s face looked down at me with an expression of stern amusement.

  He was a complete stranger, but instinctively I knew I had no reason to fear him. I had found my imagined warrior. The smooth-shaven face was well proportioned, even handsome, and decorated with elaborate tattoos etched across his forehead, cheeks, chin and scalp. His head was mostly shaven, the only piece of hair worn in a long, gleaming black lock interwoven with three bright eagle feathers, but his healthy copper skin told me that he was not one of those who had captured my husband. He wore earrings, and his nose and lower lip were pierced with small sapphires. On his temples, cheeks and chin was a deep scarlet smear of paint. Running down either side of his chest were long, white scars. Between these scars a design had been pricked into his skin. On his well-muscled upper arms were intricately worked bracelets of raw gold, and around his throat he wore a wide band of mother-of-pearl which seemed to be a kind of armor. His tattoos were in vivid reds, greens, blues and yellows and reminded me of those I had once seen displayed by powerful shamans in the South Seas. A nobleman of some sort, confident of his own ability to protect the wealth he displayed with such careless challenge.

  He regarded me with equal frankness, his dark eyes full of ironic humor. “Sometimes an angler prays for a catch and gets more than he bargains for.” He spoke a language I understood but could not identify. This was a common experience for moonbeam walkers.

  “You caught me?”

  “Apparently. I am rather proud of myself. It was less exhausting than I had expected. I enjoyed the dancing. With the appropriate incantations and trance, I laid out the robe with the head facing the moon and the tail facing the water. I did as I had learned. I invoked the spirits of the wind. I called to the water to give up her treasure. Sure enough there was an agitation in the air. A strong wind blew. Being in a trance, I heard it from a distance. When I at last opened my eyes I found you thus and wrapped you in the robe for your health, your modesty and because the incantation demanded it.” He spoke with a sardonic, friendly, slightly self-mocking air.

  “I was naked?” Now I recognized the special sensation of soft animal skin against my own. Whatever one’s notions about taking a fellow creature’s life, that touch is irresistible. While I’d accepted my adopted culture’s ways, I had no special concern about being seen undressed. I had far more urgent questions. “But what of the medicine shield?”

  He frowned. “The Kakatanawa war-shield? That was yours?”

  “What happened to it? I was caught up in a violent wind which seemed to have intelligence. It deliberately separated me from the shield.”

  The warrior was apologetic. “I believe—you’ll recall I was in a trance—I believe that is what I saw spinning away in that direction. A wind demon, perhaps?” He pointed to a thickly wooded hillside some distance away around the lake. “So it was a medicine shield and has been stolen by a demon. Or escaped you both and gone home to its owner?”

  “Without me,” I said bitterly. I was beginning to realize that this man had, through his magic, somehow saved my life. But had he or the elemental diverted me from following Ulric? “That shield was all that linked me with my husband. He could be anywhere in the multiverse.”

  “You are of the Kakatanawa? Forgive me; I knew they had adopted one of you in their number, but not two.” He was obviously puzzled, but some sort of understanding was dawning, also.

  “I am not a Kakatanawa.” I was no longer quite so thoroughly in control of my emotions. A note of desperation must have come into my voice. “But I seek the shield’s owner.”

  He responded like a gentleman. He seemed to understand the supernatural conditions involved and lowered his head in thought.

  “Where is its owner? Do you know?” I began to struggle in the soft robe. With a word of apology, that elegant woodsman knelt down and untied rawhide knots.

  “No doubt with the other Kakatanawa,” he said. “But that is where I am going, so it’s reassuring for me. I do not know how they will receive me. It is my destiny to carry my wisdom to them. The fates begin the weaving long before we understand the design. We will go together as our mutual fate demands. We will be stronger together. We will achieve our different goals and thus bring all to resolution.”

  I didn’t understand him. I stood up, wrapping myself in the robe. It was wonderfully supple, the skin of a white buffalo, decorated with various religious symbols. I looked around me. It was just after dawn, and the sun was making the wide, still water shine like a mirror. “If you told me your name, your calling and your purpose with me, I would be at less of a disadvantage.”

  He smiled apologetically and began busying himself with his camp. Behind him was the rising sun, now clearing the furthest peaks of a massive mountain range, its orange light pouring across forest and meadow, touching the small, undecorated lodge erected on the grassy lakeside. From the wigwam came a wisp of grey smoke. It was a hunter’s economical kit. The lodge’s coverings could be used as robes against the cold, and the poles could function as a travois to carry everything else. A hunting dog could also be used to pull the travois, but I saw no evidence of dogs. The shadows were dissipating, and the light was already growing less vivid as the sun climbed into a clearing sky.

  My host seemed in very high spirits. He was a charming man. Nothing about him was threatening, though he radiated a powerful personality and physical strength. I wondered if his tattoos and piercings marked him as a shaman or sachem. He was clearly accustomed to authority.

  I was obviously no longer on the Nova Scotian coast, but the surrounding world did not look very different from the landscapes I had just left. Indeed, it was vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was Lake Superior?

  Pulled up on the grassy bank of our natural meadow was a large, exquisitely fashioned canoe of glittering silver birchbark, its copper-wound edges finished in exquisite wooden inlays painted with spiritual symbols. There was no sign of another human being in the whole of creation. It was like the dawn of the world, a truly virgin America. The season was still early autumn with a hint of winter in the freshening breeze. The breeze did not overly alarm me. I asked him which lake this was.

  “I was born not far from here. It is commonly called Gitche Gumee,” he said. “You know the Longfellow poem?”

  “I understood Longfellow mangled half a dozen languages in the process and got all the names wrong.” I spoke, as one sometimes does, in a kind of cultural apology, but I was also remembering something Klosterheim had said. I was fairly certain this man was not just a modern romantic adopting a favorite role in the wilderness. I doubted, if I looked further, I would find a station wagon nearby!

  This man was wholly authentic. He smiled at my remark. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with what Longfellow included. The rituals remain in spite of the flourishes. Nobody ever asked the women their story, so their rituals remain secret, undistorted. There are many roads to the spirit’s resolution with the flesh. It is with what old Longfellow excluded and what he added that I have my quarrel. But it is my destiny to bring light to my own story. And that is the destiny which I dreamed in that journey. I must restore the myth and address the great Matter of America.” He seemed embarrassed by his own seriousness and smiled again. “As if I’d hand over the spiritual leadership of the Nations to a bunch of half-educated Catholic missionaries! There is no trinity without White Buffalo Woman. So it is a triptych missing a panel. That ludicrous stuff Longfellow put in at the end was a sop to drawing-room punctilio and worse than the sentimental ending Dickens tacked on to Bleak House. Or was it Great Expectations?”

  “I’ve never been able to get into Dickens,” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, “I don’t have much opportunity myself.” He frowned slightly and looked up at me. “I don’t want to take credit for more than is right. While it is my destiny to unite the Nations, I might
fail where an alter ego might have succeeded. One wrong step, and I change everything. You know how difficult it is.” He fell into frowning thought.

  “You had better introduce yourself, sir,” I said, half anticipating his answer.

  He apologized. “I am Ayanawatta, whom Longfellow preferred to call ‘Hiawatha.’ My mother was a Mohawk and my father was a Huron. I discovered my story in the poem when I made my dream journey into the future. Here. I have something for you …” He threw me a long doeskin shirt which was easily slipped on and fit me very well. Was he used to traveling with such things? He laughed aloud and explained that the last man who tried to kill him had been about my size.

  He began expertly to dismantle the wigwam. To close down his fire he simply put a lid on the pot he carried it in and secured it with a bit of rawhide. The lodge’s contents were folded in the hides and rolled into a tight bundle. The firepot was tied on top. I saw now that the poles were made of long, flint-tipped spears. He laid these along the bottom of the canoe and put the bundle in the middle. He had broken the entire encampment with little evident expenditure of energy.

  “You seem very familiar with English literature,” I said.

  “I owe it a great deal. As I said, through Longfellow’s poem I discovered my destiny. I had reached the time of my first true dream-quest. I dreamed a dream in which I saw four feathers. I decided that this meant I must seek four eagles in the places of the four winds. First I went into the wilderness and took the north path called The Eagle, for I thought that was the meaning of the dream. It took me into a land of mountains. It was not a true path. But in leaving that path, I found myself in Boston at the right time. I was looking to see if I had a myth. And if I had a myth I had to find out how to follow it and make it true. Well, you can work out that irony for yourself. I entered a time in the future long after I had died. I learned strange skills. I learned to read in the language of these new people, whose appearance at first astonished me. There were many amiable souls in those parts more than willing to help me, though the self-righteous voices of the bourgeoisie were often raised against my appearance. However, learning to read that way was part of my first real spirit journey. For once I had opened my spirit to the future, I received not just a vision of the founding of the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Same Roof, but I saw what was to follow them, unless I trod a certain path. In order to find the future I desire, I must maintain the immediate future as exactly as possible.”

  “You weren’t offended by Longfellow’s acquisition of various native mythologies?”

  “Longfellow was genial, lively, kind. And hideously hairy. As a Mohawk I inherited a distaste for male body hair. The Romans were the same, apparently. Yet, for all that, the poet’s good nature cut through any prejudice I felt about his appearance. He had an eccentric, springy gait and bounced when he walked. I remember thinking him a bit overdressed for the time of year, but he probably considered me underdressed. I hadn’t acquired these.” He fingered his tattoos with modest pride.

  “I was originally interested in the transcendentalists. Emerson planned to introduce me to Thoreau, but Longfellow dropped into Parker House that day as well. It was by chance that we had occasion to talk. He was not entirely sure that I was real. He was so absorbed in his poem I think he suspected at first he had imagined me! When Emerson introduced us, he probably considered me some sort of noble savage.” Ayanawatta laughed softly. “Thoreau, I suspect, found me a little coarse. But Longfellow was good-natured almost to a fault. It was a fated meeting and played an important part in his own journey. I understood his poem to be a prophecy of how I would make my mark in the world. The four feathers I had mistaken for eagle feathers in my dream were, of course, four quill pens. Four writers! I had made the wrong interpretation but taken the right action. That was where the luck really came in. I was a bit callow. It was the first time I had visited the astral realm in physical form. Sadly, that phase of the journey is over. I don’t know when I’ll see a book again.”

  Ayanawatta began to roll up his sleeping mat with the habitual neatness and speed of the outdoorsman. “Well, you know we use wampum in these parts, to remind us of our wisdom and our words.” He indicated the intricately worked belt which supported his deerskin leggings. “And this stuff is as open to subtle and imaginative interpretation as the Bible, Joyce or the American Constitution. Sometimes our councils are like a gathering of French postmodernists!”

  “Can you take me to my husband?” I was beginning to realize that Ayanawatta was one of those men who took pleasure in the abstract and whose monologues could run for hours if not interrupted.

  “Is he with the Kakatanawa?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then I can lead you to them.” His voice softened. “I have had no dream to the contrary, at least. Possibly your husband could be or will become the friend of my friend Dawandada, who is also called White Crow.” He paused with an expression of apology. “I talk too much and speculate too wildly. One gets used to talking to oneself. I have not had a chance for ordinary human conversation with a reasonably well-educated entity for the last four years. And you, well—you are a blessing. The best dance I ever danced, I must say. I had expected some laconic demigoddess to complete our trio. I wasn’t even sure you were going to be human. The dream told me what to do, not what to expect. There is an ill wind rising against us, and I do not know why. I have had confusing dreams.”

  “Do you always act according to your dreams?” I was intrigued. This was, after all, my own area of expertise.

  “Only after due consideration. And if the appropriate dance and song bring the harmony of joined worlds. I was always of a spiritual disposition.” He began carefully cleaning one of his beautifully fashioned hardwood paddles, curved in such a way that they were also war-axes. His bow and quiver of arrows were already secured in the canoe. He paused. “White Buffalo Woman, I am on a long spiritual journey which began many years ago in the forests of my adopted home in what you know as upper New York. I am bound to link my destiny with others to achieve a great deed, and I am bound not to speak of that part of my destiny. Yet when that deed is done I will at last possess the wisdom and the power I need to speak to the councils of the Nations and begin the final part of my destiny.”

  “What of the Kakatanawa? Do they join your councils?”

  “They are not our brothers. They have their own councils.” He had the air of a man trying to hide his dismay at extraordinary political naivete.

  “Why do you call me White Buffalo Woman? And why would I go with you when I seek my husband?”

  “Because of the myth. It has to be enacted. It is still not made reality. I think our two stories are now the same. They must be. Otherwise there would be dissonances. Your name was one of several offered in the prophecy. Would you prefer me to call you something else?”

  “If I have a choice, you can call me the Countess of Bek,” I said. In the language we were using this name came out longer than the one he had employed.

  He smiled, accepting this as irony. “I trust, Countess, you will accompany me, if only because together we are most likely to find your husband. Can you use a canoe? We can be across the Shining Water and at the mouth of the Roaring River in a day.” Again, he seemed to speak with a certain sardonic humor.

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, I found myself afloat. Ayanawatta’s canoe was a superb instrument of movement, with an almost sentient quality to its responses. It sometimes seemed hardly to touch the water. As we paddled I asked him how far it was to the Kakatanawa village.

  “I would not call it a village exactly. Their longhouse lies some distance to the north and west.”

  “Why have they abducted my husband? Is there no police authority in their territory?”

  “I know little about the Kakatanawa. Their customs are not our customs.”

  “Who are this mysterious tribe? Demons? Cannibals?”

  He laughed with some embarrassment as his paddle
rose and fell in the crystal water. It was impossible not to admire his extraordinarily well-modeled body. “I could be maligning them. You know how folktales exaggerate sometimes. They have no reputation for abducting mortals. Their intentions could easily be benign. I do not say that to reassure you, only to let you know that they have no history of meaning us harm.”

  I thought I might be assuming too much. “We are still in America?”

  “I have another name for the continent. But if you lived after Longfellow, then your time is far in my future.”

  Such shifts of time were not unusual in the dream-worlds. “Then this is roughly 1550 in the Christian calendar.”

  He shook his head, and the breeze rippled in the eagle feathers. I realized I had never seen such brilliant colors before. Light sparkled and danced in them. Were the feathers themselves invested with magic?

  He paused in his paddling. The canoe continued to skim across the bright water. The smell of pines and rich, damp undergrowth drifted from the distant bank. “Actually it’s A.D. 1135, by that calendar. The Norman liberation of Britain began sixty-nine years ago. I think the settlers worked it out on the date of an eclipse. Well, they just picked a later eclipse. They were trying to prove we took the idea of a democratic federation from them.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “And before them was Leif Ericsson. When I was a boy I came across a Norseman whose colony had been established about a hundred years earlier. You could call him the Last of the Vikings. He was a poor, primitive creature, and most of his tribe had been hunted to death by the Algonquin. To be honest I’d mistaken him for some sort of scrawny bear at first.

  “They called this place Wineland. He was bitter as his father and grandfather were bitter. The Ericssons had tricked his ancestors with stories of grapes and endless fields of wheat. What they actually got, of course, was foul weather, hard shrift and an angry native population which thoroughly outnumbered them. They called us ‘the screamers’ or ‘skraelings.’ I heard a few captive Norse women and children were adopted by some Cayugas who had survived an epidemic. But that was the last of them.”