Michael Moorcock - The Skrayling Tree

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-