I
It seems strange that a tribe of Redskins, whose favourite method of torturing their captives was to make them walk barefoot over a fire of hemlock coals until relieved by death, could also have produced so tender and delicate a song of the stars as the following: We are the stars which sing,
We sing with our light.
We are the birds of fire.
We fly across the heaven.
Our light is a star;
We make a road tor spirits,
A road tor the Great Spirit.
Among us are three hunters,
Who chase a bear;
There never was a time
When they were not hunting.
We look down on the mountains,
This is the Song of the Mountains.
And there is a similar strange charm in many another song of the Algonquin (New England) Red Indians, whose legends and traditions, orally chanted from generation to generation, have been saved from oblivion by the literal translations of Professor Dyneley Prince and the late Charles Leland. They constitute an uncommonly interesting bit of aboriginal literature, and of a race now so rapidly perishing that “in fifty years there will be hardly a single representative left.” Both Prince and Leland, familiar with their many dialects, collected the songs and stories by taking them down from the mouths of Indians whose confidence they gained, and in these translations have kept the primitive, irregular rhythm of the original. The results cannot fail to interest all who love real poetry and feel sympathy with Nature, wild Nature especially; and many of the poems, tales of adventure or of love, have a tender delicacy of treatment that is quite exquisite, yet comes strangely from tribes so savage and so cruel in their daily life. “Few, indeed, are those,” says Leland, “who ever suspected till of late years that every hill and dale in New England had its romantic legend, its beautiful poem or its marvellous myth—the latter equal in conception and form to those of the Edda—or that a vast collection of these traditions still survives in perfect preservation among the few remaining Indians of New England and the Northeast Coast.” The best, from a literary point of view, comments Prince, are from the Passamaquoddy branch of the Algonquins: “I need only call the reader’s attention to the very remarkable song recording the attack of the squirrels on Lappilatwan, who dwelt in the birch tree, ‘ever sitting with his mouth open,’ to which I know no parallel in any other literature. Lappilatwan was a tree-fungus who sang the ‘signal song to all wood-birds, worms and insects to go to sleep,’ and also announced the breaking of a beautiful day. The squirrels envied him his nest, and decided to evict him, and he was only saved from this humiliation by the flies, after a terrible battle in which there were many scalps taken on both sides. The sympathy of the poet is on the side of the flies, and his description of the fight is also a description of an Indian attack: only a few squirrels could rush up the birch tree at one time, whereas the flies came upon them from all sides. Their ‘sharp spears’ did effective work; the battle waged till sunset, and then the cry of the fungus at sunset proclaimed the first victory: ‘Lappilatwan, Fair tree-fungus, Sits with mouth open.’” Soon as they heard it,
All of the warriors,
Squirrels and insects,
Valiant mosquitoes,
Humble hornets,
Bold bumblebees,
Wild, whizzing wasps,
Gallant, merry midges,
Went to their wigwams.
Lappilatwan
Had faith in his warriors.
Next morning his sunrise-cry was the signal for renewed hostilities; the flies were unequal to a night attack, though they spent the dark hours “sharpening their spears, Dipping them in poison, Loud was their buzz.” Winged warriors
By many thousands
Swarmed on the foe;
Many a horsefly
Beheld no more
His wife and children;
Many a hornet
Sat no more
By the fire of his wigwam;
The dying bumblebee
Chanted his death song.
and at sunset the fair tree-fungus sang his little evening-song in safety: All was over.
High on the birch-tree
Untouched by a foeman—
Sat the Watchman—
The flies were victorious!