Stories of Glous’gap true to Micmac heritage

ON THE TRAIL OF ELDER BROTHER: GLOUS’GAP STORIES OF THE MICMAC INDIANS, by Michael B. Running Wolf and Patricia Clark Smith, Persea Books, New York, 2000, 148 pages, hardcover, $17.95; includes glossary of Micmac words.

After the ice storm of 1998, if you remember, everything came to a standstill. Most of us had no electricity, we burned wood or kerosene for heat, and for a while we couldn’t get gas for the car because the pumps didn’t work. It was like a bad dream.

The most amazing sight that January was the spectacle of broken trees. For days rending and cracking sounds filled the woods. A stocky old maple split in three as if it had been struck by lightning. Birches bowed in observance of Ramadan. Ice-crusted branches glistened in the sunlight, and whole stands of trees looked like they’d had their tops lopped off by some giant stomping across Maine with a scythe. Did Glous’gap stride through to admonish us we haven’t really mastered nature?

It was something he’d do. Glous’gap is the trickster of ancient Wabanaki stories, whose exploits and foibles are chronicled in collections of Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Micmac stories, but nowhere in as readable and authentically up-to-date a form as in “On the Trail of Elder Brother.”

Authors Michael Running Wolf and Patricia Clark Smith, who are both of Micmac descent and grew up in Maine and New Brunswick, have shaped these old stories based on tellings they heard when they were children. This book, that is, has been compiled not by anthologists, but by family storytellers.

These are stories of the Glous’gap who might have stormed across the Northeast in January 1998. Glous’gap is said to have come originally from the Sky World to put the Earth into shape. He “taught the people everything they needed to know in order to live well. From him they learned how to stalk deer and … build fires and set up wigwams … He taught them the names of all the stars. He taught them songs of great power and showed them how they might speak well when they met together in council … From him they learned the proper ways to make their prayers to the Creator and how to be kind to one another.”

By trial and error he populated the forest with animals of the right size and responsibilities. The moose, being huge, gives him some trouble, but Glous’gap is, if fallible, always clever.

The stories are brightly told, and they sensitively, subtly convey the community concerns of Glous’gap’s people. He outwits bad-tempered sorcerers, or Me’toug’ou’lin, and rescues relatives abducted from villages. He’s a master of disguises, and in one story tricks and humiliates a shameless seducer by pretending to be a beautiful, flirtatious girl.

In one of the best, and perhaps most timely of the 16 stories, Glous’gap encounters a family grieving because their son has run away saying he hates them. Glous’gap realizes the only way to console the family is to bring the son back, and sets out. The boy meanwhile has been lured in by a witch, who promptly shrinks him down to a few inches and pops him into a birch bark box. The terrified boy asks her what she wants, and she tells him, “I want your tiny little manitou, your spirit!”

Eventually Glous’gap tracks the boy down, outwits the witch in a supernatural brawl, and frees the frightened boy, who learns a major lesson about who he is, and who he needs to survive.

Somewhere amid the many stories that Running Wolf and Clark did not include in “On the Trail of Elder Brother,” there must be a good one from Princeton, or Indian Island, or New Brunswick, about someone who in the early winter of 1998 encountered an enormous man throwing ice in all directions, whacking off the tops of trees, and giving a glint-eyed but stern warning about complacency. Maybe it was all dream. This book brings some old and very real Micmac dreams to life.