Outer Banks (11 page)

Now, curl a pair of great, god-sized arms and lift these names of creatures great and small, finny and fur-warmed, feathered and scaled; hold and heft all the names of the mast-high pines and spruce, the straight and the gnarled sword-hard woods, the fruit-laden, the briary, even unto the lacy ferns and maplike lichens; and cart in the god-arms all the names to the ovoid valley bisected by the stream later to be named the Suncook, barred on the south by the morain later to be named the Blue Hills, on the north the Belknap; and here, scattering them as if sowing seeds, set the names upon the ground. Now, standing back a few leagues, see what you have made.

This is what it is: a good place for creatures capable of hunting game year-round. And a good place for creatures that are at least capable, if they cannot hunt year-round, of gathering nuts and berries and fruits and storing them against the barren winter. Creatures that must graze on long or even short grasses cannot live here, nor can creatures unable to endure long cold winters. Hummocky, rock-laden, tree-covered land bound by steep hills and potted with small shallow lakes and narrow, rapidly coursing streams, with a thin, swiftly eroded topsoil and a subsoil of
sand, clay and yellow shale—this place is good only for tough, heavy-coated, pugnacious, stubborn animals, and also for birds that travel south in winter, and too, all hibernating creatures. No others can prosper and multiply under such harsh conditions. They might try it for a few generations, but sensing the approach of species-wide depletion, they inevitably drift to the south and west.

 

T
HIS IS THE
pattern followed by the first bipeds, the first human beings, to appear in the region. They were, of course, Indians, coming, like the glaciers, from the north, walking down from what is now called Quebec and New Brunswick, first in small foraging bands following deer herds and moose, then in larger groups, families, groups of families, and finally whole tribes. They were from the Algonquin nation of Indians, these first arrivals—Penacooks, Pemaquids, Sasquatches, Deemolays, Awtuckits, Ogunquits, Kanvasbaks, Katshermits, Merrimacks, and so forth, one band after another, passing into the Suncook Valley from the north, usually following the valleys southward from the large lakes in the north, the Winnepesaukee, the Squam, the Ossipee, along the banks of the rivers that drain them.

But all these people, one following upon the moccasined heel of the other, after entering the Suncook Valley, soon departed for the broader, more bountiful valleys to the south, saving this region up north where the streams narrow for when, late each summer, the alewives run or a week in spring when the salmon spawn and can be easily snared in wicker weirs set into the shallow cold waters or even speared from the shore by boys. For the rest of the year, these tribes, the Narragansett, the Penacook, the Pemaquid, and so forth, lived in relative peace and ease, cultivating corn and tobacco, fishing from the rocks along the bays and estuaries, hunting deer and other sweet-tasting game like turkey and rabbit, along the coast of what later came to be known to the English as Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The only tribe that made do with life year-round in the small northern valleys like the Suncook was the Abenooki, late arrivals from New Brunswick, a short, slightly bent, flat-nosed people who spoke an Algonquin dialect. They, unlike their neighbors to the south, were strictly hunters and gatherers. They did not make any attempt to cultivate the soil, which is just as well, given the poor quality of the soil and their lack of modern farm implements.

The Abenooki, because they were the first group of human beings to make a more or less permanent settlement in the Valley of the Suncook, are of interest here. As their economy was essentially that of hunting and gathering, with no trade for leaven, their existence was what has been called “marginal.” They lived in huts constructed from birchbark, moss, leaves, and muddied grasses tied with thongs to a frame of saplings which they had broken and beaten down with stones. Their clothing was not woven but rather made from the tanned hides of animals, deer mostly, laced loosely together with tendons and ligaments torn from the animals. They were not potters nor even weavers in any sense, nor did they possess the skills one usually associates with eastern woodland Indians, such as canoe-making, weir-weaving, tobacco-growing (though they seem to have participated in the custom of
smoking
tobacco, apparently acquiring the substance by stealing it in the summer from wandering members of the more agrarian tribes to the south and west of them), body decoration, and organized warfare. Their religious life seems to have been an extremely simple one, based on a belief in the Great Spirit as the Creator and first principle of both the visible and invisible worlds (between which worlds they made awkwardly few distinctions). Additionally, they believed in the existence of numberless woodland gnomes and minor good spirits, evidently guardians of places thought to be especially beautiful and, therefore, lucky. Similarly, places thought to be especially ugly and, therefore, unlucky were watched over by “devils,” minor evil
spirits. Except for these devils, there does not seem to be any larger dark spirit, or negative principle, to oppose and thus define their belief in a Creator, their so-called Great Spirit (elsewhere named Mannitoo). It does not seem that any rites were associated with the minor deities, whether to propitiate, charm, or merely to honor them, nor, surprisingly, were there even any rites associated with their belief in the Creator. Therefore, though they certainly believed in the existence and power of these several deities, the Abenooki cannot be said to have worshiped them. And while it can be said that they had numerous
customs
associated with religious life, because of the absence of ritual they cannot be said to have had a religious life as such.

Their social structure was extremely loose, based as it was on a male-dominated family unit and sexual promiscuity. Although incest was a taboo, it was nevertheless practiced extensively, especially in winter. There seems to have been no established rite for selecting leaders, no council of elders, no father-to-son descent of authority. Simply, the largest and strongest male was usually accepted as leader until such time as he was replaced, in hand-to-hand combat or through manipulation and deceit or by simple assassination, by a younger male. The old, when they became ill or infirm, were allowed to freeze to death, usually by the others' refusal to allow them to come into the huts when the weather turned cold in mid-October. With a like tough-mindedness, sickly infants or badly injured children were drowned by their own parents. Cross-eyed children, especially females, were highly prized for their beauty, and female obesity, when limited to the lower trunk and legs, was regarded as sexually provocative. Large breasts were also praised.

Most of this information, incidentally, comes to us by way of a small body of chants or song poems, for the Abenooki, as much as they loved hunting and torture, also loved singing. Consequently, we have (from the first white explorers in the area) a number of songs, and while most are concerned exclusively with
hunting and torture, a few reveal homely details of the day-today existence of the Abenooki. For instance, a “Hunger Chant”:

The entire corpus of the Abenooki chants and song poems were transcribed phonetically by a pair of Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Michel LaFamme and Bruce Brôlet, who traveled in the region in the late seventeenth century, investigating reports then circulating among the Canadian Algonquin residing along the Saint Lawrence River that there were in the forests to the south of them small bands of “angry people who know nothing of a life.” From the name, the Jesuit fathers had speculated that these might possibly be remnants from the voyages of the Irish monks, meditative men who supposedly had sailed across “the northern mists” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Naturally, when they discovered only the scattered tribes of the Abenooki scratching a living from these valleys, the fathers were disappointed, for they had hoped to locate a native brethren in Christ. Nevertheless, the two priests lived for a winter among the Abenooki in the Valley of the Suncook, studying their customs and manners, such as they were, learning their language, such as it was, and taking down, as well as they could, the Abenooki lit
erature. This was made difficult because Abenooki, although an Algonquin dialect, is a wholly uninflected language spoken in a low, nasal monotone. There is no sound for
R
and none for
W
or
L
—so that, for instance, the phrase “drifting over the waters in a sloop” would come out: “difftingovathatazinna-soup” (which is one of the reasons that so few Abenookis ever learned English, French or Latin). It is, of course, not a written language in any sense of the word. To complicate matters further, there are no obvious rules of syntax, and though a sharp distinction between nouns and verbs is held, none is held between adjectives and adverbs, nor are verbs declined beyond the present tense. But since verbal communication between the Abenookis surely took place, one must assume that there are whole phonemes that simply are not heard by the non-Abenooki auditor.

Against such formidable obstacles as these, LaFamme and Brôlet nevertheless were able to notate and eventually translate into Latin seventy-three entire songs, plus one hundred and forty staves from what appears to be a half-forgotten epic of creation, certain elements of which suggest a linear kinship from ancient times with the Indians of the Labrador flatlands, the so-called Graelings of the early-arriving Norsemen. A few typical selections from that long poem (called by the Abenooki “Stone-People-Long-Song”) might be of interest:

As mentioned earlier, the Abenooki, because they were the first group of humans to make a more or less permanent settlement in the Valley of the Suncook, are of interest here. One should not make too much of it, but nevertheless it does seem that, as a society, they were preeminently well adapted to the harsh and selfish environment, its parsimony and the cruelty with which it protected itself against human exploitation. It would be a long wait before a second group of human beings would appear who
were so well adapted. And as the reader has doubtless guessed by now, foremost among this second group of humans (anthropologically speaking) would be the pipefitter A., or Hamilton Stark. As a matter of fact, one might properly think of him as the single most evolved instance of a type or class of human beings which, as type or class, had made an astoundingly successful adaptation to an environment that had successfully been turning other groups away for well over a thousand years.

 

O
NE ADDITIONAL PECULIARITY
of the Abenooki. They were the only people to have resided in the several hinterland valleys north of the coastal plain of Massachusetts, west of the coastal plain of Maine, south of the great barrier range of mountains that crosses from Vermont through New Hampshire well into Maine and terminates at Mount Katahdin, who were willing to defend their valleys against incursion. They defended them against the remnants of the southern tribes when these tribes began to be pushed northward by the English; they defended them against the Algonquins who, in the employ of the French, ranged southward and attempted to set up bases from which they could harass English settlements farther south; and they defended them against English and later Irish Protestant colonists who came tramping northward looking for cheap land to speculate with and sometimes even to farm. No one else, before or after, bothered to defend these lands against newcomers. It's almost as if the Abenooki knew that, because of the subtlety and the peculiar extremity of their adaptation, they were unable to live at anything approaching their present low state anywhere else. They were like duck-billed platypuses, or giraffes, or strange top-eyed fish able to survive only in extremely cold waters at great depths with very high atmospheric pressures against their bodies. Remove them from what had become a “natural” state and they would gasp for air, their eyes would bulge, their skin would dry and crack open, fissures and large warts would appear, and
flopping pathetically in the mud of a truly foreign shore, they would slowly, painfully, die.