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On Puzzling Wavelengths
Some years ago, in midwinter, he had been running across the ice on
a fishing lake some twelve miles from town. His leg suddenly dropped
into a crevice in the ice that he had not seen on account of the glare.
Because of the massive bulk of his upper body, he fell forward with
enough force to snap both bones in his lower leg. Going back to his iso-
lated cabin made no sense. Abandoning whatever he had been doing,
he started crawling toward town on his hands and knees, on into the
night, dragging his limp leg behind him. The pain and cold were aw-
ful. There were times when he simply had to halt for a rest and times
when he probably collapsed unconscious. Although this was hardly
the time of year to be seeing them, he soon realized that geese were
flying along with him, giving him protection. As he tells the tale, the
details of his hours and hours of painful crawling are trivial; what he
really wants to tell is the tale of his geese. He takes for granted that
their protection saved his life.
One old man I knew well, who was ridiculed behind his back for
making birch bark containers (he does “women’s work,” they said of
him), once intimated that he never went out to hunt because he had no
protecting spirit. He was savvy about power, though. Indeed, he asked
if he could give lessons to my eleven-year-old son whom he thought
had a promising, pattern-finding mind. But he was candid with me
about his personal dread of going too deeply into the forest.
Creatures beneath the Earth
People regarded it as empirically attested that creatures resembling di-
nosaurs lived beneath the earth. For one thing, a man from our com-
munity had worked at the wellhead, on a gas-drilling crew, at the time
the well was due to blow in. He told his fellows afterward about the
strange moaning he had heard in the pipe when the well finally struck
gas. He didn’t mean “moaning” in a figurative sense; for him the wail
came from something disturbed by the drilling. These great subter-
ranean creatures were even nearby. Who didn’t realize that beavers
could not possibly survive in such a cold place? The mere presence of
beavers in the ponds around us testified that something dwelt below
each pond, warming the water sufficiently for beavers to live there.
In midwinter, one occasionally sees yellow water overflowing the ice
