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On Puzzling Wavelengths
Enough is enough, the two families thought. A powerful Cree med-
icine man was flown in at great expense from southern Alberta to try
to bring the whole business to a halt. He was pale and huge, standing
a head taller than most people in the community. And everyone looked
at him anxiously. After all, the Dene term for Cree translates as “en-
emy.” Once the visitor had completed his rites in private, the jubilant
chief attempted to get a dance going. We had the requisite drums and
people. The Cree medicine man himself even started to play a drum.
The chief, however, totally failed to entice anyone to follow him in the
circle he trod. At least the broken legs came to an abrupt end.
I made mistakes in the field, especially toward the end. Hearing a
fight, I looked out my window to see a middle-aged woman on the
doorstep of her cabin, two doors away, arguing with two men. This
is the neighbor I described earlier who was heavily involved with
power. While it is my usual practice to avoid all surreptitious photog-
raphy in the field on ethical grounds, I picked up the camera and shot
the scene. There was a strange noise as I pressed the shutter release.
For some reason, the camera stopped working. I borrowed a replace-
ment camera and mailed my own to a repair shop in Chicago. In due
course, the shop wrote back asking what I had done to the camera.
Its entire shutter mechanism lay in a puddle at the bottom of the in-
strument, every single piece undone. When my film came back from
processing, I got another shock. The picture of the fight had come
out, but over the powerful woman’s head there was a black vortex.
This I report as a skeptical scientist, for whatever it is worth. None
of it was ever explained.
Seeing with One’s Eyes Closed
Summer is a season for socializing, with dances, stick games, and chil-
dren playing on into the seemingly endless evenings. That is when the
fewest people are tied up with work. It is also the time of the year when
the community reaches its peak size and when there are several great
changes in the usual character of interpersonal relations.
The stick game was a wholly different matter from dance. It didn’t
unite, it divided; it didn’t bring the two sexes together, it was just for
men. Yet, there was a comparable spirit of intense excitement and in-
