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That means,  Shut up, you fool!
He told me many stories about his native land and its marvels. Some I knew to
be true, having heard of them from the coast folk: the great floating houses
that spread their wings like birds to catch the wind, and the magic weapons
that make thunder and lightning. Others were harder to believe, such as his
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tales about the woman chief of his tribe. Not a clan mother, but a real war
chief, like Bigkiller or even Powhatan, and so powerful that any man even an
elder or a leading warrior can lose his life merely for speaking against her.
He also claimed that the town he came from was so big that it held more people
than all of the
People s towns put together. That is of course a lie, but you can t blame a
man for bragging on his own tribe.
But nothing, I think, was as strange as the plei
.
Forgive me for using a word you do not know. But as far as I know there is no
word in your language for what I am talking about. Nor in ours, and this is
because the thing it means has never existed among our peoples. I think the
Creator must have given this idea only to the whites, perhaps to compensate
them for their poor sense of direction and that skin that burns in the sun.
It all began one evening, at the beginning of his second winter with us, when
I came in from a council meeting and found him sitting by the fire, scratching
away on a big sheet of mulberry bark.
Just to be polite I said, 
Gado hadvhne?
What are you doing?
Without looking up he said in his own language,  Raiting a plei.
Now I knew what the first part meant;
rai-ting is what the whites call it when they make those talking marks. But I
had never heard the last word before, and I asked what it meant.
Spearshaker laid his turkey feather aside and sat up and looked at me.  Ah,
Mouse, he said,  how can I make you understand? This will be hard even for
you.
I sat down on the other side of the fire.  Try, I said.
O what a fond and Moone-struck fool am I! Hath the aire of
Virginnia addl d my braine? Or did an
Enemy smite me on the heade, and I knewe it not? For here in this wilde
country, where e en the
Artes of Letters are altogether unknowne, I haue begun the writing of a Play.
And sure it is I shall neuer see it acted, neyther shall any other man:
wherefore  tis Lunacy indeede. Yet me thinkes if I
do it not, I am the more certain to go mad: for I find my selfe growing more
like vnto these
Indians
, and I feare I may forget what manner of man I was. Therefore the Play s the
thing, whereby Ile saue my Minde by intentional folly: forsooth, there s
Method in my Madnesse.
Well, he was right. He talked far into the night, and the more he talked the
less I understood. I asked more questions than a rattlesnake has scales, and
the answers only left me more confused. It was a long time before I began to
see it.
Didn t you, as a child, pretend you were a warrior or a chief or maybe a
medicine man, and make up stories and adventures for yourself? And your
sisters had dolls that they gave names to, and talked to, and so on?
Or . . . let me try this another way. Don t your people have dances, like our
Bear Dance, in which a man imitates some sort of animal? And don t your
warriors sometimes dance around the fire acting out their own deeds, showing
how they killed men or sneaked up on an enemy town and maybe making it a
little better than it really happened? Yes, it is the same with us.
Now this plei thing is a little like those dances, and a little like the
pretending of children. A group of people dress up in fancy clothes and
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pretend to be other people, and pretend to do various things, and in this way
they tell a story.
Yes, grown men. Yes, right up in front of everybody.
But understand, this isn t a dance. Well, there is some singing and dancing,
but mostly they just talk. And gesture, and make faces, and now and then
pretend to kill each other. They do a lot of that last. I guess it is
something like a war dance at that.
You d be surprised what can be done in this way. A man like Spearshaker, who
really knows how
ak-ta is what they are called can make you see almost anything. He could
imitate a man s expression and voice and way of moving or a woman s so well
you d swear he had turned into that person. He could make you think he was
Bigkiller, standing right there in front of you, grunting and growling and
waving his war club. He could do Blackfox s funny walk, or Locust wiggling his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]