Algernon Blackwood

“ Lappilatwan was a tree-fungus who sang the ‘signal song to all wood-birds, worms and insects to go to sleep,’ and also announced the breaking of a beautiful day. The squirrels envied him his nest, and decided to evict him, and he was only saved from this humiliation by the flies, after a terrible battle in which there were many scalps taken on both sides. The sympathy of the poet is on the side of the flies, and his description of the fight is also a description of an Indian attack: only a few squirrels could rush up the birch tree at one time, whereas the flies came upon them from all sides. ”

“ The main body of legends, from which these songs of love and sorcery have been taken, deal with the doings of Kuloskap, the Master, Lord of Beasts and Men, who was the culture-hero of the entire Algonquin family, a sort of Hiawatha. Kuloskap was a god-man of truly Indian type, at once the creator and the friend of man. The name means “liar,” yet was meant as a compliment. “He is called the deceiver,” explains Prince, “not because he deceives or injures man, but because he is clever enough to lead his enemies astray⁠—the highest possible virtue to the early American mind.” ”

“ Having created men out of an ash tree, he next created the animals and named them, asking each in turn what it would do if it met an Indian, and, according to their answers, making them smaller, gentler, less dangerous. ”

“ The adjectives describing the various insects are significant, and anyone who has hunted in these woods will appreciate the terror of the flies and rejoice in their discomfiture. “Lappilatwan, the Singer in the Dusk,” is a Passamaquoddy song, as already noted. “The wonderful song of Nipon, the Summer, and the truly tender legend of the loves of the Leaf and the Firebird serve still further to illustrate the purity of Passamaquoddy thought and diction.” ”

“ The Leaf, however, is suspicious at first, having been warned by his grandmother that “even the smallest insect may eat your life out. A worm so little that it can pass through the prick of a needle, even as a rabbit runs through a valley, or a fish swims free up a river, may cut your stem or blight your beauty.” ”

“ We look down on the mountains,
This is the Song of the Mountains.
And there is a similar strange charm in many another song of the Algonquin (New England) Red Indians, whose legends and traditions, orally chanted from generation to generation, have been saved from oblivion by the literal translations of Professor Dyneley Prince and the late Charles Leland. [1] They constitute an uncommonly interesting bit of aboriginal literature, and of a race now so rapidly perishing that “in fifty years there will be hardly a single representative left.” ”

“ Nipon, a beautiful woman, dressed in green leaves, lived near the sun, and her grandmother, the Rain, who dwelt far away, but sometimes came to visit her, warned her against Pûn, the winter. She must never go into the Northland or she would die. ”

“ He was, of course, a wizard-in-chief, and it is interesting to note the numerous points the system has in common with other cosmologies⁠—the world covered with a flood, Kuloskap’s retiring into the wilderness when he wanted to increase his power by prayer and fasting, and how he finally rose to his giant wigwam in the sky, where his children may always reach him in prayer, and whence he watches over the world. ”

“ I It seems strange that a tribe of Redskins, whose favourite method of torturing their captives was to make them walk barefoot over a fire of hemlock coals until relieved by death, could also have produced so tender and delicate a song of the stars as the following:
We are the stars which sing,
We sing with our light.
We are the birds of fire.
We fly across the heaven.
Our light is a star;
We make a road tor spirits,
A road tor the Great Spirit.
Among us are three hunters,
Who chase a bear ”