False dawn, a time for reflection. Omens persist, their images breed uncertainty.
Smoke fills the air. Golden-gray light presages wind and storm. The sun hangs in the sky like a disc of beaten copper tempered with blood. A fog obscures our vision, hot and choking rather than cool or soothing. The smell of last night's ashes fades to the scent of a week old camp. Does the grendel burn his wagons in preparation for retreat? Or is this a scorched earth tactic meant to slash and burn our fertile fields?
Yesterday, a crow flew from the forest to the battlement, it's feathers like the night, like the ink I pour upon the page, liquid, black, and flowing, a speckled egg cradled within it's beak. Nesting its treasure in a corner of stone, it pierced the shell and drank the nutrition within. We want to judge this bird, to say how wrong it was to steal some mother's child, to differentiate it from us. Where a crow sees opportunity, humans create an industry.
The People of the Dawnland, the Abenaki people, my people, believe each of us is guided by a creature in nature who reveals itself in a vision. Was this mine?
Often on this journey, we become lost in an enchanted forest. It appears across our path like a Celtic tower rising from the mist, sylvan, dense and Grimm. Here and gone, trapping us within its borders confused and disoriented until it reappears. Deep inside an armored knight guards a holy well, issuing a challenge until he is defeated and we might drink its healing waters.
Each time we enter this tangled wood, we are transformed a little further, more features of the creature guiding us emerge behind our eyes. This metamorphosis is unavoidable, a part of the journey. None escape the experience unscathed, unchanged. We cannot bypass this forest though most sane people do. A few risk the transformation beside us. Perhaps, they bear an amulet warding them against this form of lycanthropy. Perhaps, they do not fear it, perhaps they embrace this change.
Folklore or delusion, disease or just a dream? I am not sure.
By sleepless moonlight, I wonder what creature hides within me. Each has two faces, dual, competing images, one a native son revered in vision, the other a European construct reviled from an age of darkness. The wolf, loyal and devoted, the spirit of the wild, or a bloodthirsty killer, hunted, feared and outcast. The crow, clever and opportunistic, at worst a trickster, or the iridescent darkness, a harbinger of death. Perhaps the cat, curious and silent, a lone not lonely hunter, or a mark of shadow, the servant of a witch.
Each viewer interprets what emerges for themselves. Many fear our transformation, not realizing we, too, remain uncertain of who resides behind the faceplate of the guardian we seek to slay, a stranger or ourselves.
Until we know, we roam this ancient forest tossing breadcrumbs before us. Even with this trail to follow, we must be careful not to cast them too far lest the birds consume our markers and we lose our way again.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
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