As the medievalist Morton Bloomfield wrote, “The wide distribution of folktale motifs argues for a lengthy time of diffusion. . . yet the ubiquity and universality of motifs argue against this explanation in all cases. The presence of motifs in America and Australia tends to prove an earlier period of unity.”154 When a sufficiently wide experience of fable has taught discrimination between local ethnic semblances of motifs and the underlying genera to which they belong, then not only generic motifs but also their categorical meanings are seen to belong to an “earlier period of unity.” The aboriginal Australian story-teller has of course different names for his stock of universal motifs, and he arranges them in as diverse a variety of sequences as any of his European, African, or Asian counterparts do. Yet no temporal or spatial disjunction in the telling has any effect on the primary meanings of the Two Trees’ pattern; the Australian is as much a continuator of the common fabulous tradition as any conteur elsewhere. The text of the following tale from New South Wales155 is of no less doubtful orality than the text of Kyng Orfew, but the tale itself is no less certainly a traditional fable.
A hunter named Wurrunna returns to his people’s campsite tired and hungry at the end of a day’s unsuccessful hunt. He asks his mother for prepared grain food, but her supply is exhausted; when he asks others in the place for raw cereal to prepare for himself, they refuse him. Enraged, he takes up his weapons and departs to seek a better society elsewhere.
He comes first in his journey to a monstrous old man who is cutting wild honey from standing wood. The man has no eyes, but sees well through his nose, as do all his tribe. He is gratuitously kind, giving Wurrunna as much honey as he can eat and hospitably inviting him to stay with his people. But the weird figure makes Wurrunna feel uneasy, so he quietly slips away to continue his journey.
Next he comes to a large lagoon where he drinks and lies down to sleep for the night. When he awakens in the morning, only a large dry plain appears where the lagoon was the previous evening. While he is puzzling over this, a heavy storm begins to rise, and he hurries away until he comes to a pile of cut bark lying on the ground ready for use in making a shelter. He cuts a few poles and sets up a framework to support the sheets of bark, but when he lifts the first sheet to put it in place, he discovers under it an utterly terrifying creature who shouts its name at him with such a horrendous voice that he drops the bark and flees headlong into the wilderness.
He flees until he reaches a great river and can go no farther. There he encounters a flock of wingless birds (emus) just emerging from the river, and decides to kill one for food. He climbs a tree and conceals himself there to ambush the birds. He spears one of them as they pass the tree, and descends to collect his prey, but when he reaches it he finds that he has killed a man around whose dead body the rest of the tribe are angrily gathered. Again Wurrunna flees in stark terror.
Thinking only of the danger behind him, he goes forward head-long until he stumbles into a strange camp which he has not seen until he is in it. There seven girls, whose collective name is Maya-mayi, are living alone. They receive Wurrunna hospitably, feeding him and allowing him to share their campsite that night. The next morning he pretends to depart, but hides nearby to watch the seven girls’ movements in hopes of catching one alone and capturing her for his wife.
The girls leave their camp to forage for food with their digging sticks in hand. After they have found a supply, they lay their sticks aside and sit down to eat. Wurrunna steals two of the sticks and again conceals himself. When they have eaten, five of the girls find their sticks and go back to their camp; the other two Wurrunna captures while they are searching for their sticks.
The two girls live contentedly with Wurrunna for some weeks. Then one day he orders them to cut bark from two green pines nearby to use as kindling for a fire. They protest that if they do so he will see them no more, but he insists. When they attempt to cut the pines, the trees begin to stretch upward carrying the two girls with them skyward. Soon the tops of the trees touch the heavens and the two girls disappear there forever.
If after the manner of Edmund Leach one probes this native Australian tale for its philosophical message, such a message will not be far to seek. But it will require the utmost degree of informed percipience to determine wherein that message is characteristically blackfellow, and the task will be truly hopeless unless one can first determine what part of the tale’s philosophical system transcends blackfellow culture and is simply a consequence of the universal tradition of story-telling. It may be questionable whether, if one is already sufficiently informed about blackfellow culture to discriminate properly in that way, there is any particular utility in a purely ethnocentric study of blackfellow tales. Possibly the only sure value to be gotten from the study of any one people’s multiforms of oral traditional fable is the same value that the conteur and his hearers derive—the enlargement of one’s own intellectual experience of human potential. There is value of that sort for any educated man or woman in the knowledge that an Australian blackfellow conteur in the 20th century expressed the rules of property and price in the same motival system that an unknown twelfth-century Breton poet used to construct the tale of Kyng Orfeo. Like Orfeo, Wurrunna too has his implements of hewn wood wherewith to dispel illusions and secure benefits. Like Orfeo’s, each set of Wurrunna’s hewn implements is matched with greenwood haunted by preternatural monsters. Both are tales of a cosmotact voluntarily exiled to overcome the intractability of women.
The tale of Wurrunna begins with a scene of pure reciprocity. An empty-handed male hunter, he has no bushmeat to offer in exchange for vegetable food, and finds the female gatherers of plant food in his camp equally as empty-handed as he. True to pattern, he thereupon lays hands on the hewn wood of his weapons, and departs. His impulsive anger takes him, with equal fidelity to pattern, to standing wood which a preternatural monster frequents. This alien monster, simultaneously threatening and benevolent, gives him nourishment with a liberal generosity exactly opposite to the unyielding meanness of Wurrunna’s own people. But like the yield of the green ympe tre in Kyng Orfeo, the yield of the successive green trees in Wurrunna’s adventures also steadily diminishes until finally the last manifestation of the live wood presides over restoration of abducted women.
Fleeing from the equally untenable extremes of his own weaponry (with its social implications) at home and the bee-tree in an alien land, Wurrunna comes next to the monstrous bark-backed creature whom he at first mistakes for cut wood, but who in fact is a kind of horizontal green wood. Cutting poles for a shelter, Wurrunna comes close to earning a new campsite for himself in this place, but makes the mistake of trying to appropriate unearned property in the form of the supposedly pre-cut bark. Under that bark skin lurks a howling monster who suddenly snatches away the same unearned bounty which a moment before he had seemed to offer for the taking. As surely as the fairy king taught Orfeo while he moved from tree to tree to earn a civilized domesticity by reliance on the just practice of his own skills, so surely do Wurrunna’s monsters of the wilderness teach him the same lesson.
The next incident in Wurrunna’s adventures finds him again involved with a standing tree. He conceals himself in its canopy to spear a passing wingless game-bird. His trees are becoming as it were progressively ‘greener,’ involving progressively more and farther-reaching forms of the fabulous green tree’s usual motival satellites. Thus Wurrunna’s tree of ambush has the remarkable power to make the man hiding in its canopy himself a monster who reaches out of the tree’s foliage to kill a gentle creature grazing in its precinct. This tree is a place whose illusion is the interchangeability of wingless bipedals. It is also a less hewn green tree than either of its two precursors in the tale.
The bee-tree being cut by the old man who saw through his nose gave at least one meal’s worth of unnegated benefit to Wurrunna. The bark-like skin on the back of the howling bark-monster had the appearance of having been hewn, but in the event was green and yielded nothing. The third live tree, where Wurrunna hides to kill the emu, has worse results: it almost yields a meal after Wurrunna’s monstrous if unwitting slaying of his own kind, but then in a sudden reversal it is the scene where Wurrunna’s own life is threatened by the dead man’s tribe, who pose the specifically human danger of vendetta. The illusion fostered by this tree not only disappoints its visitor, but threatens to pursue him and take away even that barest minimum of well-being which the visitor brought with him when he first approached the tree: the mere satisfaction of still being alive. The actual imposition of the duty among men to pay a life for a life is of course made not while Wurrunna is in the green treetop, but rather when he descends to follow his own hewn wooden spear to the place where his kill lies.
The final set of hewn wood and green follows immediately. Fleeing the supposed pursuit of the dead bipedal’s avengers, Wurrunna finds himself in the camp of the seven girls. They live in an orderly and civilized way, by means of the digging sticks which they use to win the vegetable food that sustains them. Who possesses the sticks possesses the women, or so it seems, and Wurrunna claims a pair of each. But they are the cruelest illusion of all, for though they seem to belong to the world of the hewn, they have a special relationship with the evergreen pine. The Maya-mayi are in fact the monstrous denizens of the ultimate green wood in the story, and are, like the conifers’ everlasting colour, themselves immortal.
Having left the cruel society of his own people where the hunter must buy all he obtains with reciprocal contributions to the welfare of others, Wurrunna living with his two captured Maya-mayi brides seems to have achieved by lawlessness and rapine that more perfect society which he had set forth in anger to seek. But the hewn wood, which in the form of the girl’s digging sticks seems at last to have worked its proper magic of social unification, is in the event a mere trifle when set against the awful power of the pine. No price in the means of man to pay can buy the permanent company of the two immortal women who, when the illusion of Wurrunna’s purchase upon them and their immortality is dispelled by the act of their hewing, rise into the sky to become everlasting stars in the Pleiades. Unlike Adam, he is not expelled or barred from his Eden when his women violate its forbidden green tree; it simply departs to a place whither he cannot follow. Finally stripped of every illusion that he can obtain something for nothing, Wurrunna is left alone in the wilderness with no alternative but to go back, as ultimately he does, to his own people, there to play the civilized game of equitable give-and-take according to the established rules.
One cannot rationally say that Wurrunna’s four sets of hewn and verdant wood are any less nor differently instructive than King Orfeo’s five sets. The cultures to which the two multiforms of the story are addressed have different idioms, and by appropriate nominal adaptation of the generic trees the same tale speaks equally well to both cultures. The ympe tre that stands now in Orfeo’s orchard, now in the fairy king’s palace, is neither more nor less marvelous than the green pine which instead of dying grows when it is hewn until finally it can carry away a female passenger from one realm to another. It is not more nor less mirific, just differently named in the descriptive idiom of the one culture and the other.
But tradition seems to go to almost any length to protect the traditional generic identity of its motifs, no matter how multiform the process of renaming and re-description makes them from one ethnic avatar to another. Consider again the Middle English ympe tre and the Australian blackfellows’ pine that grows the better for being hewn. The precise meaning in Middle English of the word ympe or impe is ‘a grafted scion;’ thus the ultimate green tree of the Breton lay is also a tree that grows the better for being hewn. No wood is greener than that whose growth cutting improves. The modern English professor’s customary contempt for the assumedly foolish, ‘animistic’ wonders of ‘primitive’ folktales is in no way justified. Western folklorists and mythographers have arguably too long been foolish and intellectually primitive believers in the outward appearance of things, but oral traditional fable is not. Not even the best of the favorite, canonical literature in the college and university curricula of the West will give up its real secrets until we learn to take oral traditional fable seriously.
So Wurrunna’s lesson is what Orfeo’s was before him. It concerns the nature and acquisition of property; his artifacts of hewn wood, for all their seeming impotence before his exile, yield progressively more and more as he gains experience with them during his time of trials in the wilderness. Inversely and proportionately, the gratuitous donations and seizures of property at green wood yield a smaller and smaller balance of profit. And just as King Orfeo learned to give up material comforts in order to possess his woman, Wurrunna learns that having material comforts means giving up the company of women. In the final analysis, the hewn wood triumphs and the law of price prevails in both the blackfellow and Middle English forms of the story.
| HEWN | GREEN |
|---|---|
|
1. Weapons (yield nothing) |
1. Bee-tree (yields a meal) |
|
2. Poles (almost yield shelter) |
2. Bark-backed monster (yields stationary horror) |
|
3. Spear (almost yields a meal) |
3. Tree of ambush (yields bereavement and terror of pursuit) |
|
4. Digging-sticks (temporarily yield wives) |
4. Pine (yields bereavement that precludes pursuit) * |
* This tale is governed by both the Two Trees’ and the honey-trickster’s pattern. Illusions, deceptions, and terrifying discoveries begin when Wurrunna meets the ancient honey-hewer, and progressively expand in fabulosity. There are seven contests of concealment; Wurrunna begins successfully to conceal himself in the fourth contest.
- Honey-gatherer conceals eyes in nose, yet sees Wurrunna.
- Wurrunna finds a lagoon in the evening; it conceals itself overnight.
- Bark-backed monster conceals itself under semblance of bark; Wurrunna discovers it while attempting to hide from storm.
- Wurrunna hides in a tree-top, and alien men hide in the semblance of emus; Wurrunna discovers their human identity.
- Wurrunna finds seven girls, hides himself from them.
- Wurrunna hides two digging sticks; girls find Wurrunna.
- Two pines conceal girls in heaven; Wurrunna discovers them in the act of departure.
Far from being a novelty of aboriginal Australian fable, the Two Trees are pandemic in Pacific Oceania. While its distance from the Asian mainland has for many suggested about Australia an ultimate degree of cultural remoteness and isolation, in fact its aboriginal people and their oral fable display great likeness to pre-Bantu strata in Central and South Africa. In many ways the most nearly ideal antipodes of our planet have proven to be in Melanesia, where, as in New Guinea, the more mountainous and heavily forested terrain has harbored a cultural isolation even more notable than that of the Australian continent. Kenelm Burridge, though he was looking for anything but generic patterns, nevertheless could not collect oral fable among the Tangu of northeastern New Guinea without meeting the Two Trees at every turn.1 The story of Nimbamung, whose native narrator Burridge did not name, is a representative example.
Once upon a time there was a blind man called Nimbamung who lived alone with his dog. One evening, as he was thinking of collecting some tree grubs on the morrow, he hafted a stone axe-blade, not taking to his pallet until he was satisfied with the balance.
Next morning, taking bow and arrows and the newly hafted axe, he set off into the forest to look for tree grubs, his dog showing him the way. They found a right good tree where tree grubs should be and, ripping away the bark with his axe, Nimbamung started to flick the grubs into the bamboo barrel he had brought with him.
Now Ambwerk happened to be close by at the time. He heard the old fellow at his work and he thought he would see what was happening. So, creeping through the undergrowth, he bid himself at the edge of the clearing. Who was this man? he wondered. Why was he behaving so strangely?
Ambwerk waited for a while, watching closely. Suddenly he understood. The fellow must be blind!
Stepping carefully so as not to make a noise, Ambwerk eased his way through the clearing and started to scuffle Nimbamung’s grubs into a barrel of his own... .
‘Out of my way! Leave my grubs alone!’ Nimbamung scolded, thinking his dog was stealing the grubs.
Ambwerk stayed with Nimbamung the whole day long, filling his barrels with the grubs which Nimbamung and his dog had found. Afterwards, he followed Nimbamung to his home.
The fellow took a strange trail, eventually stopping in front of a wamunga shrub. Creeping close, Ambwerk waited to see what would happen.
Nimbamung blew his spittle over the bush and uttered a spell: the leaves of the wamunga shrub parted to reveal an open door leading into a hole in the ground.
Ambwerk memorized the spell. Then, as the dog led the way down, Ambwerk followed close behind, leaving Nimbamung to bring up the rear and shut the shrubbery door.
Obviously we have to do here with a Tangu multiform of the Russian Saint Nicholas, and with a progression rather than a simple set of green and hewn wood. First Nimbamung hafts an axe (hewing in preparation for hewing). The function of the axe is to discover a hidden bounty of food, and it i opposed in this to the grub-tree, where Ambwerk conceals himself (to be entertained) in the company of the blind hunter and his animal companion. The wooden-hafted axe, seemingly an instrument of separation (to separate the food from the green tree), in the event brings about a new and unexpected social unity, summoning by its blows upon the food-tree the trickster Ambwerk to join the reclusive Nimbamung. And obversely, the grub-tree which seems at first to preside over a new social unification (Nimbamung + Ambwerk) in reality betokens instead an intolerable sequestration (Ambwerk and Nimbamung with his treasure of foodstuffs hidden from the rest of hungry Tangu).
The second set in the progression of woods exceeds the scope of the first set in its signification. Bamboo barrels (hewn) and wamunga shrub (green) each first conceal and then reveal the whereabouts of hidden food and men. The bamboo barrels that Ambwerk (and later also his younger brother Tuman) uses to purloin Nimbamung’s grubs seem to connote a division in the society of three who together exploit them as food, but the scene among the water-barrels in Nimbamung’s house subsequently restores that unity. Conversely, those who pass the barrier of the wamunga bush with Nimbamung seem to be joining with him, but in fact are separated from the larger society of human-kind and the normal rules of conduct that obtain in it, for social union with Nimbamung is impossible for any kind of true human, be he wise (Ambwerk) or foolish (Tuman).
The fabulosity of the green and hewn wood expands still further in the third set of the progression. The fabulous fruit trees (verdant) around Nimbamung’s house and household of hewn wood are themselves polymorphic clusters of the green and hewn principles.
Down inside the hole, Ambwerk saw they had come on a beautiful mwenk [homestead]. Coconuts a-plenty grew around the perimeter, areca-nuts hung in thick clusters, the bananas were bending with fruit. Ambwerk started to help himself. And Nimbamung, hearing the sounds of eating and thinking again it was his dog, scolded the animal, shouting to it to stop.
Inside Nimbamung’s house quantities of meat hung from the rafters, and a large heap of yams was piled on the floorboards. Ambwerk set to on the meat.
Nimbamung took a small yam, scraped it clean, cut it into small pieces and put them into his stew-pot. Ambwerk followed suit—with a large yam, a hunk of wallaby meat, and some saltwood. He took a coconut, scraped out the meat and mixed the latter with coconut milk. Ambwerk did himself proud, eating hugely, very quickly, while Nimbamung, eating slowly, cursed the dog which he thought was eating all his food.
They slept.
Next morning, Nimbamung rose early to go hunting. Ambwerk slept on. When he awoke he gorged himself on all the good food that was there, collected as much as he could carry and, remembering the spell, opened the shrubbery door and set off for home.
The second of two brothers now repeats all the adventures of the first, except that by failing to observe the necessary reciprocity with Nimbamung’s dog at the sign of Nimbamung’s hewn wood, he meets with the unwise hunter’s bad end: instead of eating, he is himself eaten. The formerly bountiful provider is suddenly lethally inimical.
Arrived back at his village, Ambwerk showed his younger brother all the food he had stolen, hanging his spoils from the rafters.
‘Where did you get all that food?’ asked Tuman.
Ambwerk told Tuman all about Nimbamung, that he was blind, what a lot of food he had, and how easy it was to rob him. Tuman was excited. ‘I’ll go along tomorrow!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll go and collect as much as 1 can and bring it back here!’
But Ambwerk had not finished. ‘Mind now’, he cautioned. ‘When the old fellow opens the door you must get in after the dog and before he does—he shuts the door behind him. When you get into his mwenk, eat as much as you like—but leave his dog alone. Let the dog eat as much as it wants.’
Next morning, Tuman went off into the forest to look for Nimbamung. He found him where Ambwerk had said he would be, and he did as Ambwerk had told him to do. He filled his own barrels with grubs while Nimbamung, cursing his dog, shovelled pith and rotting bark into his own. He followed the old man to the wamunga shrub, crept close as the fellow blew his spittle over the shrub and uttered the spell, then darted in ahead of him, following the dog down into the mwenk.
There it was, just as Ambwerk had told him. He picked some bananas.
‘Stop eating my food!’ Nimbamung shouted crossly. ‘Get out of it, there!’ Still he thought it was his dog. Grumbling and scolding, he put a pot on the fire, sliced a small yam, and threw the pieces into the pot.
Tuman followed suit with a large yam, some saltwood, and grubs. The water bubbled merrily, the food was cooked, and Tuman ate fast and furiously while Nimbamung, groping blindly, eating little, muttered and swore at his dog.
Then, as often may happen, Nimbamung’s dog nosed its way into Tuman’s food. He hit it on the snout. The dog yelped.
‘What’s that?’ Nimbamung roared. ‘Who hit my dog?’ he raged, rising to his feet and taking down his adze. ‘Who is in here eating my food?’
Tuman fled to the back of the hut and hid himself behind a pile of water barrels. And Nimbamung, stumbling blindly, thrusting and swinging his adze, crashed against the pile of barrels as he brought the weapon down in a wild overhand stroke... .
Tuman could do nothing. The blade struck him between the eyes and he fell lifeless to the floor.
Nimbamung carved the corpse, cooked the flesh, and ate it. Head and bones he hung under the porch of his house.
The third set of verdant and hewn wood in this cosmotactic tale—Nimbamung’s fruit trees and wooden house—is ultimately enclosed within a fourth and last set. The wamunga shrub, earlier Nimbamung’s device for concealment and exclusion of other men from his private Eden, now becomes Ambwerk’s road sign pointing the way to speedy discovery and invasion of it by the whole troop of his and Tuman’s fellow villagers. Via the green wamunga they come with their hewn spears to devastate Nimbamung’s house and orchard. The hewn wood that unites the greatest number (the spears) prevails over all other, and imposes universal unity; while the wamunga, once the portal leading to a place of effortless repletion and bliss, suddenly and unexpectedly becomes for those who dwell within the portal to their death and annihilation:
After five days of waiting, Ambwerk knew that something had gone awry with his brother. So, taking his bow and arrows, he went to the wamunga shrub, blew his spittle over it, and uttered the spell. The door opened and he went down into Nimbamung’s mwenk. He saw the bones hanging on the porch, he recognized the head.
Ambwerk returned to his village at once. He selected a large pig and placed it on the pekas [plaza] in front of his house. Then he fetched bunches of areca-nuts and placed them beside the pig. All the men of the village gathered round to hear what was afoot.
Ambwerk told them about Nimbamung and what had happened to Tuman. Something would have to be done.
Next day, then, the villagers shouldered their spears and set off for Nimbamung’s home. Ambwerk uttered the spell and blew his spittle over the wamunga shrub. The door opened and the party trooped down to the mwenk.
Ambwerk was first with his spear, thrusting it deep into Nimbamung’s side. Then each of the others followed Ambwerk’s example, turn by turn, until all had had a share in the killing. They killed Nimbamung’s dog too, packed all the meat and foodstuffs they could carry into string bags, and then piled faggots around the outside of Nimbamung’s house.
When the pyre was ready, they placed Nimbamung and his dog on the top and set it alight. They waited there until house, man, and dog had been entirely consumed, burnt in the flames. Then they returned to their village.
Being a tale of Two Trees with the food-trickster as cosmotact, this Tangu multiform contains the expected seven contests of concealment and discovery grouped about the hewn and verdant wood. The first three sets of wood belong to Ambwerk; the same three are experienced again by Tuman in imitation of his elder brother, but the fourth set is Ambwerk’s alone, giving the total of seven:
| Ambwerk | Tuman | Ambwerk |
|---|---|---|
|
1. Nimbamung’s axe/grub tree |
4. Nimbamung’s axe/grub tree |
7. wamunga bush as portal/villager’s spears |
|
2. bamboo barrels/ wamunga as device of concealment |
5. bamboo barrels/ wamunga as device of concealment | |
|
3. Nimbamung’s food- trees/wooden house |
6. Nimbamung’s food- trees/wooden house |
Morton Bloomfield, our enlightened modern critic, tells us “the presence of motifs in America and Australia tends to prove an earlier period of unity” than that which might be required for a less ancient process of mere ‘diffusion.’154 Acting upon his suggestion, and having looked into the outback of Australia as well as the remoter parts of Oceania, we should before leaving the Two Trees satisfy ourselves also that they have some plausibly pre-Columbian currency in the Western Hemisphere. In fact the positive evidence for this proposition is so abundant that proof of it lies waiting in the pages of any bona fide published collection from native American sources; to introduce any one such text as evidence here, as I now do, slights the evidential authority of the many others that an observant reader will readily encounter all across the gamut of attested Amerindian oral traditions.
Four Jicarilla Apache men in northern New Mexico gave the American collector Morris Opler a major corpus of their traditional oral fable during the years 1934 and 1935. It is not recorded in the published results which of the four—Cevero Caramillo, John Chopari, Alasco Tisnado, or Juan Julian—told Opler the following tale:156
A man is left destitute by gambling losses in the hoop and pole game. He obtains an axe and finds a spruce tree near a river, which he attempts to cut down on three successive days. At sunset of each day the tree is almost felled, but he finds it whole again each morning. On the fourth day a preternatural called Black Hactcin frightens the man, asking what he is doing to the preternatural’s tree. The man tells him he wants a length of log sufficient to hide himself in, and Black Hactcin then cuts down his own tree, hews the required section of trunk, and replants the leafy upper portion. This springs instantly to life and grows as before.
Woodpeckers help the man hollow the hewn trunk, then he pays them and the preternatural for their labour. He rolls the finished log to the river, creeps inside, and spiders with the help of a swallow seal the entrance into the log with mud and web. Floating downstream inside the log, the man is stopped four times and required to pay toll for the continuation of his journey downriver inside the hollowed log.
Finally he lands in a fertile country, where he lays out a garden. Using a pointed stick, he plants the seeds of all useful vegetables. They mature in twelve days. Next he observes the flickering of a light on the opposite bank of the river on each of three successive nights, but cannot find the firesite on the morrow. On the fourth night he sets a forked stick in the ground to help him divine the exact place of the fire, and next morning he finds the young woman whose fire he has been observing each night. Then he finds a cicada among the leaves of a green tree and obtains from it a flute to use in wooing the woman.
The cosmotact of this piece is the Jicarilla Apaches’ mythic inventor of gardening. He is also the principal hewer of the piece, for although he sub-contracts for all the effectual carving and woodchopping that is done in the story about him, he alone among all the story’s characters is the designer of civilization who understands the uses of hewn wood. For each occurrence of green wood, he obtains a corresponding artifact of dry wood wrought to a civilizing purpose.
Initially impoverished by the exactly predetermined forfeits that are the price of gambling at the (hewn) hoop and pole game, the man retreats from the hardship imposed by the hewn wooden artifacts of that game to the refuge of the green spruce in the wilderness. No wood is greener than that which grows the better for being cut; four times the hewer cuts, and each time finds the spruce as whole as if it were not the same tree. Then in the midst of his fourth attempt he is frightened by a preternatural who at first seems to threaten him, but who suddenly makes instead a gratuitous donation of the desired tree-trunk. Typically of this pattern, the wood of the tree itself is free, but the man must pay a price for the hewing; in this case, it is a fee of ritual cornflowers explicitly described in the story as the preternatural’s wages for labour.
The effect of hewing the spruce is to make the bole of the tree mobile. Once it is cut away, it can move as few things can, both terrestrially and aquatic ally—that is, both by rolling over the ground and by floating in the water. Its instrumentality is thus two-fold. In both ways it is drastically different from the green top that remains behind, replanted by the hand of the preternatural to root itself again in the same place where formerly it had stood.
But the hewn log is no less a thing of recurrent stages than the green tree from which it comes. The difference is that the stages of live wood are only the recurrence of new growth, while hewing may add wholly new forms of civilized value to dead wood. Once the Apache man’s log has achieved mobility, it remains to be hewn further in a way that will render it also portative. The woodpeckers hollow it so that the man can ride inside and share its aquatic mobility.
Four times the green wood is hewn only to retain its verdure, and four times the man manipulates wood that is surely dead. After the sectioning and hollowing of the log for mobility and portage, the man comes into a new land where he is a self-made exile. Planting stick in hand, he plants the seeds of an Eden-like garden. Then, after using the single-pointed cut wood of his planting stick to encourage plant reproduction and the growth of food, the man obtains a double-pointed, forked stick to locate a nubile woman and encourage human reproduction, or the growth of progeny. For whereas new plant life may spring from a single seed, humans must be paired like the forked stick to reproduce their kind.
Thus for each of four green trees that uniformly keep their verdure, the Jicarilla Apache hero has four pieces of hewn wood, each yielding a different benefit according to the virtue of its proper form. Only when the pattern of the Two Trees has thus been fulfilled does the Jicarilla story-teller move on to narrate the courtship that develops between the newly discovered woman and the exiled man, between the musical cicada’s green tree and hewn flute.157
A reader unaccustomed to the ways of oral narrative tradition may find the constancy of patterns implausible. There is really nothing like it in Western literature. The more schooled and learned the reader, the more deeply suspicious he is likely to be, and the quicker to call eccentric anyone who insists upon the critical importance of constant patterns. Common readers of ‘uneducated’ literary tastes usually find constancy of pattern appealing in fiction, but bookish men with modernistic or avant-garde predilections are good at communicating their distrust and dislike of it. Have not the great authors of Western literary tradition achieved their greatness by avoiding repetition?
And yet oral tradition does not simply repeat itself. Its bearers throughout the world continually reconstruct it according to patterns that have been proven the most potent vehicles of meaning over periods of time and diversities of culture that dwarf the duration and scope of any literary tradition in the world. The resultant pervasive resonance of each ethnic oral tradition with every genre of oral fable in other ethnic traditions is an achievement for which written literature is both far too young and technically ill-suited. The literary bushel is bad measure for oral fable.