By C. R. Manley
I tell a gentler version of the Kwakiutl Tsonokwa myth.
The hairy bogeyman who lives in the forest and eats
noisy children. Broad-Shouldered-Woman who says
“Come into my house, child. I have something for you here”
or who straps on her clam basket and carries the children home.
But before roasting them, Tsonokwa becomes entranced
by the children’s flat faces, a girl’s shaved eyebrows,
ears pierced for earrings. Tsonokwa wants these things.
The children always outwit the monster, assuring it
they can change its appearance, then smashing its head
with stones, pushing it into the fire, pounding sticks
through its eyes or ears. Tsonokwa says “O!”
and dies. The children run back to their village,
full of their news.
Tsonokwa seems almost to wish for its own death,
it finds it so easily. In the human children. That soft,
sweet food it carried-off, kicking under its arms,
to a cedar hut in the wet, dark woods.
But in the story I tell, the children instruct Tsonokwa
to bring two flat stones, to rest its head on one
and to place the other over its face. Tsonokwa does this
and lies still. Lies patient and still for weeks.
And eventually the children forget to be careful, forget
what breathes there in the trees, hungry
and dreaming of them.
Storytelling part 1, was published in a different form in Paragraph, no. 13, 1994