Storytelling Starters ~ Duck
On Thursday this week, there was ice. I went with my camera to Brockwell Park . The mid-day sun had turned the surface of the bigger pond into kaleidoscopes of sparkle and glitter. Ducks and Canada Geese and seagulls and moorhen were taking deliberate steps across the ice like little old men with sticks. Where ice had melted, they lowered themselves gingerly into the water and paddled about. When pieces of bread were thrown towards them – for several people arrived with bags of it – there’d be a sudden great flapping of wings and huge cacophonies of cawing as the birds rose up, chasing each other to the food.
Ducks
‘Ducks,’ I was thinking. ‘Ducks …’ The image must have been stirring my thoughts. For when I was on my way home, my brain suddenly dived back to a snapshot image that I remembered from an old story. It was an image of one or two ducks turning head down, tail up, diving for something deep below the surface and bringing up beakfuls of mud.
Snapshots from stories can display a powerful tenacity, lingering in the sub-conscious for years until something happens to reanimate them. (This is, of course, one of the reasons why stories are so important to humans, feedings our brains, creating connections.) But what was this story with its image of ducks?
The A-F file box
After getting home, I went to my study to see if I could trace the story. Would it be where I thought I might find it? Was it, as I was thinking, an American Indian tale? Would I discover it in the appropriate folder in my A – F file-box?
Yes, there it was, a typed-out sheet stuck onto a backing sheet of thick green paper (obviously something I’d prepared at some time for bringing out in a workshop). And yes, there was the story that my Brockwell Park trip had stirred into life, the snapshot image of the ducks so vivid, the surrounding context now coming back into focus.
My sheet of paper noted that the story was taken from Traditions of the Arikara by George A. Dorsey. 1904.
At the top of the sheet was the heading: The Arikara Creation Myth: The Wolf and Lucky-Man Create Land.
The story began very simply in the way myths do.
The Story: Wolf and Lucky-Man Create Land
There was a big lake. On it, two ducks were swimming around.
The ducks saw two figures approaching – Wolf from the south-west, Lucky-Man from the north.
The two figures met on the shore of the lake.
After a challenge – which could endure rain longest? – Wolf gave in. ‘I am beaten. But now I want you to create with me. I want to make land. I want you to make land.’
Wolf began. He said he would make land to the north of the Missouri river. So he called one of the two ducks that were swimming around on the lake.
‘Now Duck, can you dive down under the lake and fetch some dirt from the bottom.’
The duck said yes and did it. Wolf threw the mud to the north and told it to form into land. ‘Let it be prairie and let buffalo live on the prairie.’
It was done.
Then it was Lucky-Man’s turn. He called Duck and told it to go down and bring up mud. The duck brought up more than before. Lucky-Man threw it on the south side. Hills and mountains were formed. Buffalo could be seen there and Lucky-Man said that when people came, they would live there. It would suit them better.
Between the two lands Wolf and Lucky-Man made appeared the river-bed where the Missouri River is now.
Then the river began to flow.
Creative connections
The story is majestic. It’s simple. It doesn’t explain how things happen. It just tells us what occurred. That’s a lot like my experience of how creation takes place – you can’t really explain it. So I’m glad the ducks in Brockwell Park made me remember about the story and look it out.
Connections like this can be inspiring. Let’s search them out and celebrate them – links between the daily world we inhabit and the stories that lie deep in our brain like snapshots in a photo archive that too rarely gets revisited.
Track down the connections and they leap back into life, becoming food for new thought.
In my case on Thursday this week, they inspired the link that created today’s blog posting. Before my trip to Brockwell Park, I’d been wondering what I might do!
Next week: More about snapshots
Tags: Brockwell Park, creation, duck, ice, North American Indian, snapshot image, story box, Wolf and Lucky-Man Create Land