Each day after cutting wood we would sit and talk in our small tent on the bank at the mouth of the Porcupine River, near where it flows into the Yukon. We would always end with Mom telling me a story. (There I was, long past my youth, and my mother still told me bedtime stories!) One night it was a story I heard for the first time—a story about two old women and their journey through hardship.
What brought the story to mind was a conversation we had earlier while working side by side collecting wood for the winter. Now we sat on our bedrolls and marveled at how Mom in her early fifties still was able to do this kind of hard work while most people of her generation long since had resigned themselves to old age and all of its limitations. I told her I wanted to be like her when I became an elder.
We began to remember how it once was. My grandmother and all those other elders from the past kept themselves busy until they could no longer move or until they died. Mom felt proud that she was able to overcome some of the obstacles of old age and still could get her own winter wood despite the fact that physically, the work was difficult and sometimes agonizing. During our pondering and reflections, Mom remembered this particular story because it was appropriate to all that we thought and felt at that moment.
Later, at our winter cabin, I wrote the story down. I was impressed with it because it not only taught me a lesson that I could use in my life, but also because it was a story about my people and my past—something about me that I could grasp and call mine. Stories are gifts given by an elder to a younger person. Unfortunately, this gift is not given, nor received, as often today because many of our youth are occupied by television and the fast pace of modern-day living. Maybe tomorrow a few of today’s generation who were sensitive enough to have listened to their elders’ wisdom will have the traditional word-of-mouth stories living within their memory. Perhaps tomorrow’s generation also will yearn for stories such as this so that they may better understand their past, their people and, hopefully, themselves.
Sometimes, too, stories told about one culture by someone from another way of life are misinterpreted. This is tragic. Once set down on paper, some stories are readily accepted as history, yet they may not be truthful.
This story of the two old women is from a time long before the arrival of the Western culture, and has been handed down from generation to generation, from person to person, to my mother, and then to me. Although I am writing it, using a little of my own creative imagination, this is, in fact, the story I was told and the point of the story remains the way Mom meant for me to hear it.
This story told me that there is no limit to one’s ability—certainly not age—to accomplish in life what one must. Within each individual on this large and complicated world there lives an astounding potential of greatness. Yet it is rare that these hidden gifts are brought to life unless by the chance of fate.