by Wendy Hawkin | Oct 3, 2017 | Book Review, Canadian writers, writing and publishing
An excellent review of my book, To Sleep with Stones, came out today on the Ottawa Review of Books! It couldn’t come at a better time. I’m halfway through the sequel, Book 3, and just about to hunker down into draft mode again. To be inspired is to be filled with spirit and a great review is a superb booster.
Thank you Gail M. Murray for writing the review.
Thank you Ottawa Review of Books for publishing it.
And a shout-out to Kat McCarthy at Aeternum Designs for a custom cover.
by Wendy Hawkin | Oct 3, 2017 | Book Review, Canadian writers, history
Sometimes a story appears that lingers after I close the cover. The Last Neanderthal, or rather, Girl, who is the last Neanderthal, affected me like this.
I have a profound affection for the past and the ancestors; a respect for Indigenous ways. Perhaps that is why. One of my first anthropology papers (in the early 90s) was titled “Neanderthal: the First Humanitarians”. In it, I argued that the people were much like us, that they buried their dead and left flowers on their graves. This homage to those we love shows our humanity.
Cameron’s novel interweaves the stories of two women at key junctures in their lives. One is an archaeologist, named Rose Gale, who discovers a curious grave; the other, our teenage Neanderthal: the “object” of Gale’s efforts. Both are driven. Both are pregnant. But that is where the similarity ends.
I don’t like Rose. She is ambitious, obsessed, fearful of losing control of her work because of her pregnancy. The modern woman? She seems disconnected from her partner and her baby. Alongside Girl, Rose Gale is annoying and self-centred; at least, until she births her baby and accepts her tribe.
If Cameron’s purpose is to reveal how far homo sapiens sapiens (ironically: wise wise man) has strayed from humanity in his quest for knowledge and fame, she’s done a remarkable job.
Who Were They?
Hunters, 40,000 years distant, Girl’s family are fused with the land and with each other. Neanderthals are so named because of bones unearthed in the Neander River valley in Germany. The species evolved in Europe and inhabited Eurasia. Though they are now extinct, their DNA survives in us; meaning, they interbred with us. The author, Claire Cameron, says that she is 2.5% Neanderthal according to 23andme. And National Geographic says that you or I could carry Neanderthal DNA:
Everyone living outside of Africa today has a small amount of Neanderthal in them, carried as a living relic of these ancient encounters. A team of scientists comparing the full genomes of the two species concluded that most Europeans and Asians have between 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA.
Big Mother
Girl’s family live within a territory under the leadership of Big Mother, a stern loving matriarch who wears a headress of horns to highlight her status. They hunt bison and trap salmon during the spawn.
They are few: Him, Bent, Girl, Runt. And use few words.
There was a stillness to her culture. There were few points of contact between families. Changes rarely had a chance to spread. There were no other ways to live. Other words weren’t needed. The family knew how things were done (220).
Cameron has given them limited vocabulary. Aroo seems multi-purpose — Hey, how’s it going? I’m back. Do you see me? Check this out. And pitch, which means, “keep your head attached to your meat and your family attached to the land.”
Singing the Soul of the Land
Girl’s family have much to teach us about our relationship with the land. Using pathetic fallacy, this poetic author sings to us of nature and our interconnectedness through Girl’s soul.
She put a foot on a sturdy branch and held the trunk with arms wrapped tight. She pressed her body against it. The warm trunk pulled her in and her body melted into the trunk like softened sap. Her limbs stretched down to dirt, and sap ran in her veins as if it were blood. This was the strength of the forest…The trees stood together like the whole body of a family lining the ridge. The swaying branches talked and told one another of what they saw. One flicked a branch. A few dead leaves that still clung after the winter storms rustled. The limbs let the secrets pass among them. Twigs snapped and the needles clattered together in discomfort. They swayed with sadness…If Girl watched and felt the patterns in the leaves, she could read them (119).
Girl knows nature and all within it are alive and sentient. When she sees slashes on a tree she is horrified. “It hurt the tree, just like cutting skin. Its sap had bled and bubbled up from the wound. To Girl it was a kind of senseless violence” (219). She feels and senses the nature around her: “Soon the yolk of the sun cracked into the sky and colour bled” (143). It is this consciousness that keeps her alive in wild terrain where all carnivores vie with each other for meat. And she is meat herself.
Relationships
Early in the story, Girl’s family are attacked by leopards and she is left with Runt, a seven-year-old boy who Big Mother adopted. He is different from them in many ways. Smaller and finer-featured, his skin is charcoal, his hair “like moss”. He eats green plants (yuk) and jabbers too much (he’s a Crowthroat). His walking gait is more “elegant” and he likes to wear the skins of animals on his feet to protect them. Clearly, Runt is from another tribe, even another species.
Along with Wildcat, Runt becomes her travelling companion for over a year. Girl is pregnant by He (her older brother). Though incest is a taboo taught through shadow stories by Big Mother, Girl comes into heat and seduces Him, urged by a force too great to control.
From cover to final photograph, we are teased with the image of two skeletons who face in as if looking into each other’s eyes. Found together in the same stratum, they are clearly different species. One is our Neanderthal, Girl; the other is modern man. The archaeologist’s quest is to bring this story to light.
In the end, we do not see that final burial. They are touching noses: the gesture of affection Girl learned from her pet, Wildcat. But, we do not know how or why they ended up together. We are left to ponder. Is this Runt? Did Girl and Runt mate? (She is only six or seven years older than he is.) Or, is this the gaze of mother-child devotion? Is she his Big Mother and he her child? Or, did Girl survive long enough to find a new mate among Homo Sapiens Sapiens? I am troubled by this. After all her near deaths, I want to know how dead wood comes for Girl.
Dead Wood
It is their custom to excavate a hole and bury the body beneath a living tree. Thus, when a body dies it becomes wood. I love this. Let my body feed a tree. Drag the stones from our graveyards and plant trees. Leave our bones in peace. Leave our trees in peace. Let us nurture one another.
Large Irish yew tree in St Colmcille’s graveyard
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 25, 2017 | environment, journal, nature
Source: Home
This is one of the best blogs I’ve seen. Nick Rowan (he even has a tree name) is the Treeographer. He’s also a traveller, woodworker, and a wonderful writer.
The Treeographer is my attempt to bring my enthusiasm for trees to others – not by evoking guilt or pity, but rather by celebrating the interlacing history of man and tree.
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 15, 2017 | Book Review, Canadian writers, literature, nature
Farley Mowat and I go back a long way. I didn’t know him personally but his stories taught me much of what I knew about the Canadian north when I was a kid. He was the quintessential Canadian writer, not just because he wrote about Canada, but because, like the land, his stories held, and continue to hold, such power. And he was from my time. When he mentions Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky, I smile. Those were the Vikings that fascinated me in third grade, when the bottom half of our notebooks were lined and the top left blank for a pencil sketch of the explorers. Long before Ragnar Lothbrok. It was a time when authors (white males) wrote with omniscient (godlike) viewpoints and felt no need for political correctness because it didn’t yet exist.
Lost in the Barrens
I spent the last few days reading myself to sleep with Lost in the Barrens. This is the book that teachers recommend to boys who don’t read, for within its pages lie adventures they will never experience any other way. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet that Gary Paulsen of Hatchet fame found Farley Mowat’s books when he was a kid.
Written in 1956, Lost in the Barrens was the third book Farley published, and it won the Governor General’s Award. This “survival story” details the adventures of an orphaned Toronto boy named Jamie Macnair and his Cree friend Awasin, who go hunting caribou with the Chipewyans and end up lost and fighting for their lives in the land of their tribal enemies, the Eskimos.
The two sixteen-year-old boys ride out a six-month mythic hero’s journey where they are tested step by step and page by page. They encounter:
- rapids that destroy their canoe, matches, and most possessions
- a stonehouse grave with Viking treasures (Farley tells its tale later in The Curse of the Viking Grave, 1967)
- physical injuries and starvation
- the sight of 250,000 caribou moving in long files down the valley and later an epic hunt
- winter in the barrens and a blizzard that nearly kills them both
- wild animals that they tame (a fawn and two lost sled dogs) and some that they don’t (wolverines and wolves)
- snowblindness (the White Fire) that nearly drives them mad
At its heart is Awasin’s wisdom and Farley’s theme: “if you fight against the spirits of the north you will always lose.” Its echo resounds as the boys arrive home: “always travel with the forces of the land and never fight against them.”
The Forces of the Land.
I grew up in southern Ontario not far from where Farley spent his final days and some blue moons, the land calls me. I don’t know if it’s ancestral memory, karmic echoes, or simply the allure of home, but this land draws me like lodestone. A kind of madness ensues and I find myself on realtor.ca pricing Kawartha cottages where I went to university, or sorting through faded black and whites, or just visualizing the fields and trails where I rode my horse in Pickering.
My memories are forged on the flora and fauna of what I grew up calling the Eastern Woodlands. I understand the way of the land there; know the names of all the trees and plants; can still smell the odour of wax-pressed fall leaves and crave the sugar bush; remember the purple trillium, and the enormous oaks and elms that shaded us from summer sun so we could read beneath their boughs. And though I’ve lived in British Columbia for two decades I’ve never lost the lure of the lakeside cabin in the bush.
Like Yeats and Thoreau I long to cast off the city and “live deliberately” — until I think about mosquitoes and black flies, -30 Celsius and a metre of snow, and remember just how deliberate that is.
But still it calls. And, in part, I owe that calling to Farley Mowat.
Farley died in 2014 at the age of 92. He was still writing. Maclean’s magazine wrote such a stunning salute to Farley at the time of his death that I can only point the way.
In his hand he held a tiny sea shell, so old that when Awasin took it, it crumbled into dust between his fingers.
Jamie looked out over the broad valley to the dim blue line of the hills to the east. He spoke with awe. “Thousands, maybe a million years ago, this must have been one huge ocean, ” he said. “And these hills were just islands in it.”
Awasin was not surprised as Jamie expected him to be. “There’s a Cree legend about that,” he replied. “It tells of a time when the whole northern plains were all water and the water was filled with strange monsters.”
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 13, 2017 | environment, journal, nature, writing and publishing
This woman, Chris Czajkowski, is one of my heroes. For thirty years, she’s lived off the grid alone in the wilderness with dogs for company, built her own cabins, and written her books. I thought of Chris tonight as I was reading Farley Mowatt’s classic, Lost in the Barrens. I saw her present at Sechelt Writer’s Festival years ago, and I wondered how she survived the raging forest fires this summer.
Here you can read her experience living through the wildfires in northern BC.
I see she has a book tour in BC this fall. If you can make it to any of her readings or presentations, please come out and support this amazing woman.
