Aylen, My Pocahontas
I have been lying down and staring at the ceiling of the wigwam I have been staying for days by now. It's a dome shaped hut with tree branches tied together with leather strips and covered with cow hide, or should I say buffalo skin. The bed underneath me is made of straw and covered again with some type of fur with unknown insects feeding on my body. The ground is the earth as dirty as my hands and feet except they were also covered in dried blood and swollen.
A girl appearing in her mid teens would come periodically to check on me and feed me food and water. Those blinking and cheerful brown eyes speak of curiosity and expectation and the thick black hair of youth and vitality. She reminded me of my daughter Julia. She told me her name was Aylen, and I know it means joy in the Algonquian language. Aylen is my Pocahontas because she discovered and saved me from a deer trap when I was in screaming pain and she must have dragged me for miles to take me back on a travois. Sitting in the net of one of those two sticked vehicle with no wheels on them was no fun so I could imagine trying to drag one by a young girl alone would be much more difficult.
"Thank you for saving my life," as I opened my mouth when I first saw her it came as complete surprise to me. I was speaking a foreign language, not English, not Chinese, but Algonquian. As I was freed of the trap and I noticed my body was much younger. My grey hair has completed turned black and long to my shoulders and my chest pumping with muscles. I have finally come back alive, only this time as young man.
"Please give me a minute" I tried to hide my shock behind my heavy breathing. Horse Face succeeded in sending me back to America but only to a time unknown and to a life as an Indian. This is completely not we have agreed to. I am Michael Yao, I want not only my soul back I also need my body back and back in my original place. It seemed like I left due to a system glitch but my coming back was also through, not a glitch but rather a shortcut. Sending the soul back would be easy and customary but sending both the soul and body back at the same time would require much more energy. Horse Face apparently did not put in enough effort for my travel back. But there was this pendant hanging off my neck appeared to be the metal badge Horse Face has given me, only this time much more detailed and much smaller. It's size of a half walnut on leather strap with a dark amber colored lynx stone set in a gold engraved case. A silhouette horse face in the stone would lock you in and beam his eyes at you if dare to look at him.
"What is your name?" Aylen asked me again of the same question she has asked as she was handing water to me to drink.
"Little Horse Face." I blurted out to her and held up my pendant at the same time with my bandaged right hand.
Aylen's body shook for an instant and her eyes cast down. She must have checked my pendant and discovered the secret when I was asleep or passed out when she first took me in.
"Aylen, you live with your mother alone? " I asked her. Her mother Oota would also come to check on me and would often tell her to stop bothering me and let me rest. Oota is in her mid thirties and her tanned and chiseled face speaks of much hardship and determination.
"Yes, I have always been with my mother. I don't remember about my father. He died a fighter when I was too young." Aylen replied, her face expressionless.
...
In about a month time under Oota and Aylen's care I was already on my feet. It turned out I was with a group of small Ojibwe or Chippewa Indians displaced by wars with the Cayugas. Ayle and Oota said they did not know what a horse was and had not heard of the "White men," I knew I have traveled back to the stone age. The hand-rolled tobacco leaves were pungent but still enjoyable, the plant fiber made soap also tolerable, everything else was not. Oota fist, then Aylen offered themselves to me but I couldn't take it. My body may be young but my mind is in its late 50's and a traveler from the 21st Century. To join the pack and use only bow and arrow, stone-tipped arrows not those metaled ones, to hunt for animals disgusted me. The meats are organic for sure but they surely are not USDA certified. God knows what kind of viruses they may have. Of course there is no drinking water, no electricity and no internet. I really missed my laughs by watching the Trump rallies. How am I suppose to make America great again if I don't know where I am and and when I am.
I've given up asking Aylen and Oota. I'm no horticulture expert either. But judging by the trees I know and recognize, maple, oak, birch, poplar and pine trees, and the mountain terrain surrounding me I figured I should be in the Northeast, somewhere in between Pennsylvania and Upstate New York or lower Northeast Canada for that matter. Because I have spent all my life in Illinois and just moved to Upstate New York, and there is no prairie or bison here. I wouldn't recognize the mountains I see. Plus all the names Catskill or Foxkill or whatever kills the names these mountains have were given by the early European settlers. By now they have not been created yet.
I am an Algonquian now. With all the horror stories I heard and read about early American Indian history, the reduction of its population from 20 million or more down to less than half a million due to epidemics and wars with the settlers, I have to know where and when I am, if not for me at least for Ayle and Oota. While catching up with the American Indian history, my history now, it behooves me to think about the complacency that dominated it throughout. Where was the sense of urgency? If the medicine wheel was created eons ago with the belief in the Great Circle of Life and dream catchers accompany every tepee or wigwam hut, then why was the wheel for transport not invented?
I could still remember the fist time when I saw William Powell's painting, Discovery of the Mississippi, displaced at the Capital Rotunda, many years ago, with the Spanish Conqueror Hernando DeSoto looking down at the sparsely clothed natives in their pleading and helplessness in 1541; the power has to come out of the gun barrel and with a national machine behind it or its people would be slaughtered like the lams.
Eighteen is a good age when Little Horse Face came to life.
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