Disrupting nature’s balance

Iwent to the window and let in the daylight. Two ravens were in a treetop 20 yards away. The world beyond my hotel in Juneau, Alaska, was comatose, apart from the ravens. I found my watch – 5.30am. Ugh. I had travelled 4,000 miles, crossed an ocean and a continent, to make two radio programmes for the BBC.

I was jet-lagged, and I had just been bludgeoned awake by a pair of ravens.

I went to the window, in time to see a large bird glide across the car park.

It was a bird gal leon, fully rigged, down curved hook of yellow for a bowsprit, white head and hooded jewel of an eye for a fore sail, raven-black wings for mainsails, white tail for awake. what manner of a god might create such a thing?

“It was not God who made the world but the Raven.

“Raven’s first task was to create nature in perfect balance, so he made bald eagle. He gave it a white head and a white tail, but the body is black.

“That was the Symbol. Nature in perfect balance.”

An elder of the Tlingit tribe of southeast Alaska told me that.

The legend is at the core of Tlingit society, even now. Its pointed symbolism courses through tribal history, a thing of elemental simplicity.

My life as a nature writer craves nature’s unadorned simplicity. I lean close to it, studying and learning from it.

Tlingit John, who would articulate the concept of the raven-god and its eagle prodigy, was a path I felt destined to cross.

He did not see it that way. What he saw was a stranger decanted from a transatlantic plane into his sacred landscape and asking him to bare his tribal soul into a microphone.

And, as he reminded me with devastating matter-of-fact-ness, I was a white man. I had never been called a white man before. It took a while to persuade him.

I talked about my work with swans, my reading of swan legends in my own country where I had met old people in the island west who still counsel fearfully about harming a swan.

In the norse and celtic lo re that commingles in he bride an blood, the swan is the guardian of the human soul after death; harm as wan and you risk harming the human soul that flies on within. it may be your mother’ s soul for all you know.

I took arisk.i compared it to so met hingi had read of the ritual soft heog la la sioux, in which an invocation is made to the sacred Swan of the south, to carry the soul of a dead tribes man to the abode of the great Spirit.

Is aidi like to write about the bond between people and nature, that it seemed to me there was a particularly strong bond among the Tlingits.

He looked at me directly for the first time, asked if the tape recorder was switched on and said those words, about the raven and the eagle.

He talked for a while about “the conservationists makin’ the guidelines ….” and how they compromised the natives’ idea of balance.

I asked him: “Is it sacred in some way?” There was a long pause, then: “Pretty much.”

“In what way?”

Another pause, a deep breath, was I worth bothering with?

Then he explained how most Tlingits belonged to the Raven Clan or the Eagle Clan. It’s handed down from your mother.

If an eagle dies, the ravens give the family support. The opposite clan sits with the body, then provides a party when you eat food so that the spirits don’t wander. After a year, you have a pay-off party when you pay back those who sat with the body, or were pall-bearers or who cooked for you. You save up for this party, you make speeches, give gifts. The party goes on for many hours .

John was finishing up. “Without deaths, we wouldn’t have a culture. So that’s why it’s important when you say the raven and the eagle.”

That was 20 years ago. I think about him often when I watch raven or eagle.

I wonder what he would think of me now, given that I inhabit a country in which the frankly poisonous cocktail of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association and Strathbraan has been swallowed whole by the Scottish Government agency, Scottish Natural Heritage, which in turn has granted permission to kill up to 300 ravens in a landscape with a reputation for killing eagles.

The legend of the raven is at the core of Tlingit society, even now. Its pointed symbolism courses through tribal history, a thing of elemental simplicity.