STORIES CAN unite people. Neighbors gather to listen to a clever raconteur, to view a movie reel, to watch a play or a dance. Writers have their audience, poets their dreamy public. The office gossip entertains at the water cooler. A mime enchants the imagination of the crowd.
I recognize home in the folktales of distant lands. I see familiars in the antics of foreign characters. This is not to say that the strange and peculiar in the tales from beyond the mountains do not form the enchanting warp of the tapestry of the tales, only that the woof is threaded with the familiar pattern, the known gesture, the silliness of the homey mishap — in other words, the universal in the details.
I bring to mind a Papua New Guinean folktale I read awhile ago. It concerns a father and a son, who, one moonlit night, decide to go on a hunt. On the following day they pack up their things and journey far into the dense forest. Selecting a suitable place, they build a small sleeping hut and prepare their dinner. After eating, the son is very tired and wants to sleep. The father tells him to sleep, but he himself is going out to begin the hunt. And with that he takes up his bow and arrows and leaves the hut.
The son closes his eyes and hears his father go but is afraid to sleep. A thought has entered his mind: what if a ghost comes into the hut? The ghost might kill him and eat him. So he gets up and silently follows after his father. Very quietly, he tracks his father through the trees. Meanwhile the father is moving along sensitively, though unaware that he is being followed, and before long he spots a marsupial high up in a tree. He takes his weapons in hand and climbs into the tree. At the appropriate moment he draws back his bow and shoots the marsupial, which falls to the ground with a thud. Down below, the son calls out, “Did you kill it?”
At this, the father’s skin goes cold. He had no idea that he was not alone. Was this a masalai (dangerous spirit) calling to him? Fearing that it is, all at once he springs out of the tree and speeds off in the direction of the sleeping hut where he’d left his son. And his son, suddenly in terror that a masalai is now in pursuit of his father, starts out after him. Both run as hard as they can.
They run far, far. Thorny shrubs and sharp grasses completely ruin them both, but they keep on all through the night until dawn, when they arrive at their village. The father runs to his house, crying out that a masalai has chased him through the forest. The people in the village see him dash past, followed by his son, both breathless. But once it is found out that they’d only been frightened by each other, the father is terribly ashamed. Everyone in the village laughs at them hysterically.
* * *
Now I have to admit, I can only too easily imagine my own son and I haplessly ending up in a situation something like the one in this story. We can both be a bit jumpy at times. Running from phantoms is not outside of life’s possibilities for us. Perhaps in that village, we’d fit right in.
