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Wild Bill: Story of the Birch
By Chanda Hunnie
The Birch was the most honoured tree in the forest. It was the most unique, envied by all others who wished that they too were like the Birch. The flaky, scaly-barked Jack Pine admired the Birch’s powdered silk skin. The dark and textured Black Spruce, and the scar-chiseled Ash with its grizzled exterior, revered the unblemished whiteness of the Birch and correlated this characteristic to purity and perfection.
The Balsam Fir, excreting sap-like puss from warty fissures all over its silver body, couldn’t behold the Birch anymore and left for a more suitable place to live. Others followed. Some left because their deformities were amplified by the beauty of the Birch making them more difficult to ignore. The sobs of morose could be heard through the disguise of a nighttime rustling breeze. Others believed that they no longer belonged to a forest of saintly purity and moved out to worship from the periphery.
There the Birch stood, alone, in its starkness and surrounded by jealous onlookers. It was said that when the wind snuck into the forest and the other trees sowed and groaned in scornful resistance, the Birch remained silent, the wind slipping over them heedlessly. All the trees wanted to be born as the elegant Birch. All dreamt of being a part of the birch stand and pondered what it would be like to have others see them as they saw the Birch: a regiment of petrified ghosts against a backdrop of darkness.
The Birch grew taller and taller, reaching its long balmy white limbs to the sky. It was not long before the Birch began to feel as if the sun shone for it alone, its leaves snobbishly turned up to the sun, stealing its life-giving warmth.
Never meant to be the tallest tree in the forest, the birch one day stretched higher, and basked in the midday heat. Soon a sizzling emanated from the forest. It grew louder, transforming the silent stand into crackling thunder as if the forest itself was on fire - yet no flames were visible. It was as if the image that presented itself had come from within - the Birch’s ghostly white bark blistering into raw peeling strips and blackened sores.
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Oral storytelling is meant both to entertain and to educate. The tradition of oral storytelling is essential to the communal lives and cultures of Aboriginal people in Canada and throughout the world.
Wild Bill is an Ojibway storyteller and trapper. He told me this story.
