Chapter Fifteen: Bear-Skin Woman
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but in their play she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Beserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but in their play she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Beserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.