Game On

“The great spirit is our father, but the earth is our mother.

She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise.

If we are wounded, we go to our mother and seek to lay the wounded part against her, to be healed.

Animals too, do thus, they lay their wounds to the earth.

Game On
Gale F. Trapp, 2012

When we go hunting, it is not our arrow that kills the moose however powerful be the bow; it is nature that kills him. The arrow sticks in his hide; and, like all living things the moose goes to our mother to be healed. He seeks to lay his wound against the earth, and thus he drives the arrow farther in. Meanwhile I follow. He is out of sight, but I put my ear to a tree in the forest, and that brings me the sound, and I hear when the moose makes his next leap, and I follow.

The moose stops again for the paint of the arrow, and he rubs his side upon the earth and drives the arrow farther in. I follow always, listening now and then with my ear against a tree. Every time he stops to rub his side he drives the arrow father in, till at last when he is nearly exhausted and I come up with him, the arrow may be driven clean through his body… ”

– Bedagi, “Big Thunder” of the Wabanakis Nation