Hulda

Once there lived on Point au Pelee

An Indian maiden blithe and gay,

Who often from her birch canoe

Would spear the spotted salmon through.

Pride of her Chieftain father’s heart,

She oft would through the wild woods dart,

And with her bow and arrow raised

Would pierce the deer that calmly grazed.

Joy of her mother’s loving eyes

This dusky maid was a household prize

Whose beauty, grace and gentle arts

Won her a place in manly hearts.

A pale face to the Island came

To catch the fish and kill the game,

And when this lovely maid he knew,

She won his heart – she loved him too.

“Be mine, dear maiden,” then he cried,

“Let me but win thee for my bride,

And on this IsIe I’ll gladly stay” –

The maiden did not say him nay.

Happy they lived from year to year,

Then tiding came of a mother dear,

Who dying, lay on a distant shore

And longed to see her son once more.

Then with the pledge to come again

Before another moon should wane,

The pale face parted fro his bride

And o’er the waves his oars he plied.

But many moons did wax and wane,

The young wife’s heart grew sick with pain,

And all her life grew dark and chill –

Her recreant husband tarried still.

At length a boat approached the shore,

Her heart beat high with hope once more –

But ah! For her that small white yawl

Bore a brief letter – that was all.

A letter that brought a withering blight

And broke a faithful heart that night;

That told a tale of broken trust

And hurled bright hopes down in the dust.

Hark! Hark, a wail of dark despair

Floats out upon the midnight air;

A splash is heard, and Pelee’s pride

Floats out upon blue Erie’s tide.

Upon the north of Pelee Isle,

There stranger liner but awhile;

View “Hulda’s rock” – the mariner’s guide,

That marks the fate of the Indian bride.

It marks that death-leap into the sea,

And marks a white man’s perfidy.

The waves that gainst it foam and surge

Seem chanting e’er a funeral dirge.

-Bertha Smith, 1899

The Little Mermaid lost her voice, and her world, for a man. In the end, he let her sink alone beneath the waves. Pocahontas bridged the cultural divide between two peoples, only to marry an Englishman and die young, far away from her home.  These historical tales were written by men, reflecting the abandonment and plight of women who often suffered because of their beloved.

These stories exclude The Great Mother, the Goddess of all life. She goes by many names and is in danger of being forgotten. Sheis a fierce warrior, and death’s attendant. The origin of life’s pleasure. The Queen of the Lake and patron of the rain.  She is in the trees among us and in the sky above. This was once known to all. She gave a gift to women that was unknown to men. The knowledge that life comes from between a woman’s legs and paid in blood. She oversees women’s lives with ceremony and tenderness. She is the womb of life and knows its price. She is in every myth, in every culture ever known.

Hulda and her people have not forgotten. She rooted her female strength of spirit to an island, which is now forever protected by her sacrifice. Her island, her rock, her strength, and story would remain once she chose to depart this world. The waves forever chant her name through storms and calmness, with the Goddess overseeing it all.

This myth belongs to Hulda and to Pelee Island on the unforgiving shores of the Great Lake Erie. The winds can be violent, sending many ships crashing into shifting sands and settling with Hulda’s bones at the Lake’s bottom. The island weathers both tranquility and ferocity, not unlike the love affairs conceived on its shores. When the Goddess speaks, she is felt and heard. When vexed, she brings mighty waves to batter shores and people alike. Her temper is unpredictable and dangerous when provoked by the insolence of men.

This is Hulda’s story.

~

Of all the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is most famous for its fearsome storms, having caused many ships to sink beneath its slate grey waves. It has the most fearsome temper and is the shallowest of its fellows. Treacherous, shifting reefs and shallows have taken many lives within its unrest. The Lake answers only to the Goddess and is not subject to the wishes and whims of the men who would trespass it. It guards its treasures greedily, deceiving many mariners with its seeming placidity, just as Charybdis and Scylla consumed the many men fool-hardy enough to challenge the Goddess.

Erie is at the heart of the North American continent. It is a narrow, elongated body of water stretching from the Detroit to the Niagara River. The only exceptions in its fairly straight coastline are two points to the west and east, as well as the cluster of low islands near the jutting, pyramid shaped point of land known as Point Pelee, which is also the largest island. Fittingly, the name of the island in such a volatile lake was donned by French missionaries who recognized the poetic symmetry of these two natural “devils,” akin to the French volcano, Mount Pelee.

The island at this devil’s heart was inhabited by the Ojibwa people. French and English traders and settlers flocked to its shores like birds, adding to the island’s renown and natural wealth. All peoples enjoyed the abundance of fish, hunting muskrat in an almost jungle-like wilderness, and other treasures of the land that were shrouded in the warm musk of the marsh climate.

One such treasure was Hulda, the beautiful and unusual daughter of a French mother and Chieftain father.  She was raised among the rocks and trees of her island, sitting on the one while the other marked her years by the changing of the leaves.

One rock in particular, a large slab jutting out from the tumultuous waves that crashed against it, was the young girl’s favourite perch, anointing her daily with the lake’s water. It was here that she would sit for hours, communing with the spirits of the lake and forest, her ancestors and her mother’s God. Her wide green eyes watching as more and more ships of commerce sailed by.

She was quiet and wistful, but full of a strange energy and grace that struck many. They wondered what lay beneath her waves of brown hair and behind her eyes, green like the flora of the lush island. It was as if she carried the wild spirit of the isle in herself – both the beauty and tranquility of peaceful days as well as the storms and rages of others.

Many young men tried to catch the eye of the wild island princess. But her love was the wind that rippled through the waves that brought them crashing to her shore. It was the wind that whistled through the trees and the very breath of her island home that filled her every being.

One day, she sat at her rock and watched a ship come into port on the far side of the island.  It came on a brisk breeze, with sunlight glistening off a blue summer water that reflected the sky. Hulda showed very little interest in the French and English traders at first. Her father and her tribe would do their business and the ships would move on, as so many had before. However, that night, a welcome feast was held as usual for the guests. They brought valuable items to her people in return for muskrat furs, fish, and wood.

As the daughter of the Chieftain it was her duty to greet the traders and offer them her company and hospitality. She was not required to say much. There was little she could say anyway because they didn’t speak either of her parents’ languages. It was with her eyes and her hands that she communicated and a few learned words in between.

Many glances fell on her as she sat around the campfire with the traders. She looked away or only to whom she spoke. After some time, she noticed a young man whose hair was the colour of parched long grass and skin as pale as her mother’s. As he sat quietly, sharpening his hunting knife on a whetstone, he raised his eyes to meet her gaze.

She did not shy away or lower her eyes. She held and marked him as her equal. It was in that moment that she set first stepped on her path, forever altering their lives and everyone’s on the island.

As the child of two worlds herself, her parents could not offer strenuous objection to the match. Hulda and her Englishmen traversed the marshes and woods of her home isle. He spoke of his life in England and she learned to speak English. They walked longingly together with their fingers intertwined like wild vines.

Soon the words she learned in his language, and the few he learned in hers, were enough for them to profess their love to each another. He told her of his growing love for her and his desire to no longer be a nomadic trader. He stayed longer than he had intended on Pelee Island and before long the two lovers began speaking cautiously of a future together. He would stay. He would marry her and live with her people on the shores of Lake Erie, forsaking all he had previously known. “For you,” he told Hulda, “there is nothing and no one else. I am yours, and you are mine. Always.”

They sealed their love on a sandy beach one spring night when the moon had reached its fullness.

Despite the uncertainties of her tribe, and the many young men who would have preferred Hulda’s hand to go to one of their own, the two lovers became part of the island life’s rhythm.

“For you, my daughter,” said the Chieftain, “there is no set path. You are the river connecting two lakes. You are also the pride of my heart and our people.”

“For you, my daughter,” said her mother, “life will be hard. This path you are on will not be an easy one. I fear that you will suffer as I have suffered. Is this man worth the pain?”

As Hulda spent time with the Englishmen, she forgot about the silent words that connected her to the rocks and the trees. She forgot about the Great Mother. She no longer sat upon her rock, gazing at the ships and the waves and communing with the spirits and God. Instead, she cast her lover in their roles. She had forsaken her true self and cast his image in its place.

Some time passed until one day a ship arrived with a letter for the Englishman. Far away, across a lake bigger than any she could imagine, the mother of her lover lay ill and was calling for her son’s return.

“I must go, my love. Only for a little while. When I return, then we shall marry. A month or two, no more.” Such were the words of her golden-haired idol.

What could she do but grant him leave, this small act of grace? His mother was at the end of her life and they had the rest of theirs.

~

She watched from her rock as the ship carried him away. As time passed, she marked each day by sitting on her former pedestal and the spray from the waves reminding her that she still lived even if her heart had taken sail on a ship bound for England.

One gray morning when the leaves had all but fallen around her, the Chieftain emerged from the trees behind what he knew to be his daughter’s oasis. “He is not coming back,” said Hulda’s father. “Why do you linger here when there is no hope? Have you forgotten who you are, your responsibilities to your people, your gods, and your ancestors? Do I not also have your love?”

Hulda turned, her green eyes sparking with living fire, flecks of ember burning in her irises. “You don’t know that. There is still hope. And I am who I have always been. Of course you have my love.”

“Your mother also worries, my daughter. She knows more of his world than you, and of the weakness in men’s hearts. You have the Goddess’ strength in you, men do not. This is something our people know. With time, away from here, he will forget. He will be truly called home. And you must prepare yourself.”

Hulda said nothing, turning back to the slate grey waves, their dull colour dimming the fire in her eyes as she continued her vigil.

~

By winter, the lake had frozen in jagged, silver-gray waves. Pelee experienced its coldest winter in memory. Hulda’s heart was as frozen and as dead as the waves she continued to stare at from her rock, Even as her face chapped because of the icy winds pummelling the shoreline, she still gazed far into the steel plates of water that stretched before her into an equally dull expanse of sky. The green of summer and the love it had mirrored in her own eyes was gone. Now, her eyes saw and reflected only grey. Her island and her spark frosted over. Flakes of snow settled on her face but she did not move to brush them away. It was as if her world was holding its breath. For what? She no longer knew.

~

The whole of winter passed in this way. In quiet moments together, Hulda’s mother spoke to her in the French language, attempting to comfort her by telling stories of the suffering of the Virgin Mary and the female saints, all of whom had laid down their lives for the love of God and his glory.

Her father said little and betrayed even less with his eyes. Silently, secretly, he wept for the long death his daughter suffered, the death of her innocence and faith in love. He had the wise women of their tribe sit with her around the nights’ campfires and tell her stories of his people and the Great Mother, a turtle who had once carried the world on her back during the creation of the World. During these nights, the spark once again briefly lit in Hulda’s green eyes, dulling once more when the campfire extinguished.

~

When the spring came and life began anew on the island, Hulda watched from her rock when a ship came. It did not bore her love, but another Englishmen in his place, and another letter.

“I cannot read,” she said, looking calmly into the face of her lover’s countryman.

The man lowered his eyes. “I have been tasked with discharging its contents to you.” He spoke in the manner of the headsman before delivering the blow, his eyes lifting to beseech hers for misplaced forgiveness.

“He is not coming back,” she replied, not asking a question.

“He is not coming back,” the man echoed. The words reached her ears and resonated in the part of her soul that had already known the truth. She set out for her rock.

~

Her face mirrored the water’s heavy calm. She sat upon her perch for hours. After many months, the slow realization had already come to her that he was just a man, her man, like any other. She had once willingly entrusted her lifelong happiness in his hands and he had let it run through his fingers like the waters of Lake Erie. She did not love him more than her mother, her father, her people, her gods, or her island home.

She was a mere mortal but now the Great Mother spoke to her as clearly as a full moon unobstructed by clouds, shining brightly and skipping rocks of fairy lights across the waves that heaved against the pebbled shore.

It was the same moon but different from the one under which they had once sealed their love. She had forsaken the Goddess then. The Goddess reminded all mankind of her eternal presence every full moon. Hulda remembered and she listened.

She listened as the waves spoke her name and the wind whispered to her through the trees. She listened as she had never listened before. She was the island princess, the conduit between two worlds, and an envoy of her island people and the Great Mother, the womb of the world from which all life sprang forth.

It was clear to her now what she had to do, what her path had always been from the moment she locked eyes with the man across the campfire. The Goddess was in her and she was the Goddess.

In one quick, fluid motion, she dove from her rock into the Great Lake. She swam until her limbs ached with exhaustion, her spirit longing to return to whence she had come. We leave the world the same way we come into it, flowing through a tunnel towards light.

Hulda fell backwards into shallow depths, the moon’s light slowly fading as a tunneling darkness enshrouded her. Sinking through dark waters, her bones eventually came to rest among the skeletons of shipwrecks. She gazed at the full moon as she fell away from the sky.

~

After the waters claimed her, the people of the island did not mourn. They knew their princess had not left them. Hulda had given herself eternally to the island, to ensure for all time that no strange man would ever again desecrate the island shores and disrespect its people. Becoming one with the Great Mother, the Goddess Hulda watches over her rocks and trees forevermore, her guiding hand made visible with each wax and wane of the moon.