INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM SHIPLEY
One of the great adventures of my life began, during the winter holidays of 1954, when I went up into the Sierra of Northern California to seek out the last speakers of a dying California Indian language known as Mountain Maidu. I was a graduate student at Berkeley then, in the newly inaugurated Department of Linguistics. Research funds had been made available by the California State Legislature for sending qualified students out into the field to learn, record, and analyze data on as many native languages of California as possible before they all disappeared forever. Over the next few years, I got to spend some of those funds.
I found the speakers I was searching for: Lena Benner, who was ninetysomething, and her daughter, Maym Benner Gallagher. It was actually Maym who turned out to be my great friend and teacher. She fully understood what I wanted to accomplish; she bonded enthusiastically with me in the service of our common enterprise. She put all her knowledge
Before I started my work with Maym, I learned about the researches of Roland Dixon, a scholar who came out from the East at the turn of the century and investigated various California Indian languages, mainly Maidu. Among other things, he published, in 1912, a collection he had made of Maidu myths and stories, written in both Maidu and English on facing pages. He had collected this material in 1902–1903 from a young Maidu man whose American name was Tom Young. Dixon's achievement was truly remarkable in view of the inchoate state of ethnolinguistics at the time and the lack of any adequate mechanical recording devices.
When Maym and I were well along on our study of the language, I took Dixon's book up to the mountains with me. Maym remembered Tom Young very well, told me that he was noted among the Maidu as a storyteller, and said that his real name was Hánc'ibyjim (pronounced approximately like “HAHN-chee-buh-yim”). We looked through the book, noted the inadequacies of Dixon's Maidu transcriptions, and decided to reconstitute the section called “Coyote's Adventures,” an example of what's known as a Trickster Cycle—a picaresque chain of short anecdotes. That was Maym's choice, actually. She and her mother were unspoiled pagans. I'm sure she was attracted to the bawdy, sexy subject matter so characteristic of Coyote stories all over North America. Unfortunately, we never worked through the rest of the book. I reconstituted, translated, and published most of the other stories in later years, including an unbowdlerized version of the Trickster Cycle (Shipley 1991).
“Mad Bat,” however, was not among the stories that I translated. It appears here for the first time. Earlier on, I was daunted by some of Bat's speeches, which, as you will see, are essentially like the “word salad” talk of some schizophrenics and aphasics—an assemblage of valid bits and pieces of the language, jumbled together in an apparently meaningless potpourri. But as soon as I decided how to deal with those particular utterances, the rest of the translation came easily along.
The denouement of “Mad Bat” exemplifies a fairly common theme found in many Maidu stories: a powerful and malevolent creature—Bat, Frog Old Woman, and Muskrat are examples—finds himself deprived of his power and shrunken down to a small and innocuous animal. In this story, Bat commits murder and mayhem with grotesque abandon
My first impulse was to include only the first, longer and more elaborate, episode in the translation because the later—and much sketchier—adventure with Cloud and Ouzel seems, on the face of it, unrelated to what has gone before. However, it became clear to me that these later events resolve Bat's madness and restore order to the world. His death, followed by his demotion by Ouzel in the (Maidu) classical manner, involves what is, for us, a paradoxical situation. As Bat the individual he is dead, but as a stand-in for bats in general he lives on in the modern world, stripped of his power to do harm.
I should comment, parenthetically, on the brief irrelevant presence of Coyote in this story. Despite his appearance, this is not really a Coyote story; he's just here to liven the tale, a device which Hánc'ibyjim often used. Even the mention of Coyote could, in my day, move my Maidu friends to laughter. No matter that Coyote often “dies”; he always comes irrepressibly back to life again.
There are also a few contextual things that need to be explained or defined in order that the story may be more fully appreciated.
West Mountain (Táyyamanim) is the Maidu name for what is now called Mount Lassen, the southernmost peak of the Pacific Cascade range, a live volcano that dominates the skyline to the northwest of the Maidu homeland. It was thought that saying the name of the mountain out loud would cause it to erupt. Nakam Valley is the modern Big Meadows.
The ouzel, a bird that many people don't know about, is often called a water ouzel or a dipper bird (the Maidu name is mómpispistom). It lives along mountain streams and behind waterfalls and has the curious habit of walking along underwater in search of food. It is smallish and brown with a little white breast and a short tail.
There are four Maidu customs that appear in this story and require some explanation as well.
First, there is the way in which Bat and his brother seem to think of wives as (from our point of view) interchangeable objects. This is probably to be taken as part of Bat's heinousness. In fact, it seems certain that, in the old days, the woman's consent to a marriage was essential, though there was always a bride-price, and there were men who had two, three, or even four wives.
Second, the staple food all over Northern and Central California was prepared from ground and leached acorns. It was eaten as soup, bread, or mush. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for Bat's sister-in-law not to have gotten around to providing acorn soup. It's another example of Bat's madness.
Third, when people wanted to get various people together from some distance away, they sent out knotted buckskin strings with the knots matching the number of days before the event. The messengers and the recipients would untie one knot every day. That way, everybody came together on the same day. These strings are what I have called “invitation strings” in the story.
The fourth custom has to do with gambling. By contrast with our view of gambling as vaguely immoral or, for most people, trivial and peripheral, the Maidu held in high esteem an elaborate pastime known as the grass-game. It was more than a recreational event. Charms for luck in gambling were highly prized. A single game could go on continuously for many days and nights, sometimes with enormous wagers.
And now, here is how Hánc'ibyjim opened his telling of “Mad Bat,” in Maidu, nearly a century ago:[1]
pótc'odem májdym sámbojekytom hedéden bat person sibling. group very. close
mym ínk'i-di hybó ky-dom; that alongside. place-at house make-ing
amá-di myjím bomóm-di-'im, then-at that. [human] group-in-ish
syttim májdym, tetét wasó-sa-pem májdym, one person very angry-always-ish person
ohéj-c'oj-am. one.in.a.group-they.say-he.was
A very literal translation of these two sentences might read something like this:
A bat-person sibling-group making houses very close alongside each other; then, among this bunch of people, a very always-angry person was one of them, it is said.
Finally, here is the same opening passage in “good” literary English, as I have translated it for this collection:
Bat and his brothers built their houses right next to each other. Now, among all the people around, there was one bad-tempered man.
A last suggestion. This story, of course, was always told and not written, and was, therefore, more like our theater than like our literature. I have tried to maintain this spoken quality in my translation, breaking the text into phrases, or lines, that suggest how Hánc'ibyjim may have told it. The best way to enjoy the story is to read it out loud, even if only to yourself.