Nume Checks the Snares — the chief as storyteller

Among the files on Chief Hatcher’s computer were two drafts of a story he never finished. One is titled “Numa”; the earlier, shorter one is saved as “Mato looked up at the darkening sky.” Both open on the same boy — Nume (Bear) — a Waccamaw child checking the snares he and his father set, racing a storm home.

It is fiction, but it is not idle fiction. Into a simple errand — two snares, one rabbit, a darkening sky — he packed the things he spent his chieftaincy teaching: the words, the ethic of taking a life only to sustain life, and the arrival of the thing his people could never understand — the whites’ papers. Every passage from the story below is verbatim from his drafts, his spelling and punctuation exactly as he typed them.

The darkening sky

“Nume (Bear) looked up at the darkening sky. He knew there was a storm coming but the family didn’t have enough meat for the coming days and he needed to check the traps he and his father had set on their previous trip.”

And in the very first paragraph, the reason the boy cannot simply go home:

“There were two snares left and the next snare may hold the food his family needed but even if it did, he had to check the other snare too. Taking an animal’s life was a sacred thing and a man I dishonored if his kill is waster, Doing such a dishonorable thing also may anger the animal’s spirit guide and harvesting of the animals in the future may be increasingly harder which may causing hunger, lack of clothing, tools and the like.”

The words he was carrying

He seeded the story with vocabulary, glossing each word in-line the way a teacher would — so that a reader could not follow the boy down the path without picking the words up too:

“He quickened his step trying to make the trip to both traps before the hayak (lightening) started flashing everywhere. He knew he had to watch his steps because ya (snakes) were abundant here. Most were harmless but some like the ya p`k ta tcesa (snake with narrow neck or the copperhead) were very dangerous and hard to see on the brown pine needles that covered the walking path.”

The boy hurries toward his suk (house); at the end he turns back toward his su`k-t-ba (villege); the snare, when he reaches it, holds a large paa ksai (one who hops or rabbit). And over the whole story stands Wakien Tanka — the Great Mysterious.

Making meat

Ask him about hunting in his oral histories and he would correct the word itself:

“We didn’t have a word that meant hunt. Our word meant making meat, and we felt like the only reason to take a life was to sustain life.” — Center for Cultural Preservation oral history, 2014

The fiction runs on exactly that ethic. In the earlier draft the hunters travel the animal trails “to try and make meat.” The snares are paw snares, not kill traps, so nothing dies before it can be used. Even the black bear he hopes is not in the snare is owed something:

“He didn’t have the skills or the weapon to kill a bear and he could not just leave it caught least it die and be wasted. The Great Bear Spirit would be angry if he allowed that to happen.”

And when the boy takes the rabbit, the taking is answered with a gift:

“Nume took some corn and tobacco from his pouch and left it where he had taken the paa ksai and thanked the paa ksai spirit for the gift it had given to sustain the life of Nume and his family.”

The papers

Then, in the middle of the trap line, the other story arrives — the one the chief told in courtrooms and commission hearings for thirty years, here reaching the village as a rumor the boy overhears:

“He had also heard some of the men of the village talking about some unspoken words that white people had brought to them saying that they could no longer stay in their village or hunt on the land that their fathers and grandfathers had hunted since the first of time.”

“No one understood how the houses they built, the fields they planted, the very earth they lived on, was now forbidden to them. The White people had what they called papers and the papers for reason no one understood, somehow gave them rights over Wakien Tanka (the Great Mysterious) possessions, the ground, trees, water, rivers, and all things living on it.”

“Most of the men in the settlement talked as if there had to be some mistake in the papers and carried by the whites and no one ever heard of any one speaking for Wakien Tanka, so the white’s demands were unanswered and life continued as it had always been.”

In the fuller draft, a single stray sentence sits between the paragraphs like a note the author left himself — the history under the fiction, not yet dissolved into it:

“South Carolina’s Land Grants given to prominent Whites even though Native people lived on it when it was simply given to others.”

The boy’s answer to the rumor is the story’s quietest, truest line:

“This was something the Elders had to decide but for now, there is still a storm brewing and traps to check, so Nume turned his attention back to the trail.”

Where it stops

The boy makes it: one rabbit, the snares reset, the storm still holding off.

“Nume checked the other snare and had caught nothing so the paa ksai was the only catch for the day. Nume started to move back toward his su`k-t-ba (villege). He had caught the only meat for supper and had to get back before the storm.”

And then the manuscript ends — mid-thought, mid-word, two words into whatever came next:

“Numa imidiately”

He never finished it. But the story had already done its work: a reader who walks the trap line with Nume comes home carrying hayak and ya and paa ksai and Wakien Tanka — and knowing what the papers were, and what they took. He wrote fiction the way he did everything else for the People: so the language and the land-loss story would be carried forward by someone.