Wiwilamehkw's Horns

The man who knows most about bark canoes this week was happily polishing off his masterpiece: a book comparing the primitive canoes of America, Australasia and Tierra del Fuego. He is grey, lean E. (for Edwin) Tappan Adney, the most distinguished resident of Upper Woodstock (pop. 250).

Canoe Expert Adney gives lessons to New Brunswick's Micmac and Malecite Indians in their forgotten art: canoe making. He sews the bark with spruce roots. There are 100 Adney-built scale models in the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Va. Adney also has another interest. He believes vocal sounds in every tongue express common mental reactions. On this theory he explains similarities between European and North American Indian speech. Example: in the language of the Algonquian Indian, mundo means God or, literally, "protecting hand"; in Anglo-Saxon, mund meant hand. Explains Adney: "[By this method] I have cracked words and phrases the original meaning of which had been believed lost beyond recovery."

Ethnologist Adney has always been a curious fellow. As artist-correspondent for Harper's Weekly he covered the Klondike Gold Rush of '97, proved that Robert Henderson and not George ("Siwash") Carmack made the original strike. He came home, wrote a best seller (The Klondike Stampede), lectured and had his picture in a parka plastered on American billboards.

During the war of 1812, Adney's grandfather played as a boy with the Miami tribe in what is now Ohio. Thus Adney accounts for his insight into the Indian mind. Ohio-born, he became a naturalized Canadian to qualify for a World War I Engineers' commission. Now he frets that he must register as a "British subject." He lives alone in a small cottage among Upper Woodstock's towering elms. He puts down his own pickles, launders his own shirts. He likes to speed parting guests with an ancient Malecite blessing: "May the horns of Wiwilamehkw (wee-willa-menka) protect you and your goods."

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