Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology
The story which intrigued me most of the anthology was that of "The Indian Who Wrestled with a Ghost." To start with a brief summary, a young man on a warpath passes through a forest where, over the course of two nights, he encounters two ghosts. The first is that of an ancient-seeming woman who attempted to cut the man's foot off as he lay there, motionless, attempting not to provoke her. The second is a singing stranger who approached the young man, asking for food and tobacco and then, revealing his ghoulish nature, demanded to wrestle, claiming if the man could beat him, he would be successful in his warpath. The two wrestled until dawn, with the young man eventually prevailing (and then going on to great success in his warpath as the ghost had foretold).
This story interested me the most for two reasons, conveniently separated by the two ghosts. Firstly, the ghost of the "woman of old" and the way she is described reminded me very much of the kind of stories told in Boy Scouts, not necessarily around the campfire, but more often in the tents after everyone had settled into bed. The image evoked by the description of the young man peering through the hole in his blanket to see the figure approaching him feels almost exactly like the dread and terror you'd feel as a young scout, wrapped tightly in his sleeping bag, having just heard one of these stories, seeing the shadow of what, in retrospect, was almost certainly just someone getting up to go to the bathroom passing by your tent.
The second reason this story interested me is the uncanny resemblance to the Judeo-Christian story of Jacob wrestling with an angel as told in Genesis. The similarity in themes (a young man encounters and must wrestle with an otherworldly being till the break of day, whereupon he wins and gains the blessing of his opponent) found in each story is very hard to miss and quite fascinating to think about, given the two stories almost certainly came about independently.
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