Counting coup, p.30
Counting Coup, page 30
The bellows was probably my own blood pounding.
The medicine man had an eagle’s wing, and was slapping it against my thigh, probably waving the wing in the steam-black air. I know that now, knew it then; but I remember that on one level, it was an eagle loose in the sweat-lodge. I knew it was a trick, but a trick played by the Trickster, one that had resonance on a level beyond the rational. For in that instant I had felt the eagle, not the medicine man’s feathers, but the eagle.
It was a shared hallucination. I remember shyly asking someone who had sat next to me in the sweat-lodge if he felt anything strange in that session. He laughed and said, “Yeah, you mean the eagle in the sweat-lodge.”
* * *
Why was I in that Indian sweat lodge?
I was researching an idea I had for a novel, of course.
Counting Coup.
However, traditional Indian religion is not often accessible to non-Indians, and I’ve been told that most accounts of Indian religion are not entirely accurate. Traditional Indians are wary of “Wannabees,” ie., groupies who see Indian life as glamorous and want to be close to it. How did I get in? I got lucky, I wasn’t a “Wannabee,” and … well, it’s too personal to put to paper.
But those experiences subtly changed the way I experience the world. I recall being at a friend’s vision-quest where everyone was “giving flesh,” a ceremony in which the medicine man cuts the supplicant’s skin with a razor and drops the tiny pieces of flesh into a colored square of cloth, which the participant later ties to the branch of a nearby tree as a totem. I asked the medicine man why people were doing this, and he looked at me as if I had just asked the most stupid question imaginable. He laughed and answered, “Because that’s the only thing you’ve got to give. Your skin is the only thing you really own. So you give a little of it to your friend, to help him. You give a little of yourself. You take a little pain for him.”
And so I gave flesh.
For my son Jody. For my friend Albert. For all of us. And for a little while I lost hold of my ego. There and in the sweat lodge where I burned for a few minutes, or a few hours, I had the revelation—or aberration depending on your point of view—that perhaps down deep in the quick of our unconscious our basic impulses are not selfish and self-seeking.
Of course, back then I also felt the wings of eagles beating in the sweat-lodge.
* * *
My characters often have different “intentions” than their author, who often sits bemusedly in front of the laptop while the characters engage in their own conversations and take the “plot” in directions I never intended. I had intended Counting Coup to be a straight-forward road novel, a novel about two men who are at the end of their lives and decide to show the world that they are still alive, still vital, and can still drink, shout, and shake the trees. I thought I’d write a novel in the tradition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Originally, I thought it would be interesting to explore the interaction of two men from different cultures in similar circumstances. But once again the research changed the story … and of course my life.
The elements of magical realism in Counting Coup are close to the truth of my own private experiences. I have found as I enter my more mature, reflective years that my “real” life is scattered with these small bits of magic realism. Or perhaps it’s just that as I wander through that distant country that is my past, I recast the ordinary into the numinal.
For me fiction has always been a way of ordering and remembering experience; and I came closest to remembering the sight and smell and “feel” of those experiences when I wrote Counting Coup. Once again I could hear the spirit voices and feel the steam that’s so hot it’s cold. Once again I remembered what happened when everything soured and turned into “bad medicine.”
Once again I remembered being on the road, living without impediment …
And once again my fiction and my personal life blurred, one folding into the other.
BOOKS BY JACK DANN
Counting Coup
Dreaming Down-Under
(coeditor with Janeen Webb)
The Man Who Melted
The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci
The Silent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, including The Memory Cathedral, which is currently published in ten languages and was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and most recently The Silent, which The Australian called “an extraordinary achievement.” He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (twice), and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrative Fantastica award. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). Jack Dann lives in Melbourne, Australia, and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
COUNTING COUP
Copyright © 2000 by Jack Dann
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published under the title Bad Medicine by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-30185-7
First U.S. Edition: October 2001
eISBN 9781466838222
First eBook edition: January 2013
Jack Dann, Counting Coup
