Glusap and the Giants

I tell this as it was, and as I remember it as it was carved into the stones of the mountains. Under my teaching the people loved the land and the land answered them: fields grew heavy with grain, rivers ran clear, and the children learned the songs of the loons. For a time the world breathed easy. Then the giants came. They demanded of the people, the prosperity that was not theirs because the were slothful and did not care for the land. They took until all was barren and moved on. The people refused, so the giants came.
They came like mountains walking, each step shook the earth and the rivers trembled. The birches bowed and bent like reeds. Their faces were twisted with hunger and their hands were wide with taking. Monsters slithered at their heels and clung to their shoulders like dark, greedy shadows. Where the giants passed, smoke rose and the ground steamed; where they spat their fire the rock ran like molten metal and the rivers fled from the heat. The people fled to the high places or were swallowed by the blaze; the sun itself seemed to shrink behind a veil of ash. Their breath turned solid rock to flowing rivers, as the rivers turned to steam, they were sealed with this molten rock. Even the harvest the giants had come for, they burned to cinders.
I rose from the heart of the land, from the place where I had first pressed my palms and taught the bays to hold water. The earth remembered my touch and answered with a steadying breath beneath my feet. I walked into the giants’ shadow with hands that had shaped mountains and named the first moose; I did not meet them with blind anger. I had learned that force without cunning only makes new ruin.
“Giants,” I called, my voice like a drum rolled in the hollow of a shell, “you have come with mouths that only consume and hands that only break. Why do you burn what feeds you?”

They laughed, a sound like boulders grinding. One of them spat a tongue of flame that turned a ridge to glass. He answered only with hunger.
“We take what we want,” he said. “We are the tallest, the strongest. The world will give.” So I did not answer with a single blow. I called the wind to circle their heads and howl in their ears, to lift the smoke and show them the faces of the people they had driven from their homes. The wind obeyed, coiling like a ribbon, but the giants’ laughter did not falter even when the wind showed them the children’s empty hearths.
I led them in their anger into a hollow in the mountains, a bowl of stone where the winds gathered and their rage grew louder. There I waited and let their fury fill the space. Then I moved.
My arrows are not only of wood and feather; they are of thought and timing. I loosed them and they flashed like lightning, not to pierce flesh but to split the sky so that the sun could shine through and make the giants look up. When they looked up, their breath—hot and full of fire—was caught in the hollow and turned inward. Their own flames began to melt the very mounts until the mountains held them. The molten rock ran over their feet and sealed them in a shell of cooling stone. Their own hot breath melted the mountains around them.
“See,” I said as the first giant’s foot sank and stilled, “what you would do to the innocent you have done to yourselves. Theft burns the hand that holds.” Some giants were trapped and turned to cooling rock, their faces frozen in surprise. Others, more cunning, tried to flee with their monstrous pets, fleeing beyond the horizon. Others stamped toward the sea, and some of those beasts dove into the waves and tried to sink the people’s boats, snapping oars and dragging nets into the deep. The sea churned with their terror. I waded in until the cold wrapped my knees and then my waist. The serpents that had been let loose to terrorize the coast writhed and hissed, long as the coastline itself and slick as oil. I took each by the tail, one after another, feeling their strength coil and pull. They fought with the old cunning of the deep, but I turned them to knots in my hands. I bound them together with cords of kelp, tying their tails in a braid that would not come undone.
I then flung the braided serpents to the far center of the waters where their hunger for the flesh of the people would not be feed. “Learn the weight of your taking.” I yelled as I threw them outward, and they sank into the distant dark of the ocean keep. The coast grew quiet again.
I used my voice to calm the molten rivers. Where a giant’s foot had gouged a valley, I laid my palm upon the raw stone and taught the land to breathe. I spoke to the riverbeds and the broken springs; I coaxed the rock to crack in the right places so water could find its way home. The molten scars cooled and the soil remembered how to hold seed. I planted my hands in the earth and new green pushed itself to the surface.
At the last, when the hollow had cooled. Rain fell like a blessing and the people, who had hidden and wept, came out and saw the world mended.
“You have been taught,” I told the giants who remained, their shoulders bowed beneath the weight of what they had done. “Take only what you yourself have sown”
Some giants stayed beyond the horizon, their pride broken into a long, slow walk. Some of their monstrous pets were turned to stone where they stood, and their shapes became cliffs and strange islands that the people learned to avoid. Those that in sea were bound, were kept there. And the rivers ran clear and the fields began to fill again. The people returned to their work. They mended the nets, replanted the saplings, and taught their children songs of me.
I sat upon a ridge and watched the land breathe. My hands were tired, but my heart was steady. The lesson had been hard, and the scars would remain as memory, but the people continued to love the land as I had taught them.
“Remember,” I said to the gathered folk, my voice soft as moss, “what you tend will tend you. Keep your hands gentle and your promises true, and the world will answer in kind.”
They nodded, and the children laughed and ran to the river. The sun warmed the valley, and for a long while the world was at peace.

The Song the People Sang:

When the world was young and trembling,
And darkness ruled the plain,
Gluskap rose from mountain’s heart
To break the cords of pain.

He faced the giants born of greed,
The monsters born of pride,
He met the storms that tore the trees,
And turned their rage aside.

His arrows shone with lightning’s edge,
His voice could calm the wave,
He fought not just with strength of arm,
But with the heart he gave.

He battled those who hoarded life,
Who poisoned field and sky,
And when their fury dimmed the sun,
He would not turn nor die.

He bound the serpent of the sea,
He stilled the burning breath,
He taught that courage, love, and care
Can stand the test of death.

Then when the land grew bright again,
And people walked in peace,
He laid his weapons in the dawn
And let the fighting cease.

Yet still, when shadows thicken near,
And greed would rend the day,
Gluskap’s spirit wakes the wind—
To drive the dark away.