Family Reunion.
Big gathering.
Sometime in the middle 90s my then wife and I, and our infant daughter, went to a family reunion. It was on my mother’s side (Dumont), but the Carrier side was represented, too.
The event was held at a campground east of Lancaster, New Hampshire. Now my memory is quite vague of exactly where this campground was, so looking at a map, it may have been Roger’s Campground and Motel just 4 minutes outside of town. In the story, The Sachem Challenge takes the runners up Mount Madison. This mountain, part of the Presidential Range, is actually 34.7 miles south east of the campground. Oops.
So, for the sake of the story, The Flying Pheasant Campground is much closer to Mount Madison.
My great grandmother Carrier was not at this reunion having died years ago. But a family represented at the reunion was there who helped inspire this story. They were family I remembered seeing while growing up in my parent’s home town of Colebrook, NH. The couple were larger, rounder and taller than most, with dark hair and features. Being older myself, I looked at them with more educated eyes and immediately saw an American Indian look, maybe Inuit. I never fully verified this, though I asked my mother who didn’t have an answer either.
However, my crazy imagination took off.
With my mother’s background being French Canadian, I had a thought: What if? What if WE had Indian/Inuit blood in our family’s background! What if there was the side of our French-Canadian family, years and years ago, who connected with the natives!
Of course, I was excited by this concept that we could have American Indian blood in the family. And, along with me experiencing the actual “initiation dream”, I got an easy start at how I might weave this wolf-shifter story into place.
