Read an Excerpt
ONE
He stood at the wheel, watching the current stream, and the bald eagles fishing for herring that waited until the boat was almost upon them to lift, to drop the instant it had passed. The tops of the islands were wreathed in cloud, the sides fell steeply, and the firs that covered them grew so precisely to the high tide line that now, at slack, the upcoast of British Columbia showed its bones in a straight selvage of wet, dark rock.
“There’s the sign of an old village,” said the Indian boy who was his deckhand.
His eyes sought a beach from which, long ago, the big stones had been removed so that the war canoes could be pulled up stern first. But there was no beach. There was nothing but clean, straight selvage, and a scattered mound of something broken and white in the gray of rain against the green of spruce, and he remembered the words Caleb had quoted him, and he repeated them now.
“ ‘When you see clam shells, know it is Indian country. Leave it alone.’ ”
“Queen Victoria,” the Indian boy said quickly. “Some people didn’t hear her.”
Caleb had prepared him for this one, the first he was to know: “He’s been working for a year in a mill town and is eager to return to his village. You’ll not take the boat out without him until you get your papers. He could handle a boat when he was ten, and he knows more about the coast than you will ever learn. You’ll think he’s shy, and you’ll be wrong. When you shake his hand, you’ll know at once it’s a gesture he’s learned which has no meaning. In his eyes you’ll see a look that is in the eyes of all of them, and it will be your job to figure out what it means, and what you are going to do about it. And he will watch you—they will all watch you—and in his own time he will accept or reject you.”
Caleb, the old canon, had come out of retirement to acquaint him with all the endearing—and exasperating—little ways of the forty-foot diesel launch upon which his life would depend.
Back up. Go forward. Up and down the straits. In and out the lower inlets in a mild chop, in a moderate chop, in a gale. The tide-book open by the compass because you came with the tide, you went with the tide, you waited for the tide, and sometimes you prayed for the tide. Check the oil pressure and the shaft bearings. Pump the bilge. Watch for the drift logs. Count the lights on the masts of the tug boats that showed the size of their booms.
Because Caleb was old, the young man had thought, of course, he would be garrulous and full of reminiscence, but he was wrong. The talk had been entirely nautical. Even in the galley, over meals which the young man cooked, Caleb had occasionally dropped what surely could not, yet must, be godly counsel.
“Be sure to use the Victorian ‘we,’ lad.”
“When you bury anybody, remember to look in the box the very last minute. Forty years ago up at Fort Rupert I buried the wrong man, and even now the RCMP has not forgotten it.”
“Don’t call them cannibals. It was never true literally. No one alive has seen the famous dance in which the young man, maddened by the cannibal spirit, returns to his village crying for flesh and carrying a body taken from a grave tree.”
Then one evening they had tied up at the marina of Powell River where the Indian boy had been working, and Caleb lived.
“He’ll be here early in the morning, and he’ll help you load the organ the local church is sending to Kingcome Village. Don’t be sorry for yourself because you are going to so remote a parish. Be sorry for the Indians. You know nothing and they must teach you,” and Caleb had blessed him and ambled off, bare-headed in the rain, a man whose work on the coast was so legendary that it was said the Archbishop of Canterbury greeted him by his first name and a joke old between them, “Tell me, Caleb, how’s your trap line? Any poaching?”
Then he was alone in the galley and sure of the look he would see in the Indian’s eyes. The tribes of the villages which would form his patrol belonged to a people that had never been at war with the white man. They lived where they had always lived. They fished as they had always fished, known for their intelligence and a culture that was perhaps the most highly developed of any native band on the continent. In the old days when a chief had given a great feast for his rivals, he let the fire that burned in the center of his ceremonial house catch the roof beams until the red hot embers fell, knowing that until he gave the sign, no guest dared move lest he admit the host’s fire had conquered him. When he served his guests from the great ceremonial dishes, he spilt hot grease on their bare arms to see if he could make them wince. And sometimes he broke his own copper—big as a shield, its buying power as great as three thousand of the white man’s dollars—broke it to show to his guests his disdain for his own wealth. Surely the look would be one of arrogance.
In the morning he awakened early, dressed, put the coffee on to boil, and went up the ladder into the wheelhouse and out onto the deck. On the float waited the first one.
He waited patiently as if he had waited all his life, as if he were part of time itself. He was twenty-seven, perhaps, which was the age of the young vicar. He wore a fisherman’s dark trousers and jacket; a pair of gum boots hung over one shoulder. Beside him were his belongings in a heavy cardboard box, tied with string.
The young vicar jumped down on the float.
“Welcome aboard. I’m Mark—Mark Brian,” and he held out his hand.
“I’m Jim Wallace,” the Indian said shyly, and he took the hand with no answering pressure.
There was pride in his eyes without arrogance. Behind the pride was a sadness so deep it seemed to stretch back into ancient mysteries Mark could not even imagine, and he felt that small thrill of fear, of anticipation, which a man knows if he’s lucky enough to meet and recognize his challenge.
He led the way aboard. Eager to be off, the two of them worked hard, loading the organ onto the aft deck, covering it with a canvas, and lashing it tight.
Then they started north in a moderate swell and a driving rain, past the fishing village of Lund, past Cortes and Redonda, through the Yuculta Rapids, with Jim, the Indian, fighting the tide for the wheel. Just before dark they came to a lonely float in Shoal Bay.
“Shall we spend the night here?” Mark asked carefully. “Shall we have supper? I’ll get it.”
Now, on the second afternoon in the twentieth hour of passage, he stood at the wheel, approaching the first village which was to be part of his patrol.
“How soon now?”
“Very soon now. First you will see Ghost Island. It is where the Indians of Gilford village once buried their dead.”
“In the ground?”
“No—in low sheds. Most of them have fallen and broken. If you go there now, you stumble over skulls green with moss.”
He saw the small island, lovely as a jade jewel, and he slowed the boat and passed the village with its rare beach, white with clam shells, its stretch of cedar houses facing the water, and four great cedar posts standing in the rain—all that was left of some ancient ceremonial house.
“This is the same tribe as yours at Kingcome?”
“No, but we’re close relatives. Each February we come here to clam. Once the Indian agent asked us to live here because he could step easily onto the big float without getting his feet wet.”
“And you refused?”
“No. Our old people said, ‘We are going to Hollywood,’ and we came. We had some fine dancing, the air filled with duck down. We saw the famous blanket trimmed with a thousand eagle beaks, and because we are not permitted to buy liquor to serve in our own homes, the boys traded two masks for three cases of beer, and we drank it very fast and got very drunk.”
“And then?”
“Then we returned to our own village.”
Beyond the village, inches above the high tide mark, Mark saw two carved killer whales, topped by a full moon.
“It’s only the grave of Johnny Ray who was drowned,” Jim told him. “When you come here to marry, to bury, to hold church in the school house, they will say to you, Johnny’s hiding in the bush, and he steals things and scares our women. What’ll we do?’ ”
In Cramer Pass a school of porpoise refused to move out of the boat’s way, and watched the boat, heads up, headed straight for the boat and, at the last moment, leapt aside. And in the late afternoon they stopped to take on oil and water at the last point of contact with the outside world, a store where the loggers and Indians came for mail and supplies, built on a float, cabled to the steep island side.
