Heartbroke Bay (20 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
“He showed you he wanted the shell. Then you got mad.”
Both ravens whoop, raising and lowering small feathered horns at their temples. Negook shakes his head and mutters in the Tlingit language, whether to himself or the ravens, Hannah is not sure. What he says is, “White people are crazy.”
Negook has walked the long trail from his village to Lituya Bay many times since this bunch arrived, following the line of blazed trees from the canoe haul-out up through the twin hills that are shaped like a young woman’s breasts, along the ankle of the bluff that rises parallel to the shore, and down into the fjord, where he stands observing and unseen. When his old bones do not want to make the trip, he sends the ravens to watch in his place. The whites have neither gathered a single egg from the gull colonies on the cliffs at the head of the bay nor killed a single seal. He thinks they must be eating dirt.
He has seen their strange inventions; he once went to Sitka with a band of young men hoping to trade mink and otter furs for bullets for their rifles and had marveled at a machine with a place to sit and two wheels going round and round. The bicycle went by as fast as a man could trot, the rider’s legs pushing up and down. When a white man asked Negook what he thought of the contraption, the shaman had not said that only white people would think of a way to sit down and walk like hell at the same time.
Hannah briefly considers firing the shotgun to attract the miners but decides not to, fearing that to do so would somehow validate the shaman’s dubious opinion of her sanity. And above all, her English blood considers it critical to be seen as calm and sane, even by a wrinkled old wood spirit dressed in puzzle-twined garb. It is also her English blood that speaks for her next words, which she immediately fears will sound more addled yet. “Would you like some tea?”
Negook is silent a long time before responding. When he does, the answer is so ordinary and so unlikely it takes Hannah the space of a long breath to understand.
“Got coffee?”
Negook sits on a drift log dragged into camp to be sawn into firewood and becomes still as a stone. A breeze curls through the camp, circling about the cabin and playing with Hannah’s hair as she grinds the beans and boils water. The feathers arrayed from Negook’s cloak and hair hang motionless, as do the wisps of beard about his face, as if the wind passes through the shaman without encountering his substance. Hannah’s natural urge is to polite conversation, but she can think of nothing to say. Negook is still and quiet, pondering, as he has pondered for days, how best to get to the business at hand.
He eyes the crude cabin, the slant of its walls and the loose arrangement of stones and boards that hold down the canvas roof.
“You will not stay here a long time.” He wants to believe this and sees the evidence he needs in the shoddy construction. When the Tlingit build a house, they use wooden wedges and mauls to split long, straight planks from large trees carefully selected for their perfectly smooth grain. The planks are assembled around corner posts and pegged into four strong walls and a roof to protect all the members of a clan, then carved and painted with symbols and figures that remind them who they are. The cabin looks like something children would build for the pleasure of tearing down.
Hannah considers how to best answer what question there is in the statement and replies, “We plan to depart in the fall. Until then we will be mining our claim.”
Negook feels a twist of anger in his belly at the proprietary words. The Lituya-kwan band of the Tlingit people has been hunting and trapping the seals, birds, and fish of this fjord long enough to learn lessons as old as the mountains and the ice. The white people have been here for fewer days than it takes for meat to rot or the moon to grow fat and already they call it theirs. He pushes the anger down, back out of sight. There is something much more important to be dealt with.
“This is not a good place for you.”
Hannah pauses, a cup in her hand. “Whatever do you mean?”
Her speech patterns stir an inkling of memory from Negook’s distant past. He is so old his mind remembers things that he sometimes cannot find the words for, and he gropes now among the loose bits stirred by the rhythms and tones of Hannah’s speech. In particular, the way she says “Whatever do you mean?”
When it comes, it comes clearly: The Boston men, the traders that came hard on the heels of the Russian bastards, they used those words. And before the Boston men and Russians there came a few ships with men who spoke the same way and said they were sent by a great king on an island far away, a place they called England. The head Englishman called himself George Van-Koo-Ver and told the Tlingit that everything now belonged to the English king.
White people were always showing up and telling the People that this was not the People’s land anymore. Sometimes it was necessary to kill a few of them, but that always seemed to make things worse, because whites did not seem to have any laws.
Negook digs around and finds an American word he enjoys using and mutters it to himself. “Horseshit.”
This land belongs to the One whose name is not spoken aloud. The Lituya-kwan are the keepers and users of the land and waters, but it is the great Bear God Kah-Lituya that owns this place. Even the Tlingit come here only on his sufferance, for he is easy to enrage and his anger is dreadful.
Many years ago, Kah-Lituya was kind to the People for a long time and let them take plenty of seals and mountain goats back to their longhouses from this place. But the People became arrogant, forgot the ways of appeasement, and even worse, grew lazy.
Over the objections of the shamans, a band of sixty-five people built permanent longhouses here instead of the temporary hunting and fishing camps tolerated by the Bear God. Incensed at the trespass, Great Kah-Lituya came down from his ice cave in the glacier, took the mountains into his wicked jaws, and shook the world. The earthquake generated a tidal wave that killed every man, woman, and child in the presumptuous band, tore away their longhouses, and for good measure scalped every bush and tree and blade of grass from the hills. Even the barnacles and chitons that cling to the rocks at low tide were obliterated. Over an area of several square miles, every living thing died.
Since that last fury Kah-Lituya has been kind to the Tlingit. Now and then he will swallow a few if they forget to pray to him as they come and go through the currents at the mouth of the bay, but he has not shaken the land so badly again. But the presence of strangers has always irritated Kah-Lituya. After the Englishmen came white men from a place called France. Kah-Lituya drowned twenty-three of them at once, swallowing their boat at the entrance to the bay, after which they were smart enough to leave forever. So that is the danger now. If the Bear God comes down from the glacier, he will not discriminate between smiting the whites for their offense or smiting the Tlingit for allowing it.
Negook accepts the coffee Hannah holds out to him and takes a sip. It is not possible to mention Kah-Lituya’s name to these people, for that would surely enrage him, but they must somehow be made to understand and agree to leave. He raises the cup and passes it before him in a broad gesture that takes in the forested hills and fjord.
“These trees. They are all the same size.” After the last tidal wave, the devastated area regenerated itself as an even-aged woodland of uniformly sized timber, whereas the forest that was out of reach of the tsunami is made up of trees of all ages, from saplings to ancient giants. He waits for Hannah to understand.
She looks in the direction of Negook’s gesticulation, as if she is seeing the forest for the first time. The evenness of the second growth is apparent and appears as a distinct division, through the forest that is a mixture of greens and blacks on the ancient side and a paler, brighter green on the new. But this is meaningless to her. She is used to the carefully manicured, homogenous woods of England.
Negook tries again. “Everything was gone. Now there are no old trees or young trees. Everything came back at the same time.”
The shaman sees the flicker of doubt across Hannah’s face; she is starting to think he is just a crazy old man. He swigs down the entire cup of coffee, oblivious to the scalding heat, and holds out the cup to Hannah, who hesitates before taking it gingerly. Obviously, the only approach is direct, so he repeats his earlier warning.
“This is not a good place for you. You will not stay here long.” Surely these fools will not ignore straight words.
Hannah stands straighter and pulls back her shoulders. “Mr. Negook,” she says, for she does want to address this elderly man with respect, even though he is decidedly strange. “Mr. Negook, we will leave Lituya Bay when the mining season is over. We have come for the summer and cannot alter our plan. I assure you, we will do nothing to interfere with you and your people.” Then, as an afterthought, she asks, “And where are your people? Your village? How did you get here?”
Negook’s only reply is a vague gesture to the north. There is no need to tell the whites how to find the village. That could only lead to trouble.
“Will you leave when you have enough gold?” When the People have enough salmon drying on the racks or seal skins scraped and stretched or berries in the buckets, they quit taking.
“Enough? Well, I suppose we shall. When we have enough.”
Negook stares at the sea where the smooth, slender shape of a sea lion is briefly silhouetted at the peak of a swell before it breaks. The shaman watches for the brown head to emerge in the swells behind the surf line, and in a moment it does, with a wriggling fish in its jaws.
Negook considers the driftwood that litters the beach and the long journey each pale silver log has made, from its youth as a sapling to its fate as an uprooted tree. He sees the floods and upheavals that wash trees whole from some distant river into the sea, where they tumble until scoured free of bark and limbs, before drifting ashore on this long curve of beach beneath icy mountains. He looks at all of this and wonders if “enough” and “gold” are words that go together.
Without another word to Hannah, he walks away into the forest, winding his way through the field of tree stumps left by the miners, then up a slight rise and into an uncombed tangle of salmonberry. The whoops and calls of the loquacious ravens follow. There is a brief rustle in the thicket, and the shaman is gone, leaving Hannah with the empty coffee cup and an odd sentiment that she has been dreaming. From the shelf beside the cabin door, the pink glimmer of a seashell winks at her from its nest within the pearly grip of a mussel.
Negook does not go far before stopping beneath a tree, where he sits to wonder at the huge stupidity of whites who dig at the ground instead of hunting seals or goats. They wade in the water like children and dig at sand that yields nothing when they could be digging for
k’oox
, the wild rice that grows at the base of the dark lilies. This is actually a woman’s job, but that could be why white men are so crazy: They never have enough women around.
k’oox
, the wild rice that grows at the base of the dark lilies. This is actually a woman’s job, but that could be why white men are so crazy: They never have enough women around.
The ravens sit above Negook, watching him think. As he considers the odd ways of the whites, a squadron of dark-eyed juncos flits by in ragged maneuvers, moving from alder to alder, pecking at small meals. Negook is so old he remembers the oldest living grandmother among all of the People as a young girl. Now she is an ancient who no longer speaks, but just sits, year after year, humming to herself. Among the People it is not unusual to live a long, long time, through more salmon seasons and winters than there is a number for. Negook is the oldest by far.
He knows that white people believe wholeheartedly that they are only allowed to live just so long, measured in years; to do less is somehow a failure or to do more is somehow a sin. The Tlingit understand that a life cannot be measured in numbers of years, because some people die quickly, and some, like himself, stay a long, long time. Yet to each is given a whole life. Unlike the whites, with their sentiment for record keeping and birthdays and putting things in drawers, Negook does not measure his life.
Negook has heard also about reincarnation, the odd notion being related to him by a prospector who wandered, babbling and digging, along the shores south of here just last year. Reincarnation seemed like a good idea, but the thought of all the lost animals—the slaughtered whales, the millions of fish the whites took every year in their nets and traps, or the herds of mountain goats that had disappeared around settlements like Juneau and Skagway—coming back as white people made Negook nervous. He just did not see how this could be a general elevation or improvement of the world’s spirit.
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