Heartbroke Bay (23 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
Negook’s voice takes them all by surprise. “Somebody is pretty mad at you.”
Hans leaps to his feet, kindling stick and knife thrust cruciform before him, as if to ward off the primitive apparition in the doorway. Michael and Harky stare. Dutch on his stump is oblivious. Hannah is the first to find her voice.
“Mr. Negook. Please come in.” Her own civility amuses her, if no one else.
Negook shuffles into the cabin, ignoring Hans’s muttered, “Who the hell?” and places himself before Harky. The shaman and Texan are eye to eye, though the latter remains kneeling, holding a plank in place to receive Michael’s peg.
Negook’s dark eyes flicker up and down Harky’s bulk, taking in the size of his hands, his feet, the width of his chest. Their eyes lock for just a moment, but sufficiently long for Harky to hear all the winds of the world blowing through the darkness of the eyes that regard him.
Negook’s hand comes quickly and cleanly from beneath his fur cloak, clutching the dried and severed shinbone of a heron, and points it at Harky. In the swift, fluid motion Hans, Hannah, and Harky all once again see the knife-wielding bedlamite from the lumber ship from Skagway.
The shaman makes a complex passage of the fisted yellow talon over Harky’s head, drawing some unknown hieroglyphic pattern, and Michael—the only Catholic among them—sees the silhouette of a Monsignor performing an arcane absolution. When the shinbone swings and points at the Irishman, it becomes a sword, and Michael’s heart skips a beat.
The wand disappears back into a fold of fur, and Negook repeats himself. “Somebody is pretty mad at you.” He is looking at Harky, but he speaks to the group at large.
Hans starts to sputter, still holding his whittling before him. “See here, we won’t be threatened, not by some—” He gropes for the words. “Not by a . . . a . . . drowned rat of an Indian!”
Negook’s response to the insult is unexpected. Genuine amusement breaks across his face, a crooked, wide-open smile that exposes teeth yellowed and broken by centuries of gnawing. “You been diggin’ at the ground a lot. And the ground moved. Now the ice attacks you, and you got no more food. No more boat, huh?” Negook looks in turn at each of their faces, still grinning, waiting for them to catch on.
“Come on to my village. Tlingit people going to take you back to
Goots-ka-yu kwan
, your own people.”
Goots-ka-yu kwan
, your own people.”
After a long debate in the longhouse, Negook had convinced the people of the Lituya-kwan to take the whites away in their great canoes, take them back to Sitka or Juneau as a way of appeasing the Bear God. Most of the young men had argued for killing the whites by putting them into the crevasses of the glacier, the blue ice caves in which the bear lives, until the shaman reminded them what had recently happened to the village of Angoon.
A Tlingit shaman working for the white man’s money on a whaling ship had been killed by the premature detonation of an exploding harpoon. By Tlingit law the whaling company was required to indemnify the man’s family by paying the “blanket price,” a few stacks of blankets as tall as the man. The whaling company refused, and when the villagers of Angoon took the whale boat and a couple of company men into keeping as a way of demanding payment, the company had sent a greatly exaggerated message to a U.S. Navy warship anchored in Sitka that said a general uprising was under way and the slaughter of every white man in the north was imminent.
By the time the Navy responded to the whalers’ plea, the council of Tlingit elders had already decided to pursue litigation “white man style.” The company’s men had been sent on their way after a banquet and dancing to show that their detainment had only been a matter of custom and nothing personal.
Duly informed that the company managers were safe, the captain had nonetheless decided to administer summary justice in true white man style and ordered his cannons turned on the village, setting it on fire and utterly destroying it. Hundreds of men, women, and children lost everything—shelter, clothing, weapons, food, and tools—at the very beginning of
T’ak
, the longest part of winter. The suffering was terrible and the people learned a valuable lesson in the savage and arbitrary law of the
Guski-qwan
, those cloud-faced people with no blood in their hearts.
T’ak
, the longest part of winter. The suffering was terrible and the people learned a valuable lesson in the savage and arbitrary law of the
Guski-qwan
, those cloud-faced people with no blood in their hearts.
Caught between the hammer of the white man’s cannons and the anvil of Kah-Lituya’s rage, the villagers accepted the words of Negook. The Dogfish Clan will supply a canoe and ten men to paddle; the miners will be evacuated immediately.
Hannah asks, “You mean you will take us back to civilization? In the large canoe that was hunting here in the bay?”
Negook nods. Hans looks suspicious.
“How much?”
It takes the shaman a moment to realize the blond cloud-face is asking about price, not how much time it will take to paddle them away or how much weight the canoe can carry.
White men,
he thinks to himself,
everything is business.
This is something that was not discussed in the longhouse. The only thing of importance is getting the whites away, getting them to go in the canoe.
he thinks to himself,
everything is business.
This is something that was not discussed in the longhouse. The only thing of importance is getting the whites away, getting them to go in the canoe.
To make it easy for them to agree, Negook looks around the cabin, considering a price. They don’t have much, just some clothes, a few dishes, but they will need those things, and Negook does not want to leave them with nothing. Winter will come, and they will need supplies back in Sitka.
He considers asking for the stove—useless, hungry thing; a man can’t even sit around and poke at the fire with a stick, watching the visions in the flames—but the whites will know they cannot take it anyway, it is too heavy; they take business seriously and might get insulted if he asks for such worthless payment. And if he asks for the shotgun or the pistol that bulges under the giant’s shirt, they will be afraid he intends to shoot them. No, the only diplomatic thing to do in this delicate situation is ask for something they treasure, but which has no real value to their survival through the winter.
“Gold. Trade us gold and we will take you to your people.”
The howling and barking that ensues shocks Negook. Hans pounds on the table, Michael takes a threatening step forward, doubling his fists. Even Hannah’s mouth tightens into a straight line. Only Harky seems unaffected. Negook conjures a talisman of raven feathers bound with plaited grass and beads from beneath his cloak and holds it before him, hoping the charm is strong enough to protect him from these violent lunatics.
Dutch abandons his lookout at the sound of the commotion, steps in the door, and asks “What’s this? What is it?”
His shoulders jerk when he spots Negook. His head bobbles on his neck as if it were attached by a spring, and he warbles. “Who’s this?”
“This here’s the bastard wants to steal our money, that’s who it is,” shouts Hans. Michael nods in agreement.
Dutch jumps back, gawking cross-eyed at the bundle of feathers in the shaman’s fist, then looks puzzled, mouth agape, as he tries to figure how the fetish might take the place of a gun or knife.
Harky makes a rumbling sound, and his chest starts to quiver. Hannah at first thinks the sound is a precursor to an angry eruption, then realizes the Texan is laughing.
“Horseshit,” says Harky. “Horseshit!” and shakes his head.
Harky rises to his feet and takes a step toward Negook. Hannah fears for the shaman’s neck, but the Indian relaxes, nods toward the Texan, and replies in kind, “Horseshit.” What a fine, useful word.
“How much gold?” asks Harky.
The shaman imitates a gesture he has seen white people use: He lifts his shoulders up and drops them, shrugging.
Harky picks up a spoon from the table and holds it out. “This much?”
Negook pushes out his lower lip and ponders the spoon. Negook raises his hand, holding the fingers spread wide.
“Five spoons of gold?” Harky says. “Five?” In pretext, his voice is sad and full of consternation at the same time. He sighs and shakes his head, laying the spoon back on the table.
“It’s a big spoon. Two is plenty.” Harky learned to bargain on the streets of Juarez, where dickering is a good-natured sport. The Tlingit, too, are avid traders and dealers, and may spend days haggling over a carving or paddle. Negook plays the game better than most, but today he just wants it finished. He holds up three fingers.
Harky holds out his hand and says, “Done.”
At dawn the sky is blue, fading to mauve in the west, and as Negook leads the prospectors into the wilderness, the colors of the forest reach out in tousled grays and greens. They walk in single file, pushing into serried tangles of blueberry shrubs and devil’s club along a subtle path that rises and twists across broken and gullied ground. They move through a continuous mantle of sun-dappled emeralds and shadowed browns, following the trail’s windings among Mamelon hills, along steep, crumbling bluffs. After the first hour, none of the miners has any sense of direction and each guesses differently at the alignment and location of the mountains, the sun, and the sea. By noon sweat runs in their eyes and Negook must pause every so often as the whites gasp for breath. The shaman’s bare feet are black and cracked as macadam, and as he walks, his toes splay cloven and grasping over stones. He never stumbles, never pants, and never speaks, as he leads the party through the winding, cathedral maze of the forest.
The devil’s club raises its claws to the miners as they push along behind Negook down the faint, tangled trail. Negook slides through the barbed and stabbing undergrowth with hardly a rustle while the abundantly thorned stalks and broad, palmate leaves of the plant brush at the whites’ faces and stab at their shins with its needle-sharp spines. Dutch cries, “Damnation!” when a naive handhold inflicts a painful punishment on his palm. “How much farther is this damned place?”
Negook shakes his head at the ways of the white men, wasting themselves on words that mean nothing and questions with no answer, when already they run short of wind and still have far to go.
The blue black rustle of a raven’s wing flickers high overhead, indistinct in the canopy of greens. When a smooth, ebony feather flutters down and places itself at Hannah’s feet, she picks it up and pins it into her hair. The gesture draws a glance of rebuke from Hans and a long, black-eyed stare from Negook.
After a march of long hours through trees pillowed and quilted in moss, the party breaks out into a meadow.
Negook lets loose a sudden raucous call, which is answered by a human cry from down river. Hannah smells smoke, freshly cut wood, and the sea; in the distance is the low, mumbling thunder of ocean waves.
“Lituya-kwan,” says Negook, pointing to a pale column of smoke rising above the brush. “The village.”
The settlement is a cluster of plank-built longhouses assembled in orderly fashion along the rim of a sandy, surf-pounded cove. The face of each house is screened with a broad panel of cedar planks carved into the stylized forms of killer whales, bears, eagles, and salmon. A tall pole topped with a stylized raven stands guard over a number of canoes aligned at the edge of the beach, two of which are mammoth. Large enough, estimates Hannah, for each to easily hold forty or fifty people. The prows of both are decorated with staring, red-painted eyes that give the impression of giant sea creatures, which, having come ashore through the angry waves, now rest in vigilant repose on the sand.
Men and women clad in cedar bark cloaks and clothing cut from trade blankets filter out of the longhouses, surrounding the new arrivals. Negook addresses the assembly in a language that is harsh and glottal to Hannah’s ears. Some of the villagers speak to the miners in
Siwash
, the farrago language distilled from a dozen Indian tongues and mixed with English and French to form the dialect of commerce used along the coastal trade routes between Oregon and Alaska. Hannah understands few of the words, but as Negook explains that the shipwrecked miners are ready to be evacuated, his gestures are clear.
Siwash
, the farrago language distilled from a dozen Indian tongues and mixed with English and French to form the dialect of commerce used along the coastal trade routes between Oregon and Alaska. Hannah understands few of the words, but as Negook explains that the shipwrecked miners are ready to be evacuated, his gestures are clear.
A squarely built man with an imperial bearing points to the sea and waves a finger at the churning waters. He wears a woven grass hat in the shape of a cone and a leather vest open to the waist. The muscles of his chest are hard and smooth as plates of armor, bunching and swelling as he makes a paddling motion, saying,
“Ta dar da nook
.
Sa-cum
.
Sagun kleh ar.”
“Ta dar da nook
.
Sa-cum
.
Sagun kleh ar.”
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