CHAPTER 2
ELIZABETH
“Of course Chief, I’d like to help, but I still don’t understand why you want me to be involved,” replied a surprised Elizabeth Winters. “From what I’ve been told the last couple of days, I guess I’ve already caused plenty of trouble.”
Chief George Running Buck sighed and shook his grey-haired head. What more could he tell her? She had indeed created difficulties, but then she was an outsider, and outsiders always created difficulties for the Tribe and for the Goths. Unlike most outsiders, at least Elizabeth had good intentions. Since she started teaching school on the Reservation twenty months ago she had become a true friend to the Tribe.
She was an innocent, and an honest and good person, and the Tribe trusted in her and liked her. Grouchy old Mort Goth had actually started to take a liking to her. Besides, Great Two Bears approved of her, and that was plenty good enough for Chief George. Good enough to hire her in the first place and to ask for her help now, even though it was highly unusual to ask an outsider to become involved in Tribe business.
Still she was an outsider, and he couldn’t possibly explain the whole situation to her, certainly not the thousands of years of tribal secrets, much of which he himself could only guess at, as he was merely Tribe Chief, and not the Shaman or a Goth. From what he did know of tribal history, the current crisis was unprecedented. Elizabeth had to be made to understand the urgency and criticality of the situation without causing her to panic and without revealing secrets. He sat down at one of the larger student desks directly in front of her, and tried to relax and look calm. “Trouble yes, I’m afraid so, but it isn’t really your fault. You did what you thought was right, under the circumstances. Now we badly need your help.
“The Goths and the Tribe have worked together for many years to protect the woodlands on Goth land from outsiders. Now the Goth land might go up for auction as soon as next week.”
“That soon? Don’t these things take months or years?”
“There are powerful forces in play that will make it happen much quicker. If that happens the Tribe will try to buy the Goth land, but our cash resources are very limited.”
“So are mine. I work for you, remember?”
The Chief grimaced. What the Tribe paid Elizabeth was disgraceful, by white man standards, though a fortune for the Tribe. “And we’re very glad that you do. For you money isn’t everything though, or you wouldn’t work for us. Now I’m asking that you do another favor for the Tribe, a very big favor. I want you to temporarily close the school, and take over Mort Goth’s cabin, so to speak, to buy us some time.”
“Close the school? I don’t understand. We only have a couple weeks left before summer break. Is it because I’m the only blonde on the Reservation?”
Chief George smiled. One of Elizabeth’s greatest assets was her sense of humor. “No, we manage to overlook your blondeness as well as your blue eyes. This will be only temporary, for a few days at most. We want you to move into the back room of the Goth cabin and claim that you have been renting it from Mort.”
Elizabeth’s jaw dropped open.
“Mary can give you a few things right away that you can put in the room to make it look like you've been there a while already. You didn’t explain to Sheriff Barns why you were there when you found Mort’s body, did you?”
“Hardly; I simply told Sheriff Barns that I had found Mort dead. After all, that’s what happened. Does this new story make any sense? Why would I live in Mort’s cabin?”
“Your story can be that you moved in a month ago, when snow had melted enough to allow passage from the Reservation on foot. You didn’t like the long commute from town and his was the white-man’s place closest to the Reservation school.”
True, the Goth cabin was only a three-mile hike from the Reservation school, though much of that distance was vertical. Still it was not too far at all, by rural western standards, if you were a true health nut, except of course when winter buried the mountainside in snow ten meters deep. “But Mort was an avowed hermit; everyone knows that. Why would he take on a border?”
“Mort needed cash for taxes, and that’s the truth. Barns knows that all too well.”
“But why must someone stay at the cabin? Can you tell me more about what the Tribe wants me to protect, and how I would do it?”
“If anyone associated with Fenster gets a good look at the forest beyond the cabin, he’ll want to log it immediately for sure. That’s prime old growth Douglas Fir forest, with plenty of big Red Cedar and Western Hemlock, too. We just want someone to keep an eye on things and keep snoopers out for now, someone who has a legal right to be there. It could delay the auction for a few days, if we’re lucky. We’re drawing up a rental agreement for you right now. We can simply back-date it, and make it all look real. We have to delay Fenster.”
“Bill Fenster, the drug store Fenster? I heard he is an important man in Lathem.”
“Right. Fenster owns the drug store, food store, lumber yard, apartments, funeral parlor, and the county sheriff, among other things and people all over the state. He runs the town of Lathem and the whole area, except this Reservation, and he’d like to own the Goth land and Goth Mountain, as well as our Reservation that surrounds most of it. He’s the one that had the taxes on the Goth land raised.”
Elizabeth had seen Fenster in town a few times, but hadn’t met him. She recalled that he was a past middle aged, small, shifty eyed, weasel-like man that drove a huge old Cadillac.
At least given the Chief’s explanations more things were beginning to make some sense to her. She had recently seen the old-growth trees surrounding the Goth cabin, and they were incredible. This was logging country, and Fenster was evidently in the logging business. Goth trees sacred to the Tribe were now in danger. No wonder Chief George made her dismiss school early!
She already knew that Tribe members visited the Goth property frequently, and not just to visit Mort. The Goth Mountain and forest were important to the Tribe in some sort of spiritual sense. Besides that, she personally felt very strongly that any still-existing old-growth forest should be preserved. “But why me? Why not someone from the Tribe?”
“Off the Reservation we’re all treated lower than dirt on a totem pole, as long as Barns and his men are the law and working for Fenster. You have the political advantage of being white, Elizabeth. Our hope is that Fenster and Barns would have to think twice before crossing you, in particular since you are known to the public through the press.”
Elizabeth shook her head in understanding. Last summer Trevor Stanton, her ex-boyfriend, had written a glowing human-interest press article about her teaching efforts on the Reservation. He made her out to be a Florence Nightingale, while ignoring the fact that she had taken the position primarily because it had been her only job offer in the general area of her Aunt's farm.
Since then she had fallen in love with the job and the Tribe’s children. ‘White Woman Helps Mysterious Backward Chinook Tribe,’ Trevor’s newspaper story had proclaimed. News must have been slow that week, because several west-coast newspapers and TV stations had picked up the story, and it went viral on the web. Trevor seemed quite pleased with the whole thing, though it didn’t cause Elizabeth to change her mind about him. He was still a lousy creep.
The Tribe was immune to publicity and indifferent to it, for the most part. The reaction among whites in Lathem was mixed. A few townsfolk snubbed her, but many more told her that they supported her helping the Tribe. However, there were powerful individuals that didn’t care about Indians or anyone else, only about what could be gained from any situation. Fenster was definitely such a person. The tribe had nobody in the white world of high standing to defend them. The fact that the Tribe’s chief felt that she, a young nobody newcomer schoolteacher, had more stature legally and politically than they did, was very telling.
The bottom line was that Elizabeth loved these people, and wanted to help them and Mort’s forest, if she could. “I’ll help any
way I can. Exactly what do you want me to do?”
Chief George sighed in relief. The Tribe needed all the help they could get right now. Old Fenster had been patiently trying to get the Goth place for decades, but with the death of Mort Goth, the aging tyrant saw his chance at last and his patience was spent. “Stall and keep them off the property, that’s your job. Claim you need privacy, that you have paid for it, damn it. That will all be in your rental lease.”
“Doesn’t sound easy.”
“But it could keep Fenster's snoopers off Goth land for a short while. We’ll back you up, even physically ultimately, if it comes to that, but we need you to provide some legal authority as a renter, and a white renter at that. Keep them from the Sacred Grove beyond the inner fence at all costs, and out of the garden in back of the house, if possible. Tell them that you're renting use of the land and it’s your garden.”
Inner fence? Sacred Grove? She had heard Tribe members talk to each other about fences and patrols and a holy, sacred forest; they always clammed up or switched to their own language when they noticed her listening. In another year or two, that wouldn’t work, given the rate she was picking up their Chinook-like dialect. “I didn’t even know there was a garden.”
“He had flowers out front that you’ve probably already seen, but he had mostly vegetables out back. Old Mort had what your people would call a green thumb. If folks see the garden out back by the old barn they’ll get even more curious about everything else. We could tear out the garden, of course, but we’d rather not do that out of respect for Mort.”
“I’ve seen the fence on the property border. Are you saying there is a second fence deeper in the forest? Is it there to protect more trees?”
“Yes, to keep outsiders from the upper, sacred grove. You can’t see the inner fence from the cabin, but you can see it from the back of the garden. The inner fence was built by Mort’s great grandfather long ago. Mort and his younger brother Mark built the outer fence when Fenster logged the lower valley.”
“I’ve heard Tribe people talk about carrying out patrols along a fence. I had assumed they were referring to the outer fence along the Goth property line.”
George sighed. How much had she picked up, teaching on the Reservation these last 20 months? How much should he tell her now? How much could he get away with not telling her? “We’ve helped the Goths patrol both of their fence lines for many years. Besides occasional hunters, mountain climbers and geologists to turn away, animals and falling trees can damage the fences or get caught in them.”
“How long will I have to stay at the cabin?”
“Hopefully only a few days, until we locate Mort’s heir. He must be located very soon or the land will be auctioned. Only by producing the heir and getting the taxes paid can we hope to stop Fenster completely. He is pushing the auction forward, but you living in the cabin will hopefully delay him, at least for a few critical days.”
“The heir is Mort’s nephew? The children talked about him in school today.”
The Reservation was very small, word got around, even in the secretive Tribe. “Yes, Mort’s only living heir by blood, his nephew, Johnny Goth. Fenster tried to claim that there is no heir, but fortunately the Tribe had papers to prove that Johnny exists. We don’t have enough cash to pay the Goth taxes though. That’s helping Fenster’s cause.”
“Do you even know that Johnny’s alive? That seems like a huge assumption.”
Chief George shrugged. “No one around here has heard from him or his mother for fourteen years. On the other hand, Two Bears and Mort have said that he lives, so it is really not an assumption at all. He lives.”
“How could they possibly know that for certain?”
He shrugged again. “Great Two Bears is the Tribe Shaman, and Mort was the Goth. They have ways of knowing such things.”
Elizabeth shook her head. No sense in asking what that meant. Once that sort of explanation had been given by the Tribe, she had never been able to dig any deeper. “And you think you can find him now?”
Chief George stood, signaling an end to their conversation. “We must. The fate of the forest depends on finding Johnny Goth.” Not to mention the fate of the Tribe and perhaps humanity, he couldn’t help thinking.
Secrets of Goth Mountain Page 2