Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  Kid Hugh walked past Stuart and climbed into the canoe. Steve bounded in after him.

  James said to Stuart, “Have you heard anything about my mom?”

  “Only that she’s in Juneau. I’ll check in with her daily if you’d like.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Take good care of your grandfather.”

  “I will.”

  “Pace yourself.”

  “I will.”

  “What do you think, Keb?” Oddmund asked, apparently concerned that the tide or rain or building wind would change his mind. “What’s it going to be? Stay or go?”

  Old Keb reached up and felt the rain in his hair. Nobody carves canoes anymore. He looked at James.

  “Óoxjaa Yaadéi,” James said. “Against the wind. We go.”

  ANNE FOLDED HER laundry in the large common room apartment in Bartlett Cove, while Ranger Ron and two other men shot pool and drank Alaskan Amber next to a small chattering television. The Juneau eleven o’clock news came on. The anchorman said, “We now take you to Jinkaat, a live report, where Tanya Pantaletto has more breaking news about Keb and James Wisting. Tanya, what can you tell us?”

  Anne put down her laundry. Ron put down his pool cue.

  “Good evening, Bill. Yes, this is a rapidly unfolding story. About two hours ago, high school basketball star James Wisting and his grandfather Keb Wisting, the oldest man in Jinkaat, pushed off in a newly carved red cedar dugout canoe that was dedicated last night in a big ceremony. Very early this morning Keb Wisting’s house burned to the ground, the result of suspected arson. I’m now on the beach in Portage Cove, just outside Jinkaat, where townspeople witnessed the canoe’s departure.” The camera swept left and right to show many faces behind Tanya, and beyond the faces, the dark of the night.

  The anchorman asked, “Where are they going in the canoe?”

  “Nobody knows. They initially headed north, toward Icy Strait. From there they might continue north to Crystal Bay, the ancient homeland of the Jinkaat Tlingit.”

  “What are the sea conditions?”

  “It’s pretty calm here, with a light rain. But the marine forecast is calling for a small craft advisory, with winds up to twenty-five knots and seas up to six feet. I have with me a friend of the Wisting family, Oddmund Nystad.” Next to Tanya stood a lanky man who was no stranger to the rain, slightly hunched with wispy hair across his wet brow, water dripping off his angular face. “I understand, Mr. Nystad, that you witnessed the launching of this canoe.”

  “Sure did. We all did.” His voice whispered through his nose. “They took a dog, too, in the canoe, named Steve.”

  “The canoe is named Steve?”

  “No, the dog is Steve. The canoe is Against the Wind.”

  “Are you worried about them?”

  “Not at all. The canoe runs straight and has good freeboard, and a kroner under each mast.”

  “A kroner?”

  “A Norwegian coin, for luck. That’s how the Vikings found Greenland a thousand years ago.”

  “With kroners under their masts?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did they take an outboard?”

  “Nope, they didn’t have outboards a thousand years ago.”

  “Not the Vikings. Keb Wisting and his party, did they take an outboard?”

  “Oh no, Keb don’t like outboards. Too noisy. Besides, there’s no transom on this canoe, no place to mount a motor of any kind.”

  “Do you know where they’re going?”

  “Don’t tell her, Oddmund,” a voice yelled from off camera. A goofy look came over Oddmund’s face, a small accomplishment, Anne thought, given what he had to begin with, all eyebrows and nose. Tanya the reporter made the mistake of swinging her microphone into the crowd to pick up more comments.

  “Hey, Oddmund,” came another voice, “show her what a real kroner looks like, the one under your mast.”

  A rueful smile came over Tanya’s face.

  “They’re going to Crystal Bay,” shouted another voice.

  “Shut up, Roger.”

  “You shut up, Mitch.”

  “Nobody’s going to find him as long as he’s got that magic feather.”

  The camera swung its light onto more wet faces. A few people waved.

  “Crystal Bay,” Tanya said, as the camera turned back to her, “is the Native homeland of the Jinkaat Tlingit. It’s where they came from long ago, and where, if you ask around, you’ll find they want to return again, some to fish and hunt and gather as they did long ago, others to open up industrial economic opportunities through PacAlaska, the regional Native corporation created more than forty years ago, long before Crystal Bay became a national marine reserve.”

  The anchorman asked, “Is it possible that Old Keb Wisting would try to take his canoe all the way to the glaciers?”

  “It’s possible. The glaciers are more than one hundred miles from here. They no doubt have special significance for him; they carved and shaped his homeland.”

  And he’s a carver too, Anne thought.

  “Old Keb trusts no land that has no glaciers,” somebody shouted from off camera.

  Anne smiled. Let the old man go. Just let him go.

  Tanya said, “The glaciers in Crystal Bay today are small remnants of the great glacier that occupied all of Crystal Bay just two hundred and fifty years ago, a glacier that was one hundred miles long, ten to twenty miles wide, and in some places, more than four thousand feet thick. It’s the glacier that forced the Tlingit out of the bay, and has since retreated to unveil a new land, a new bay where Keb Wisting hunted and fished as a boy.”

  “And picked berries,” came a voice from the crowd.

  The anchorman said, “Keb Wisting is the father of Ruby Bauer, the Pac-Alaska advocate for challenging federal jurisdiction in Crystal Bay. How might this canoe journey affect that lawsuit?”

  “Hard to say, Bill. I’ll have continuing news on this story in the morning, exclusive here on Channel Four.”

  The anchorman thanked Tanya and moved on to the next story.

  Ron put down his beer and headed for the door. Turning, he said to Anne, “This is the exact thing Director Johnson was afraid of. A publicity stunt to help PacAlaska get into Crystal Bay.”

  Anne said, “I don’t think that’s Keb Wisting’s intention at all.”

  “It doesn’t matter what his intention is, Anne. It matters what the rest of the world makes it out to be. It matters what the media and PacAlaska turn it into. We’re going to need total control on this, with an incident command team and trained law enforcement personnel from Washington. I’m calling Paul.” Ron seemed thrilled, as if he fed on conflict. Anne wondered: Did the last flower of summer just die?

  It was no time for poetry. She didn’t even finish her laundry.

  ALL NIGHT LONG, Old Keb dreamed to the rhythm of water, enchantments on the canoe, liquid voices he hadn’t heard in a thousand years, voices learned and forgotten and learned again as one life ends and another begins. He could write his story in water: t’éex’, kugóos’, naadaayi heen, séew: ice, cloud, river, rain. Begin with his Tlingit name. From there describe his first hunt with Uncle Austin, his mother’s brother, du káak, how the great man taught him to see, but more important, to observe. “Each animal knows way more than you do,” Uncle Austin used to say, as if it summarized everything he knew and believed. Keb remembered how Bessie taught him to waltz, with his eyes closed. “You’re thinking too much,” she would say. “You’re counting your steps, one-two-three . . . one-two-three. . . . Let go. Close your eyes and let go.” And with that, she moved him across the floor as the wind moves a fireweed seed.

  James and Kid Hugh paddled for hours while Old Keb slept fitfully in the fo’c’sle next to Little Mac. If she moved that night he knew nothing of it. She was little more than a bundle under a blanket.

  At one point Keb awoke to feel the canoe at ease. He heard James and Kid Hugh speaking in low voices as they huddled over one of
those small, satellite-linked direction-finders. Forget dead reckoning and celestial navigation, the taste of salt, the smell of kelp, the voices of birds or the sound of breaking water, the waves like words slapping the hull and speaking of weather yet to come. Forget the maps and dreams of your ancestors. These boys were setting their course by a gadgetgizmo they got at Fred Meyer, on sale. Great Raven. Someday the future will sell us our instincts wrapped in a little box.

  Keb once heard of an old Yup’ik Eskimo who rode a snowmachine all night long through minus-forty to get back home. When he made it, he was too frozen to move. He sat stiff as a board on his machine until his family came out and lifted him off and carried him in to thaw him out. That would be Old Keb after one night in the canoe, stiff as the boat itself, wooden, his bones like cedar. He might die there, dreaming of water.

  One day, many years ago, soon after he and Bessie were married, a letter arrived from a cousin in Petersburg. Written in a tight hand, it told Keb that a famous distant relative had died in Norway. Oscar Wisting, champion skier. Not just any champion. Oscar had been one of four men to ski to the South Pole with Roald Amundsen, the legendary explorer. So perfect was their deed that they beat the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott by five weeks and made it look easy. Too easy. “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale,” Scott wrote to the people of Great Britain as he lay dying in his tent, freezing to death. Better to fail flamboyantly than to succeed quietly. Amundsen was first to the pole, but Scott became the hero. The cousin in Petersburg told Keb that the world saw it through Scott’s eyes, not Amundsen’s. Scott left a widow and an infant son. Amundsen never married. Scott was the better writer, the better actor. Amundsen had no patience for the crowd, no witty responses to reporters’ questions. Scott came from the British Empire, Amundsen from a tiny, newly independent country, Norway. Scott’s journals were edited by his friend, James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, who wrote, “Surely it must be an awful adventure to die.” Amundsen grew disillusioned, bitter. Years later, he disappeared in a small plane over the Arctic. It broke Oscar Wisting’s heart. One night, in a nautical museum in Oslo, while nobody was looking, old Oscar climbed aboard the little wooden ship that he and Amundsen and the others had taken to Antarctica. It had a rounded hull to lift it above the Antarctic pack ice as winter squeezed in from all sides. That way it wouldn’t be crushed. The ship’s name, Fram, meant “forward.” Oscar climbed in and bedded down in his old bunk, surrounded by his best memories, his time with friends in an icy world more wild, pure, and white than anything he’d seen before or since. What comfort he must have felt as he closed his eyes, fell asleep, and never woke up.

  A damn good way to die. In a boat.

  BY THE GRAY light of dawn they could see the opening to Flynn Cove. James and Kid Hugh had raised the small main sail, and reefed it when necessary, and paddled twenty-some miles through the night, without sleep or food, across Port Thomas on an ebbing tide. “It’s still raining, Gramps,” James said, “and it’s beginning to blow pretty hard.”

  “Kuti kanigi,” Keb heard himself say. Tlingit weather watchers. They would sit back-to-back in the big canoes to study the clouds and waves and give good advice. Big canoes rounded Cape Spencer this way, long ago. All these years later, you could still see their tracks through the kelp beds. Forward, Uncle Austin would say. Always forward.

  You don’t have to master nature. You only have to master yourself.

  PART TWO

  timeless yet out of time

  SUPERINTENDENT PAUL BEALS folded one lanky leg over the other and read the Juneau Empire on his iPad. Seated around him, a dozen rangers and administrators spoke softly at a conference table in reserve headquarters in Bartlett Cove. Ron closed his cell phone and said, “Kate Johnson will join us by conference call in a few minutes. We’ll run incident command from here, with coordinated public affairs and a clear search and rescue objective before this old guy paddles his canoe into the bay and dies and everybody gets excited.”

  Anne thought, If words were water he could turn turbines. She listened from out in the corridor, through the open conference room door, where she sat with her back against the wall, near a large notice board filled with memoranda, evidence of a thriving bureaucracy.

  “And Ruby Bauer?” Paul asked Ron.

  “She wants to be in on the conference call.”

  “Tell her no.”

  “She insists.”

  “Tell her no. And no incident command team until we ask Kate about it.”

  Ron got to his feet. “Do I make the call to Ruby?”

  “Yes.”

  It must have been a slow news day, Anne thought. “The Old Man and the Bay” story as reported by the Juneau Empire had caught the attention of bloggers and media outlets around the state, including an online feature in the Alaska Dispatch News, which she pulled up on her MacBook Pro:

  All his life, Old Keb Wisting, part-Norwegian, part-Tlingit Indian, has wanted to go home, back to Crystal Bay. Nobody ever expected him to do it in his nineties, in a canoe, in Alaskan waters patrolled by killer whales, icebergs, and federal government rangers.

  In the last hour, three Anchorage-based news networks had called Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve looking for an angle. Was Old Keb deaf? Disabled somehow? Libertarian? Leatherstocking? Little Big Man? A Tea Partier? Occupy Wall Streeter? Undaunted by danger? Tough as nails? A shaman? Medicine man? Chief?

  “We’re just trying to find an angle here, something to work with,” said a producer. Is he in a war canoe? Will rangers arrest him if he enters Crystal Bay without a permit? Does he have a death wish? A magical feather? A dog in the canoe that nobody else likes but he does? A dog that will defend him to the death? And the two young men, James Wisting and this Kid Hugh, do they have hunting rifles and shotguns? And this Little Mac, this Mackenzie Chen? What’s her story? And the Gant brothers? Where are they?

  Jinkaat Deputy Sheriff Stuart Ewing was quoted as saying, “Keb Wisting has done nothing wrong. He’s a good man who’s wanted for no crimes or questioning. The media is making too much of this. People need to calm down and leave him alone and take it easy.”

  Anne thought: I like this Stuart Ewing. Take It Easy. A great Jackson Browne song made famous by the Eagles. She’d been a Jackson Browne fan ever since she’d seen him sing at a “Save the Oceans” festival in Honolulu, ten years ago. Did Stuart Ewing listen to Jackson Browne?

  She pressed herself deeper into the wall and tried to think about whales, think like a whale. No easy thing. She pushed the door farther open to see the rangers and senior staff all talking quietly, waiting for Kate’s call. There were chiefs of various divisions—law enforcement, resource management, interpretation, administration, and maintenance—plus a cultural anthropologist from Anchorage, and Ron’s pool buddies, who happened to be rangers from Seattle, decked out in their National Marine Reserve Service uniforms, the black-and-white orca patch on the shoulder, gold badge over the heart, small NMRS pin on the lapel, long creases down the sleeves. It intrigued Anne to see all these so-called “division chiefs” assembled to discuss what to do with a real Indian. An old man in a canoe. Paul kept reading the same article that had appeared on everybody’s iPad that morning:

  He grew up in the small town of Jinkaat, near Crystal Bay, where his uncle taught him to hunt seal, moose and deer. Where he picked wild strawberries with his grandmother, who made them into pies. And where, as a boy, he fell asleep in the sunshine, and a bear bit off part of one of his toes, and he came to be known, affectionately by his Norwegian friends and others, as “Keb Zen Raven, Nine and a Half Toes of the Berry Patch.”

  FLANKING ANNE IN the corridor were half a dozen seasonal scientists and field technicians like herself, all licensed boat operators who would be pressed into action. It was Ron’s idea. Use everybody. “O.F.,” he called it. “Overwhelming Force, the kind of thing we should have used in Vietnam and Iraq.” Dear God, Anne thought.

  Next to Anne sat her friend
, Taylor, texting her boyfriend in Strawberry Flats.

  Kate Johnson called in and said by speakerphone, “Where are we, Paul?”

  “We’ll contain it.”

  “If this canoe enters Crystal Bay and causes a big fuss, PacAlaska will almost certainly use it to strengthen their jurisdiction case for industrial development. Not good, Paul. Not good.”

  “We’ll contain it.”

  “The Juneau Empire already makes Keb Wisting sound like Hemingway’s Santiago and he hasn’t even been out there for a full day. Have you heard from Ruby Bauer?”

  “She wanted to be a part of this conference call.”

  “Handle her carefully; contain her but also invite her to Bartlett Cove and mollify her. Tell her that at all costs we will ensure the safety of her father and nephew.”

  “Kate, this is Ranger Ron Ambrose. We met in June.”

  “Yes, Ron.”

  “Can I tell you what I told Paul earlier?”

  “Yes.”

  “At Basic, at Fort Benning, we had a video game called An Unusually Quiet Day that taught us that you make decisions by your actions and your inaction. You choose which way things go. We need to keep things safe by being on high alert at all times. We need to accept the inevitability of the unexpected, and be chronic noticers of anything out of the ordinary. We need total control. That’s why I propose we have an incident command team and a command leader.”

  Nobody said a thing.

  Anne felt herself go rigid. Taylor leaned over and whispered, “Ridiculous.”

  “Let me think about that, Ron,” Kate said.

  Ron’s cell phone rang. “I have to take this. It’s Ruby Bauer.” He stepped out of the conference room and walked past Anne and Taylor down to a private office.

  The atmosphere changed. “Kate, this is Clive Dickinson, a cultural anthropologist from Anchorage.”

  “Yes, Clive.”

  “Do I have permission to speak freely?”

  “Please do.”

  “This isn’t Iraq. This old man and the kids with him aren’t insurgents or terrorists. This isn’t a video game. These people are—”