Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  CRADLEBOARD IN A TREE, August, 1906.

  (gelatin-silver print)

  Taken at sunrise at the western edge of Culloden pasture. A cradleboard with the buckskin laces dangling is hanging from a young cottonwood tree. A grey horse is just to the right of the tree, head down as though sleeping. The soft light filtering through the cottonwood branches gives the photograph an atmosphere reminiscent of the platinotypes made by Clarence H. White in the late 1800s.

  2.

  She hadn’t planned the next shot but had been returning on Daisy from another shoot with all her equipment and had come upon the place where she’d found the drinking tube the previous year. It was late afternoon, with clusters of high cloud in the sky. The sun was just passing through one such cluster, creating an ethereal light. Margaret hurriedly got out her camera and took three shots. The third included some things she was taking home to use as props — an old pair of her grandfather’s moccasins, a necklace, a few of Uncle August’s old tools. As she looked through the viewfinder, she felt the sensation again of seeing presences. This time, a girl came from nowhere to place a small figure of an animal fashioned out of wisps of grass and a little clump of brown-eyed Susans among the rocks. Her face was painted with a wide yellow band across the forehead. Margaret remembered her grandmother saying that this represented the grey trail or the Milky Way. Was this girl the dead girl? And was this like a dream, seeing her through the viewfinder? There were stories about those who dreamed of the dead, their heads touching the pillows of the dead, stories of the dead returning to wear the clothing of the living. Painting your face or purifying your body with a sweatbath could take away the events promised by the dreams. Taking her eye from the camera to look, Margaret saw only the boulders, irradiated by the aureole of the sun behind clouds. She quickly took the props from her saddlebag and placed them by the boulder she’d seen the girl approach with her offerings.

  GRAVE-SITE ABOVE LAUDER CREEK, August 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  In the foreground, boulders heaped in an informal cairn with assorted boulders strewn around the central grouping. Tall stalks of grass cast a netting of shadows over the ground. Beyond, a grove of trees, their shadows clean shapes that echo the dark lines of grass. A shaft of intense light coming from behind high cloud bisects the photograph, illuminating the central cairn. A few artifacts — a necklace of animal teeth, a stone hammer with an image carved into its head, a pair of moccasins — lie to one side of the largest boulder, as if abandoned.

  3.

  “Will you go with me to the kikuli site? I thought I’d ask Tessie and Jack to come along in case I want to use people in some of the shots. If we go early, we can take a picnic and even swim. Nicola Lake never gets very warm, but if the day is hot, we’ll be glad to have it for cooling off.”

  KIKULI HOUSES BY NICOLA LAKE, August, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  Three winter houses near the lakeshore, the notched poles that served as ladders protruding from the west side of the entrance holes on two of them, the third pole in the foreground of the photograph. Clumps of bunchgrass growing on the earth covering the framework indicate that these are not recent structures. Two children stand to the far left of the photograph, each dressed in leggings and a buckskin shirt, some ornamentation woven into the fringe of the shirts. The children are carrying lidded baskets of the sort used as kettles.

  4.

  Wanting to capture something of what she’d seen at the hay camp earlier in the summer, Margaret planned two shoots in a row to take advantage of the fact that the Indians were taking a second cutting of hay off the Reserve’s fields. She slept at her grandmother’s cabin and was awake at four in order to replicate the image she’d loved of the work horses materializing out of the mist near the creek to be harnessed for the day. She tried a number of shots of the rakes and stackers, the men in their work clothes, a group of children coming across the field with baskets of food and bottles of water, the teams of horses waiting out the worst of the heat under a grove of aspens, and a close-up shot of a large cluster of thistles gone to seed.

  HORSES AT DAWN, September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  Two massive horses, Clydesdales (as evidenced by their blazes, each with four white stockings and heavily feathered fetlocks), are emerging out of a misty field. A fence of grey boards bisects the photograph horizontally to the right of the horses. A grove of trees balances the composition to the left of the horses.

  HAYFIELD AT SPAHOMIN RESERVE, September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  An expanse of shorn grass, articulated by high mounds of hay, one of them with a boom stacker positioned over it. Two teams of horses with flat wagons behind them are visible at the far end of the field. The light is clear, and the shadows cast by the stacker timbers indicate that it is around noon.

  5.

  The baskets gave her the most trouble because she had in mind that she wanted to photograph them individually, to take their portraits, and it was difficult to arrange the compositions so that the imbrications achieved the clarity she felt they deserved. In the end, after a number of attempts to place the baskets in settings that told something of their making — among piles of dried rushes, lengths of cedar roots, heaps of various barks — she settled on simply shooting each basket from an angle that gave it a clean shadow.

  A SERIES OF SIX BASKETS FROM THE NICOLA VALLEY, September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  Each basket is photographed on a flat rock surrounded by pasture. Two are of coiled cedar-root, two are open-work, of twigs, and two are of laced bark, birch or poplar, and these are decorated with painted designs. A note on the back of the photo of one bark basket says that the pigments were made of iron pyrites, lichens, copper salts and animal grease. One of the cedar-root baskets is decorated with a fine design, geometric in nature, noted on the back as “deer hoof and entrail.” The other cedar-root basket is a fly pattern of different shadings and has a lid hinged with buckskin. The open-work baskets are particularly beautiful. Each photograph is well composed, but two suffer from light leaks around the edges.

  6.

  “I haven’t been here since the day of the capture. This is where I tied my horse after I saw the wisp of smoke coming up from over the little knoll and all the men sneaking up to it. And right there, that’s where Mr. Edwards and his friends were sitting. They had a skillet over the flames and a coffee pot on that flat rock there. That man who was shot, Shorty Dunn, he ran over there first, and that’s when the shooting began. We could probably find bullets lodged in some of the aspens if we looked. And over here, where the marsh begins, is where the cranes usually nest, the reason I’d come here in the first place. How still it is! All you can hear are the ducks muttering in Chapperon Lake.”

  THE ROBBER'S GLEN, September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  An area of aspen trees on a slope of ground leading to some rushes and reeds on the edge of a body of water. The trees make strong vertical lines across the entire width of the photograph. In the foreground, to the left, is a small ring of stones describing a fireplace, partly covered in leaf litter. Shafts of sunlight filter down through the tree-tops.

  7.

  Because she knew the photograph of August and his family standing in traditional clothing by the tule shelter told only part of the story of their lives in particular and Reserve life in general, Margaret took shots of their cabin, inside and out, and a variety of scenes about Spahomin.

  ALICE'S WASH DAY, September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  A woman in a plain dress with a bandana tied around her head is doing her family’s laundry in a creek. A pile of clothing is on one side of her as she squats beside the creek, scrubbing a pair of men’s trousers against a river rock. A number of items are spread over the bushes to dry — bed-sheets, a child’s dress, several shirts, a pair of bloomers. The woman’s face is turned toward the camera, th
e shadow of a smile on her mouth.

  8.

  Margaret spent several days persuading her grandmother to let her take a portrait shot. When the old lady finally agreed, Margaret brought the sinew chair out onto the porch of the cabin. Asking her grandmother to sit in the chair, she set up the camera and tried various angles before she found the one she wanted.

  MRS. SUSANNAH JACKSON AT HOME, SPAHOMIN. September, 1906.

  GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

  An elderly woman, seated on a chair on a weathered wooden porch, looking straight at the viewer. The chair has thrown a shadow of fine fretwork onto the wall behind it, where animal skins are stretched as though to dry. The woman is wearing a calico dress, bare legs, a pair of moccasins. Her own shadow appears behind her, almost exactly fitting the outline of her form on the chair. She is holding a nosegay of flowers, and on her left wrist can be seen what appears to be a tattoo.

  Nicholas was packaging Margaret’s photographs into a special portfolio to send to Dr. Boas. He thought they were extremely fine, and he wanted his mentor to see them.

  “He’s very interested in photography itself, and not just as a way of recording anthropology research. He often recommends exhibits for us to see. I remember one in particular, the work of a man named Adam Vroman, who spent a number of years making photographs of the Indians of the pueblos. His portraits are magnificent. Another man, O’Sullivan, he’d photographed some of the terrible battles of the Civil War, Gettysburg, Bull Run, the Slaughter Pen at Round Top, and others as well. Later he went west with geographical survey teams. His pictures of the ruined village sites near the Grand Canyon are extraordinary. And there’s a beauty I remember, one of a cliff house at Canyon de Chelly. You can see the striations of the rock, his focus is so clear.”

  The places sounded a haunted poetry to Margaret as she watched her photographs disappear into tissue and card. Canyon de Chelly, Bull Run . . . for a moment, she saw a grey field with some trees to the side and bodies lying side by side, like felled logs. Some were draped with striped blankets, looking sodden. She could smell stale gunpowder and the cloying odour of blood. When Grandmother Stuart had visited two years earlier, she and William sat one evening by a blazing fire of pine logs discussing the terrible war that had occurred in their country. William had been a boy in Astoria during the battles of the Civil War, but news of them had come across the land by newspaper and telegraph. His own father had been a supporter, in word at least, of the Union Army, and had been angry as the lists of the dead, published in the newspapers, grew longer and longer. William and his mother talked quietly of those days, and Margaret heard the names of the foreign cities softly punctuating their conversation: Petersburg, Richmond, and loveliest of all, Arlington, Virginia, a name like falling water. Now, remembering Arlington, she shuddered, associating it for reasons beyond her knowledge with loss, with the terrible ceremonies of the dead. Shaking her head to clear her sight, she began to make a list of the photographs she was sending. Although she had the plates still, she wanted to keep track of the prints.

  I have dreamed of a girl.

  In all weathers I’ve travelled up to stand on the high plateau, to look around me half in excitement, half in fear. Although I know enough of my family background to know that the Nicola Valley does not figure in my past, no relation farmed here, no great-ancestor walked across these wide grasslands trapping small animals and skinning them carefully, no one fished the lakes, no one drew a needle of porcupine quill under the surface of a child’s skin, pulling a thread blackened with charcoal to mark her for life. Yet I am no less branded than the horses that come to the truck, the arrows and crosses of their belonging delicate scars that tie them forever to a patch of grass. Each time I come, I wonder what I will discover — a small wildflower unnoticed until now; the remains of a blackbird’s nest; a shadow in a corner of the photographs taken of trees, buildings, views of the far-off hills. And the shadow might have been a girl, tracing the narrative of her own belonging, unaware of me waiting in the years to come to find her in the pollen, the seeds I bring unnoticed in my clothing, the clump of southernwood I dig up with a spoon to take home for a dry garden. Waiting on the side of the road below Hamilton Mountain, I almost see her on her bay mare, obscured by dust and the shadow of a cloud. When I sleep, she enters my dreams quietly, leaving a fine mesh of memory threaded with the tiniest of keepsakes, the hollow at my ankle pierced with the sharp seeds of rye.

  At the bottom of the box of memorabilia, something has slid between the flaps of cardboard. An envelope, powdery as moth wings, foxed like dried and fading blood, and inside, a piece of paper folded into squares. I know what I will find before I open it: the certificate telling of her death, influenza, 1908, before she has even turned twenty. The language of mortality is so formal. Schedule B — Deaths. Name and surname of deceased. Certified cause of death, and duration of illness. Religious Denomination. The careful lettering of her name, the duration, three weeks, her physician, Dr. Tuthill. And was there a moment when the hand paused before filling in Presbyterian, from her father’s Scottish upbringing, did a heart remember a girl crouched in a sweat lodge, sweet juniper steaming on hot rocks? How angels move. Is it too much to imagine her still among the hills or seen in the cheekbones of a girl selling ice cream in Merritt, wiping tables at the Quilchena Hotel, leading a group of green riders across the rangeland at Douglas Lake?

  After the photographs had gone to New York, Margaret was too busy to think about camera work. The ranch was gearing up for the fall cattle drive, and as usual she would accompany her father on the round-up and then to Kamloops to the buyers. They would take two full days and part of a third to make the trip, spending the first night near Stump Lake, where the cowhands and the Stuarts would sleep in an abandoned cabin and barn while the cattle rested and foraged on bunchgrass. The second night would be spent between Brigade Lake and Knutsford, depending on time and weather. They’d rise very early on the third morning and try to drive the cattle to the corrals by the railway station by mid-morning. Some years they would have trouble — a minor stampede when a grizzly met them on the trail, tearing the chest out of a steer before the cowboss shot him dead; some losses when a couple of young steers got into a patch of larkspur and ended up bloated on the ground, unable to continue; and once there was a sudden hard freeze-up at the higher elevation that upset the cattle and horses, coming as it did without warning.

  Nicholas was working hard at his information-gathering, and there wasn’t much time for long rides together on his irregular trips to the valley from his base at Spences Bridge. He wrote letters to Margaret, which she would take out to the creek, reading them under the cottonwoods which were beginning to lose their leaves.

  I’ve been out to a series of deep pools near Spences Bridge where a few men were using bag nets of bark and twine. These were hung from hoops of fir with rings made of animal horn. They are very beautiful and work well, too. The feasts of salmon are wonderful, and everywhere you can smell the fish drying on racks in the sun. At first I found it almost nauseating, but now it is simply a note in the complex melody of the air. I was lucky enough to be asked to go night-fishing with a group of young men Charles Walkem introduced me to. They used torches of pitch-pine, and it was eerie to watch them spearing the fish from rock shelves along the river, like looking at old photographs. We went out in a canoe, too, and they speared from the sides of the boat. Some of the fish were enormous.

  Margaret was familiar with these methods from her mother’s family, although on the smaller creeks they usually used weirs. She had helped take fish that had been lured into traps within the weir systems, some of them speared and some of them raked in with gaffs. Her mother’s brothers always brought a supply of fresh and dried fish to the Stuarts in exchange for beef or pork or young stock. She knew what Nicholas meant by the odour of drying fish. It was everywhere this time of year, hanging in the air near the drying racks and shifted about by wind. She thought of it as one of the smells of aut
umn, tied to the season like new hay to summer and fresh scallions to spring. Sometimes in winter she would pull an item of clothing, unworn since the fall, out of her wardrobe and be surprised at the faint smell of smoke and fish contained in its fibres.

  The prospect of Nicholas leaving entirely caught Margaret unaware on a visit he made to the valley in early October. Walking in the field behind the home ranch, he told her he had nearly completed the work he had set out for himself upon arriving.

  “I’ve made notes, made drawings, photographed everything and everyone, conducted many interviews, and I can’t really put off going back to the university any longer. I still have course work to complete, and then I’ll treat the translation as a thesis, perhaps writing a monograph of my own as a kind of appendix to Mr. Teit’s work.”

  Margaret was quiet. She had not forgotten his other life, exactly, but in her pleasure at his company, the attraction she felt not just to him but to his ideas and work, she had put aside her knowledge that his time in the valley would end. She looked at him and touched his arm, not quite trusting her voice to say what she felt. He took her hand and they walked a little further.

  “I have been thinking almost constantly of what I need to say to you, Margaret,” Nicholas began, his own voice tentative. “You see, I could not have imagined, when I arrived here, how I would come to feel about you. Everything seemed so clear — I would gather my data, talk to people, make some contacts that might serve me over the years for future work in this area. I suppose I hoped to find the valley congenial, even to make a friend or two. Those things are true beyond my dreams. But I had not counted on falling in love, though that is the most important thing of all. And am I right in thinking your feelings are the same?”

  Margaret nodded, and for a few minutes they walked, the ranch buildings receding as they began to climb the eastern ridge above the field. The profession of love surprised her a little; she knew the current of emotion running between them was powerful, but she hadn’t yet given it a name. She thought of it like water, sometimes fast moving as a spring freshet, sometimes more placid and quiet, like a pool. And, like water, mysterious and lovely.