Hannah & the Spindle Whorl

by Carol Anne Shaw

  “Do you think we’ll find anything else in that cave tomorrow?”

  “I dunno, Han.” He swivels around in his chair. “Maybe some gold bars and bullion?”

  “Daaadd! It’s a Native site, not a sunken pirate ship.”

  “Well, you and Max just be careful. What if the cave belongs to Bigfoot or some other old cranky thing?”

  “Bigfoot?” I sneer. “You mean the Sasquatch? Come on, Dad. You and Max are both obsessed with Sasquatches!”

  Dad just raises his eyebrow at me and keeps quiet.

  “Uh, Dad? Hello? You know that Bigfoot isn’t real, riigghht?” It would be just like my dad to be a huge believer. He lives in a fantasy world most of the time anyway.

  “Don’t be so sure, Han,” he says, hiding the grin on his face. “There are a lot of people who say they’ve seen one.”

  “Sure,” I say, adding, “just like all the people who say they’ve been abducted by aliens!”

  That makes him smile. “Just when did you get to be so skeptical, Hannah Banana?”

  “Whatever. I just hope we find some more cool stuff tomorrow, not a stinky old Sasquatch guy.”

  “Well, unless you get yourself off to bed, you’re not going to find out, are you?” he says in his father-knows-best kind of voice. I blow him a kiss and climb the stairs, trying not to trip over Chuck as he weaves in and out of my ankles, mewing for more wet food.

  I curl up under my comforter and look up at the sky. It’s clear and the moon is big — almost full. The stars blink over the top of the mountains and I can see a satellite moving steadily across the sky above Mount Prevost. I wonder what kind of pictures it’s sending back to earth tonight. Maybe there are some of me and Chuck wrapped up in my quilt, or maybe a couple of Dad scratching his head, chewing his pencil and making notes that no one else can read in the margins of his typed pages. A moment later, I hear Chuck purring and the clacketty-clack of Dad’s fingers on the keyboard. The last thing I remember before falling asleep is listening to the music coming from the Baxters’ place two boats down.

  Tuesday turns out to be bright and sunny. The birds are singing really loud this morning — a sound I look forward to all winter. Chuck is already up, sitting on the windowsill looking hopefully at the little wren perched on the stovepipe of Ben’s boat.

  Dad is nowhere to be seen, but while I’m getting my cereal, I hear his feet coming along the dock outside. He has a newspaper under his arm and his sweater is on backwards with the tag sticking up under his chin — my father the fashion statement.

  “Today’s the day!” I tell him excitedly.

  “Right … right … the museum thing,” he says, beginning to unfold the newspaper. “Make sure you take the camera, Han … you may find some other stuff, right?”

  “Good idea.” Once again, I imagine the newspaper headline: Local Girl Discovers Important Archaeological Site. Only now, I’ll also get credit for the photography. Sweet!

  I’m too excited to finish my cereal, so I give it to Chuck. I stuff some things into my backpack and hurry out.

  “Knock ’em dead, kiddo,” Dad calls after me.

  Outside, the air is still and the docks are sort of slippery from the dew. I jog down the planks and up the ramp, two steps at a time. I don’t even stop in at the bakery to say hi to Nell. Max and I meet on the trail almost as soon as I cut into the forest.

  “Where have you been?” he demands, looking impatient.

  “What … it isn’t even nine-thirty!”

  “Well, I’ve been up and down the trail for, like, hours already! Geez … I never thought you would sleep in on a day like today.”

  “Chill out, Miller!” I tell him. “The team has to drive up from Victoria. Anyway, they said ten o’clock. We still have a whole half an hour.”

  “Whatever,” he shrugs. “So … anyway … show me the site. We can go in first, and look around and stuff. I brought my flashlight.” He waves a slim black Maglite under my nose.

  “No, we can’t. I promised my dad I wouldn’t go in the cave again until he or some other adult knows how to find it. And remember, Mr. Sullivan said to wait for the crew just in case we wreck something important trying to get in.”

  “Oh yeah,” Max shrugs. “Well, show me where it is, anyway. I couldn’t find it.”

  We walk quickly down the trail and talk nonstop about the possible finds inside the small dark space. It takes me a minute or two to remember just where to stop, and I have to backtrack to find the huge clump of salal.

  “Here it is,” I tell Max. “Look, you have to get down on your hands and knees, and …” I begin to scramble through — but then I stop, suddenly.

  “What are you doing?” Max stops short before he bumps into me.

  I don’t say anything. I just look straight ahead on the ground, and then I turn slightly and look up into the bushes above me. It’s spooky. Something feels funny … not quite right.

  “Earth to Hannah! Whassup?” Max asks, sounding impatient again.

  “Shhhhh, just a sec,” I stall. I stare up past the salal into the giant cedar that looms before me. The breeze has picked up a bit and it moves the huge limbs of the tree, back and forth. They make a soft whispering sound. I hold my breath. I think I hear someone. I think I hear a girl’s voice … a girl’s voice calling someone, but I can’t be sure, and then the feeling goes away — probably because Max is pushing on the back of my foot.

  “Anderson! What’s with you? Get going!”

  “Uh … er … did you hear something a second ago?” I ask him. “Did you hear a girl’s voice?”

  “What? Are you nuts?”

  “Okay. Never mind. Here. You have to get through this small space right here, and kind of tunnel behind this yew tree, and … are you with me?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m right behind you.”

  “Okay, then, check it out.” We brush off our hands and knees and stand staring at the wall of ivy before us. I point to the dark opening at one end.

  “Whoa! COOL!” Max cries, walking toward it, craning his head down low so he can check out the entrance.

  “Don’t start messing around in there, Max. You might wreck something,” I warn him, before looking over my shoulder and up at the cedars again.

  “Oh yeah? Like a creepy skeleton of some old spirit dude? You’re not freaked out, are you Hannah?” he teases.

  “No! But you are definitely obsessed with creepy things and dead stuff.”

  “Nah — you’re just chicken. I can tell,” he says. “I can see it in your eyes.” He looks like he’s enjoying himself.

  “Besides,” he continues, “what’s so creepy about dead stuff? Everybody’s curious. Why do you think cars slow down at accidents? ’Cause it’s a total gore fest! Everyone wants to get a good look!”

  It feels like someone has just taken a sledgehammer to my chest. I can’t breathe … Max’s words … The car … they said it was a write-off. I remember the exact moment when the police officer came; how he struggled to find the right words to tell Dad and me what happened; how I couldn’t believe that Mom was never coming home again. For a second I can see her face right in front of me. I can smell her … the lemon-scented fragrance she wore every single day. I feel like I’m going to fall over. Instead, I yell at my friend.

  “Max! You stupid jerk!”

  And then I’m shimmying through the underbrush to get out to the trail. I can’t get there fast enough. In a flash I’m up and running. I don’t know why, but I keep going. I run as fast as I can and I don’t stop until I get to the clearing at the end of the trail, near the bakery.

  I hear Max running up behind me. “Hannah! What’s your problem? I don’t get you.”

  I can tell he’s mad. He must think I’ve really lost it. I just stand there, breathing hard, staring out at the ocean, unable to look at him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He steps in front of my face and breaks my gaze, forcing me to look him in the eyes.

  What’s wrong
with me is that I suddenly hate Max. I don’t care about the stupid spindle whorl. Or the archaeology team. I don’t care about the cave or my school project. I don’t care about anything.

  I miss my mom.

  I miss my mom, so much!

  10

  The Dig

  “HANNAH?” NOW MAX looks more worried than angry. “Hannah, how come you’re crying? Will you please tell me what’s wrong? I don’t understand.”

  Of course, how could he? He doesn’t know that much about me. He was just goofing off; guys are like that. And I understand how it must seem to him since he knows absolutely nothing about my mom. So I take a deep breath, and I tell him everything, about how she died in a car accident almost two years ago. When I’m done, he looks like he wants to sink right into the ground.

  “I’m really sorry, Hannah. I … I didn’t know,” he says.

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  “I just thought your parents were, like, divorced or something.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, I’m okay. It felt good to talk about it.” I smile and the tension vanishes. “Besides, I figured I’d better tell you, before I sucker punched you for being such an idiot.”

  “Oh really? Like you could, Anderson!” He gives me a good-natured shove and I trip him and knock him to the ground. We’re both laughing when we catch sight of a big green pickup truck pulling up outside the bakery. The driver gets out first and I recognize Mr. Sullivan, wearing a grey sweater. As he grabs a backpack from the box of the pickup, another person, a woman, gets out. She’s wearing khaki cargo pants and a Green Day T-shirt, and she looks pretty young. The last person to leave the truck is a tall guy wearing a hat. He looks real serious and I think he’s younger than Mr. Sullivan, but it’s hard to tell ’cause of the hat. Max and I run across the road to meet them.

  “Hi there!”

  “Good morning, Hannah. Hey, Max,” says Mr. Sullivan. I smile and secretly hope they can’t tell that I’ve been crying. I’m not a pretty crier. In fact, I look like a Hawaiian blowfish after I’ve cried.

  Mr. Sullivan introduces Max and me to the team: Jim Williams is a speleologist — he studies caves — and an expert in the field of First Nations culture; Kelly Parker is a graduate student at the university. I can tell Max thinks she’s cute by the way he tries to stand taller. And he’s kind of staring at her dark wavy hair, piled loosely on top of her head, and the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.

  We’re ready to hit the trail but first Kelly darts off to buy juice and butter tarts from Nell at the bakery. She says she didn’t have time for breakfast but I know it’s the smell of those baked raisins that got her. Max watches her jog across the road and then he looks up at Jim and blurts, “Hey, are you Coast Salish?”

  “Good guess. What was your first clue?” Jim teases, pointing to the hat on his head. Max reads the word Quw’utsun’, part of the Cowichan Cultural Centre logo embroidered in plain view on the front. He looks over at me and I can see his face turning red. I just shake my head and look away. Duh.

  Then Kelly comes back and Mr. Sullivan says to me, “All right, boss, lead the way.”

  “Sure,” I say, trying to sound calm, but I can’t wait to get started. “It isn’t very far at all.”

  Everyone is so anxious to see the cave that no one stops to look at anything on the way, so we get there pretty fast. I show them where to shimmy under and through the underbrush, one at a time, ’cause it has to be the exact spot. Within minutes, we’re all standing in front of the ivy-covered rock face.

  “Wow,” says Jim, shaking his head. “That’s been growing here for a while. Wish they had nabbed the twit who brought that stuff over on the boat!”

  “What stuff?” I ask.

  “The ivy,” says Mr. Sullivan.

  “Oh, I like it. It’s pretty.” I tell him my grandma has ivy covering the whole front of her house in Vancouver. There was even a robin’s nest buried in it last spring. A turquoise eggshell fell out of that nest, and I still have it sitting on my dresser at home.

  “It may look nice, but it’s an introduced species. They choke out all the native plants, and they are impossible to get rid of once they start.”

  Jim studies the ivy for a minute or two and then checks to see what else might be growing in and around it. Mr. Sullivan tell us that Jim is also an ethnobotanist, and explains that this means he studies the history and use of local plants, especially where they grew and what the people native to the area used them for in ancient times.

  Jim starts pulling away the ivy in one corner of the rock face, just over by the cave entrance. “Whoa … will you look at this?” he says excitedly.

  “WHAT!” Max and I screech at the same time.

  Jim carefully removes more of the ivy to reveal a dull red line on the rock. “I’m not sure but I think we might be looking at the edge of a very big pictograph,” he explains.

  “That’s rock art, for us laypersons,” Kelly laughs and pulls out her camera.

  “For real?” I ask, stepping closer.

  “For real,” Mr. Sullivan confirms with a half-smile. He puts down his pack and tells us all to set about the business of removing the rest of the ivy from the rock. “Hannah, you and Max can start over there, slowly, and with care, like this.”

  “But what about the cave?” Max pipes.

  “All in good time. First things first.” Mr. Sullivan and Jim both say it at the same time. By the expression on Jim’s face, and Kelly’s, too, I get the feeling that it’s one of Mr. Sullivan’s favourite sayings.

  Max and I take off our own backpacks and get to work. We pick up an ivy runner each and begin pulling it away from the rock, very gently.

  About eleven o’clock, we all stand back to look at our progress. I can’t believe what I’m looking at! Before us is a crudely drawn human figure — a girl — and not far from it, another girl. The two figures have their arms open to each other, as if they are going to hug or something. They’re painted in a dull red, which is faded in spots, especially near the bottom. There’s this big circle between them and it has a tiny circle in the middle.

  Mr. Sullivan thinks that the ivy covering them all these years is probably what protected the figures from the elements.

  “Maybe the ivy’s good for something after all, then,” I say, rubbing some dirt off the end of my nose.

  “You could be right, Hannah,” he says.

  I pull out my camera and, together with Kelly, I take a zillion photographs of the rock art. Mr. Sullivan and Jim start talking seriously about site protection and funding. They also need permission from the Cowichan Band for a full-scale excavation. If there’s enough money, Mr. Sullivan wants to involve the university’s summer field school, which means Kelly gets to stay on.

  “This is a very rich site,” Mr. Sullivan adds. “We know that Tl’ulpalus village was only a stone’s throw from here, very close to where your houseboat now sits, Hannah. There must have been some significance to this cave for that village.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because of this pictograph,” Jim explains. “The locations for rock art carvings and paintings were chosen very carefully by the Coast Salish. These places were usually places of mystery, where spiritual forces were believed to be especially strong.”

  “This discovery is sure to excite a lot of people,” Mr. Sullivan adds.

  I look at the crudely drawn picture on the rock, and study the strange circle between the two figures. Could that circle be a drawing of my spindle whorl?

  11

  Voices

  WE STOP FOR LUNCH and everyone is chattering at once about what this means for the museum and how it adds another piece to the puzzle of Vancouver Island’s rich history. Mr. Sullivan fiddles around with his iPhone, makes a bunch of calls, and then scribbles some stuff in a spiral notebook. His handwriting is even worse than my dad’s.

  “What’d they use for that paint?” Max asks Kelly, before biting off a corner of his tuna
sandwich.

  “Mmmm … things like charcoal, and crushed shells, and berries and stuff. And they’d usually mix in fish eggs or animal fat to make it last longer.”

  “How’d they figure that out?” I ask. Who’d ever think that fish eggs would make paint last longer?

  “Well, I guess the first people here had thousands of years of trial and error,” Kelly explains. “Probably used oolichan oil too,” she adds, pulling her hair into a ponytail. Max is staring at her again.

  “Ola-what?” I ask.

  “Oolichan. A tiny oily fish. Big staple food for the Coast Salish.”

  “Well, I’ve lived near the sea my whole life and I’ve never heard of them.”

  “It’s true. They were a handy fish to have around. There aren’t many critters that will help you write a letter before you eat them,” Jim says, smiling.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. Maybe all the excitement of the day has gone to his head. I think that Jim senses my confusion because he goes on to explain. “Oolichan. Candlefish. That’s another name for them. So oily you could run a wick right through them, light them up and use them like candles.”

  “No way. Really?” I wonder if Dad has ever heard of them. He knows a little about a lot of things.

  “Really,” he assures me.

  We talk more about fish and spirits and shamans and stuff. Jim tells us a few Coast Salish legends that are pretty intense and kind of spooky. Especially the one about Quamichan, a wild woman who lived on Salt Spring Island, who ran around with a basket that she’d made out of a snake. She ate people, and would sneak into different villages at night and steal the children. Jim said that one time she hid a hundred little kids in a cave until she was ready to eat them for dinner. Then she invited her sister to come and help her cook them, but in the end she got pushed into a big fire and burned up. It’s a pretty freaky story.

  I move a couple of feet farther away from the cave after Jim tells that one! But, scary or not, I’m glad that I now know a little bit more about the people who used to live on the island and the stories they would tell.