Hannah & the Spindle Whorl

by Carol Anne Shaw

  “Oh, right. What if he’s lost somewhere?” I’m surprised at how intense I sound. “What if he meets that thing outside, in the dark? What if he meets Thumquas!”

  “No,” Yisella says calmly, “he’ll be fine. Now go back to sleep. I’m sure Poos will show up in the morning.”

  She’s right, of course. Cats love wandering around at night. Chuck often went on little midnight adventures, returning in the morning with a half-chewed mouse or some fishy souvenir for us in his mouth. But I can’t settle. I miss the warmth of Poos’ little body curled up in the space beside my neck, and the sound of his gentle purring in my ear. How can silence be so deafening? What if he’s lost forever? A tear slides down my face. Another surprise. It’s so quiet that I cover my ears with my hands. What if he’s lost in the woods and unable to find his way back to Tl’ulpalus? What if—

  “Did you hear that?” Yisella says, suddenly wide awake too.

  “Hear what?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. A booming noise. The third one tonight. There were two others earlier. I almost woke you up but then they stopped.” I hear her feet padding across the ground as she comes to sit down on the end of my platform. “Something is different. I can sense it. I’m like my father that way.” I can see her dark shape at the end of my bed and even though I can’t see her face, I can feel her staring at me.

  “Maybe the noises scared Poos away,” I say, sitting up and wiping my face with my arm. “I really need to find him, Yisella. He might be lost or trapped somewhere.” Like me.

  I half expect Yisella to tell me I’m being totally dumb — that it’s ridiculous to go out in the middle of the night in search of a lost kitten. But she doesn’t. She’s dressed and outside in no time, heading down to the beach before I finish getting dressed. I chase after her as quickly as I can, avoiding the bits of driftwood and rocks on my way.

  We stand on the sand, side by side, looking out over the flat ocean. The night is calm, the air is still, and the stars twinkle overhead. Jack stands a little farther down the beach, preening his feathers. How does he do that? Just appear out of nowhere whenever Yisella and I go anywhere together.

  I try to steer Yisella back toward the longhouse, “I think Poos might have gone into the woods.”

  “Okay,” she says, “but first let’s go up the beach and around the point. I’m sure Poos will show up, but I have to find out more about those booming noises.” She disappears into the darkness and I can barely make out her shape as I follow the sound of her feet scrambling over the rocks.

  22

  The Wait

  IT’S THE FIRST TIME during this whole crazy adventure that I feel kind of choked at Yisella. It’s way past the middle of the night, I’m tired, my feet are wet again and I’m traipsing after her on a rocky beach with no idea where I’m going or why I’m going there. I call for her to wait up, but she doesn’t stop. She’s moving about a million miles an hour. Several times, I slip on slimy rocks and fall on my knees. I wince from the pain in my injured knee, still sore from my fall in the river. What’s her hurry, anyway? I thought she was going to help me look for Poos. And what’s this special “sense” that she claims to have? I’m mulling all this over in my head when she appears in front of me and says, “There! Again! The loud boom. Did you hear it?”

  I didn’t hear anything. I was too busy being mad, but I can’t tell her that I think she’s delirious from lack of sleep, so I strain my ear in the direction of the ocean and listen. Nothing. Nothing except for the call of a gull or two and the gentle slapping of the waves on the shoreline. It’s the same sound that the water makes when it slaps against our houseboat. I’d give anything to be back there now. Back in my warm bed with my lavender and green striped duvet, with Chuck purring like a little wind-up motor beside me. I blink a couple of times, partly from the salty sting in the air, but mostly from the picture I have in my head of Chuck stretched out with his paw on my cheek, ignoring my pleas to move over. I miss him so much, which makes me almost frantic to find Poos.

  “Your ears must be full of seaweed,” Yisella snaps, clearly annoyed with me.

  Great. Now I get to be cold, tired and have insults hurled at me. Seaweed ears. Nice.

  “Yisella … come on. Can’t we just go back to the woods and find Poos? There’s nothing out there. I don’t get why you have to be so intense all the time!”

  “Because I listen when something speaks to me!” she yells. “I care about my family and our safety! I don’t want to be afraid anymore and I don’t want to lose anyone else!”

  She looks smaller, kind of deflated, and I instantly feel ashamed of myself for whining like that. Me of all people. I remember all the ups and downs that I felt in the days that followed my mom’s funeral. Yisella’s been through so much. I make my mind up, then and there, to be a better friend.

  “I’m sorry, Yisella. Of course we’ll keep going. You lead the way and I’ll just follow.” I find the energy somewhere to follow my determined friend up the beach.

  Soon we veer off the rocky shore and onto a hardly-there trail skirting the beach. It’s even darker in here, damper, and the roots from the trees are slippery and treacherous. I press the illumination button on my iron-woman watch and it lights up, but it still reads 4:11:26 pm. I shake my head. Really, what difference does it make if I know what time it is? I don’t even know what day it is. But I do know that it’s August, and that the days are already getting shorter. I even heard the crickets the past few evenings, a sound that always comforts me. Until now, that is. Now their sound just makes me anxious, as if I’m running out of time. But time to do what?

  I follow Yisella over the dark tangle of roots and across fallen logs. I’m not used to this skirt yet, so it makes me clumsy, and I trip more often than before. Occasionally I hear a rustle in the bushes beside me and then something runs out in front of me and disappears into the salal. It chitters at me from the safety of the undergrowth.

  “Raccoon,” I whisper, while my heartbeat returns to normal.

  Finally we come to a small clearing on a point, far from Tl’ulpalus village, and stop. Yisella better have a pretty major gut feeling about something to take us this far from our beds. I can see the moonlight reflecting off the calm night ocean and Yisella points to a seal bobbing its head just above the water’s surface.

  “Now what do we do?” I ask, wrapping my cloak around my legs.

  “Now we just wait, watch and listen.” She stares straight out to the sea.

  “For what?” I sound ignorant, but I don’t care.

  She answers, talking more to herself than to me, as if she’s trying to justify her reason for coming all this way. “For anything. For something.”

  So, that’s what we do. We wait. Yisella watches and listens. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open, and I feel myself nod off several times. I’m jolted awake each time her elbow gives me a little shove.

  This time I hear it. Faint, and in the distance: a deep boom. Almost like the fireworks that I watch from Victoria’s inner harbour every Canada Day, only farther away. Yisella hears it, too, and clutches my arm.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “Okay. I heard that one!”

  “What’s making that sound?” Her fingers squeeze my arm so hard that I think she’s going to cut off my circulation.

  “I’m not sure. It almost sounded like an explosion, or maybe—”

  “Maybe a big fireball from a hwunitum boat.” There’s a solemn tone to her voice.

  “A cannon? From a white man’s boat?”

  “Yes, it happened before when a boat came, not to Tl’ulpalus, but to other Quw’utsun’ villages. Fireballs flew through the sky from a big boat with many white sails. I heard this story told when all the Quw’utsun’ villages gathered. Twice the fireballs came as a warning from the hwunitum.”

  “What kind of warning?” I ask Yisella. There’s nothing about this in my textbook at school.

  “It was a warning that they’re here. Nothing more, nothin
g less. It is why we must watch and listen. We need to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Another one of my lame questions.

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know,” Yisella answers. “Just ready.”

  I sit there beside my friend, waiting and watching. Exactly what for, I’m not sure. But at least now I’m listening.

  23

  Left Behind

  IS IT THE WEEKEND? Is it a school day? Am I in my own bed? I wake up the next morning not knowing what day it is or where I am. The first thing I hear is Jack, cawing madly from an arbutus branch directly above my head, squawking louder than usual. I’m about to cover my ears when I hear the ocean and the seagulls calling just above its surface. I wake up to those sounds almost every day of my life. As soon as I shift my body, I get a sharp pain in my hip, and I feel that my leg has gone to sleep. Then it hits me: I’m not at home on my houseboat; I’m not even at Yisella’s on my sleeping platform; I’m lying on the hard ground with a sharp rock digging into me. My knee throbs and I remember last night, how I slipped and fell. I’m miles away from Cowichan Bay, or should I say Tl’ulpalus, on a rocky bluff, and I’m still wearing the cedar skirt. I’m cranky and it feels scratchy.

  I sit up and rub my eyes. The day is another beautiful summer day with the sun’s rays already warming the top of my head. Jack stands a little way away, craning his neck out toward the sea, the wind ruffling his feathers in every direction. He looks as if he just rolled out of bed too.

  I squint and try to focus on the ocean when I see something moving way out on the water. Six dark specks, in a group, are swiftly moving past Salt Spring Island, about to disappear from sight. I nudge Yisella who is still sleeping, and when she only groans and rolls onto her back, I nudge her even harder.

  “Ouch!” she cries, and stirs again.

  Then I blast her with, “YISELLA!”

  She’s up like a shot, as disoriented as I was, and checking her surroundings for a clue as to where she is. A look of horror comes over her face when she looks at the sky, to the sun.

  “Oh no, Hannah … we’ve slept so long! It’s close to midday …” but she doesn’t finish her sentence when she sees the look on my face. She follows my gaze to the dark specks in the distance and she knows, just as I do, that those specks are canoes from her village. Canoes that will wind through the twists and turns of Active Pass before they cross over the wide open Strait of Georgia.

  The colour drains from her face and her shoulders slump. For the first time ever, she looks like she’s totally had enough and ready to give up. “It’s no good,” she says. “They’ve gone.”

  “No way! They wouldn’t leave without us … I mean you!” I shout, angry at the entire village. Didn’t they notice Yisella was gone? Didn’t they try to find her? How could they just leave her without knowing if she’s okay?

  “They can’t wait for just one person. Not when they were already late to go. Not when everything was right for leaving. They have to go when the time and tide are right. I shouldn’t have slept! I should not have let this happen!”

  “What’ll we do?” I’m starting to panic but the last thing Yisella needs is a frantic friend burdening her with hysterics. I try to be calm, except I know that the villagers took most of the food with them and the cooking tools as well. Tl’ulpalus will be like a ghost town when we return.

  “It’s okay.” Yisella stands up and brushes off her skirt with both hands. “There’s plenty of food here. We won’t starve, it’s summer. I mean, there’s lots of things to eat here at this time of year. But we have to stay calm.”

  Stay calm? Who is she kidding?

  I’m amazed how quickly Yisella recovers from stuff. Sure, she freaks out like anyone else, but she seems to be able to pull herself together so much faster than I ever could. Doesn’t she ever come completely unstitched and just pitch a fit?

  “When they get back and discover that I’m unharmed — that I stayed behind because I fell asleep — I’ll have shamed them.” She twists and untwists the shining abalone shell on the cord around her neck.

  “But what about those cannons? What about the boat?” I ask, recalling the strange booms we heard last night.

  Yisella doesn’t answer right away. I know she’s worried about that too. She doesn’t stop twisting the abalone shell. “We have to go back to Tl’ulpalus. We should stay in the village until they return. That’s all we can do. I don’t want to leave my village empty. Not now. They won’t be gone for too long.”

  We head back through the thick undergrowth of the forest, back to, well, nothing. Or should I say no one. My stomach growls, so I keep an eye out for something edible. I spy some blackberries. They’re not the big variety that was introduced later on but they are incredibly sweet. I stuff them into my mouth, and instantly I picture myself on my first day here. Yisella’s right. There is plenty of food. If we had to, we could probably live on blackberries alone. I am instantly energized.

  When we get back to Tl’ulpalus, the houses already look bleak and deserted even though it can’t be more than a couple of hours since everyone left. Somehow, the buildings look older and more weathered. Jack flies overhead and lands on one of the welcoming poles facing out to sea.

  Yisella and I make our way up the beach and there I spot Poos, hunkered down in the grass beyond the sand. He looks anxious until he sees us, then he runs out and wraps himself around my leg as if he’s a furry little piece of Velcro. I pick him up and carry him as he purrs happily in the crook of my arm. I bury my face in his fur and close my eyes.

  “Oh, Poos,” I murmur, squeezing his little paw tenderly, “I thought I’d lost you for good. I’m so glad you’re back!”

  We walk through the village checking for any stored food they may have left behind. We’re relieved to find enough dried salmon, butter clams and berry cakes to last us for quite a while. Yisella says that we can pick more berries and she knows how to dry them into strips, a kind of blackberry fruit leather.

  We’re both pretty quiet for the rest of the day. It’s like neither of us is quite sure what to say or do. I can tell that Yisella is ashamed to have missed the summer trip. I think she even feels she may have let her imagination — the “booms” far out on the ocean — get the better of her, although I know she wonders if that something is still there? And what if her feelings do mean something? Maybe there is a reason why she’s supposed to stay here at the end of the summer? I want to share my thoughts, but my instincts tell me it’s better to leave her alone for a while. Even though she believes that her village had to go, I can’t help wondering if she’s feeling abandoned. I can’t imagine my dad not looking for me if I ever went missing.

  While Yisella is down on the beach collecting something in a woven basket, I decide to try spinning some more of the goat hair and fireweed cotton into yarn. I want to keep busy; sitting around, especially when my mind is confused, is not something I like to do. Also, there’s nobody here to stare at me now, like I’m some kind of red-haired freak. There’s just Poos following me around even more than he did before. Of course, there’s also Jack, who is never far away.

  I go into the longhouse to check out the baskets of fleece. Some are still full and I wonder if I’ll be able to get through a whole basket at the speed of light, the same way I did the last time. I sit down and pick up the long smooth spindle and whorl that rest beside me.

  There it is again! The electric jolt in my fingertips and the heat radiating over both of my hands. I can feel the pulse in my temples quicken. Before I have time to think, the whorl is spinning faster and faster — the salmon images again thrown into a perfect synchronized swim, holding my gaze and steadying my hands. Again and again, without thinking, I grab a handful of fleece, separating it with three fingers as I was shown, and guide it gently into the long strand of off-white yarn. I’m no longer conscious of time. The only sensations present are the sound of the spindle turning on the hard ground, the rustle of baskets and the warmth on my back from the su
n streaming through the longhouse door. I feel wonderfully calm, like the way Aunt Maddie says she feels when she meditates.

  I stay like this for a time, spinning, enjoying the sun, not really thinking about anything, and then, as quickly as I began, I’m finished. The basket is empty and once again the spindle is full of yarn. This time I don’t stop there. I find the goat hair and the fireweed cotton, and I work the two together until I have another evenly mixed basket ready for spinning. I even remember to add the white powdery stuff, a clay-like dust that Yisella showed me, into the mix to make it less oily. Then away I go again, turning, spinning, and feeding, stopping only occasionally to shift my weight or stretch my back.

  I know I spend most of the afternoon doing this because by the time Yisella comes through the door, the sun is much lower and her shadow much longer on the longhouse floor. Poos is curled up in a basket full of fleece, which reminds me of Chuck curled up in his favourite spot, the laundry basket.

  Yisella isn’t surprised to see what I’ve done all afternoon. It’s as if she expected it. She inspects the rolled balls of goat hair yarn, pulling on a length to test its strength. “This is really good, Hannah. It’s as good as Mother’s.”

  I know that this is very high praise. I’m so happy; finally, I feel useful. I also feel tired in a good way, the kind of tired you get when you’ve worked hard and you have something to show for your efforts at the end of the day.

  Yisella and I have a dinner of roasted roots, from a plant with a name I can’t pronounce, some more dried butter clams and some green shoots of something that tastes a lot like onions.

  Despite the bad start to the day, I am smiling when I crawl into bed. Poos curls up beside my head and goes to sleep with his paw on my eyebrow. It’s such a little thing, but so familiar that it makes me feel safe. I think about writing in my journal, but I can’t move. I might disturb the cat.