by Will Hobbs
“Nothing like that ever happened to you, Father,” Nathan said. He was immensely proud of his father’s long history at sea. At the age of fifty-one, with his commanding height, his thick gray hair and full silver beard, Zachary MacAllister looked every bit Nathan’s ideal of a ship’s captain. Until his retirement, he had captained the grandest sailing ships ever built, the Yankee clippers. For years he’d worked the trade route from the Atlantic coast of the United States around the horn of South America all the way to China and back.
Captain MacAllister replied humbly, “I had my close calls, believe me. When I made my mistakes, I had luck on my side, and there’s no accounting for luck.”
Nathan’s father prevailed upon Lighthouse George to stay the night on Tatoosh, as George had done several times after delivering the mail when bad weather had prevented his return to Neah Bay. The Makah fisherman hadn’t survived into his mid-thirties by taking unnecessary chances, and it would be dark before he’d be able to return home.
Lighthouse George accepted amiably, stooping to lift a string of three red snappers from the canoe. He brought a present of fish whenever he came, and Nathan’s mother especially loved red snapper. After beaching the canoe above the high-tide line, the three walked up the steep path that wound through a break in the cliffs to the grassy top of the island. As he always did, for good luck, Nathan gave a tap in passing to the signpost he’d erected there several months before. With arrows pointing in opposite directions, the sign read in bold letters: WASHINGTON TERRITORY—½ MILE and CHINA—6,000 MILES. On the back he’d scrawled Nathan MacAllister, 1874.
Nathan was pleased to be in the company of Lighthouse George, whose gentle voice and easygoing manner understated the power of the man that was evident in his canoe strokes. On the days the mail was to come, Nathan kept a lookout for him from the rim of Tatoosh, and then ran down the trail to be ready to help with his landing. The fisherman steered deftly through the tricky waters swirling between Tatoosh and Cape Flattery in a graceful canoe fashioned from a single cedar log.
Running ahead of the two men into the house and using his favorite term from his limited Chinook vocabulary, Nathan called to his mother, “A guest for muck-a-muck!” The phrase meant just about anything having to do with food that a person wanted it to mean. His mother was delighted to have a guest. “And look what you’ve brought!” she cried. Her pale complexion brightened as she laid eyes on the red snappers.
“How you do, Beth-Mac,” George said to Nathan’s mother. A gentle smile spread across his rugged, dark face as he removed his hat made from woven strips of cedar bark. Somewhere George had learned the custom of doffing his hat in the presence of a lady. His black hair spilled past his shoulders. Other than his hat, he dressed in white men’s clothes, except that he never wore shoes.
Nathan was fond of Lighthouse George’s names for them. His mother’s was short for Elizabeth MacAllister, his father’s was “Cap’n Mac,” and his own was “Tenas Mac.” Tenas, in Chinook, meant “little.”
After greeting Nathan’s mother, Lighthouse George followed Nathan and his father up the iron stairs of the lighthouse to watch them light the lamp, which they always did half an hour before sunset. The three watched as Vancouver Island, often called the Graveyard after the many shipwrecks along its shores, began to take on a reddish tinge twelve miles across the Strait. Nathan’s father happened to mention to Lighthouse George that he was concerned about running out of oil for the lamp.
“How ’bout whale oil, Cap’n Mac?” Lighthouse George suggested.
Zachary MacAllister’s bushy gray eyebrows rose with interest. “Sperm whale oil would be excellent, but no other whale oil will do. Is there some at Neah Bay, George?”
“Only kwaddis oil,” the fisherman replied, shaking his head. “Gray whale. Too bad.”
The next morning, Nathan helped Lighthouse George launch his canoe, watching as he sliced his way through the incoming surf with sure and powerful strokes. A fairly short man, Lighthouse George nonetheless had considerable height from his waist up. He seemed to have been born for the canoe, in which long legs would have been no advantage. Paddling had made his chest and back thickly muscled, as were his neck, shoulders, and arms. Nathan hoped that one day he would take a ride in Lighthouse George’s canoe, possibly even paddle the five miles to Neah Bay with him. But he couldn’t see how the opportunity would ever come up.
The next day, still no ship appeared on the horizon, no sign of the overdue government lighthouse tender. Nathan was anxious for the new assistant keepers to arrive. He hoped there would be three of them, to bring the station back to full strength. He hoped they would be good men this time. But right now what the station needed more was lamp fuel, or the Tatoosh Light would go dead. The lighthouse tender would also bring more coal for the fog trumpet, plenty of muck-a-muck, and a hundred other essentials his father had requested.
At supper they finished the last of the red snappers. His mother’s cough was worse, and she wasn’t able to finish her supper. Sometimes her cough scared Nathan, and he knew that it scared his father as well. His father poured her a cup of tea, which usually helped.
“With May coming, and summer,” she managed apologetically, “I’ll put this behind me. I just haven’t had a chance to dry out my lungs, I suppose.”
“Summer will be raw on Tatoosh,” his father replied soberly. “Windy and cold, you know that, Elizabeth. You won’t be able to grow much of a flower garden, or your vegetables either, as you could on the coast of California.”
Nathan knew his mother and his father must wonder if they ever should have left California, but he’d never heard them say it. He’d never said it either.
“Ah, but there’s a wild beauty here,” she said instead. “Even if the flowers and vegetables might do poorly.”
“Elizabeth…,” his father said, with a tone that signaled he was about to make a request, an important one.
His mother looked away, and then brought the teacup back to her lips, waiting for what he would say.
“The doctor’s house at the Agency in Neah Bay is still sitting empty. They haven’t found another doctor, and from all accounts they won’t anytime soon. They tell me it’s a snug little cottage with two perfectly operating stoves, one for heating and one for cooking. You wouldn’t be alone; you’d have Nathan with you. Please, I want you to reconsider, not only for your sake, but for all three of us.”
His mother sat up straight, twisting her finger around a strand of dark hair at the side of her face. Her hazel eyes reflected her habitual determination. “I’ve never been frail—you know that. I still think I can hold out until they build the new quarters here. We’ve always been together.”
It had been nearly five months that his mother had lived in these damp and smoky rooms, and she’d been sick since the end of the first month. Nathan could still remember her face when they’d first come through this door. She’d been crushed with disappointment upon seeing the moss growing inside on the plaster walls, and the soot from the fireplaces over everything. “Well,” she’d managed with her brave cheerfulness, “we have some work to do.”
His mother was looking at him now. Nathan knew this was not a time to hide his fears for his mother’s health. “But that will be another year, Mother,” he said, “maybe longer, before the new quarters will be completed. It might be like waiting for the lighthouse tender, only worse.”
His mother had heard the quaver in his voice. With a nod of her head, she acknowledged his concern, then gazed out the window for such a long time that she seemed to have left them.
“I just don’t like to give up,” she said finally, with a half-smile, as her eyes returned to them and to the present. “We were to be the first family to live here. It’s apparent that when the head keeper is a bachelor, as they’ve all been, they just won’t stay. How many head keepers have there been since this light was commissioned in ’57?”
“Eleven,” his father admitted. “Twelve in seventeen y
ears, counting me. But none of that matters compared to your health.”
“I’ll pray on it this evening,” his mother said. “Nathan, what do you think?”
His reply was simple. “You need to get well, Mother. I’ve heard it’s warmer some in Neah Bay. Drier, too.”
His father nodded. “That’s what they say.”
“We’d be leaving your poor father on Tatoosh, with bachelors who will probably be much more adept at spitting, chewing, and smoking than they are at cooking.”
She’d made them laugh, but it was short-lived laughter. Nathan was certain she hadn’t been swayed, that she would insist on staying at the lighthouse. He was as afraid of having his family split apart as his mother was. But he was even more afraid for his mother’s health. She was only thirty-four years old, much younger than his father. His mother had always been strong. She shouldn’t be so sick.
Nathan was surprised the following morning by his mother’s decision. Over breakfast, she said calmly, “We can have Lighthouse George bring the vegetables we grow to your father every week, and some flowers, too, when he brings the mail. Your father is right, Nathan. The village will be a better place for us.”
As they began their preparations for the move to Neah Bay, the watch continued for the lighthouse tender, which failed to arrive the next day or the next. They were surprised, however, by the sight of Lighthouse George nearing Tatoosh in one of the “great canoes,” as Nathan had heard them called. The canoe was more than thirty feet long and paddled by eight men.
To Nathan the great canoe seemed an apparition from ancient times. Its high tapering prow lifted above the waves, carved with the likeness of a wolf’s head, as if the entire canoe behind it were a charging, wave-riding sea wolf. Nathan spotted George at the rear of the canoe, seated against the squared-off stern. He was ruddering with his paddle and leading the high-pitched, eerie singing that the others used to time the strokes of their paddles.
Lighthouse George brought news of the lighthouse tender, the steamship so long delayed. Dockside in Portland for mechanical repairs, it wouldn’t sail for yet another week.
Lighthouse George also brought one hundred gallons of pure sperm whale oil for “Cap’n Mac.” The Makahs had paddled the great canoe from Neah Bay all the way across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Canadian port of Victoria on Vancouver Island, in order to find sperm whale oil. There was undisguised satisfaction in their faces as they watched Nathan’s father’s astonishment, both at the feat of crossing the Strait in an open canoe and at the gift itself.
The Makahs would accept no payment for the oil. George insisted this was potlatch, the Chinook word for gifts and the giving of gifts. Nathan had heard about the legendary gatherings called potlatches in which they were said to give away nearly everything they owned. This gift-giving was their greatest pleasure, his father had told him, and the faces of these Makahs, as they gave the whale oil, showed this to be true.
Before the Makahs left, Nathan asked Lighthouse George if there was any more news about the ship that had wrecked. An hour hadn’t gone by without Nathan puzzling over the wreck of the Burnaby and the meaning of the footprints. It was going to trouble him until he’d made some sense of it. He wondered if this had been an ordinary shipwreck, or if something strange might have happened, something mysterious.
George seemed reluctant to speak of the Burnaby, but at last he did. “Hyas cultus, Tenas Mac,” he said, as he raked the back of his hand against his chin whiskers. “It’s very bad.”
“Was the survivor found?”
Lighthouse George shook his head. No survivor had been found, but another body had washed up on shore, he told them. But not between Cape Flattery and Neah Bay, where the others were found. This one was discovered about thirty miles south of Cape Flattery, near the Makah village of Ozette. The body was removed by sea to Port Townsend, where it was identified by the owner of the Burnaby as that of the captain of his ship.
“But he didn’t drown,” George said. “He died of a stab wound to the heart.”
3
A Thief in the Night
Nathan shut the door of their new cottage in Neah Bay quietly behind him. His mother was sleeping, and even though she’d wanted to see him off, he knew it was important to let her rest. In the middle of the night, he’d awakened and found her writing a letter by the light of the kerosene lamp in her room as she muffled the sound of her cough with a handkerchief.
In a few minutes he’d put Baada Point behind him, where their cottage sat on a bluff seaward of the government buildings of the Indian Agency. The sun was rising behind him and it cast his shadow far ahead on the beach. He walked along the sweep of Neah Bay toward the Makah village. His eyes focused on the Makah canoes in the distance, between the beach and the cedar-plank longhouses where Lighthouse George and most of the Makahs lived. Some of the fishermen were already launching their canoes.
Nathan was heading for the trading post to meet up with Lighthouse George, and he was carrying the big Makah basket that George’s wife, Rebecca, had given his mother. Its bottom half was filled with clothing for his father on Tatoosh—some his mother had just made and some she’d mended—and the top half was full of baked goods for his father and the new men. Her letters to him, one per day, were tucked in between.
When Nathan arrived at the trading post, he found Lighthouse George already there, sitting at the table in front of the counter. He was having coffee with Captain Bim, the huge owner of the trading post, a bear of a man who was talking excitedly in English spiced with Chinook. Lighthouse George saw Nathan at the door. A happy smile spread across the Makah’s face, which brought one to Nathan’s as well. Today was the day he’d go out in a canoe with George, and Nathan could barely contain his excitement.
“Come in, come in!” cried Captain Bim, who was the friendliest man Nathan had met in his life, also the biggest talker and just plain the biggest. Even his beard, curly and gray, was enormous. A colony of swallows could nest in it, Nathan mused, perhaps without the trader noticing.
Captain Bim wasn’t really a captain at all, Nathan had discovered. He just liked the name, and he liked wearing a nautical cap with an anchor emblazoned on the front. For much of the day, the trader remained seated right where he was, under the sign that read EVERYTHING FROM NEEDLES TO ANCHORS, where he could readily visit with everyone who came through the door. His Makah assistant, an old man who never seemed to speak, did the legwork around the place and the measuring of tea, coffee, sugar, flour, molasses, and everything else that was kept behind the counter.
Captain Bim’s eyes immediately fastened on the baked goods peeking from Nathan’s basket. Setting it down beside the table, Nathan brought out three sweet rolls, one for each of them. “Muck-a-muck,” Nathan said. Delighted, Captain Bim poured Nathan a cup of coffee, so quickly that Nathan didn’t have time to explain that he didn’t drink coffee. He decided to follow Lighthouse George’s example, and added three spoonfuls of sugar, then waited for the coffee to cool as he savored his sweet roll, bite by flavorful bite.
“I was just telling George that I had a robbery here last night,” Captain Bim reported, picking flakes of sugar out of his beard. As he popped the flakes into his mouth and proceeded to lick his fingers, his eyes shifted back to the basket of baked goods, which made Nathan feel a little uneasy.
Nathan took a sip of the coffee. “What did you lose?” Coffee, he decided, wasn’t half bad when it was this sweet.
“A Makah fishing harpoon, a whetstone, a good deal of food, some pots and pans, a long length of rope, matches, a hunting knife with an engraving of a clipper ship on the bone handle…I’m surprised about the harpoon. With all the fish harpoons around Neah Bay, I can’t see why someone would have to go and steal one. I just had it up on the wall for looks. You’d think they would’ve just made their own. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I might retire to Port Townsend sooner than I expected. I’ve had in mind to start an ice-cream parlor….”
&nb
sp; Captain Bim reached across to the basket and brought out a scone. Nathan wished he hadn’t set the basket so close. “Have you had burglaries before?”
“It’s been a while—ten, twelve years. That’s why I had such a silly little lock on the door. From now on, it will be a great big lock.”
With a determined expression, Captain Bim reached for another pastry. Nathan noticed that Lighthouse George had finished his sweet roll, and he remembered about the oil George had brought from Victoria. “Potlatch,” Nathan said to George, giving him a scone and taking one for himself.
“A beautiful concept,” Captain Bim purred, and took yet another roll with his free hand. They were disappearing as fast as berries into the mouth of a bear.
“I’ll be watching everyone who comes into the store,” the trader said with his mouth full. “The thief will give himself away; that’s what happened last time. The Makahs take care of their own—they humiliated him publicly, and that took care of the problem.”
“But what if the thief this time wasn’t somebody who lives here?” Nathan suggested on the spur of the moment. He was already considering the possibilities, which was his nature.
“There’s nobody here except who’s here,” Captain Bim proclaimed. “There’s nothing but the forest primeval at our backs, Little Mac. No roads in or out. How could there be somebody else?”
“But what about the footprints? The footprints that were found at the time of the shipwreck?”
The trader chuckled and poured Nathan another cup of coffee. “A budding detective! Haven’t you heard, young man, that the territorial marshal who came to investigate said those probably were just Makah footprints?”
“What do the Makahs think about that?”
“They say they didn’t make the tracks,” Bim huffed impatiently, “but who else would be walking barefoot on the beach?”
“Somebody who kicked off his shoes trying to swim to shore!”