by Will Hobbs
“Do they still do that?” Nathan asked, trying to keep the big man talking.
“Nowadays they bury everyone in the ground—you’ve seen the village graveyard. Sometimes they build little spirit houses on top of the graves, so they can leave things for the deceased.”
Nathan wished he could ask about the yellowed decorated bone cylinders in the small cedar box that had been left in the ghost canoe, but he couldn’t without telling that he had indeed climbed into the tree and taken a look. He decided to keep asking questions, to try to lessen the tension that was still thick between him and the trader. Bim usually liked nothing better than talking. “What kind of stuff do they leave nowadays for the dead?”
“Dishes, baskets, maybe some tools,” Bim said impatiently, waving him off. “You just stay clear away from any Makah graves, and especially stay away from that canoe, and any others like it. I won’t tell Lighthouse George or anyone about that part of your explorations, and neither should you. Now get going, Young Mac. Your mother’s probably given you up for dead.”
Bim had managed to conceal the strongbox behind him, but he was still agitated. “And don’t you say anything about our encounter this evening to anybody, ever, or I’ll have your liver,” Bim said, deadly serious. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What a headache you’ve given me! Go!”
Nathan took off at a run, anxious to get out from under the darkness of the trees and into the village. What did Captain Bim have in that strongbox, and what was he doing out in the woods? As he hopped the village creek and passed alongside the great canoe that Young Carver had been shaping from a giant cedar log, Nathan made out the form of a man sleeping in the bottom of the canoe. His clothing was entirely dark except for a row of brass buttons down the middle of his jacket. The man sat up suddenly, frightening Nathan. His thin face was strange, scarred somehow. It was hard to see in the poor light.
“Dolla Bill,” the man said, staring at Nathan and pointing at himself.
Nathan had never seen this Makah before. He was caught off guard, especially by the man’s staring and his seemingly hollow eyes. A Makah had never asked him for money before. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”
Nathan was surprised to hear the man ask, “Who are you?” in English. So few Makahs spoke any English.
“Nathan MacAllister,” he replied.
“Poor Dolla Bill need a friend.”
The man made no sense. Nathan wondered if there was something wrong with him. He had to get away from this man.
“I have to go,” Nathan said, and he turned quickly for the cottage.
8
Dolla Bill
It seemed a night that would never end. Whichever way Nathan tossed and turned, he kept seeing that pair of eyes glimmering in the dark and the glint of the knife. He heard the breathing as vividly as if it were right there, in the front room of the cottage where he was pinned to his bed with fear. He wished he could tell his mind to quit remembering, but he couldn’t. If only he could fall asleep. He’d never been so frightened in his life.
A second scene kept repeating itself: the terrified trader pulling out his revolver and pointing it straight at Nathan’s heart. Fool that Bim was, Nathan realized, he might have pulled the trigger. Bim had come within an eyelash of shooting him. He’d said as much.
At last Nathan slept, perhaps for an hour or two. Then a dream in which he was surrounded by countless pairs of eyes, glowing in the dark, woke him up. With the first hint of dawn came a soft tapping at the cottage door. Nathan heard it from the front room and knew it was Lighthouse George. “Come now,” George said.
The fisherman’s shy smile was missing this morning. Nathan’s eyes went immediately to the spear Lighthouse George was carrying, much taller than himself. It was lighter than the spear in the ghost canoe, and it branched into two fearsomely honed and barbed mussel-shell tips.
Nathan merely nodded and turned to get dressed as fast as he could. At his mother’s door, he heard her coughing lightly. “Going with Lighthouse George,” he whispered.
His mother was awake. “Rebecca says her husband thinks you will make a good fisherman.”
“I hope so. Go back to sleep, Mother.”
He didn’t tell her that he thought they were going to be fishing for a man.
At the beach, in the improving light, a number of broad-shouldered Makah men were placing clubs and spears and paddles inside canoes about twenty-five feet in length—not their great canoes but not their smaller fishing canoes either. A war party, Nathan was certain of it. Captain Bim must have told Lighthouse George, who had told the rest of the Makahs about the man hiding in the cave out near the tip of Cape Flattery.
The morning star was shining bright over the Pacific. The clouds had passed through; the fog was gone. Nathan shivered in the cold as he watched George and other men drop skid-poles every ten feet or so up the gravelly beach, all the way from the shore up to the canoes. Lighthouse George had motioned for him to stay on the porch of the trading post and wait. Now Nathan wondered if he was going along after all.
The Makahs began to skid their high-prowed canoes across the poles and down to the water. What if they found nothing out at the Hole in the Wall? What would they think of him?
Nathan noticed a man standing alone high on the beach, not working with the rest. It was the man who’d been sleeping in Young Carver’s canoe. He was tall for a Makah, if he was a Makah, and unusually skinny. He was wearing a dark blue U.S. military jacket, which explained the brass buttons that had stood out in the dark.
A dog trotting along the beach on its early morning rounds approached the lone man, stopped and studied him, then steered away. Many Makahs over the age of twenty showed signs of having survived smallpox, but their faces hadn’t been utterly ravaged by the disease, like this man’s. He’d further disfigured his face with tattoos—circles with dots in their centers, two rows of them across his forehead. Yet it was his hollow eyes, even from a distance, that Nathan found the most disarming. Makahs never stared.
The strange man took off his military jacket, and then the shirt underneath, picked up a bunch of weeds he had apparently gathered, and began whipping his bare flesh with the weeds, on his chest and arms and back. At the same time he began a wailing chant that made Nathan’s spine shiver. It sounded like the wailing of the damned, Nathan thought. Captain Bim, who was lumbering toward the trading post with his big key ring in his hand, barely paid attention to the eerie demonstration.
Bim had no greeting for Nathan other than a stiff nod. Nathan worried that the trader was angry with him.
“I’m sorry about last night—running into you like that,” Nathan began.
“Not to be discussed,” the trader said gruffly, “and we’ll get along just fine.”
The wailing from the pock-faced man continued, but the Makahs preparing the canoes paid him no attention.
“What’s that he’s thrashing himself with?” Nathan asked.
“Stinging nettles. The poor devil’s going to suffer for that, and badly.”
“But why’s he doing it?”
“He wants to go with them.”
“What’s his name?”
“Dolla Bill, he says.”
“Oh—I thought he wanted money.”
“You met?”
“Sort of…last night. Is Dolla Bill his real name?”
“Of course not. Somebody gives them a name and it sticks.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“He arrived with the Anna Rose yesterday from Port Townsend.”
“That’s not what I meant. He doesn’t look like a Makah.”
“He is and he isn’t. He was a child here—in fact, he remembered my name, after twenty years gone. Then I remembered him.”
“Did his family remember him?”
“They’re all dead, from smallpox, but they weren’t his family to begin with. It used to be, all these tribes kept captives
—slaves, essentially. They were treated well, but they were a chief’s property all the same. When this man’s Makah family died, some twenty years ago, another chief sold him and his sister to a British ship’s captain. In fact, it was the year I first came, shortly after the big smallpox epidemic. Twenty-two years ago to be exact. The Makah were destitute. They’d lost over half their people to smallpox. One gold coin bought each child. I remember those children’s faces—utterly forlorn—as they were led away. How could I forget?”
The trader spat, then added, “He shouldn’t have bothered to come back here, but I suppose no place else looks like home.”
“Where has he been?”
“All over the world, he says. But he won’t fit back in so easily as Lighthouse George did. I remember what a big potlatch they gave when George returned. But Lighthouse George was the son of a tyee, a chief. He was born with the right to use the whaling harpoon, and you can’t be born any higher in Makah society than that.”
“I thought Lighthouse George became a harpooner on a whaleship, when he was away.”
“They took him for a harpooner because he was already a master at it.”
Nathan was thoroughly confused. “You’re telling me that the Makahs hunt whales?”
The trader looked at him like there was no conceivable way to account for his ignorance. “Where have you been, Young Mac? That’s who the Makah are! They hunt the great gray whale, to be exact. They’re the only whaling tribe in these United States, and it’s likely they’ve been whaling here for a thousand years or more.”
“But I never knew…. Do you mean they hunt whales from their canoes?”
“They hunt the leviathans of the deep, young man. Forty-ton gray whales.”
Captain Bim’s gaze, and then Nathan’s, was drawn to an old Makah approaching them from the canoes. Nathan recognized him from his long white hair and the abalone-shell earrings as the old man who’d been stripping planks from the cedar tree the day before. “Here comes Jefferson,” Captain Bim said. “He’s the top chief.”
Jefferson strode directly up to Nathan and said, “Kloshe tumtum mika chako.”
Nathan turned to Captain Bim. “‘Welcome’? Is that what he said?”
“‘Good intentions you come,’ to be exact. In other words, you’re invited. Somehow or other, you got on his good side—”
Before Nathan could even thank the chief, Jefferson was striding away. Nathan ran straight toward Lighthouse George’s canoe. George had a Makah paddle ready for him, decorated with a fanciful design that might have represented an eagle. Nathan helped George and three other men launch the canoe. As soon as his feet hit the water, they hurt with the cold. He said nothing. He looked around at all the men in the canoes. This was a high honor. The youngest Makahs in the canoes were several years older than he was. He wondered if Lighthouse George had asked the chief to invite him along.
The next moment, he was helping to paddle a twenty-five-foot Makah canoe. He was seated on the last thwart toward the back.
Behind him, Lighthouse George was ruddering at the stern, and George already had the canoe pointed toward Koitlah Point at the northwestern end of Neah Bay. George began to chant in Makah, and the men answered him with a high-pitched song that served to keep all the paddles stroking in unison. Nathan made his strokes count, and the canoe shot forward on the water, fast as a killer whale.
As they were rounding Koitlah Point, Nathan glanced back at Neah Bay and saw a single canoe trailing them. One man was chasing them, paddling a small fishing canoe as fast as he could. Nathan could make out the blue military suit with the brass buttons. It was Dolla Bill.
9
Swims Like a Fish
Abruptly, the men in the lead canoe stopped paddling, and those in the other three canoes immediately quit singing and paddling as well. The forward motion of Lighthouse George’s canoe brought it close enough for Nathan to see what was happening. The bowman in the lead canoe, with a motion of his thumb, was pointing in the direction of the Chibahdehl Rocks, where the Burnaby had foundered. Nathan spotted several large fur seals offshore of the rocks, afloat and sleeping on their backs.
The lead canoe went on alone. The Makahs’ tapered paddles parted the water soundlessly. The canoe approached the seals as invisibly as the wind. The bowman stood slowly, brandishing a two-pointed spear like George’s with rope attached. It was actually a harpoon, Nathan realized.
The bowman was nearly on the seals before they woke with a snort and a commotion. It was too late for one of them. The harpoon was thrown with deadly force and accuracy—the seal died almost instantly, pierced through the heart or lungs. On impact, the killing heads had detached from the weapon’s shaft.
The canoes all paddled close as the men of the first canoe hauled on the rope and retrieved the huge animal. The seal was so heavy it had to be gutted before it could be hauled into the canoe.
Once again, paddles were flashing, including Nathan’s. The canoes raced forward past Slant Rock and Mushroom Rock, both covered with cormorants and gulls. All the men were singing. Once they’d arrived at the tip of the Cape, Nathan was surprised that the canoes in front made no effort to weave a way among the seastacks hiding the Hole in the Wall, where he’d encountered the man in the cave. Instead, they remained out in the Strait. The canoes navigated easily around Jones Rock, between the Cape and Tatoosh, and began to turn south.
Fuca’s Pillar was coming into sight. Nathan glanced back at Lighthouse George, for explanation, but an explanation wasn’t forthcoming. The Makahs had left off singing once again, and their paddles parting the water made not a sound. The concentration of every man was so intense that Nathan left off paddling altogether, for fear he’d make a mistake. All he could hear was the surf and sea parrots by the hundreds beating their wings as they flew in and out of their nests in the cliffs.
Around the tip of the Cape, halfway down to Fuca’s Pillar, the canoes skirted a reef and aimed toward one of the many caves that the sea had carved into the mainland. Its mouth was perhaps twenty feet across. The canoes paused a hundred feet offshore, keeping their position. All eyes were on the cave. Nathan glanced to Lighthouse George. With his thumb, George motioned several times toward the cave.
Nathan concluded that his cave ran through the tip of Cape Flattery and connected back to the Hole in the Wall. The Makahs intended to sneak up on the fugitive by way of this cave. He wouldn’t be able to escape up the stairs or by any other route.
The Makahs should have brought their smaller fishing canoes, Nathan thought. The twenty-five-foot canoes seemed large for maneuvering inside a cave.
To Nathan’s surprise some of the Makahs in every canoe, including Lighthouse George, began to remove their shirts and trousers. They stripped down to their shorts, and then they began to tie their long hair into topknots. From a cedar box, one of the men in Nathan’s canoe produced dozens of sticks whittled from some sort of pitchwood; Nathan handed a bunch back to Lighthouse George, as he was directed. Another man brought out a clam shell and gently opened it up. A live coal was glowing inside.
The first man to take the clam shell lit one stick at a time, placed them upright in his hair, and passed the coal on. In every canoe, men were doing the same. The paddlers who hadn’t stripped were guiding the canoes soundlessly closer to the cave entrance. All the while, none of them spoke a word.
The coal came to Lighthouse George, who lit the sticks and placed them flaming upright in his hair. George made a swimming motion with his arms. For the first time Nathan understood that the men meant to swim into the cave.
The swimmers began to slip over the sides of the canoes. Lighthouse George was about to join them. Nathan pointed to himself and then to the cave entrance, and made the swimming motion himself. “Good swimmer,” he mouthed, and he began to take off his clothes. “Mamook swim kloshe,” he whispered to the surprised Makah in front of him in the canoe.
Lighthouse George nodded, then put his fingers to his lips. Nathan nodded i
n return, showing he understood the need for utter silence.
The shock of the Pacific’s frigid water set his heart pounding as he lowered himself over the side of the canoe. Two of the swimmers were being handed short clubs carved in the image of seals, like the one he had seen in the ghost canoe. Lighthouse George was handed a neat coil of rope such as Nathan had seen Rebecca braiding from strips of the inner bark of cedar. Nathan was not disappointed that the men staying behind in the canoe gave him nothing to carry, leaving his hands free.
The swimmers from the other canoes were already approaching the mouth of the cave. Nathan began to breaststroke toward it, alongside Lighthouse George, who was keeping a close watch on him to see if he was as strong a swimmer as he’d claimed.
He was. He’d swum in the surf with his father along carefully selected spots on the California coast. He knew the power of the surf. He knew to go with it and never to fight it, especially if he was ever caught in a riptide and swept out to sea.
As Nathan was about to enter the mouth of the cave, he had to adjust suddenly as a wave surged and almost threw him against the cliff. With several strong strokes he was into the cave mouth alongside Lighthouse George. The water was cold, so cold! With relief, he could see that the cave was lit up brightly by all the flaming pitch-sticks crowning the heads of the swimmers in front of them.
A passage of no more than thirty feet led to a grotto perhaps fifty feet across and thirty feet high. It was eerie how quietly all the men were swimming. Neither hands nor feet were breaking the surface. The swimmers were fanning out now all along the width of the brightly lit grotto. Nathan couldn’t see another tunnel leading out. He was confused. It couldn’t possibly connect to the Hole in the Wall.
There were smooth, rounded shapes all over a rock shelf that spanned the rear of the cave. Seals, Nathan realized, as they began to lift their heads. Hair seals, quite a bit smaller than the great fur seal. He could see at least fifty pairs of eyes shining.