Ghost Canoe

by Will Hobbs

  All the Makahs, and Nathan too, swam to within feet of the rock shelf and the seals. He could see the whiskered faces of the seals clear as day, but the seals apparently couldn’t see him. They were blinded, he realized. Blinded by the light. For the first time he realized that he was on a seal-hunting, and not a manhunting, expedition.

  Perhaps someone had given a signal. The men with the clubs slipped out of the water all in one fluid motion. And in the next moment, swiftly and surely, they were cracking the skulls of the seals.

  Barely more than half of the seals escaped. Nathan felt the turbulence in the water from one that exploded past him in its desperate flight from the cave.

  “Lotsa meat, lotsa oil,” Lighthouse George said as they paddled for home. Nathan wondered if this would be a good time to tell George about seeing the fugitive in the cave. Obviously, Bim hadn’t. He wondered if George would say once again that it wasn’t the Makahs’ business, and he worried that George might be upset at hearing about him going off alone and doing something so dangerous.

  Nonetheless, he had to get the word out that there was someone hiding at the Cape. Just as he was about to speak, all the Makahs stopped paddling. They were staring at a man marooned on one of the smaller rocks that stood among the giant seastacks offshore of the Hole in the Wall. It was Dolla Bill.

  Lighthouse George motioned for his paddlers to rescue the man. The surf buffeting the rock and the weight of the dead seals in the canoe tested George’s skill at the rudder position, but he was able to bring the canoe close enough for Dolla Bill to spring into the center of the canoe among the seals.

  The pock-faced, tattooed outcast began speaking wildly in a combination of Makah, Chinook, and English, waving his arms all the while. His canoe, he claimed, had been stolen by a “hairy white skookumman” who was “strong as ten men” and “swims like a fish.”

  Now Nathan knew he had to tell George what he’d seen. But he would wait for a better time, not in front of a crazy man.

  On arriving at Neah Bay, Lighthouse George did something surprising. Unlike the rest of the Makah, who were ignoring Dolla Bill, Lighthouse George took the outcast to his longhouse, which he shared with four other families. With Nathan at his side, George designated a place by his and Rebecca’s corner where Dolla Bill would sleep. Nathan saw Lighthouse George point to Rebecca’s fire pit and say something in Makah. Nathan realized that George was saying that this was the place where Dolla Bill would eat. They were going to feed him.

  The outcast broke into tears and threw himself at George’s feet. George spoke sharply, and Dolla Bill stood, forcing himself to regain what little dignity he possessed. Like Lighthouse George, he pretended that nothing had happened.

  10

  Yaw-ka-duke

  “Hairy white skookum-man.” The phrase kept repeating itself in the back of Nathan’s mind as he paddled past the Hole in the Wall the next morning with Lighthouse George. Nathan craned for a glimpse, perhaps, of the tip of the stolen canoe behind the rocks, but he saw nothing.

  He kept paddling, around the tip of the Cape, past the cave of the seals, past Fuca’s Pillar. They were headed for the halibut banks. He and George were going fishing.

  Nathan decided it was time to broach the subject of the fugitive with Lighthouse George. “Do you believe Dolla Bill, about what he saw?”

  “Dolla Bill doesn’t lie to me,” George replied. “He knows that I can see the part of him that is still good. I understand how he let all the hurt of the world poison him during the years that he was away. But he has a little bit of hope that he won’t always be this way. And so I try to help him.”

  “I think I saw the same man Dolla Bill saw,” Nathan said, and then he told his story of what had happened at the Hole in the Wall.

  George listened with a grave expression all the way through, and then said, “Hyas cultus. This is bad.”

  “What I saw was barely a shadow. Dolla Bill saw him in broad daylight. Is there any way to prove that Dolla Bill was telling the truth?”

  “The marshal will come again from Port Townsend. The agent sent for him. The marshal will find out.”

  “Good,” Nathan said.

  He thought of how frightened Dolla Bill had been by what he had seen, and how frightened he himself had been. Who, or what, was this man?

  He said to George, “I know skookum means ‘powerful.’ But the way Dolla Bill said it, skookum-man must mean more than just strong. Dolla Bill’s eyes were as big as silver dollars—it looked to me like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “It means that, too,” George replied, without missing a stroke. “Or an evil spirit, or a demon. But it’s not good to talk of such things. Evil can hear its name called.”

  When they reached the fishing spot that George had decided upon, under towering cliffs, they sank bentwood hooks to the sea bottom on long lines Rebecca had woven from three strands of inner cedar bark. “From the size of these lines,” Nathan said, “halibut must be pretty big fish.”

  “Great One Coming Against the Current,” the fisherman replied with a smile.

  The U-shaped wooden hooks were as big as Nathan’s hand. He and George had baited the bone barbs with octopus—six sets altogether. The hooks were designed to float a foot or two off the bottom, where they were attached to a stone sinker by a slipknot. On the surface of the ocean, the lines were tied to wooden floats carved in the images of sea otters floating on their backs.

  After a short wait, one of the wooden floats on the surface came suddenly to life. Nathan wanted to paddle directly to the buoy and pull hard on the line, but George said, “Not yet, Yaw-ka-duke. Let Rises Steeply eat some more.”

  The first halibut was so large that when they hauled it to the surface, its thrashing threatened to damage or even upset the canoe. At last George was able to thrust a long, sharpened pole through the gills of the enormous white fish with eyes on top of its head. With the pole over one knee and under the other, George lifted the great flatfish and dealt it a swift death blow with his club.

  Nathan forgot to ask George what Yaw-ka-duke meant. When they reached Neah Bay, and he was on his way back to the cottage, he asked Captain Bim, who didn’t know. “Must be a Makah word,” the trader muttered. The trader was still out of sorts. Two days had passed, but it seemed Bim wasn’t going to forgive being surprised with the shovel and the strongbox. If anything, he seemed more and more perturbed. What did Captain Bim have in the box that made him act so strange about it? Was it money, or was it something else? Had he found some of that Spanish treasure?

  “I heard the territorial marshal is coming,” Nathan ventured.

  “If your wild man ever existed,” the trader snorted, “he’d be long gone by now.”

  “What do you mean by ‘if’? Do you mean you still don’t believe—”

  “Consider the sources,” Bim interrupted haughtily. “A former slave who is patently insane and an impressionable boy who frightened himself in a cave.”

  Nathan left the trading post fuming. Bim would cut off his own nose to spite his face!

  As he approached the cottage and smelled the comforting aroma of fresh baking, Nathan put the disagreeable meeting with the trader behind him. Rebecca was coming out through the screen door with a basketful of fresh bread for the longhouse. As always, she had a warm smile for Nathan. “Good fishing?” she asked.

  “We could’ve sunk the boat,” he replied proudly. “Lotsa halibut.”

  “Klo-she. I go take care of them.”

  “What’s Yaw-ka-duke mean?” Nathan remembered to ask.

  “Sort of like ‘friend.’ ‘Partner,’ that’s what you call it.”

  “Yaw-ka-duke,” Nathan whispered, proud and pleased.

  The next day, when they delivered the mail out to Tatoosh, he brought a prime halibut to his father and told him all about the fishing. He also told his father about the skookum-man. Nathan’s father listened solemnly to his son’s account of going down the ancient stairs and detecting the man in th
e sea cave, and then he listened as Nathan told Dolla Bill’s story of the theft of the canoe. When Nathan was finished, his father’s gray eyes turned inward, and he remained silent, deeply troubled.

  “George believes Dolla Bill was telling the truth,” Nathan added.

  “Then I do as well,” Zachary MacAllister said. “I’m displeased that you went out to the Cape alone. That was hardly prudent. At least we can assume that this man has fled the area, now that he has a canoe.”

  Nathan left Tatoosh without telling his father about Captain Bim’s strongbox. He feared that telling Bim’s secret might mean risking his life, or even his father’s. Nathan remembered the barrel of the revolver too well, and Captain Bim’s words: “Don’t you say anything about our encounter…or I’ll have your liver.” Bim had meant it.

  He hated keeping secrets from his father, but now he had two, and temperamental Captain Bim knew them both: the buried strongbox and the ancient canoe he’d discovered up in the tree. Nathan knew he dare not tell anyone about the ghost canoe, not after what Captain Bim had told him. The Makahs would be very upset with him, especially if they learned he’d climbed up and looked at the burial, even touched things—maybe Lighthouse George wouldn’t want him around anymore.

  Over the next two days, Nathan and George filled the fishing canoe to capacity again. All the Makah fishermen were doing well. With all the thin-sliced halibut on the drying racks, Neah Bay, from a distance, looked as if it were decorated with thousands of white flags.

  At last the territorial marshal came. Unfortunately, he came and went while Nathan was out fishing. “It was just as I said it would be,” Captain Bim reported smugly. “Once the marshal took a look at the sole eye-witness, Dolla Bill, all he wanted was to get back to Port Townsend as quickly as possible. It was much easier to believe that Dolla Bill had wrecked the canoe or stolen it for himself.”

  “Didn’t he even go out to the Hole in the Wall and search?”

  “He spent several hours out there. He didn’t find anything.”

  “I never got a chance to tell him what I saw. Did you tell him?”

  “Aye, I mentioned that, and I mentioned that some Makah children had also seen the Hairy Man in the woods, too. The marshal didn’t appear to be impressed. Look, young man, I’ve been here over twenty years. Neah Bay is not so exciting as your imaginings would have it.”

  “So nothing’s going to happen,” Nathan said sadly. “He’s going to get away—probably get away with murder.”

  The trader paused. “If you’re right about all this, Young Mac, there’s nothing to be done in any event. Your fugitive would have paddled to one of the ports on the Canadian side, that would be my bet, and by now he would be beyond the reach of the law.”

  11

  Stolen Dreams

  Captain Bim took Dolla Bill on as a second assistant in the store, which surprised Nathan and made him consider the possibility that both of them, along with the fugitive, had been involved in some grand conspiracy. But then he rejected the idea, because there was a much simpler explanation for the hiring of the outcast. Dolla Bill spoke English, and having him in the store gave the trader someone to talk to all day long. For Bim, that was reason enough. And Dolla Bill, now an employee in the store, was beginning to act almost normal.

  One day, while Nathan was at the trading post, a sudden commotion erupted down on the beach. People were shouting and running every which way in what looked like a tidal wave of excitement.

  “What’s happening?” Nathan asked.

  “Eulachon,” Captain Bim explained as he stood on the porch of the trading post and surveyed the activity on the beach. “They’re late this year.”

  “Who are eulachon?” Nathan ventured.

  “They’re not a ‘who,’ Young Mac. They’re fish—small, silver fish,” the trader replied irritably. “Also known as candlefish, the ‘fish that burns.’ They’re eaten fresh, dried for food, or rendered for glease.”

  “Do you mean grease?”

  “Of course I mean grease, young man. Do you object if I pepper my speech with Chinook?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nathan said. Nothing he could say turned out right with Captain Bim anymore. “I just wanted to make sure—I couldn’t see how you could get grease from a fish.”

  “Well, you can. It’s immensely valuable among all the tribes. They slather it all over the fish they’re eating, and almost anything else. Only a few of the tribes control the trade. The grease trails—those are trading routes—go clear into the remote interior of Canada.”

  Nathan was about to turn and go. He knew Lighthouse George would be going after the eulachon if they were so important, and could use his help. Suddenly Nathan felt the pressure of the big man’s hand on his shoulder. He looked back and saw anguish in the trader’s bloodshot eyes.

  “Why do you torment me?” Bim asked, his voice tense and unnatural.

  “I—I don’t understand,” Nathan stammered.

  “You take me for a fool. I know when I’m being spied upon.”

  Nathan protested his innocence. He had no idea what Bim was talking about, and asked him to explain. But the trader would say no more, and Nathan could tell Bim hadn’t believed him.

  Perplexed, Nathan turned and ran down toward the beach. Spying? What could Bim have meant? Nathan was happy to find Lighthouse George on the beach, and added his shoulder to those of four men who helped George portage his canoe over to the swamp behind the village, where the Waatch River began its short run to the Pacific.

  The two of them, along with Makahs in dozens of other fishing canoes, paddled down the gentle river toward the sea. At the river’s mouth, where it flowed into the Pacific at Makah Bay, hundreds of Makahs assembled to take as many of the seething eulachon as they might. Some people set out bag nets in the shallows while others, like Nathan and George, fished from their canoes with dip nets.

  The smeltlike eulachon drifted in from the Pacific in teeming schools. Sea lions and porpoises followed them right into the shallow river. Screaming hordes of seagulls filled the air, diving to snatch the silvery fish, and bald eagles skimmed the water and raked sometimes two or three at once in their talons. Nathan saw, offshore, the tall dorsal fins of killer whales, who must have been taking their considerable share—unless it was the sea lions and the porpoises they were hunting. Lighthouse George had told him that the killer whales worked in packs, just like wolves. There is a story, George explained, that in the early times killer whales had actually been land wolves. Now they are wolves of the sea.

  The eulachon run lasted three days. The crows, the ravens, and the eagles glutted themselves on spawned-out, dead eulachon washed up all along the banks of the river.

  The Makahs ate some of their eulachon fresh, and they dried it and smoked it, but most of it they buried in pits lined and covered with logs. When the fish were thoroughly rotten ten days later, the entire disintegrated mass was heated in large cedar boxes or else in canoes such as Lighthouse George’s.

  When the time came to render the grease, Nathan helped George and Rebecca. Trying to ignore the stench as best he could, he brought dozens of red-hot stones on forked carrying sticks from the fire to the canoe and dropped them inside. The stones had to be retrieved and reheated again and again. Rebecca, with her big cedar ladle, skimmed the grease from the top by the gallon and stored it in bentwood cedar boxes decorated with elaborate carvings. One of the designs depicted a gigantic creature that was part man and part bird—the same figure Nathan had seen on the prow of the ghost canoe. Its wings were spread wide, and it was clutching an entire whale in its talons.

  Lighthouse George was pleased. “Lotsa fish oil, lotsa seal oil for the potlatch,” he told Nathan. “The Nitinats are coming soon from Vancouver Island for a big potlatch. Last time we paddled over there, we got lotsa gifts. Now it’s our turn.”

  Nathan was on his way to the cottage, bringing a small box of the eulachon grease from Rebecca as a gift to his mother. Rebecca said to try d
ipping clams or fish or almost anything in it. As Nathan passed close to the trading post, he was hailed by a trembling voice.

  It was Captain Bim, like a wounded bear, all in a rage.

  The big man ordered him inside. “What’s the matter?” Nathan ventured, stepping into the trading post. It was late in the evening—a terrifying conclusion to a seemingly endless and perfect June day. The trading post was closed, and there was no one else around. It was too dark to see clearly. Once Captain Bim was inside, his rage suddenly turned to tears. He shuddered with huge uncontrollable sobs.

  “What’s the matter?” Nathan repeated. He had never seen a grown man break down, but this man was broken.

  “My money box! It’s gone! It’s all I have in the world.”

  “Captain Bim…,” Nathan pleaded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  The trader tore at his beard. “It was my dream! I was going to open a little ice-cream parlor in Port Townsend, just like the ones they have in San Francisco. I was going to build a home on the hill, where I could watch the ships come and go. It took me twenty-two years to save the money in that box, and I did it honestly, by God.”

  “But Captain Bim,” Nathan protested. “I didn’t take it! Please believe me! I didn’t even know what it was you were burying. I…I thought you might have found some of that Spanish gold you told me about! I never told a soul, just like you said.”

  “How did you know it was gold?”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t have any idea what was in there!”

  Bim glared at him, and then snarled, “Gold it was, but hardly Spanish treasure. Twenty-dollar gold pieces, that’s what was in the box, my life’s savings, but I suppose you already know that, and have counted them out!”

  “I don’t know anything!”

  “You say you haven’t told a soul, Red? More likely you haven’t told a soul where you put it. Is that what you meant?”

  “Haven’t told a soul that I ever ran into you that night and saw that box!”