by Rod O'Grady
Keeping low in the water, Kaayii could see the girl and the man silhouetted by the light from the cabin. The man had his killing stick. Soon they went back inside and closed the door. Kaayii stared up at the cabin and thought about how they had hit the back of their home, and how it must have worried them. He decided he wouldn’t hit their home again.
He waded back across to his uncle who was eating another fish, and making noises as he ate that reminded Kaayii of feeding coyotes – a kind of grunting, gasping, spluttering noise.
Ahniiq flicked away the bare backbone and tail, and swam out into deeper water, the long hairs of his shoulders, back and arms trailing behind him. Kaayii followed him. His uncle dived down into the inky black sea. Kaayii waited … and waited … until Ahniiq’s huge black conical head broke the surface, emerging triumphant with oysters in his hands and a broad smile on his face. His yellow teeth had bits of seaweed stuck in them and soon they would have shell stuck in them too as he crunched through an oyster shell and sucked out the animal. He dropped the shattered shell, and crunched into another.
Kaayii dived down into the depths. The sound of bubbling and swooshing water and the thrumming of the blood in his ears reminded him of the sounds that trees make in springtime, when water is moving up from the earth, up through the trunk to the crown of the tree.
He searched with his hands among the seaweed and, feeling something hard and round, he pulled. It came away and he kicked and kicked, looking up through the water to the sky – a ghostly grey promise beyond the invisible skin of the sea. In his hand he held a mussel, wedge-shaped, smooth and midnight blue.
Pleased with himself, Kaayii swam back to the shore where Ahniiq had climbed onto the rocks and up the steep path. He whistle-warbled from the top of the rocky climb, but Kaayii waved him away – he had something important to do right there at the shore. He knew the human girl would understand the feeling behind his actions, but he also knew the human man with the killing stick would not.
MINNIE
Chapter Sixteen
As Minnie stepped on to the jetty three seagulls flew away. Across the full width of the jetty, artfully arranged in a circle, were shellfish – dark-blue mussels, small grey limpets, white cockles, silver and black striped oysters, pink scallops and brown clams. Forming a cross perfectly dividing the circle into four quarters were strips of green and brown seaweed. Laid on top of the seaweed were fish – two silver-grey salmon and two grey-green cod. In the centre of the design was alarge red spiny sea anemone.
The seagulls had attacked some of the oysters and eaten parts of the fish, but the circle was was beautiful. It was staggering to Minnie because she felt she knew who had put it there. She knew who had taken the time to find these creatures – to swim and to dive, to probe amongst the rocks as the tide went out and to arrange them.
‘Dan!’ she yelled. ‘Connie!’
The three of them stood and gawped. Dan knelt down to look under the jetty. The tide was coming in again, and the only activity on the exposed shore was a wading seabird stalking the mudflats, exposed by the receding tide.
Dan snapped photos with his phone. ‘I turned the lights off about midnight to save power. I’m sure there was nothing then.’ Musto sniffed the fish then turned and trotted back along the jetty. He jumped down on the rock and entered the water, swimming round and round in circles.
‘Maybe they left footprints down there.’ Minnie started to climb down the side of the jetty to the muddy strip of beach and rocks.
‘The tide has come in and out, Minnie,’ said Connie.
‘This is not good,’ said Dan.
‘Oh my gosh!’ said Connie, gazing at the circle.
‘What is it?’ asked Dan.
‘Is it lined up like a compass? That fish is pointing due west, look.’ Connie pointed at the fish and lifted her arm to point due west across the bay towards the big long island where the sun sets. ‘And that one is exactly north…’
‘Well, that proves this was not Bigfoots,’ said Dan, ‘so that’s good, in a way.’
‘That is so cool,’ said Minnie, ignoring Dan. ‘This is a gift. They are saying sorry for frightening us with the banging on the cabins.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Dan.
‘No, Dan, it is not,’ said Connie. ‘I think Minnie is right.’ She turned and looked up at the mountain.
‘So why did they bang on the cabins?’ said Dan.
‘They want access to the shore,’ Minnie said as she prowled the strip of beach, where waves were gently lapping on the round grey rocks. ‘Musto! What are you doing? Here, boy!’ Musto swam towards her. Emerging from the water, he ran to Minnie, shook the seawater off his coat and licked her hands. ‘Can you still smell our visitor, Musto?’ She patted and fussed him and pulled up his ears.
Pointing at the seafood circle Dan said, ‘They have access to the shore! Look!’
‘I think this is just one or two of them, if there’d been more, we’d have heard them,’ Minnie called.
‘Or was it you, Connie?’ asked Dan. Connie and Minnie laughed at the suggestion.
‘You think I’d leave this beautiful seafood harvest out here for the gulls?’
‘This would take all night to catch,’ said Minnie. ‘Good job, Connie!’
‘OK, OK,’ said Dan. ‘So, Minnie, you think they whacked the cabins because we’re in their way? They’ve never whacked the cabins before.’
‘It’s the fire,’ she said. ‘There’s less food because there’s more competition on this side of the mountain now. Either that or they just want to be able to go for a swim on warm nights without carrying their towels and their picnic stuff over those big slippy rocks!’ She and Connie laughed, Dan didn’t – he just gazed at the sea life arranged on the jetty.
Billy had emerged from the cabin and was standing on the deck. ‘Hey, what’s so darn funny?’
They sat on the deck around the table sorting and cleaning the big bowl of seafood. ‘Won’t they be upset that we left the fish down there?’ asked Billy.
The gulls were still picking at the fish down on the jetty. ‘The gulls had already gorged on the fish,’ said Connie. ‘We have plenty here.’
Dan took a sip of his coffee and said, ‘I think it’s time we moved.’
‘What? No!’ said Minnie. ‘No, Dan! No!’
‘Wait. Listen, I’m not saying I’m a Bigfoot believer but maybe we should think about moving this cabin. Maybe to just there, backed up against the cliff.’ He pointed to the small cliff with the wind turbine on top of it. ‘We could make it bigger, and two levels so I can walk out the back and check the turbine without having to climb up that cliff.’
Minnie jumped up from the table and hugged Dan, spilling his coffee. ‘Thank you! Thank you, Dan!’
‘OK,’ said Dan, ‘so when do we start?’
Minnie grinned. ‘Right now.’
Chapter Seventeen
It took them the rest of that day to move all their stuff over to cabin number one, the closest cabin, with the help of Connie and Billy. By the end of the day, placed all around on the grass were things they couldn’t fit in, like the fridge, the cooker, desks, lamps, small tables, and their beds. Dan spread a big green tarp over most of it, though it didn’t look like it was going to rain any time soon.
The next day he removed the roof in three sections, and by the end of day three he had dismantled the walls by unscrewing each wooden plank that had been stacked and attached to the frame.
Then he started removing the floorboards, so by midday on day four all that remained of their cabin was eight, fat, cobwebby posts sticking out of the ground, surrounded by what had been the dusty, flat-earth floor under the cabin, where they’d stored bikes, tools, a lawn mower and other family stuff in sturdy plastic boxes.
Now that the cabin was gone you could walk up the path from the jetty, through the eight big posts by the vegetable garden, and on to the hiking trail, straight up to the mountain.
‘Hey, Min
nie, what say we have a wrap-around deck,’ Dan called, dumping the last floorboard in the pile, ‘on all three sides. That way there’s nothing for your Bigfoot to whack. I’ll build the back wall right up against the cliff face. Yeah? Like it?’
He was grinning at her and she gave him a thumbs-up. This new project seemed to have energised Dan. She had never seen him work so hard, and he’d even started whistling while he worked. She hadn’t heard him whistle for a long time.
Minnie remembered when she was little a new cabin appeared most summers, but a few years ago her mom had needed help to build two new cabins – numbers four and five on the little rocky rise over on the far side. She’d asked around town for recommendations. The only construction company based in the town couldn’t help as they were building a fancy new fishing lodge down in the south part of the bay.
Dan had showed up one day with a truckload of tools and he had never really left. He and her mom had built the cabins together, and Minnie didn’t know it at the time but that cacophony of hammering and sawing, accompanied by whistling and laughter, was the soundtrack to the most important love story in her mother’s life.
Dan was looking through the stuff in one of the boxes as Minnie lay in the sun with Musto on the grass nearby.
‘Hey Minnie, you want to go through this stuff of your mom’s with me and see what you want to keep? We should take the rest to the thrift store in town. And you should have your mom’s wardrobe. It’ll fit in your spacious new bedroom.’
‘What about all her clothes?’ asked Minnie.
‘Same. Go through ’em and take what you want. There’s too much stuff we don’t need. We should be…’
Dan hesitated, and it felt to Minnie like he couldn’t bring himself to say the words, ‘moving on’, so Minnie said, ‘de-cluttering, Dan?’
‘That’s it!’ he said.
That afternoon they sat on the raised deck in front of cabin number one, taking a break and drinking lemonade. From this deck there was a fine open view of the jetty. They faced onto the property looking across to the other cabins, which were dotted about on the grassy slope – cabin two closer to the shore, cabin three across nearer to the car-parking space, and cabins four and five up on the rocky rise, close to the pines, overlooking the beach.
Dan spun his head dramatically to the left, and with a sharp intake of breath lifted his electric screwdriver and held it at the ready, like a weapon poised for attack, ‘You hear that? Up on the trail! Something this way comes!’
‘What?’ asked Minnie.
‘Sounds very much like a woman and a boy, walking and talking.’
‘Oh, Dan!’ And Connie and Billy came in to view walking down the trail, and through the posts carrying a canoe.
‘Hi! Gosh, it’s weird walking through that space now. It’s like I just walked through the ghost of a cabin. All the energy that was in that space is still lingering. Did you feel the same, Billy?
‘Nope,’ he said, setting down his end of the canoe. ‘We’re going fishing, Minnie.’ But Minnie was walking up the slope away from them towards where the old cabin had been.
‘Cool,’ said Dan, ‘should I fire up the grill?’
Minnie wandered amongst the posts. Minnie had taken her first breath there. Her mom had taken her last. She stretched out her arms and looked up to her beautiful mountain, where she had always felt most at peace and where her mother loved to walk and sit and be. She turned to the sea and looked across at the bay where Connie and Billy were now paddling out in the canoe.
She remembered scattering her mom’s ashes on the water and how, as she had looked down into the sea, crying over the side of the canoe, her salty tears dropped into the water. Part of her mom, that was always part of Minnie, became part of this sea, which was part of every sea on the planet.
Chapter Eighteen
The sunset painted thin wisps of cloud in hues of pink and gold, as the four of them sat on the deck of cabin number one, eating grilled trout. Connie and Billy had caught five fish. The cabin had a good-size deck and, like all the decks, it had a strong wooden railing all round to lean on and admire the view, or to place pretty shells gathered from the beach. Dan looked at Minnie. ‘This is way smaller than we’re used to, but it’ll do fine ’til we build the new one, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Minnie as she wolfed down the pink flesh of the fish.
It had been a busy day and Minnie was tired. The full moon was already rising above the mountains in the southwest as Dan took a swig of his beer from a bottle. A pair of magpies alighted on the wooden railing across the way on cabin number four. ‘One for sorrow,’ he said, ‘two for joy.’
‘Three for a girl, four for a boy,’ continued Connie.
Back in the woods somewhere a couple of crows cawed a brief conversation between each other, caw … caw… High in the pines behind Connie’s cabin squirrels complained, cheek, cheek, tututututut!
‘Are those gulls, terns, or skimmers?’ asked Dan, peering at a wheeling flock of white birds with black-capped heads, circling and circling lower, before settling on the calm sea. He answered his own question. ‘Gulls, I reckon.’
‘And are those gannets or boobies?’ asked Billy, stifling a giggle and pointing at a pair of large white birds with black-tipped wings and pale orange heads, floating out by the nearest island.
‘Gannets,’ said Dan. ‘Boobies are rare this far north.’ Which made Billy and Minnie giggle even more.
Connie twisted round and gazed up at the forest. ‘Anyone hear thunder coming from the mountain?’ There was a faint rumbling sound coming from up in the woods.
‘Maybe an earthquake,’ said Minnie, grinning.
But the low rumble stopped, fading quickly away, and they continued eating, apart from Dan who kept looking up at the mountain. A faint drumming sounded from deep in the woods.
‘Ah, the distant drumming of the yellow-bellied sapsucker,’ said Minnie.
‘You’re a yellow-bellied sapsucker!’ said Billy inevitably.
‘No, you’re a yellow-bellied sapsucker!’ replied Minnie.
‘Let’s hope that’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker,’ said Dan.
Connie stood and leaned on the rail looking back up at the mountain, the skies behind it a deep, darkening blue. ‘Well, four days and nothing’s happened,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s it. Maybe they’ve moved on. The smoke has gone, finally.’
Minnie looked away from the mountain and across the bay. There was no movement on the water – no boats to be seen, just the flock of seagulls floating in close formation on the still grey expanse of water, rising on the swell.
Minnie didn’t want the Bigfoots to go. They’d looked after her when she’d fallen and hit her head, watched over her as she’d slept in the forest, and then terrified her and Dan escorting them out of the woods. She felt she understood them and that they cared about her and that the forest would be a different, lesser place if they left.
‘Do you think they’ve been watching us move the cabin and everything?’ asked Billy.
‘Yes,’ said Minnie, and Dan looked at her.
‘Have you seen anything, Minnie?’ he asked.
‘No, but I reckon they’ve watched us from the trees up there somewhere and maybe even come down to take a look, at night…’
‘Please, no!’ said Billy.
‘They don’t mean us any harm, Billy. I know they don’t,’ said Minnie patting his back.
‘And we don’t mean them any harm,’ said Connie.
‘The more you keep your rifle out of sight, Dan,’ said Minnie, ‘then the closer they will come.’
Dan opened another bottle of beer, tossing the cap on the table. ‘Well, I have to say that there may be something out there, but until I see one clearly, and I mean clearly, then I can’t, hand on heart, say they exist.’
‘Wow,’ said Minnie, ‘after all that’s happened, Dan?’
‘Yup. I need to see one. Just one.’
‘Dan, come on!’ said Connie. ‘Th
ey put pine resin on her cuts!’
‘Listen,’ said Minnie. And they did listen – a silence had fallen on the nearby forest. The chattering and chirping had ceased.
‘That’s odd,’ said Connie.
‘What’s that?’ said Billy, pointing to the furthest corner of the deck from where they were sitting. There was a small black object lying on the edge of the deck.
Minnie stood up and took a step towards it. ‘It’s a crow,’ she said, ‘and I think it’s … it’s dead.’
The crow was lying on its back, motionless with its black talons curled up, closed tight. They all stood up to get a better look at it.
‘Is it dead?’ asked Minnie, moving slowly towards it and crouching down to look more closely, but in a few seconds the bird twitched, flapped one wing, and staggered to its spindly black feet. It cawed. They all stepped back to give it space.
‘Caw-Caw? Is that you?’ asked Minnie, ‘What’s up with you?’ It flapped its wings a couple of times, cawed again and lifted into the darkening sky, flying up and up towards the forest.
They all watched it, astonished by what they’d just witnessed. Connie spoke first. ‘How? … What? … I’ve never seen such a thing.’
From below the front of the raised wooden deck where they were sitting, below the corner where the crow had been lying moments before, came a deep guttural grunt followed by breathy sibilance, ‘Oooshh…’
‘What was…?’ said Billy.
‘Shhh!’ said Minnie, just as the top of a huge, dark-brown, hairy, cone-shaped head rose slowly up from below the deck, until two widely spaced dark eyes, under a prominent brow, twinkled in the reflected light from the cabin. There was a V-shaped notch missing from his right ear. They all froze, not moving a muscle, as he kept rising up very, very slowly, showing first the top half of his human-like face, covered in hair apart from his broad nose and hairless grey cheeks, and then his mouth, and his hair-covered chin. They could hear his breath on each exhalation, and the smell it brought to the little deck where they sat was strong – sour, piney and earthy.