by Gloria Repp
“What was the matter with him?” Stan asked.
Karin told Stan what happened, and he turned red. The muscles in his jaw knotted as if he were angry, and Julie watched him in surprise. He must really like dogs, she thought.
After Stan left, she told Karin about the Indian village Dad had mentioned and asked whether she knew where it was.
Karin looked at her for a long moment, as if considering something. “Sure I know where it is,” she said with an odd little smile. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind taking you there tomorrow.”
That night Julie thought again about Karin’s smile. It would be wonderful to visit the Indian village, and maybe she’d even find Paul Edenshaw.
But what did that smile mean? She already knew that she couldn’t trust Karin Fletcher.
When she awoke the next morning, there was no sunlight to brighten her room, and her legs felt stiff from the bike trip. Gray, lowering clouds covered the sky. Even the birds weren’t saying very much.
They probably wouldn’t hike to the Indian village in this weather, so she took her time getting up. She read a little farther in the book of Mark and wrote out Melissa’s verse so she could remember it better.
For God so loved the world . . . She smiled at the words, started to thank God for loving her, and stopped. The verse said the world. Did that mean Karin too?
It was an unsettling thought. If she was going to follow Christ, how could she hate someone He loved?
She sat up straighter in the chair. Today would be different. No matter what happened, she wasn’t going to lose her temper with Karin.
By the time Julie went downstairs, her cousin was eating pancakes and looking impatient. “You almost ready to go?” she asked.
“I’ll hurry,” Julie promised. She couldn’t admit that she’d thought bad weather would keep them indoors, so she ate her pancakes quickly and made sure she was ready when Karin started out the door.
Karin headed for the trail where Julie had walked Siem the day before. Today it seemed to be hung with cold shadows, and she wished the dog were trotting beside her, but Karin had ordered him to stay home and rest.
Her cousin seemed to be thinking about something else, so Julie didn’t try talking to her. Perhaps today, for once, they could do something together without a quarrel.
The trail wound on and on through deep woods, and as Julie began to wonder how far they were going, it ended in a large, ragged clearing. “There’s your Indian village,” Karin said.
Julie stared at a huddle of ramshackle huts with blank, broken windows and sagging doors. Rusted cans and bedsprings poked through the weeds that choked the clearing.
“But it’s deserted!” she cried. “Where is everybody? You said—”
“I said I’d take you to the Indian village your father told you about,” Karin said. “From the way you described it, I knew it had to be this one. That was a long time ago. Since he was here, the Indians just up and left.”
“But why?” Julie gazed across the empty settlement.
“Probably some kind of disease came through.” Karin shrugged. “Who knows why Indians do things, anyway? They built a new village on the other side of the point from our place.”
Julie couldn’t take her eyes off the tattered shacks. “It doesn’t even look like an Indian village,” she murmured.
“What did you expect, teepees?” Karin said. “These Indians aren’t the same as the ones you Americans have, chasing cowboys and all that stuff. Their customs are different. Like those totem poles over there.”
The sharp tone crept back into her voice. “Ask Robert to tell you about them. If he’ll talk to you.”
“Are those real totem poles?” Julie asked. She walked closer to the carved wooden posts.
Their odd animal shapes had the same grinning faces and staring eyes that she’d seen on the small totem poles in Uncle Nate’s study. Some even looked like people’s faces, topped with funny little stovepipe hats. But these posts were gray with age and spotted with moss. A few of them leaned toward each other, as if ready to fall.
“Better not touch them,” Karin said. “They’re probably rotten clear through by now, and the Indians are fussy about white people handling their sacred objects. You could get into trouble with a whole bunch of evil spirits.”
Was she joking? Julie threw her a quick glance, but her cousin’s face was solemn.
“Come on,” Karin said. “There’s another place I want to show you.”
Graveyard Totems
They retraced their steps on the trail for a short distance, and the light under the trees grew dim, as if clouds were gathering above them. Soon Karin turned off onto another trail, “Let’s go this way.”
These trees looked older and taller than the others, Julie thought, as if they were giants, the last of an ancient forest. Walking under them made her feel as small as a beetle.
Ferns grew here, some of them pale and lacy-looking, others spurting up in great dark fountains of green. Fungi, like dirty-white ears, grew on the tree trunks, and moss covered every fallen branch and stump.
Mist began to curl down through the trees, and she remembered Stan’s description of island fog. They reached another clearing, and she glimpsed a bank of fog curling across the ocean toward them. Would it get thicker and thicker, as Stan said?
Karin walked silently through the knee-high grass of the clearing. Finally she turned, speaking to Julie in a low voice. “This is the Indian graveyard. You can tell the graves by the totems and the crosses. Some have one of each. See that house way over there?”
She gestured to where a rocky point of land was barely visible through the fog. “That’s the house of the Old One. The Indians say that when the fog comes to weep over the graves of the dead, he calls their spirits back into this world.”
Karin’s voice faded into silence, and Julie gazed around the graveyard, awash now with drifting fog.
Some graves had weathered crosses, bleached gray by the sea winds, but most of them were marked by short totem poles. Nearby, a raven balanced on a post, his wings outstretched and his sharp beak extended, but he was overgrown with moss.
The grave beside the raven was marked by an ordinary gravestone. She brushed back the overhanging weeds and knelt to read the inscription. Only one word had been chiseled into the stone. Joseph. Beside it was the profile of a raven.
“Karin, look here,” she said. “I wonder who Joseph was. He must have especially liked ravens . . . Karin?”
She stood up to look for her cousin, but Karin had disappeared into the fog.
Immediately she turned toward the sea to get her bearings. The water, the rocks, the distant house, had all been blotted out by billowing fog. The trees, too, had become a gray haze of nothing.
She took a few quick steps in the direction she thought the shore would be.
“Karin,” she called. “Karin?” Her voice sounded much too small.
She could hear the soft murmuring of the sea, but it seemed to be whispering at her from every side.
If she couldn’t find the ocean, she was lost. And even if she did find it, which way should she go?
She shivered, staring in disbelief at the thick gray curtain that surrounded her. She’d always thought of fog as delicate and lacy. But this! This was a creeping, living thing, and its fingers felt clammy against her skin. She thought, unwillingly, of the Indian spirits Karin had talked about.
For one panic-stricken moment her attention was caught by a bear totem with cruel-looking rows of sharp teeth. Had it moved? Had it? Now it seemed to be grinning at her through the tendrils of fog that curled around its huge body.
“Stop!” She said it loudly to herself and added, “You’re imagining things!” She wasn’t going to fall for another one of Karin’s tricks.
“Hello? Hello?” She was shouting now. “Is anyone around?”
She kept her eyes on the bear totem and called again.
A dark shape moved toward her through the fog, an
d she reached for a stick to throw at it.
A big black . . . dog. “Siem!” she cried, laughing with delight. “How did you ever find me?”
She wrapped her arms around his damp, furry neck, and he licked her face.
“Maybe . . .” she whispered into his ear, “. . . maybe the Lord sent you!”
But Siem was staring past her into the fog, to where a dim figure walked among the graves.
Siem wagged his tail, and a minute later she recognized Robert Greystone.
He greeted her calmly. “Thought I heard something. People don’t usually visit this graveyard.”
“I came with Karin,” Julie said, and anger stirred again as she told him what had happened.
His dark eyes narrowed, and he muttered, “Karin, she is a bad one.”
“I was the one who wanted to come,” she said. “It must have just occurred to her on the spur of the moment when she saw the fog. If this is supposed to be a joke, she has a weird sense of humor.”
She looked around at the totems, which seemed to float in the shifting gray. “Do all these creatures have some special meaning? Are they sort of like idols?”
“Not idols,” Robert said. “Some Indians thought that creatures like Raven had supernatural powers, but they carved animals on totem poles to show the family crest, not to worship them.”
He touched the bear’s wide snout. “The crest of this family was Grizzly Bear. That family over there had Raven.”
He looked at her earnestly. “You know how people in the States brand their cattle to show which ones are theirs? That’s what the Indian does. He carves his tribal crest on everything, including his canoe and his grave marker.”
“What about the poles I saw by the old village?” she asked.
“Each of them has a couple of figures, and together they tell a story,” Robert said. “It might be about some family experience or a legend.” He glanced at the grizzly bear and added, “Totem poles used to be a kind of status symbol, sort of like having two cars in the garage.”
As Julie listened, the fog pressed coldly against her face, making her shiver. She wanted to go home and get warm, but she had to ask one more question. She waved a hand toward the rocky point, still invisible in the fog. “Is it true that the Old One is a shaman?”
He gazed at her, his eyes dark with mystery, and for a moment she worried that she’d offended him.
He turned as if to leave, and spoke over his shoulder. “You are cold. Come with me.”
She followed willingly through the tall, damp grass. She had no idea where he might be taking her, but she didn’t feel afraid, perhaps because Uncle Nate knew this boy and trusted him.
Besides, she’d probably been in more danger when she’d gone with Karin into that desolate graveyard.
There was no trail, but they seemed to be going toward the beach.
They came out of the trees into a clearing with more rocks than she’d ever seen at once. It looked as if a huge bucket of rocks, large and small, had been dumped here to arrange themselves as they pleased, and they stretched out of sight into the fog.
Robert looked back at her. “We call this The Spill—it’s a great spot to explore.” He picked his way through the rocks, heading for a place where they had stacked themselves into layers, forming a cliff.
Soon she caught the scent of wood smoke, and he said, “We’re almost there.”
A minute later, he ducked beneath an overhang and into a shallow cave. The first thing she noticed was a small fire, and she hurried to stand beside it.
Robert dragged a flat stone close to the fire and motioned for her to sit down. She crouched on the stone and gratefully held her cold hands to the fire. Siem curled up beside her on the stone floor, and Robert sat next to him.
As warmth began to steal through her fingertips, she looked around the cave with admiration. Its furnishings consisted of two shelves of books, a stack of firewood, and a bucket of water, but it was dry and cozy. “This is a wonderful place,” she said.
Robert glanced fondly at the rough stone walls. “It must have taken the ocean a long time to carve this spot out of the limestone. I found it by accident, although your uncle knows about it too. It’s a good place to study. My house in the village is crowded.”
She glanced at his books. “You’re going to be a doctor, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Robert’s eyes brightened with determination. “I want to do research like Dr. Fletcher. There are many terrible diseases, and some of them are especially bad among the Indians.”
He picked up a piece of wood and laid it precisely on the fire. “Your uncle has been a great friend to me, and to my people.”
His words reminded her of the question she’d wanted to ask. “My father told me about a friend of his who lived in the Indian village—Paul Edenshaw. Do you know of him?”
Robert shook his head. “Not anyone by that name. You realize that the Indian village is in another place now, don’t you?”
“Karin said it’s over past the Fletchers’ house. But I don’t think I’ll ask her to show it to me.”
She sighed. Now her problem with Karin was worse than ever. “I don’t know what to do about her,” she said, half to herself.
She gave Robert an apologetic smile. “I want to be friends with my cousin, but she hates me, no matter how hard I try.”
“Why bother, if she treats you so badly?”
She wondered what to say—he’d think it was silly.
She watched a thick branch glow red in the fire and finally mumbled, “It’s kind of hard to explain.”
Robert gave her one of his studying looks. “Try me.”
“I guess it’s because of Christ . . .”
He waited, and she went on, her words tumbling over each other. “There’s this verse in the Bible that says God loves the whole world, which includes me—and I’m happy for that—but I guess it includes Karin too. So I’d better not hate her.”
He nodded. “Your uncle said something to me about that verse.”
“It’s a favorite of mine,” Julie said. “But I keep forgetting, and every time Karin does something mean, I get mad at her again.” She stole a glance at him. “I guess I don’t have enough willpower.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Willpower?”
As soon as he said it, she felt defeated, and all she could do was shrug.
“You don’t look as if you’re listening to your verse,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“After the love part . . .” She stroked Siem’s smooth black neck and tried to remember. “It says if we believe in Christ, we’ll have everlasting life.”
Robert pushed a branch farther into the fire and it flared up, lighting his serious face. “Hmmm,” he said. “Your uncle told me that too, and I’m still thinking about it. But if it’s true, it sounds like Christ is pretty powerful.”
“Yes, He is—”
“So why do you say you’ve got to have willpower to keep from hating your cousin?”
She gazed at him, thinking it through. “You’re saying I should ask God to help me love her?”
Robert shrugged. “Something like that.”
He stood up to scatter the glowing embers, reached for a bucket, and dribbled water on the fire. “Your aunt will be wondering where you are,” he said, taking two books from a shelf. “I’ll walk you back to the right trail. It’s on my way to work.”
She followed him out of the cave. “Where do you work?”
“At the general store, most afternoons.”
He paused to survey the rocks in front of them. “The shortest way to your place is right through The Spill, so that’s how we’ll go.”
He climbed a boulder in one easy bound and began jumping from rock to rock. She followed as well as she could, scrambling from rock to rock, climbing over others, and crawling on her hands and knees when she had to.
Finally Robert stepped off the last
rock onto a trail under the trees, and he turned to watch her with something like approval in his eyes.
Her sea-otter pendant had swung on its chain while she climbed, and now it was hanging out over her blouse.
Robert glanced at it. “What’s that?”
Still breathing hard, she unclasped the necklace and handed it to him. He examined it as they walked along the trail.
She explained how her father had given it to her. “Now I’m curious about sea otters,” she added. “Uncle Nate has some pictures of them, and they look like fascinating little creatures. Are there any around here?”
“I think they’re almost extinct.” Robert handed the necklace back without saying anything more.
They had reached a fork in the trail, and he pointed down the right-hand side. “That’s the way to your uncle’s house. Do you remember the trail you were on the first time I saw you?”
At Julie’s nod, he went on. “That one is the trail to the Indian village. See you later.” He lifted a hand in farewell and walked off.
She watched him go. What he’d said about God’s power was true. But still . . .
The trail ahead looked like a dim tunnel with wet, green walls, and she followed it, wishing she were already back inside where everything was warm and bright.
Robert had been kind to her, and she wasn’t going to argue with him, but now, alone with her thoughts, she could say, Sure, God is powerful enough to help anyone He wants to. If He wants to.
Maybe this wasn’t such a big deal to Him.
She began to shiver again. Oh, forget it!
A pink salmonberry flower caught her eye, and she stopped to pick it for her collection, but as soon as she started walking again, words began drifting through her mind.
For God so loved—Julie—that He gave His only begotten Son . . .
She walked faster.
I will never leave thee nor forsake thee . . .
The trail curved past more salmonberry bushes and clumps of ferns and a fallen cedar, and the words repeated themselves, keeping pace with her footsteps until finally she began to listen.
A sense of shame, cold as the ocean, washed through her. God had said all that to her, and she was still wondering whether He wanted to help?