by Ivan Doig
Edinso huffs from the tent and Swan falls asleep to the mutters of the crewmen debating the biscuit issue.
In the morning the dietary squabble wakes with them. Had a good blow up with old Edinso, Swan’s pocket diary begins forthrightly. This time the chief tries Swan on the angle that the canoe crew wants to eat with him and they want flour and potatoes and pancakes, and want Johnny to be their cook.
They might as well have wanted Swan to pare their toenails during supper every night, too. If there is one matter in the cosmos that Swan has a clear doctrine about, it is the sanctity of his meals. He fires back to Edinso and the other Haidas the ultimatum—bluff, more likely—that if I heard any more complaints I would return to Masset and get another crew....When they found I was determined they gave up and all became good natured.
Good-natured or not, Edinso defers on biscuits and hotcakes and begins showing Swan and Deans the long-awaited shores of his North Island, today’s Langara.
He takes them first to a site called Tadense, a deserted village rapidly expiring back into the forest. Even the more recent houses built fifty years ago are fast decaying: the humidity of the climate causes a growth of moss which, freezing in winter and seldom or never dry in summer, rots the soft cedar and rapidly reduces it to a pulpy mould. Then from the oozing-away village, along the waterline to a burial cave. A dry cavern some 60 feet in length, as Swan jots it, the entrance to which is 25 feet above high water mark and approached by a rough path over conglomerate boulders. Edinso, who is proving to have a rhetorical formula for every occasion, assures them that no white eyes ever have seen the hallowed spot before this instant.
They clamber in among some 28 or 30 burial boxes of various sizes....In one of the boxes of skeletons which had been opened by age, a puffin or sea parrot had made its nest....Some of the burial boxes were ornamented with the crests of the occupants carved and painted in colors, others were merely rough boxes. Some of the bodies were rolled in Hudson Bay blankets, and some of the heads were mummified like AZTEC mummies....That of a Chief or doctor, was well preserved the hair tied in a knot on the top of the skull, and the dried ears still holding the abalone shell ornaments....
Yet one more stop in this funereal day: Cloak Bay, sheltered by a small island which thrust up a conglomerate cusp of cliff astoundingly like a round medieval tower, everything but the want of windows made this appearance complete. Sharp rocks fanged around the island. One pinnacle displayed a hole bored through by the ocean’s action. Edinso at once advertises the cavity as the work of an immense fish gnawing a doorway to its house. That reminds him that he hasn’t adequately explained the castellated island, and he relates to Swan and Deans that here lived an Indian slaver named Teegwin, and for his misdeeds he was turned into this big stone, and his sister coming to see him was also turned to stone.
After this recital we hoisted sail and returned to camp.
Two days after that, on the tenth of August, Swan makes a find which is among the oddest in his thirty years of nosing along the Pacific shoreline. Edinso and crew had steered Deans and him to the deserted village of Yakh, there to see the burial place of a medicine man named Koontz. Inside his plank box, Koontz in a shirt of caribou skin reclines in full dignified length, not doubled up as is the practice. Bodies of doctors alone being allowed to remain in the position in which they die. Deans potters around the corpse a bit, but Swan is less interested in Koontz’s posture than a pair of items among the skaga’s burial trove. Two large curved teeth which he thinks resemble those of a beaver, but which seem too long, too...odd. The baffling incisors, he subsequently learned were tusks of the African wild hog...probably procured from the wreck of a Japanese or Siamese ]unk which was lost on Queen Charlotte Islands in 1833.
Swan has on his mind even another mystery of Africa-in-the-North-Pacific. Back at Kioosta he noticed among the carved column figures a creature with a rolled-up snout. Except for the lack of tusks it looked for all the world like the head of an elephant. Beginning to wonder about the pachydermic enthusiasms of the Haidas, Swan at last questions Edinso and is enlightened when the chief points toward a flutter on a nearby bush. The carved creature was a colossal butterfly, the snout its proboscis.
Swan of course asks for the legend, Edinso of course has it ready: that when the Hooyeh or raven was a man, he lived in a country beyond California, that he got angry with his uncle and lit down on his head and split it open. Then fearing his relatives he changed to a bird and flew to Queen Charlotte Islands where he was told good land could be found. The butterfly, a creature as big as a house accompanied him and would fly up in the air and when he saw any good land he would unfold his proboscis and point with it.
Just the way, Edinso drives the point home to his white questioner with a tap of mockery, Johnny was going with me showing me places.
Day Seventy
Recited in turn by each of Swan’s three sets of diary pages during their early weeks in the Queen Charlottes, a legend, a belief, and a lore:
Towats was a great Haida hunter, and once while hunting he found the house of the king of the bears. The king bear was not there but his wife was, and Towats made love to her. Arriving home to a much disordered house the king bear charged his wife with unfaithfulness. She denied all. But the king bear noticed that at a certain hour each day she went out to fetch wood and water and was gone long. One day he tied a thread to her dress. By following the thread through the forest he came upon his wife in the arms of Towats. The king of bears slew the hunter Towats by tearing out his heart.
Called on Kive-ges-lines this PM to see her twins which were born on the 10th. They were pretty babies but the Indians are sure to kill one. Next day: One of the twins died during the night as I predicted. The Indian who told me said...”It died from want of breath” which I think very probable. These Haidas like the Makahs have a superstition that twins bring ill luck....
Old Stingess...came to my house and...I asked her to tell me about tattooing and when the Haidahs first commenced tattooing. She said it was always practiced...as long ago as the most ancient legends make any mention. Formerly the Indians procured the wool of the mountain sheep which was spun into fine threads which were stained with some black pigment either pulverized charcoal and water, or with lignite ground in water on a stone, as at present, then with needles made of copper procured from the Sitka Indians, these fine threads were drawn under the skin producing indelible marks. When white men came they learned the art of tattooing with steel needles from sailors on board the vessels, and have adopted that plan since...here the old woman became tired and went home.
How elliptical, literally, the past becomes. Stingess culls from what may have been an evening-long narrative an answer for Swan. Who chooses as much of it as he thinks worth cramming into his diary pages. At my hundred years’ remove, I select lines from his and frame them in trios of editing dots. From her Haida tradition to Swan’s white tribe to my even paler version. The logical end of the process signaled by my ellipses, I suppose, might be for the lore of Haida tattooing to compress down to something like a single magical speck of print, perhaps the period after the news that Stingess has got tired of all the chitchat and hobbled home. But I’ve heard it offered that a period is simply the shorthand for the dots of an ellipsis. That a story never does end, only can pause. So that would not complete it either, the elliptical transit from Stingess to Swan to me to whomever abbreviates the past next.
MARCH
The Cracked Canoe
TCHIMOSE
A mythological animal residing in the ocean.
Day Seventy-One
I flip the month on the photo calendar above my desk, and the room fills with lumberjacks. The calendar came as a gift, a dozen scenes from the glass plates of a photographer who roved the Olympic Peninsula lumber camps in the first years of this century, and I’ve paid no particular attention to the scenery atop the days: January a stand of age-silvered trees, February a few dodgy sawyers off in the middle distan
ce from the camera. But March’s four loggers, spanned across the cut they are making in a cedar tree as big in diameter as this room, hover in as if estimating the board footage my desktop would yield.
The chunky logger at the left stands on a springboard, his axe held extended, straight out and waist-high, in his left hand and the blade resting almost tenderly against the gash in the cedar. He is like a man fishing off a bridge beam, but absent-mindedly having picked up the camp axe instead of the trout rod.
The next man is seated in the cut, legs casually dangling and crossed at the ankles, a small shark’s grin of spikes made by the bottoms of his caulked boots. His arms are folded easily across his middle; he has trimly rolled his pant legs and sleeves; is handsome and dark-browed with a ladykilling lock of hair down the right side of his forehead.
The woodman beside him is similarly seated, arms also crossed, but is flap-eared, broad hipped, mustached. Surely he is the Swede of the crew, whatever his origins.
The final logger, on the right edge of the photo, is a long-faced giant. As he stands atop a log with his right foot propped on the cut, broad left hand hooked into a suspender strap where it meets his pants, there is unnatural length to his huge stretched body. The others must call him Highpockets. Or Percival, if that is what he prefers. His shirt is work-soiled, his eyes pouchy but hard. Unlike his at-ease mate across the tree, he clenches his axe a third of the way up the handle, as if having tomahawked it into the tree just over the left jug ear of the Swede.
Down the middle of the picture, between the seated sawyers, stands their glinting crosscut saw. If the giant is six and a half feet tall as he looks to be, the saw is ten; the elongated great-granddaddy of the crosscut in Trudy and Howard’s cabin. Under its bright ladder of teeth are strewn the chips from the cut. The foursome has not much more than started on the great cedar, and already the woodpile is considerable.
Twenty days until spring in the company of these timber top-plers, and by-God forceful company they promise to be. I want all at once to see the Peninsula woods that drew whackers like these, if only to reassure myself that they’re not out there now leveling daylight into whatever green is left. Late tomorrow, Carol will be finished teaching her week’s classes. We will head for the Hoh rain forest.
Swan at Kioosta, his forty-eighth day in the Queen Charlotte islands and his fourth on the venture along the western shore: Very disagreeable morning, thick with misty rain.
He decides to sit tight and do such diary matters as ruminating on the blessed total absence of fleas and other annoying insects so common and universal in Indian camps and villages....Edinso says that formerly fleas were very numerous, and at Masset they were so plentiful as the sand on the beach and they remained as long as the Indians dressed in otter’skins and bark robes, but when the white men came with other hind of clothing and bought all the old fur dresses, the fleas began to disappear. At last the Indians all went to Victoria, and on their return they found that the fleas had entirely left....Edinso said perhaps the world turned over and all the fleas hopped off.
Day Seventy-Two
Sunshine, bright as ripe grain. Just before lunch as I looked out wishing for birds, a cloud of bushtits and chickadees imploded into the backyard firs. I stepped into the yard to listen to their dee dee dee chorus, watched them become fast flecks among the branches.
No sooner had I come inside than the lion-colored cat, pausing for a slow slitted look in the direction of the sun, lazed up the hillside into the long grass.
Three times in four minutes he tried to nest himself. Then sat casually and eyed a number of items he evidently had never noticed before, such as his own tail, a bug in the grass, every nearby tree. Sneezed, and was astonished about it. I have decided there is no worry about him marauding the birds. More prospect the birds will mistake him for a fluffy boulder, perch atop him and drown him in droppings.
Now to Swan. Sunday, the twelfth of August, he arises at five intending an early start downcoast from the North Island waters, the cornering turn which will take the expedition at last along the Queen Charlottes’ west shore. Arises and feels a southeast wind on his face and peers seaward to a brilliant and perfect rainbow, a double one, which indicated rain. Within half an hour the downpour has begun.
I am disappointed as there is nothing to prevent our going but the rain, and I am anxious to be moving.
That double rainbow, signal to Northwest rain, indeed must have been an “anxious” omen to Swan. Dampness is a price humankind hates to pay. (“Eleven days rain, and the most disagreeable time I have experienced,” wrote an edgy Captain William Clark on November 17, 1805, and that was at the very start of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s sodden months in winter camp near the mouth of the Columbia.) Perhaps it is because rain tugs all that is human in us too far back to our undry origins. If it has taken this long to encase us, set us upright and mobile on frames of bone, and all that evolving can be pattered back to sheer existence by drops of water, we are not safe. No, I think the private red streams in us do not at all like that call of commonality, and the unease of it now must be in Swan.
Monday, thirteenth of August, a most disagreeable day, misty rain and alternate showers. I remained in my tent most of the time, writing and drawing, but the rain prevented out of door sketching. Edinso’s sprained back also remains a bother. Yesterday he put some hot sand in a sack and...sweated the part; now evidently has taken cold. This makes it disagreeable to us as well as painful to him. The ailing chief passes the day by having several messes of boiled halibut served up till Mr. Deans and I were surfeited.
Meanwhile, Swan adds, one of the paddlers is busy at the fire forging a lot of square staples to mend our canoe which had got split along the bottom.
The cracked canoe creates a new fret, and Swan’s most serious yet. Cedar canoes such as those of the Haidas were so finely honed, so extreme an alchemy of tree-into-vessel-of-grace (recall the Masset canoe maker Swan watched stretching an amidship portion to double its natural width) that their beautiful tension of design became a kind of fragility. For all their length and capacity they were thin, thin craft, leanest of wood. Think of this: you are in a twin-engined aircraft and one propellor begins to stutter, semaphores an erratic pattern in from the wing to your solid stare. There, maybe, is something like the jagged message Swan must read now from the canoe bottom.
To me, Swan exactly here is tested as a true explorer, for this is the first deep nip of predicament. Predicament somehow shadows an expeditionary in strange forms that cannot be imagined until the pounce happens. The Antarctic explorer Mawson, the bottoms of his feet dropping off like insoles, forcing him to bare his body for periods so the polar sun might bathe germs from it. Meriwether Lewis, on his way home down the Missouri after the two-year expedition to the Pacific, wounded in a buttock when one of his hunters mistook him for an elk. Swan’s confrontation with predicament is not yet so dire, but as odd: the canoe which he has chosen as the single capable implement to carry him along the west shore now becomes threat to the journey. And dependent for safety on Edinso’s canoe, which like its owner has endured considerably past spryness, are Swan, Johnny Kit Elswa, Deans, the chief himself, the chief’s wife, the five crew members: ten persons, plus full supplies, plus Swan’s hefty tanks of fish specimens.
It can be imagined that Swan watches carefully, hawk-intent, as the copper staples are tacked into place along the fissure through which the Pacific could come in, and the entire expedition dribble out. Then that he puffs a long moment on his white meerschaum before saying aloud that in the morning they will push on.
The rain has gone by morning, and on the ebb tide they set out again, Swan uneasy about the canoe bottom but as I know Edinso is careful I don’t think he will take any chances although I expect we will get some of our things wet, and we may have to lighten the canoe by throwing some part of our cargo overboard.
That put away in the diary, we moved and paddled along, noting everything of interest in this, to
me, most interesting region.
Rounding Cape Knox, a long promontory which on the map looks ominously like a canoe flipped on its back, Swan and crew meet a headwind which forces them to land on a rocky point and scramble for a camping site. They find a place sheltered from the rain by spruce trees and high grass. With tents up and a fire going, Swan decides to lift the party’s spirits. This is a pretty rough time, with wind and rain, so to mark the event I had a ham cut and some slices fried for supper.
The ham and a good campsite warm Swan’s sense of whimsy. This same place had been occupied as a camp last summer by Count Luboff, a Russian who was looking at lands for parties in Victoria. He had put up a notice on a board, that the place was taken as a coal claim. Some of the Indians not knowing what the board meant, split it up for fire wood, which was the best use that the board could be dedicated to, as there is no coal or any indications of coal at this place except the charred remains of Count Luboffs fire.
I have said Swan’s trio of diaries tell very nearly as much as possible about this expedition, but there is an omission noticeable by now. The phantom of these pages is Deans. Johnny Kit Elswa and Edinso receive their ample share from Swan’s pen, but the British Columbia Indian agent is mentioned only when he goes prospecting or accompanies Swan into a burial cave. The notations are unfailingly polite: too polite, as though the diarist does not want any commotion if wrong eyes find the pages.