When they came to the Clearwater where the swimmer spawned, they turned off the motor and paddled through deep quiet pools, overhung with thick brush, to the little falls at the end of the stream and pulled the canoe up on a small, rocky beach of a little island, and they saw they were not alone. Old Marta was there and the girl called Keetah, and the two small children who were his friends, come from the shake cabins to pick blueberries.
At lunch, which they shared, Mark felt at ease for the first time. It was a picnic like any picnic. The day was fair on the small and lovely island. The children played as all children play, and the girl called Keetah, in the faded blue denim slacks and jacket, was a pretty girl anywhere.
‘Mark wants to see the end of the swimmer,’ Jim announced after lunch, and Marta smiled and said she was too old to hang over the pool’s edge flat on her middle; she would stay with the children and pick the rest of the blueberries. Jim found a place where an old maple grew over the stream and the underbrush cast deep shadows. There the three of them crept carefully to the stream’s edge and looked down.
Under the clear water they saw the female swimmer digging the seed beds with her torn tail, her sides deep red and blue, her fins battered and worn.
‘When she has laid her eggs and the waiting males have covered them with milt, she will linger, guarding them for several days,’ Jim said. ‘Let’s try another pool.’ They moved again and saw the end of the swimmer. They watched her last valiant fight for life, her struggle to right herself when the gentle stream turned her, and they watched the water force open her gills and draw her slowly downstream, tail first, as she had started to the sea as a fingerling. Then they crept away from the pool’s edge and returned to Marta, and Mark saw that in Keetah’s eyes there were tears.
‘It is always the same,’ she said. ‘The end of the swimmer is sad.’
‘But, Keetah, it isn’t. The whole life of the swimmer is one of courage and adventure. All of it builds to the climax and the end. When the swimmer dies he has spent himself completely for the end for which he was made, and this is not sadness. It is triumph.’
‘Mark is right, Keetah,’ Marta said. ‘It is not sad. It is natural. When I was a child and a sea-hunter died, we believed he went to the land of the killer whale, and a land-hunter to the home of the wolves, and a slave to the home of the owls. But when twins were born in the village, we did not think they were children at all. They were swimmers.’
‘I have a twin sister,’ Mark said. ‘She is my only close relative,’ and they all laughed, and Marta said, ‘The swimmer is your relative. You belong to the salmon people.’
On the way back to the village Mark and Jim spoke little. When they had moored the canoe, waded ashore, and were walking up the path to the vicarage, Mark said slowly, ‘Keetah is a beautiful girl. Do you not think so?’
‘Yes. When she was at the government school in Alert Bay she was called the “little princess”. She was homesick. When the children stood in line to receive the cod-liver oil, she went to the end of the line for another dosage because the oil tastes like the gleena in which we dip our food.’
‘She is married?’
‘No — she is to marry Gordon. Her grandmother has arranged it. He is at the government school in Alert Bay. He is older than the others there because he stayed out of school to help his uncle with the fishing. But she will not marry him. She will marry me.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because I am the only other man in the village she can marry. She is too closely related to the others. She will marry me, keep my house, and have my children, and I will leave her and go off to fish.’
‘She does not like Gordon?’
‘She likes him.’
‘Then what is the matter with him?’
‘Gordon is Che-kwa-lá, which means fast moving water,’ Jim said slowly, ‘and Keetah is the pool.’
Whenever they came up the river from the float, Mark watched for the swimmer, the pressed silver forms moving secretly beneath the surface. He did not see him again.
6
IN LATE OCTOBER THE FISHING DAYS grew fewer, lessening slowly to an end. Now there were more men in the village. Sometimes Mark would see one setting off into the woods to hunt, his rifle held so easily it seemed part of the man himself. And sometimes he saw two starting off together, one man’s arm over the shoulder of the other, and he knew this was no indication of homosexuality; it was the warrior-to-warrior relationship, centuries old. But never did he see groups of men talking loudly of the hunt that was planned, and this also was rooted in the past. If a man said aloud, ‘I will pursue the deer here; I will seek the bear there,’ some woman would hear him, and ten minutes later all the wives of the tribe would be promising each other venison and bear steaks, and discussing how to cook them, and the spirits that lived in the bear and the deer would hear them, and the game would hide.
One day in the vicarage over lunch, Mark questioned Jim about the hunting, and Jim asked if he’d like to go along, and Mark said he would — to watch, that is, since he was no hunter himself and had never shot anything larger than a rabbit or a duck.
‘Have you had sufficient sustenance to suffice?’ he asked when the meal was done, and Jim said, ‘What is this word suffice?’ and Mark told him it meant ‘Have you had enough to eat?’
Early one morning, they went again up-river with three other men from the village, and after an hour on a mountain called Quanade, they followed a bear. However hard Mark tried to keep up, he was always last, breaking through the underbrush with a frightful clatter, snagged on the devil’s club, slipping on the shale. When he was sure he could not take another step, one of the Indians whirled and a shot sounded, and a large brown form dropped. They approached it carefully.
‘I thought we were following the bear,’ Mark said to Jim.
‘We were until he circled. He’s been following us for an hour.’
‘But there’s no bullet hole.’
‘It is hidden by the fur and the rolls of fat,’ and Mark saw the laughter rise and hold in all the dark eyes. ‘This bear did not die of a bullet,’ one of the Indians told him gravely. ‘He died of shock. It’s the first time he’s ever seen a vicar so far up on the mountain.’
In mid-afternoon one of the men shot a grey timber wolf that weighed at least a hundred and thirty pounds, its big mouth full of what seemed to Mark an overabundance of very large teeth, and he and Jim took leave of the others and walked through the woods back to the shake cabins to start supper and prepare the bough beds upon which the blankets would be spread.
They trudged in silence for at least an hour.
‘You know something, Jim?’
‘What?’
‘I think we’re being followed.’
‘It’s only the mate of the wolf that was killed. When we move, she moves. When we stop, she stops. Let’s rest.’
They rested, and Mark got out his pipe, filled, tamped and lighted it, trying very hard not to look back, trying not to show by squirming that he wished to go on. Finally Jim spoke. He spoke slowly and carefully.
‘Have we had sufficient to suffice? Have we had enough?’
‘Did you say we?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I have,’ and they went on quickly, leaving behind them the widow wolf and Caleb’s splendid Victorian we that had served Mark well and that he would not use again.
That night, in the largest of the shake cabins, they lay close together on their bough beds in their clothes and their wool caps, the fire burning on the dirt floor, and the Indians talked so long of the man-god who lived in the sea and controlled the fishes that Mark went to sleep before he ever learned what the killer whale said to the swimmer, and the swimmer to the halibut. When he awoke the shake cabin was filled with smoke, his face was grimy with soot, his eyes stung, the bough bed had grown hard, and even with his head under the blankets, he could not stop coughing. He pulled on his bo
ots — the only things he’d taken off —and, plucking the top blanket, he crept for the door and out. He put the blanket around his shoulders and his back against a big cedar, and stood in the cool dark. Presently Jim joined him.
‘What are you doing here? We thought we’d lost you.’
‘I couldn’t stop coughing. I was afraid I’d waken the others. Jim, don’t ask me to creep behind a deer and wham him over the head with a club.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And I’ll never fish as well as the Indians. Sometimes I’m not even sure I’ll learn to handle the boat.’
‘You are doing well with the boat. In another six months you will be almost as good as an Indian boy by the time he is ten.’
They stood under the cedar in the rain until daybreak. Both knew there was friendship between them now, forged without words and needing none.
In November the rain fell in a slow and patient drizzle. Already the rain had become an element of life like the air Mark breathed, and when it stopped he missed it somehow, and found himself listening for the drip, drip, drip that seemed now a necessary and comforting component of his life.
7
IN NOVEMBER THE HOSPITAL SHIP of the tiny Anglican fleet tied up at the float as it did every six weeks, and the doctor was brought up the river by canoe, and turned the old vicarage into a clinic. The doctor was new on the ship and had never pulled a tooth in his life. He could not hypnotize the Indians during the process as had his predecessor. When he did not wait long enough for the novocaine to take hold, Sam, his first patient, let out such horrific moans that little Ethel, one of the two children who had come first to the vicarage, hid in the woods. When the doctor had gone, Mark found her among the trees, and he took her to the vicarage, sat her in a chair, tied one end of a string around her wobbly baby tooth and the other to a doorknob, and he said, ‘Now, Ethel, I’ll count ten, and then I’ll kick the door shut.’
‘One-two-three,’ he counted, and he slammed the door on five and out flew the tooth.
‘Nothing to it,’ he said, and while he picked up the swabs, the lint, and the bandages, little Ethel swept up the tooth from the vicarage floor.
A week later one of the boys of the village was very ill in the night with what Mark was sure was acute appendicitis. The hospital ship was in Seymour Inlet, too far to come quickly, and a bush plane, if he could manage to summon one by the radio-telephone on the boat, could not land on the river at night. He and Jim packed the boy in blankets, took him by canoe to the boat, packed his side in crushed ice and took him to Alert Bay. When they had delivered the patient safely to the hospital and started back to the village, they found the straits shrouded in a thick fog, and the boat rolling heavily in the swell that came down Queen Charlotte Sound. But Jim knew the way, sounding the whistle to catch an echo from an island or an inlet side. They crept up the inlet to the float, and they crept up the river past the log jams and the snags, the water gurgling around them, Mark, who had forgotten his Kingcome slippers, trying to hold his feet out of the rain water in the bottom of the canoe.
When they reached the vicarage, Marta had started a fire, and set a pot of soup on the back of the stove and a loaf of homemade bread on the table, and they ate ravenously.
With December all the things in the village – the stubborn, inanimate things – revolted at once. The church stove smoked. The wet wood refused to burn. The hot water boiler in the house of Chief Eddy burst its seams. The mended roof of the old vicarage developed sundry leaks, the rain hitting the waiting buckets with a rhythmic plop. The boat developed gasket trouble, and the generator that operated the lights in the church – the only one in the village – refused to start fifteen minutes before the Sunday Evensong. Mark took off his surplice, put on his heavy Indian sweater. Out came the wrenches, off came the fuel line. He drained the fuel tank. He bled the air from the fuel line, then connected it all up again. He cranked, talking steadily to himself, ‘Yes, my lord. No, my lord. Yes, my lord. No, my lord.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Jim asked.
‘The Bishop.’
‘But he isn’t here.’
‘And a good thing too—,’ and he gave a violent kick to the generator which responded with a surprised wheeze and a chug-chug. Then he hurried to the vicarage, washed the grease from his hands and face, got into his surplice and went to the church where the congregation was waiting. ‘And God said, let there be light, and there was light.’
In the last week of the month Mark neglected his boat and paid for it heavily. He and Jim had returned from patrol and had just tied up at the float when the radiotelephone began to beep, and they were summoned back to one of the other villages, where three children, left alone in their cedar house for a few moments, had tipped over a kerosene lamp and been burned to death.
On the way back from the funeral on a rainless night, the wind blowing and the tide turning, the engine died. Frantically Jim worked on the filter while Mark tried to keep the boat from the rocks, and when the filter was cleaned and the engine caught, he knew that curious change of tempo — one moment every breath a prayer and the next moment, the tension gone, and the two of them joking. The next day he knew also the exhaustion which is the price of courage.
When the weather turned cold, the trip up river became torment. One afternoon a violent wind caught them in the open boat, the sleet blown vertically across the mountain sides. It cut their faces and blew an empty oil drum and the mail sack from the boat. When they reached the vicarage, they sat with their feet propped in the oven door of the old stove, sure that they would never know what it was to be warm again.
Mark wrote to the Bishop : ‘I have learned little of the Indians as yet. I know only what they are not. They are none of the things one has been led to believe. They are not simple, or emotional, they are not primitive.’ The Bishop wrote back : ‘Wait — you will come to know them.’
But his acquaintance had widened now. He knew the young hand-logger who took his four children in a little open boat to the school at Echo Bay each morning and home again each afternoon, and sometimes he shared dinner with him and his fine brood at their float house on the edge of the chuck. He had visited the logging camps, and never did he pass the float house of Calamity Bill without looking to see if smoke was coming from his chimney and his ancient donkey engine was wheezing in the spruce. At sixty-five, Calamity climbed four thousand feet each day straight up the mountainside to cut his timber, and three times he had ridden his gear down into the chuck. When Mark stopped to ask how things were, the reply never varied, ‘Calamitous,’ and when Calamity Bill asked if he might come aboard, Mark’s reply never varied either, ‘Yes, if you take off your cork boots.’
One day in the church he remembered the organ, and he sat down and pumped the pedals and very tentatively, as if he didn’t care at all, he pulled out a stop and poked a key and was rewarded by a fine, round tone. That night, one of the Indian women who had studied music at the school at Alert Bay, practised hymns which were to be sung at Christmas, and an old brown bear, hibernating under the church, awoke, and the Indian hounds heard him and began to worry him. In the night the village suddenly exploded into sound, and Mark put on his slippers, threw a robe over his pyjamas and dashed out to collide with a huge dark shape. He made two complete circles of the vicarage.
The next morning Chief Eddy stopped him on the path.
‘I don’t believe the Bishop would want you chasing bears around the vicarage in your pyjamas.’
‘But I wasn’t. You have it all wrong. The bear was chasing me.’
Christmas was a busy time in the village. The churches in Vancouver sent toys which the women sorted into packs, not only for the village children, but for those in the logging camps, the isolated float houses on Mark’s patrol. Ten days before Christmas Mark and Jim delivered the gifts, visiting the other villages, and each lonely float, in and out the inlets, travelling usually by compass, often with the bow awash, and always with the
mountains thick with snow. Wherever there were children Jim wore the ancient Santa Claus suit and lifted the pack of toys on his back while the children waited on the float to welcome them, to rearrange the boats so they could tie up. And after the carols were sung, and the gifts given, always Mark set up the portable altar for the simple service, and when they were pulling away, always he looked back to see some little girl clutching the rag doll to be cherished all year long.
They returned to the village Christmas Eve, with no time for dinner, and a hundred details to be checked before the midnight service. At eleven Mark was still trying to extract a little more heat from the fat round stove in the church. Hurrying back to the vicarage, he washed the soot from his hands, put on his vestments, and returned to the church to check the wine and the chalice, to toll the bell, to light the candles.
Then all was ready. He was alone, waiting in the hushed silence with the candlelight shining on the golden eagle and on the sad eyes of Christ holding the little lamb, and it seemed to him the little church waited also.
He walked slowly down the centre aisle, and not wanting to open the door until the very last minute for fear of losing the precious heat, he walked to the window at the left of the door and stepped without expectation into one of those moments that is suspended between time and space and lingers in the mind.
The snow lay thick on the shoulders of the Cedar man; the limbs of the young spruce bent beneath its weight. He saw the lights of the houses go out, one by one, and the lanterns begin to flicker as the tribe came slowly, single file along the path to the church. How many times had they travelled thus through the mountain passes down from the Bering Sea?
He went to the door and opened it, and he stepped out into the soft white night, the snow whispering now under the footfalls. For the first time he knew them for what they were, the people of his hand and the sheep of his pasture, and he knew how deep was his commitment to them. When the first of the tribe reached the steps, he held out his hand to greet each by name. But first he spoke to himself, and he said, ‘Yes, my Lord.’
I Heard The Owl Call My Name Page 4