by Lynn D'urso
Since that last fury Kah-Lituya has been kind to the Tlingit. Now and then he will swallow a few if they forget to pray to him as they come and go through the currents at the mouth of the bay, but he has not shaken the land so badly again. But the presence of strangers has always irritated Kah-Lituya. After the Englishmen came white men from a place called France. Kah-Lituya drowned twenty-three of them at once, swallowing their boat at the entrance to the bay, after which they were smart enough to leave forever. So that is the danger now. If the Bear God comes down from the glacier, he will not discriminate between smiting the whites for their offense or smiting the Tlingit for allowing it.
Negook accepts the coffee Hannah holds out to him and takes a sip. It is not possible to mention Kah-Lituya’s name to these people, for that would surely enrage him, but they must somehow be made to understand and agree to leave. He raises the cup and passes it before him in a broad gesture that takes in the forested hills and fjord.
“These trees. They are all the same size.” After the last tidal wave, the devastated area regenerated itself as an even-aged woodland of uniformly sized timber, whereas the forest that was out of reach of the tsunami is made up of trees of all ages, from saplings to ancient giants. He waits for Hannah to understand.
She looks in the direction of Negook’s gesticulation, as if she is seeing the forest for the first time. The evenness of the second growth is apparent and appears as a distinct division, through the forest that is a mixture of greens and blacks on the ancient side and a paler, brighter green on the new. But this is meaningless to her. She is used to the carefully manicured, homogenous woods of England.
Negook tries again. “Everything was gone. Now there are no old trees or young trees. Everything came back at the same time.”
The shaman sees the flicker of doubt across Hannah’s face; she is starting to think he is just a crazy old man. He swigs down the entire cup of coffee, oblivious to the scalding heat, and holds out the cup to Hannah, who hesitates before taking it gingerly. Obviously, the only approach is direct, so he repeats his earlier warning.
“This is not a good place for you. You will not stay here long.” Surely these fools will not ignore straight words.
Hannah stands straighter and pulls back her shoulders. “Mr. Negook,” she says, for she does want to address this elderly man with respect, even though he is decidedly strange. “Mr. Negook, we will leave Lituya Bay when the mining season is over. We have come for the summer and cannot alter our plan. I assure you, we will do nothing to interfere with you and your people.” Then, as an afterthought, she asks, “And where are your people? Your village? How did you get here?”
Negook’s only reply is a vague gesture to the north. There is no need to tell the whites how to find the village. That could only lead to trouble.
“Will you leave when you have enough gold?” When the People have enough salmon drying on the racks or seal skins scraped and stretched or berries in the buckets, they quit taking.
“Enough? Well, I suppose we shall. When we have enough.”
Negook stares at the sea where the smooth, slender shape of a sea lion is briefly silhouetted at the peak of a swell before it breaks. The shaman watches for the brown head to emerge in the swells behind the surf line, and in a moment it does, with a wriggling fish in its jaws.
Negook considers the driftwood that litters the beach and the long journey each pale silver log has made, from its youth as a sapling to its fate as an uprooted tree. He sees the floods and upheavals that wash trees whole from some distant river into the sea, where they tumble until scoured free of bark and limbs, before drifting ashore on this long curve of beach beneath icy mountains. He looks at all of this and wonders if “enough” and “gold” are words that go together.
Without another word to Hannah, he walks away into the forest, winding his way through the field of tree stumps left by the miners, then up a slight rise and into an uncombed tangle of salmonberry. The whoops and calls of the loquacious ravens follow. There is a brief rustle in the thicket, and the shaman is gone, leaving Hannah with the empty coffee cup and an odd sentiment that she has been dreaming. From the shelf beside the cabin door, the pink glimmer of a seashell winks at her from its nest within the pearly grip of a mussel.
Negook does not go far before stopping beneath a tree, where he sits to wonder at the huge stupidity of whites who dig at the ground instead of hunting seals or goats. They wade in the water like children and dig at sand that yields nothing when they could be digging for k’oox, the wild rice that grows at the base of the dark lilies. This is actually a woman’s job, but that could be why white men are so crazy: They never have enough women around.
The ravens sit above Negook, watching him think. As he considers the odd ways of the whites, a squadron of dark-eyed juncos flits by in ragged maneuvers, moving from alder to alder, pecking at small meals. Negook is so old he remembers the oldest living grandmother among all of the People as a young girl. Now she is an ancient who no longer speaks, but just sits, year after year, humming to herself. Among the People it is not unusual to live a long, long time, through more salmon seasons and winters than there is a number for. Negook is the oldest by far.
He knows that white people believe wholeheartedly that they are only allowed to live just so long, measured in years; to do less is somehow a failure or to do more is somehow a sin. The Tlingit understand that a life cannot be measured in numbers of years, because some people die quickly, and some, like himself, stay a long, long time. Yet to each is given a whole life. Unlike the whites, with their sentiment for record keeping and birthdays and putting things in drawers, Negook does not measure his life.
Negook has heard also about reincarnation, the odd notion being related to him by a prospector who wandered, babbling and digging, along the shores south of here just last year. Reincarnation seemed like a good idea, but the thought of all the lost animals—the slaughtered whales, the millions of fish the whites took every year in their nets and traps, or the herds of mountain goats that had disappeared around settlements like Juneau and Skagway—coming back as white people made Negook nervous. He just did not see how this could be a general elevation or improvement of the world’s spirit.
“Ai-ya,” he says out loud. That might be what is happening, because there are certainly fewer animals and more white people every year. Ai-ya, ai-ya.
Negook struggles to rise and sighs. His feet hurt to walk, and his ass hurts to sit. He knows he must die soon and fervently hopes his soul does not have to come back as a white man. But first he has to deal with the troubles at hand.
“There was a damn blanket-ass in this camp, and you didn’t signal us?” Hans is livid. A blue vein pulses in his neck beneath his skin. He is outraged that an Indian, just wandering loose, has come into camp where his jars of gold—and his wife—lay about unguarded. Back in Minnesota the damned Indians know enough to stay on their reservations. The fault must be Hannah’s, and he rails.
Today the men returned early from the diggings. For several days the take has been inconsequential, and now Michael’s back has been strained by furious, nonstop shoveling in pursuit of another vein. The Irishman is on the boat, in his bunk, being nursed by Harky and Dutch, and Hans worries that the reduction in manpower means even less gold if they do find another vein. He kicks at the table, sending it skittering across the floor.
Hannah assures him that there is no reason to worry, the visitor was a harmless old man. But she is overruled: The old man was likely a scout.
“They’ll be back,” insists Hans. “They’ll steal us blind.”
“They won’t,” she insists. “They know we are here, but ignore us. The old man just came to tell us …”
But flustered by Hans’s anger, she does not remember exactly what the old man said, except his suggestion that they leave. “He thought we should not stay here. He seems to think Lituya Bay is a dangerous place.”
Hans assumes an air of amazement, hands on hips, fa
ce caricatured in astonishment. “What did your sweet old man have to tell us? That now that we’ve done all the work we should just leave so he and his friends can come take everything? That may be fine with you, Mrs. Nelson,” he spits, “but no damned Indians are going to get my gold.”
Hannah draws back her shoulders, angry at being so abused. All of her stored-up anguish—her misery in Skagway, the discomfort of being a woman alone in the wilderness, and the drift of Hans’s passion from their marriage to the hunt for gold—boils over, and she stabs at Hans’s weakness. “What gold is that then, Mr. Nelson? Just what riches have you found that have made all this worthwhile?” She waves a hand around her at the crude furnishings of the shack.
Hans turns on his heel and storms from the cabin. Hannah is two steps behind him with more to say. The slamming door strikes her full in the face.
Overhead a raven screams, drops from its tree, and flees.
The next morning Hannah’s lip is cut and swollen. She stays in the cabin when Harky and Dutch row ashore. Hans has been solicitous since the argument and keeps looking back over his shoulder as the three men shoulder their packs and hike away. At noon Michael comes on deck, hollering for Hannah to row out in the skiff. His back feels better, he says, and he would like to go to work. She yells back, cupping her hands to her swollen mouth like a megaphone; he should continue to rest, she says. But he insists.
She can think of no way to put him off and tries to avert her face as he climbs down into the skiff from Tara Keane’s deck. Settling with a thump onto the thwart in front of her, he says, “Sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Nelson, but I’ve got to get moving. When my back’s out like this, after a while lying about gets to be worse than moving around.”
As he reaches to take the oars from her hands, he starts at the sight of her swollen mouth. The image of his mother holding a bloody rag to her own fist-split lip leaps fully to mind, and the old urge to succor or kill uncoils inside him.
“Hannah?” he says gently.
“It was an accident,” she says. Tears begin to burn in her eyes. She feels as if the blow has fractured something, some connection to the world that is neither skin nor bone, but the severance of which has left everything full of sharp angles and dangerous; she feels alone.
“I’ll have his hide,” growls Michael as he reaches for her.
A spike of irritation at the willingness of men to always offer violence as a solution pierces her blanketing misery for a moment, then fades as he draws her to his chest. “It was an accident,” she repeats, muffled by his shoulder.
“Shhh,” he says and soothes her hair.
The warmth and weight of his arms around her lets loose her sobs.
Michael does not go to work that day. Instead, he holds her and touches her while she cries.
Hans draws the towel from the bottom of the sluice box and lowers it carefully into a shallow pan. Swishing and squeezing, he washes the contents of the cloth into the dish and begins shaking it lightly from side to side. Dutch watches the cleanup carefully. A few fine grains of gold speckle along the rim. Harky probes at the take with a grimed and calloused finger, gives a grunt of dissatisfaction, and turns away.
This is the fourth site on which the prospectors have erected the sluice box since the height of summer, and none has given satisfaction in return. Each successive site is farther from camp; they must now walk more than an hour each day to reach their work.
They have shoveled, dredged, hammered, and panned for months, oblivious to the ripening of blueberries and the changing phases of the moon. They have labored, shirtless and sweating, while eagle chicks fought free of the egg, fledged, and began to consider their first dizzying step into space and freedom. Salmon have returned to their natal streams and begun the ritual of procreation, while the mountaintops turned from white to brown, then green as summer advances. To all of this, the miners are blind, impassioned only by the search for gold.
At mealtimes Hannah and Michael are cautious with each other, courteous and proper, though the intimacy of the cabin quickens their blood. Their fingers touch in passing dishes. Once Michael stands close behind Hannah as she brings a pot to the table and without thinking rests his hand on her waist; throughout the meal she is silent, afraid her voice will quiver with the trembling aroused by his touch. In the presence of the others they are careful to always address each other as “Mr. Severts” and “Mrs. Nelson.”
On a day of heavy rain, while a wind from the south cuts rags of cloud from the sky and slings them loosely around the mountains, Michael returns to the cabin alone, to fetch a forgotten tool. The tide is low, and the fine, strong smell of the sea blends with the delicate perfume of the dripping summer forest.
The canvas roof leaks in the wet weather. Pans placed here and there to catch the drips tinkle and plink, playing a sad, musical tune in the key of rain. Hannah sits beside the open door, darning a sock. The light inside the cabin is subdued.
When Michael’s shadow falls across her lap, her breath quickens, and she rises. There is a pause as the force of attraction freezes each in the realization they are alone. Michael is acutely aware of Hannah’s shape and her softness; she of his full lips and dark lashes above pale blue eyes.
Taking two steps back, she maneuvers to put the table between them, and the moment is broken. When Michael steps forward as if to come around the obstruction, she holds the sock and darning egg to her stomach. “No, Michael.”
He holds out his hands, palms raised. “Hannah.”
She shakes her head, closes her eyes, and keeps them closed until she hears the splash of his steps retreating through the puddles outside.
Dear Diary,
There is difficulty among our company. The poor return of gold weighs heavily upon Hans, whose temper becomes virulent at times. Meals are often quite strained. Discontent infects Harky and Dutch as well. Mr. Severts remains of remarkable good cheer, but he, too, is sometimes reserved.
The rains continue without cease. Everything is sodden; our clothing molders, as do some of the supplies. I was compelled to throw out half of our stock of potatoes, which had gone black and soft, and an entire sack of flour has clotted and smells so of mildew that I cannot believe it is safe to eat. We have enough dried food to see us through until September and our return to Sitka, but I fear coming to table will be an increasingly bland experience. There is no more sugar or molasses, and the pepper runs low.
Hannah pauses in her writing as the sensation of Michael’s hands on her returns, then she touches her fingers to her healing lip. Staring at the half-filled page, she considers what she might say of the pull she feels toward Michael or the tension and confusion that boil within her when she thinks of Hans. But to put words to paper is to risk setting them loose somehow. Feeling duplicitous, she distills the disarray of her feelings into code:
There was an accident with the cabin door, she writes. Grave concerns for this marriage.
Three weeks of cold rain. The creeks swell and can be heard roaring from the mountainsides. Dutch develops a gagging, phlegm-spitting cough that tears at his boney chest. The leather of their boots never dries; their feet grow wrinkled and soft. The ringing, back-and-forth cries of ravens resonate among the trees. Probing and persistent, the ceaseless litany of kawks, klook-klooks, and pealing bell calls digs at Hans, stirring unnamed fears in his superstitious Viking blood. His grandfather’s Old World phrase for a flock of the black birds was an unkindness of ravens, and the old man delighted in frightening young Hans with the legend of Odin’s pets, Hugin and Munin, who perch on the angry god’s shoulders every morning to whisper the news of the world in his ear, particularly the misdeeds of young boys.
Early one morning Hannah hears the shotgun bark once, then again, as Hans fires a fusillade into the trees. The report of the shotgun wipes out all other sounds, stilling the shrieking of an eagle and the brassy call of a jay. But the outraged cries of the unkindness of ravens fade slowly into the trees, profaning the gunman as they g
o.
Dutch’s cough worsens. One day he returns from prospecting the beach west of the diggings with a fantastic story of having seen an odd bear. “Strange-colored animal, sorta shiny all over. Silver, he was. Or maybe gold. Big bugger, too.” He persists so hopefully and insistently in the face of Hans’s mockery that Hannah worries that his cough has brought a feverish delusion.
Harky does not speak for days. He is a prodigy of labor, burning away unnamed angers by digging without cease, hauling and shoring, carting and cutting. The thok of his ax knocking cordwood into stove wood resounds into the night.
Hans mutters darkly, measuring and remeasuring the sparsity of his gold.
Dear Diary,
There was an earthquake in the night. Hans describes it as a “small one,” and mocks my fright. The others felt and heard nothing as they slept aboard the boat. There was a rumbling sound beforehand that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, then a trembling of the ground that rattled the pots and pans. It was quite the most frightening experience of my life and has left me quite nervous. All day I have been starting at the slightest sound. It gives one a feeling of terrible helplessness to feel that even the earth itself can no longer be trusted.
July advances into August, with summer growing weaker and the days becoming shorter; night assumes a larger role in the order of things. Once again, stars appear as points of light overhead, and when the moon is full, the icy white surface of the glacier shines between crenellated, black-shadowed walls. At night, the wind bites with teeth sharpened over the ice field, but during the day, the land basks in a warm breeze.