Heartbroke Bay

by Lynn D'urso

  Hannah sighs with relief. At last the rains have eased, bringing a few days of blue, marshmallow-clouded skies, and for a change the take from the sluice box has been generous. Hans’s mood is much improved at the evening meal.

  The warm amber light of the lantern falls around the miners as they sit down to heaping plates of bannock and beans, its golden color matched by a glow behind the peaks to the east that hints at a moonrise to come. A fast-moving cloud bank moves in from the west, eating up the sky, throwing a shadow across the stars, and by the time Hannah has scoured and rinsed the dishes, a crescent moon has risen, slid across the sky into the oncoming clouds. Throughout the night, the wind clocks west, south, then west again, gathering its energy.

  At first light the sky turns the color of a gun. The wind begins to rise, sucking the canvas roof into loose billowing shapes that snap and crack above the roar of heavy surf.

  The rain begins as an intermittent mist that steadies into a downpour, as the miners trudge away to their work. Hannah stands in the doorway, watching the stones of the beach go dark and shining and the color of the sea change to match the sky.

  Driven by the wind and the pull of the moon, saltwater brims into the bay until it laps into the beach grass along the rim of the fjord. When the tide turns, the outrushing water boils through the channel, slamming head-on into the incoming surf. Alone, Hannah struggles to secure the roof with a lashing of lines and strategically placed cobbles, but the wind fights unfairly, twisting its hold on the canvas, flinging her aside. She wonders that the storm has not driven the men from the diggings and curses the bright light of gold, which so thrills, stupefies, and blinds that anyone would consider its pursuit in such weather.

  The rain becomes blinding, rendering the mountains and ocean invisible beyond its dark wall, and when it eases, Hannah sees the furious, windblown bay seething about the cutter. Tara Keane bucks against her anchor line, hobbyhorsing and plunging, ducking the angry spray. A small iceberg fallen free from the glacier passes the cutter, sailing absurdly into the face of the wind. It takes Hannah a moment to realize that the bulk of its body, seven-tenths submerged, is being swept so strongly by the falling tide that it overcomes the wind pushing in from the west. Charging like a buffalo straight into the eye of the wind, the ice is at first perplexing to Hannah for its oddity, but puzzlement quickly builds into alarm as another, larger berg appears from the gloom.

  Looming larger than the cutter, the second is a massive blue and white juggernaut untroubled by the waves breaking against its base. Hannah stares in frozen panic as it trundles on a course calculated to take it directly and inevitably into the ship. She sprints for the cabin, emerges with the shotgun, raises it to her shoulder and fires. Anyone watching would think her desperately insane: The shotgun has no more effect on the iceberg than it would on a slow-moving train. She fires again, drops the firearm, and clutches at her bruised shoulder before crying out, “Dear God!” and screaming into the wind “Hans! Harky! Help, for the love of God, help!”

  The iceberg spins slowly, seeming to stall for a moment. The surf roars and dares it to keep coming; the frozen blue monster rolls and bobs slightly, as if nodding its acceptance of the challenge. Tara bucks like a frightened horse, kicking and rising, slamming at her tether.

  Hannah scrambles to reload the shotgun, frantic to signal the men. The report—an impotent pop—is torn away by the wind. The sound of the ice taking the cutter comes to her as a terrible grating, the crunch of a predator gnawing at a bone.

  Stung by the rain, she sinks to the ground, throws her arms around her knees, and wails a death song for the cutter.

  ELEVEN

  “From hell to breakfast.”

  This is how Harky describes the shattering of Tara Keane’s bones along the shore. “Just broke and scattered from hell to breakfast.”

  The men stand aghast at the tangle of kindling and cordage awash in the surf. The pounding of the waves has chopped the cutter to pieces, dispersed the splinters along the beach, and begun to cover them with sand. Sodden articles of clothing lie scattered about the shore; a shirt with one arm akimbo, the other flung up in boneless despair; Harky’s union suit beaten into the sand and bent at the waist, its legs and arms kiltered at impossible angles. As they watch, the mast comes ashore, its once-slender length broken to pieces and formed into a haphazard bundle by the random knotting of halyards and downhauls.

  It is Dutch who moves first, sprinting into the surf to grab at the miscellany of salvage that is all that remains of their supplies: a pot, a shirt, a short piece of line. Harky snags the broken mast by a tail of the halyard and heaves it shore. Hans grabs at a small wooden box of dried apples, but misses. Michael slumps and does nothing, standing in the rain and staring as his dream of a triumphant return to Ireland is broken across his shoulders and drowned.

  A raven hook-hook’s from the forest; the grass behind Michael rustles with a sibilant slithering of fur. From within a bower of alders, the wrinkles of Negook’s old face deepen as he peers at the disaster, sniffing the wind. The sea smells of anger, the rain tastes of rage; Kah-Lituya is walking the land.

  We are in a frightful condition. Of food we have little; only what beans, rice, and dried fruit that were stored in the cabin; a few tins of tomatoes and one tin of milk that washed ashore; a metal bucket in which was stored cornmeal and barley (which has now been partially damaged by water); and a half pound of tea. Thank God Mr. Witt encouraged me to bring seeds for a garden, which now bears a few vegetables that will lend to our sustenance. Michael still has a shotgun, and a number of shells since he brought them into the cabin beforehand to protect them from the damp aboard the cutter.

  It was providential that I had chosen this day to wash and mend the men’s blankets, else all would have been lost. They are now without spare clothing, excepting a few items that came ashore from the wreck. Poor Michael is despondent and bitter, as are we all, with the exception of Harky, who is very brave and jokes about making “gold stew.”

  We must make preparations for a signal should a ship be sighted. Who can say when that might be? Has there ever been a more wretched party of castaways?

  Michael and Harky are pegging together a bunk bed of rough timbers and planks. The small cabin is crowded now, with five people sleeping where once there were two. Dutch and Michael will have the new bunk beds, and Harky will sleep under the table. With no blanket to spare for a curtain, Hannah has had no privacy since the wreck, and the men must do her the courtesy of retiring outside “to check the weather” while she prepares for the night.

  Harky aligns a board with a post, gripping it for Michael to peg. Hans toys with a knife and kindling, shaving long, slow curls into a pile at his feet. It has been three days since the iceberg took Tara Keane to her death, and no one has made any move to resume mining while they await rescue. A signal fire of logs and brush has been laid on the shore and covered with a scrap of mainsail. They’ve placed a pint of oil and matches at hand to light it quickly. They have devised a schedule of lookouts, with each person standing vigil for two hours throughout the day and night, in hopes of spotting a passing ship.

  Dutch is on watch. He sits on a stump at the side of the cabin, scratching random designs of his name in the sand with a stick. The weather has been decent since the storm, with bands of cloud lying across the tops of the mountains and the sun throwing out long shadows from the trees. Flocks of southbound shorebirds write twisting letters against the horizon, atwitter with the excitement of migration.

  Negook’s voice takes them all by surprise. “Somebody is pretty mad at you.”

  Hans leaps to his feet, kindling stick and knife thrust cruciform before him, as if to ward off the primitive apparition in the doorway. Michael and Harky stare. Dutch on his stump is oblivious. Hannah is the first to find her voice.

  “Mr. Negook. Please come in.” Her own civility amuses her, if no one else.

  Negook shuffles into the cabin, ignoring Hans’s muttered, “Who
the hell?” and places himself before Harky. The shaman and Texan are eye to eye, though the latter remains kneeling, holding a plank in place to receive Michael’s peg.

  Negook’s dark eyes flicker up and down Harky’s bulk, taking in the size of his hands, his feet, the width of his chest. Their eyes lock for just a moment, but sufficiently long for Harky to hear all the winds of the world blowing through the darkness of the eyes that regard him.

  Negook’s hand comes quickly and cleanly from beneath his fur cloak, clutching the dried and severed shinbone of a heron, and points it at Harky. In the swift, fluid motion Hans, Hannah, and Harky all once again see the knife-wielding bedlamite from the lumber ship from Skagway.

  The shaman makes a complex passage of the fisted yellow talon over Harky’s head, drawing some unknown hieroglyphic pattern, and Michael—the only Catholic among them—sees the silhouette of a Monsignor performing an arcane absolution. When the shinbone swings and points at the Irishman, it becomes a sword, and Michael’s heart skips a beat.

  The wand disappears back into a fold of fur, and Negook repeats himself. “Somebody is pretty mad at you.” He is looking at Harky, but he speaks to the group at large.

  Hans starts to sputter, still holding his whittling before him. “See here, we won’t be threatened, not by some—” He gropes for the words. “Not by a … a … drowned rat of an Indian!”

  Negook’s response to the insult is unexpected. Genuine amusement breaks across his face, a crooked, wide-open smile that exposes teeth yellowed and broken by centuries of gnawing. “You been diggin’ at the ground a lot. And the ground moved. Now the ice attacks you, and you got no more food. No more boat, huh?” Negook looks in turn at each of their faces, still grinning, waiting for them to catch on.

  “Come on to my village. Tlingit people going to take you back to Goots-ka-yu kwan, your own people.”

  After a long debate in the longhouse, Negook had convinced the people of the Lituya-kwan to take the whites away in their great canoes, take them back to Sitka or Juneau as a way of appeasing the Bear God. Most of the young men had argued for killing the whites by putting them into the crevasses of the glacier, the blue ice caves in which the bear lives, until the shaman reminded them what had recently happened to the village of Angoon.

  A Tlingit shaman working for the white man’s money on a whaling ship had been killed by the premature detonation of an exploding harpoon. By Tlingit law the whaling company was required to indemnify the man’s family by paying the “blanket price,” a few stacks of blankets as tall as the man. The whaling company refused, and when the villagers of Angoon took the whale boat and a couple of company men into keeping as a way of demanding payment, the company had sent a greatly exaggerated message to a U.S. Navy warship anchored in Sitka that said a general uprising was under way and the slaughter of every white man in the north was imminent.

  By the time the Navy responded to the whalers’ plea, the council of Tlingit elders had already decided to pursue litigation “white man style.” The company’s men had been sent on their way after a banquet and dancing to show that their detainment had only been a matter of custom and nothing personal.

  Duly informed that the company managers were safe, the captain had nonetheless decided to administer summary justice in true white man style and ordered his cannons turned on the village, setting it on fire and utterly destroying it. Hundreds of men, women, and children lost everything—shelter, clothing, weapons, food, and tools—at the very beginning of T’ak, the longest part of winter. The suffering was terrible and the people learned a valuable lesson in the savage and arbitrary law of the Guski-qwan, those cloud-faced people with no blood in their hearts.

  Caught between the hammer of the white man’s cannons and the anvil of Kah-Lituya’s rage, the villagers accepted the words of Negook. The Dogfish Clan will supply a canoe and ten men to paddle; the miners will be evacuated immediately.

  Hannah asks, “You mean you will take us back to civilization? In the large canoe that was hunting here in the bay?”

  Negook nods. Hans looks suspicious.

  “How much?”

  It takes the shaman a moment to realize the blond cloud-face is asking about price, not how much time it will take to paddle them away or how much weight the canoe can carry.

  White men, he thinks to himself, everything is business. This is something that was not discussed in the longhouse. The only thing of importance is getting the whites away, getting them to go in the canoe.

  To make it easy for them to agree, Negook looks around the cabin, considering a price. They don’t have much, just some clothes, a few dishes, but they will need those things, and Negook does not want to leave them with nothing. Winter will come, and they will need supplies back in Sitka.

  He considers asking for the stove—useless, hungry thing; a man can’t even sit around and poke at the fire with a stick, watching the visions in the flames—but the whites will know they cannot take it anyway, it is too heavy; they take business seriously and might get insulted if he asks for such worthless payment. And if he asks for the shotgun or the pistol that bulges under the giant’s shirt, they will be afraid he intends to shoot them. No, the only diplomatic thing to do in this delicate situation is ask for something they treasure, but which has no real value to their survival through the winter.

  “Gold. Trade us gold and we will take you to your people.”

  The howling and barking that ensues shocks Negook. Hans pounds on the table, Michael takes a threatening step forward, doubling his fists. Even Hannah’s mouth tightens into a straight line. Only Harky seems unaffected. Negook conjures a talisman of raven feathers bound with plaited grass and beads from beneath his cloak and holds it before him, hoping the charm is strong enough to protect him from these violent lunatics.

  Dutch abandons his lookout at the sound of the commotion, steps in the door, and asks “What’s this? What is it?”

  His shoulders jerk when he spots Negook. His head bobbles on his neck as if it were attached by a spring, and he warbles. “Who’s this?”

  “This here’s the bastard wants to steal our money, that’s who it is,” shouts Hans. Michael nods in agreement.

  Dutch jumps back, gawking cross-eyed at the bundle of feathers in the shaman’s fist, then looks puzzled, mouth agape, as he tries to figure how the fetish might take the place of a gun or knife.

  Harky makes a rumbling sound, and his chest starts to quiver. Hannah at first thinks the sound is a precursor to an angry eruption, then realizes the Texan is laughing.

  “Horseshit,” says Harky. “Horseshit!” and shakes his head.

  Harky rises to his feet and takes a step toward Negook. Hannah fears for the shaman’s neck, but the Indian relaxes, nods toward the Texan, and replies in kind, “Horseshit.” What a fine, useful word.

  “How much gold?” asks Harky.

  The shaman imitates a gesture he has seen white people use: He lifts his shoulders up and drops them, shrugging.

  Harky picks up a spoon from the table and holds it out. “This much?”

  Negook pushes out his lower lip and ponders the spoon. Negook raises his hand, holding the fingers spread wide.

  “Five spoons of gold?” Harky says. “Five?” In pretext, his voice is sad and full of consternation at the same time. He sighs and shakes his head, laying the spoon back on the table.

  “It’s a big spoon. Two is plenty.” Harky learned to bargain on the streets of Juarez, where dickering is a good-natured sport. The Tlingit, too, are avid traders and dealers, and may spend days haggling over a carving or paddle. Negook plays the game better than most, but today he just wants it finished. He holds up three fingers.

  Harky holds out his hand and says, “Done.”

  At dawn the sky is blue, fading to mauve in the west, and as Negook leads the prospectors into the wilderness, the colors of the forest reach out in tousled grays and greens. They walk in single file, pushing into serried tangles of blueberry shrubs and devil
’s club along a subtle path that rises and twists across broken and gullied ground. They move through a continuous mantle of sun-dappled emeralds and shadowed browns, following the trail’s windings among Mamelon hills, along steep, crumbling bluffs. After the first hour, none of the miners has any sense of direction and each guesses differently at the alignment and location of the mountains, the sun, and the sea. By noon sweat runs in their eyes and Negook must pause every so often as the whites gasp for breath. The shaman’s bare feet are black and cracked as macadam, and as he walks, his toes splay cloven and grasping over stones. He never stumbles, never pants, and never speaks, as he leads the party through the winding, cathedral maze of the forest.

  The devil’s club raises its claws to the miners as they push along behind Negook down the faint, tangled trail. Negook slides through the barbed and stabbing undergrowth with hardly a rustle while the abundantly thorned stalks and broad, palmate leaves of the plant brush at the whites’ faces and stab at their shins with its needle-sharp spines. Dutch cries, “Damnation!” when a naive handhold inflicts a painful punishment on his palm. “How much farther is this damned place?”

  Negook shakes his head at the ways of the white men, wasting themselves on words that mean nothing and questions with no answer, when already they run short of wind and still have far to go.

  The blue black rustle of a raven’s wing flickers high overhead, indistinct in the canopy of greens. When a smooth, ebony feather flutters down and places itself at Hannah’s feet, she picks it up and pins it into her hair. The gesture draws a glance of rebuke from Hans and a long, black-eyed stare from Negook.

  After a march of long hours through trees pillowed and quilted in moss, the party breaks out into a meadow.

  Negook lets loose a sudden raucous call, which is answered by a human cry from down river. Hannah smells smoke, freshly cut wood, and the sea; in the distance is the low, mumbling thunder of ocean waves.