Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  Then the Snow Men appeared, and new fighting began. The day they came with their two winged war canoes, we were still singing for our lost people, and that is a song you must never interrupt, but one person stopped singing, then another and another, and one of the children shouted, Look! Look! so of course we all stopped singing, and there in the bay were the largest canoes we had ever seen. Grandfather, who is almost blind, saw instead a giant raven, and shouted that it was Yehlh, the creator. We all ran into the woods, because you will turn to stone if you look at Yehlh with your eyes, and although we knew Grandfather could not see and that the canoes were canoes and not a raven, no one can say, Grandfather, you are blind, you are wrong.

  I hid behind a rock and felt a tug at my back. It was my little cousin, pulling on my dress. I call him my little cousin even though we are almost the same age. He is always coughing, he is shorter than I am and much too skinny, and he has followed me around ever since his brother drowned, the one I was supposed to marry. He was holding a bit of my dress between his bony fingers and wheezing. I shook him off and punched him hard, in the arm. What was that for? he said, and his eyes got watery. I said, If you hang on to me or start crying, I will hit you again. So he stopped saying anything, and I was a little disappointed. I wanted to hit him some more. The aunts say I will have to marry this cousin now that his older brother is dead. But not till he is older. If he grows older. I am glad that now I will not have to marry till later. My other cousin was handsome and I felt proud to be promised to him. I just wished we could wait a little—maybe till next salmon season. My aunts laughed at me when I said so. Hush, they said, you are lucky to get a man like him, you do not make a man like that wait.

  Now my little cousin stood trembling next to me, and I said, You need to think. My aunts are always saying this to me. You never think, they say, You need to think. But really, I am always thinking. What they mean is, Do what we tell you to, do it more, do it sooner—which has nothing to do with thinking. But when I told my cousin to think, I meant it. I said, What did you think you saw, before Grandfather said it was Yehlh? Two giant canoes? You saw them with your eyes, yes? And have you turned to stone? Look at your hands and feet—see, they are fine. Come, we will have another look. And he shrank back, shaking his head, but I rolled up some skunk cabbage leaves and gave them to him. What are you doing? he asked. I showed him how to look through the rolled-up leaves. I had heard Grandmother say once that it is safe to look at spirits if you look through a cabbage leaf.

  We crept forward, and when my older brothers saw me they did the same, staying just behind us. When I looked through my rolled-up leaf, I said, They are giant canoes with wings, white wings, and little ants crawling all over, and my brothers ran to Grandfather to tell him what I said, and he nodded and told them they were brave. My little cousin frowned and said, But you are the one who is brave, you are the one who looked, not them, and I threatened to punch him again if he was not quiet.

  Then we heard Grandfather tell my brothers that the ants were not ants, but tiny ravens, Yehlh’s helpers, who would fly here to peck out their eyes, and my brothers who were so brave ran shouting into the trees, and my cousin laughed and looked through his skunk cabbage leaf and said, They are not ants, they are strange people. So I looked again, and he was right—they were men, climbing over the wings of the canoes. My cousin dropped his leaf and ran to Grandfather, who stood looking out with cloudy eyes, scaring everyone with his words and never feeling afraid himself. Grandfather, my cousin said, they are canoes filled with men, we will not die from looking, and it is she who knew it. He pointed to me and tried to say my name, but he started coughing, and for a while he could not stop. When he finally caught his breath, he spoke the rest of my name, but I pretended not to hear.

  The canoes were so large they were like floating villages. The women and children watched from the hill while the men went out to meet them, and they came back with black metal and colorful beads and white food that looked like maggots that no one dared to eat, and told us that it was Snow Men. We had all heard of Snow Men, but none of us had seen them before except for one of our slaves. He said Snow Men had visited his people, and these men in the giant canoes looked like them, and he warned us about a powerful Snow Man weapon that made a noise like thunder and could kill a man a long way off. Grandfather was pleased by the slave’s knowledge and told him he would be freed at the next potlatch. Then the aunts were unhappy because the man was their best worker, and the other slaves were jealous, so there was new unhappiness right after the Snow Men arrived.

  But the real fighting did not start till a few days later. At first we were all excited. The Snow Men moved their canoes to the far side of an island in the bay and camped there. Our men and the older boys followed them during the day, and every night around the fire they would tell us what they saw: Snow Men climbing the ice rivers or scratching pictures on funny boards, cleaning their canoes or looking up at the sky through hard, hollow sticks, and my brother made us laugh by making shwa la la la sounds to imitate their talk. My other brother asked, What do Snow Women look like? and my uncle said, They do not have women, that is why they are here, to take our women. The aunts laughed and said, No, they are on a great hunt and they do not take women on their hunts, just like you. Then Father said some of the Snow Men go off into the woods with the Eagle women on the other side of the bay, and my uncle said, They are all ugly anyway, the Eagle women, and everyone laughed except for his wife, because she is an Eagle, and she refused that night to sleep by him, and then he was not laughing.

  After a couple of days, though, the women became angry with the men for not catching salmon like they should and for trading what they did catch with the Snow Men for more beads and metal. The men started gambling with one another for the metal, and fighting when they lost, and spying on the Eagles across the bay, and getting angry when the Eagles got something from the Snow Men that they did not, and then there was fighting between our people and theirs. But when we were not fighting with one another or with the Eagles, everyone complained that the Snow Men were taking all of our fish and our otters without asking, and the men bragged each night about what they took from the Snow Men in return. Then there was fighting over that—Give that back, I saw that before you did, you stole it from under my mat, you liar, you son of bear-dung—all for strange-looking things you could not eat or wear, things no one knew how to use or what they were for. They even stole one of the Snow Men weapons—the slave was right, we saw them knock birds out of the sky, with a great noise—but no one could make it work.

  One day, my brothers and some of the Eagle men snuck onto the island and came back with a large wooden container filled with juice that looked like blood and smelled like spoiled berries. The Snow Men drink this every day, they said, It may be the secret of their skill in canoe building. Your skin will turn white like theirs if you drink it, the aunts said, your hair will become wild and yellow. But my brothers and the Eagles tried it anyway. They spat it out right away—it burned their throats—but they kept sipping it little by little even when we told them to stop, and it must be poison, because it turned them all into noisy fools and then into retching fools.

  I was tired of them all, so I wandered away from the fire. There is a rock I like, up the hill behind our summer village. You can look at the whole world from there. Standing high on the rock, I could see the fog over the ocean like a rolling plain of snow, lit from above by the sun. The Snow Men had come out of that fog, and I wished they would go back into it. The bay was purple below me. What was Kah Lituya doing down there? How could he not notice when the Snow Men came with their giant canoes? Why would he take one of our canoes and not theirs? Maybe it is not true about the bears, I thought. Or maybe the Snow Men’s canoes are too big. Maybe Kah Lituya and his bears are afraid of the Snow Men.

  I heard whistling behind me, and I spun around so fast I hurt my neck. I thought it was my cousin, the dead one, I even saw him for a moment, smaller than he should
have been, but with the same straight nose and the eyebrows that came to a slight point over each eye. But it was just my little cousin. I had never really noticed before how much he looked like his brother. The setting sun made his skin look better. Did I scare you? he said. I wish you would stop following me, I told him. He climbed up onto the rock. We are supposed to marry, you know, he said, panting. So? I said. So maybe we should— he began. Should what? I said. I don’t know, he said, Never mind. I scrambled down the rock and headed home. Wait for me, my cousin said, you are too fast. I never asked you to come along, I said. His wheezing grew fainter and fainter behind me as I walked, and when I heard nothing, I got worried, so I stopped and waited till I could hear him again before moving on, and that was how we got home that night, with me always ahead of him but making sure I could hear.

  The next morning Kah Lituya took two of the Snow Men’s canoes. I saw it.

  Their giant canoes had many smaller canoes inside, all different sizes, some with oars and some with wings and some with both. That morning three of their canoes came out to our side of the bay—two of them big enough for ten men each, and a smaller one that fit six or seven. They looked like they were fishing, dropping strings in the water, and we all laughed and said, What are they doing? They will not catch anything like that. But then the canoes started running, running on the water, running toward the ocean, and we all stopped laughing, and someone said, Kah Lituya. One of the larger canoes turned and turned in the water, huge waves filling it and soaking the men, and then we saw the other big canoe rowing to help them, and Kah Lituya caught it too. Only the smaller canoe got away. Even from the hill we heard the Snow Men screaming, but only for a moment because the water swallowed them so fast. And then our men—my brothers, my father, my uncles—raced to their own canoes, to go to the two giant canoes by the island, the floating villages, to tell the Snow Men what they saw.

  A strange excitement comes over people when something very bad happens. It happened the day our own men drowned. I felt it too. Even while I was crying, I was excited. I was thinking, This is one of those terrible things that I will remember always, I will tell this story to my children and grandchildren. It happened again when the Snow Men drowned, but without any sadness—just the excitement. When our men came back, their canoes were filled with presents from the Snow Men—metal tools, more beads, pretty cloth. There is more if we find any bodies, my brothers shouted, then they were off again. Some of the children started playing with their toy boats, pretending to turn them over, making screaming sounds and then starting over. I went and kicked away their toys and slapped the biggest child. Stop that bad game! I shouted. The aunts came running over and pulled me away by my hair. What are you thinking? they yelled. They are only playing! They thrust a large basket at me. Make yourself useful, they said. Go fill it with berries. Ripe berries, they said. Our men will be hungry when they return.

  I made my way down the hillside and through some thickets and ate almost all the berries I picked, and I knew I could go home if I wanted to, but I kept walking. I wandered out onto a narrow finger of land, with the bay on one side and the ocean on the other, and just a line of spruce trees growing in between. For once I was not thinking at all. I just kept seeing the Snow Men’s canoes disappearing into the angry water. I kept hearing the screams before they all went under. And I kept saying, Oh, cousin, my poor cousin. I had not actually seen him drown that day. I was in the group of canoes that came after. We did not know what happened till we landed safely and found everyone else shouting and crying at the landing place.

  Now I saw five men walking along the shoreline, and at first I thought they were the drowned Snow Men coming out of the water, turned into Land Otters. I was so frightened a little water leaked out of me and down my leg, and I had to set down my basket to make it stop. But then I started thinking again. It was daytime, and it was too soon, and Land Otters are supposed to be invisible. Also, after what I had seen, I knew it was Kah Lituya who ruled these waters. If I was going to see anything unusual, it would be bears. These were Snow Men, living Snow Men.

  One of them was far ahead of the others and walked right past without seeing me. His clothes were so strange—dark on top and white below, and so tight on his body I wondered how he could have put them on at all, much less moved around in them. I also wondered how the white coverings on his legs could stay clean, but when he got closer I saw that they were dirty. The man was looking down, down at the ground and down into the water, and his face was so sad. I knew he was looking for his lost people. He bent over a dead gull washed up on the beach, and at first he looked relieved to see that it was only a bird, but then he uttered a loud, choking cry and kicked it hard into the water.

  You will not find them, I said out loud, and I was surprised by my voice in the air. My voice often surprises me like this. My father says it has a spirit of its own, but my aunts say, Spirit? What spirit? She talks too much, that is all.

  The Snow Man turned around quickly when he heard me, and for just a moment I saw the wild unhappiness on his face before it opened into surprise. Now that I saw one of them close, I saw that their skin was not anything like snow, which is clean and bright. They should be called Raw Salmon Men because that is what they look like, like salmon flesh before we smoke it. The man was now smiling at me, and I did not like that. Why would he smile, when two of his canoes were gone and so many of his men? But his strange, pale eyes were still sad, and then he spoke, and his voice was even sadder. I remembered my brother at the fire saying shwa la la la to imitate the Snow Men, but it did not really sound like that. It was more like the babbling of babies before they can talk. The man touched his chest and spoke again, and I was afraid he was saying his own name, which is something children do before we teach them not to. He held a yellow stone in his hand, still wet, and I thought of our boys—they also like stones, they fill their hands with them and save them under their mats, and when their mothers and sisters and aunts sweep the stones outside, they shout as if their best arrows have been taken away. Maybe, I thought, Snow Men are people whose bodies grow big but whose spirits stay small. This explained many things, like the way they just took whatever they wanted.

  The man stepped toward me, and I had almost decided to run when he sat down on a low rock and spoke again. He held out his hands and turned them over, and I knew he was showing me the canoes he had lost. His eyes filled, which I could tell even though he took a flask from his side and hid his face behind it. I wondered what was in the flask, if it was the red poison water. But it wasn’t. I could tell because he spilled some of it. It was water, our melted ice water, the water our men said the Snow Men collected in great round vessels and rolled onto their canoes. I could not blame them for taking it. It tastes so good—better than the lake water we drink at our winter camp—and there is so much of it. And then the Snow Man held his flask out to me, but I did not need his water, which was actually our water, and I stepped back so he would know.

  He laughed then, either at me or at something he said—he was still talking—and even as he laughed, he was still crying, and I felt ashamed to be there, although he was the one who should have felt ashamed, crying in front of me, a stranger, a girl. I hate that—feeling someone else’s shame because they are not feeling it like they should. If he were one of our boys instead of a giant Snow Boy, I thought, I would rap the top of his head with my knuckles and say, Come now, be a man! But he might not understand. Where he came from, a girl rapping on your head might mean something else. It might mean, Yes, I will marry you and have your babies. So I just stood there looking at his bent head before me, wishing he would stop but also wanting to touch his hair, which was the color of moose hair, but tangled, like moss. Some of it stood away from his head, floating in the breeze, and I could not help reaching out my hand. I must have brushed a few hairs against my palm, but they were so thin I could not feel them.

  Then I saw, behind the man, one of the other Snow Men coming toward us. I pulled my h
and away and stepped back, which made the first Snow Man, the crying man, look up and turn around. He called out to the man, who said something in return. The new man was very thin, which I could see even though his clothing was looser on his body, and he was carrying one of the Snow Men weapons in his hands. There was something scared and hungry about the way he moved that I did not like. I liked him even less when he looked at me. I saw in his eyes the same wanting that I sometimes see in our men when they look at women, and that I sometimes saw in my cousin, the one who drowned, when he looked at me. I used to get a strange, watery feeling low in my stomach when my cousin looked at me that way, but with the thin Snow Man, it was more like cold fingers against the back of my neck.

  The two Snow Men talked to each other, and although I did not understand anything they said, I could see that the first Snow Man was chief over the second one. They should have been saying, Our people are dead, we cannot find them, let’s go back to our canoes and leave this place at once. But the new man kept staring at me while they spoke, and then the chief Snow Man looked at me too, so maybe they were talking about me. I should have been afraid. I should have run away, snaking through the spruce trees and back up the hill to my village. I could have outrun them, the chief Snow Man in his tight clothes and the skinny Snow Man with his heavy weapon. But I did nothing. I just waited to see what would happen.

  Once, when I was very small, I wandered in front of a large tree the men were felling for a new canoe. It started to fall toward me, and someone screamed for me to get out of the way, but I just stood there. I looked up and watched as the tree grew larger and larger. My father threw himself on me and rolled me away from the tree. That is the story everyone tells, anyway. I do not remember my father saving my life. I only remember waiting for the falling tree.