McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  The ship’s loudspeaker blared again over the calm waters. “Give up, Makahs. We’ll never let you get that close to a whale again.”

  Meanwhile, the crew below us busied themselves with unloading. Each man had a wooden paddle, ornately carved and painted with native designs. Two men lifted out a long coil of rope. A man at the bow hefted a ten-foot long pole from the canoe and stood it on end. It was a harpoon with a dangerous-looking, six-inch, shining metal barb at its tip. He raised the weapon and held it over his head and shook it at the Righteous, bringing a round of hoots and jeers from a dozen men and women lining her upper deck railings.

  The last Makah to get out of the boat needed assistance from two of his mates. He was injured and cradling his left arm with his right. As we watched the man step onto the dock with his fellow crewmen helping him, a wailing siren sounded the arrival of a medical rescue van with red lights flashing. It pulled into a gravel parking area just ahead of us.

  We paused and watched the Makahs escort their wounded mate along the pier and up a grade to the van. Two medics briefly examined his injured arm and then helped him onto a stretcher in the back of the van. They closed the doors and the van sped away, and we were left standing uncomfortably close to the angry whalers.

  The loudspeaker of the Righteous blared over the harbor again. “That’s what you get for attacking whales, Makahs. Whales feel pain, too.”

  The Makahs eyed us sullenly as we resumed our walk, which led in their direction. Curtis murmured, “Their lead man with the harpoon is Andy Archawat. He’s - well - not too friendly.”

  “Archawat,” I repeated. “An interesting name.”

  “A traditional family name, I suspect,” said McKean.

  We walked on an angle that would take us to the elder center, but Archawat strode to a point directly in front of us and stopped with the harpoon’s butt on the ground and its barbed steel tip glinting at the end of the long wooden shaft. He blocked our way and we stopped.

  Archawat wasn’t as tall as McKean, but he was taller than me and therefore over six feet. He wore a short-sleeved wetsuit unzipped to the waist. His bronzed torso and arms were muscled and lean and covered with sweat or rainwater, or both. Steamy vapor rose from his shoulders. His black hair was shaved at the temples and a long ponytail arched out from the back of his head in a streamlined, dolphin-like flow. He wore a band of woven cedar-bark fibers around his head, tied in such a way that the bristling ends of the cedar strands projected from his forehead. He was a particularly handsome Makah but his dark brows pinched together below the cedar bristles in an evil-tempered scowl. He had a tattoo on his chest in the form of a lightening bolt zigzagging from under his left nipple, across his pectoral muscles and onto the right side of his neck, where it ended in a Northwest-style serpent head with bared fangs and protruding tongue.

  He and his men gathered in a semicircle around us, scowling darkly as the ship’s loudspeaker echoed across the water again. “Shame on you, Makahs.”

  Archawat gestured toward McKean and me with his free hand and demanded of Curtis, “Who are these guys?”

  “They’re - ” Curtis hesitated, ” - from Seattle. Fin Morton and Dr. Peyton McKean. They came to get the DNA sample.”

  As Archawat eyed me and McKean pugnaciously with his chin thrust out and his eyes narrow, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. “More white people from Seattle,” he muttered. “Who says they can take anything from the grave?”

  “You know who,” Curtis replied evenly. “I’ve already got the elders’ permission.”

  “Elders don’t speak for all Makahs. Old folks don’t come out on the ocean with us. They don’t see what goes on out there.”

  The Righteous’ loudspeaker blared. “Give up, Makah murderers.”

  “My friends aren’t protesters,” said Curtis. “They’re scientists.”

  “You know what happened today?” Archawat growled. “We had a whale on our bows. Seven men at full stroke and me in the front, harpoon ready. Then a goddamn Zodiac rammed us. Broke Billy Clayfoot’s wrist and his paddle too. Whale went down and didn’t come up for half a mile. We lost him.” There was a choked note of pain in his voice that I hadn’t expected from such a fierce-looking man.

  The loudspeaker from the boat didn’t let up. “We stopped you today and we’ll stop you every day until you quit whaling.”

  “We got families to feed,” Archawat muttered. “Some Makah kids are two, three years old and they never tasted whale.”

  “But surely they get plenty to eat,” I responded, “without needing to eat whales.”

  “Who are you to say, mudpie?”

  “Well, I’m - a medical reporter.”

  He pointed toward the Righteous. “Why don’t you report genocide, then? They’re trying to kill Makahs.” His face was hot and his neck veins pulsed. I decided not to make any more arguments.

  “Stop the slaughter!” the loudspeaker cried.

  Archawat’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Pretty soon we’re not gonna take no more crap from white people. Not them protesters. Not you grave robbers from Seattle.” He glared at McKean and me with undisguised contempt.

  Curtis took a conciliatory tone. “Come on, Andy. What harm is there in taking just a small DNA sample?”

  Archawat remained stony, leaning on his harpoon’s shaft. “You wouldn’t take nothing if I had a say.”

  Curtis shrugged. “I’m certain it’s a Spanish burial, not Makah.”

  “It’s on Makah land. It’s not your business.”

  Some of the crew had remained on the dock, unloading the canoe. One called, “Hey Andy! Here they come!” Two Zodiac launch boats had been tied at the stern of the Righteous. Now they came toward the pier with two-man crews. Each boat carried a load of red five-gallon fuel cans.

  Archawat’s tan face reddened with rage. “Sons of bitches!” He put his harpoon into the back of a large black pickup truck in which the other men had been stowing gear, and then rushed back down onto the pier.

  The Zodiac crewmen disembarked at the far end of the pier, near a solitary gas pump with a long black hose. Before the Zodiac men could begin fueling, Archawat and the other Makahs raced to the end of the dock and closed in on them. A tense standoff ensued, with shouting and shoving on both sides. One protester in a purple Sherpa hat and a pullover jacket of black polypropylene began aggressively elbowing his way toward the pump, but Archawat piled into him like a football linebacker and drove him back. The two men grappled on the brink of the dock while the others, Makahs and protesters alike, seemed divided between egging them on and trying to pull them apart. Suddenly, both men plunged into the water beside the dock. The scuffle was over as fast as it had begun. Both sides fished their man out of the water. The protesters got back into their boats and roared back to the Righteous without getting gas. The Makahs resumed unloading their canoe. The Righteous’ loudspeaker blared again, “No problem, Makahs. We’ll get gas over at Snow Creek landing. See you tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

  We resumed our walk to the elder center. McKean asked, “Whose side would you choose, Fin?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t consider myself an out-and-out whale lover, but I don’t see why Makahs need to take out their macho aggressions on gentle sea creatures.”

  “And I don’t consider myself a defender of Makah whaling,” McKean replied, “but there are usually two good sides to any argument that goes on as long as this one has.”

  “What’s good about whaling? It’s a return to barbarism.”

  “Or to tradition,” Curtis interjected.

  “But who needs a tradition that involves slaughtering intelligent creatures?”

  “Don’t overstate your point, Fin,” said McKean. “Whales are about as smart as cows or dogs. People slaughter cows for food and use dogs as experimental animals.”

  “Leave it to Peyton McKean,” I said, “to resort to cool logic and science. I hate to think of the suffering of a harpooned whale.”

 
; “A clash of cultures,” Curtis sighed as we walked on. “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “And I’m more concerned right now about my own miserable condition,” I said. My wet clothing had begun to make me shiver.

  The Makah Elder Center is a large wooden structure, one of very few buildings that stands on the beach side of Bayview Avenue. Constructed on a framework of huge round log beams and uprights, its wood-planked sides and slanted roof recall the native longhouses that once crowded the shore.

  We approached the building via a walkway that passed a twenty-foot-long, open-sided, wooden shed standing just outside the main doors. Pungent driftwood smoke billowed through a hole at the top of its roof. On the sandy floor was a driftwood fire that had been rendered into a huge heap of hot embers. Desperately cold as I was, I moved close and raised my chilled hands toward the bed of coals. Its radiance warmed me from head to toe.

  There was a man on the opposite side of the fire who nodded a friendly greeting and gave me a smile. “Looks like you fell in a mud hole.”

  Curtis explained, “We had a little trouble at the grave site.”

  “Always trouble there.”

  The man wore a chef’s apron over blue jeans and a red western shirt. His long, straight, gray hair was pulled back in a single braid. He moved around the sandy floor of the pavilion on bare feet, tending to the preparation of some tempting food. A half dozen whole salmon fillets were arranged around the fire, each one fastened on a three-foot upright cedar-wood stake with its sides spread like a square-rigged sail and kept in place by horizontal wooden skewers like yardarms holding it flat. Having been exposed to the heat of the bonfire for some time before we arrived, the filets’ pink meat had roasted to a crisp golden brown. The chef turned each fillet on its stake and then tamped the sand around the stake’s base with his foot. “One last turn and they’re done,” he said amiably. The fillets steamed from the heat of the embers, bubbling and dripping juices onto the sand. My wet clothes steamed too. The scents of baking salmon and driftwood smoke combined with mouthwatering effect.

  Leon continued in the direction we’d been walking, to a large cedar door that led into the elder center. Seeing that neither McKean nor I were in a hurry to leave the warmth of the fire, he called, “Come on, gentlemen. We’ve got business inside.” He opened the tall door and gestured for us to go in. I reluctantly left the warmth of the cookhouse and followed Curtis and McKean into the building. Pete Whitehall, who had just shambled up, hesitated on the walkway. “I gotta go park the dozer first,” he said to me. “I feel a little better now.” Without waiting for a reply, he hurried back the way he had come. Curtis led us into a foyer where he began taking off his muddy outerwear and hanging it on wooden wall pegs. In a moment, he was clean and dry in a blue plaid Pendleton shirt, blue jeans and stocking feet. McKean hung up his wet hat and coat and was passably dry himself. I, on the other hand, had a distinct problem. “I don’t know what to do about all this.” I gestured with both hands at my soaked and muddy body and a spreading puddle of drip water. “I can’t go inside like this.”

  At that moment a small old woman with permed white hair, wearing a long white cotton dress, an embroidered blue felt vest, and beaded moccasin boots, approached us. “Hello! Welcome! Come in!” she cried, smiling sweetly at Leon and Peyton. When her gaze fell on me, her neatly penciled eyebrows rose high. “Oh my gosh! You poor dear! What happened to you?”

  “I had…a little accident.”

  “I guess you did!” She scrutinized me up and down through her thick bifocal glasses. “You’re all over mud.”

  A group of other Makah oldsters came out of the main room and gathered around us. Old men, some with crew cuts and others with long gray hair in Indian braids, and old ladies with flower-patterned dresses, some with braids and some with thinning hair permed into gray-and-white curls, looked me over with expressions of mixed concern and humor.

  Curtis, McKean, and I hesitated, uncertain of what to do with me, until the first grandmother said, “Come here.” She waved me to follow her to a door just beyond the entry foyer with a men’s room symbol on it. “Go in there and take off those wet clothes. We’ll get someone to wash and dry them for you. And meanwhile, I’ll get you something else you can wear. My name’s Alma Kingfisher, by the way.”

  Leon said, “Go ahead Fin, we’re going to be here awhile.” I went into one of the stalls and peeled off my soggy windbreaker, my soaked shirt, my muddy running shoes, my damp socks, and finally my mud-caked black levis, dropping each piece into a pile in a corner of the floor until I stood there in just my white skivvies, which somehow had managed to stay dry. A glance in the mirror at my muddied face and hands encouraged me to go to the sink and splash soap and water over myself. As I scrubbed, an old Makah gentleman with hearing aids and a crewcut shuffled in and gingerly picked up my pile of clothes, putting each piece into a black garbage bag.

  “Folks across the street can wash these for you,” he said, turning and carrying them out while I dried off with paper towels from the wall dispenser. I stood there a moment, wondering if they expected me to go out and join them as I was. Then the door opened a crack and a small hand appeared, holding a red-and-black felt blanket towards me.

  “Here,” said Alma Kingfisher. “It was all that was handy. Wrap yourself up and come to lunch.”

  I took the blanket and the hand withdrew. I threw the blanket over my shoulders and wrapped myself in it, clasping it shut in front with one hand like old Gordon Steel had done with his bearskin cape. In the mirror I noticed that this was no ordinary blanket. I turned myself around to inspect its front and back. It was a square of heavy red felt cloth edged in black felt, about five feet on a side, with a black felt applique design of a thunderbird with its wings spread diagonally from corner to corner. The thunderbird and the blanket itself were outlined with half-inch mother-of-pearl buttons.

  “It’s Henry Clayfoot’s old button blanket,” said Kingfisher from outside the door. “It’s for dancing. Come on out and let’s see how you look in it.”

  I had wrapped myself in the blanket as thoroughly as I could, but when I stepped out into the main hall and was appraised by a dozen elders, I looked down with dismay at my legs, which were exposed below the knees. My bare feet, shiny with water, were much too white-looking for the company, who all had one shade or another of Native American coloration. The oldsters ooh-ed, ah-ed and chuckled, getting some cheap entertainment at my expense.

  Alma Kingfisher said, “Oh, don’t look so glum, sonny. We’ll have your clothes back on you before you know it. Come on now and eat some lunch.” She took a pinch of my blanket and led me into the main hall where another several dozen elders were seated at long tables. The great room spanned the building’s forty-foot width. Huge log beams sawn from whole tree trunks supported a slanted ceiling that rose to join a wall more than twenty feet high on the bay side. Almost entirely windows, the wall gave a wide view of glittering Neah Bay. Three giant upright logs carved as totem poles integrated into the wall to support the ceiling beams. The central house post was topped by a thunderbird with outstretched wings, clasping a whale in its talons.

  Everyone in the great room seemed to be talking at once, filling the place with a lively hubbub. My benefactor led me to one long table and gently pushed me down into a chair at one end, which happened to be near a large stone fireplace in which a pile of driftwood logs blazed.

  She moved to the other end of the table and took her seat, smiling with queenly serenity at Leon Curtis, who was already seated on her left with McKean beside him. They began chatting with her as soon as she was seated. I found myself excluded at the far end of the table but didn’t mind because the fire warmed my chilled body.

  Basking in my new warmth, I looked around the place, admiring its bold architecture and hand-carved furnishings. On my left sat an old man and woman who leaned close to one another and conversed softly, occasionally casting glances my way. His face was dark tan and deeply li
ned and his white hair was cropped short and bristling. Her face was much paler than his and dotted with large sparse freckles. Her thin salt-and-pepper hair was curled. Her dark eyes looked watery and outsized behind thick, dark-rimmed glasses, but they twinkled when she saw me glance her way. Flashing a white-dentured smile, she introduced herself. “I’m Ginny Musselshell and this is my husband Arnie.”

  Arnie, the man who had taken my clothes, looked me over amusedly. “Had some trouble at the grave, did you?” he asked.

  “Word travels fast,” I replied.

  “Always trouble there,” he remarked, echoing the sentiments the cook had expressed.

  Several young Makah men and women were circulating around the room, serving luncheon plates brought from the kitchen. A young man leaned over my shoulder and placed a plate in front of me. On it were a generous slab of the salmon that had been cooking outside, buttered corn on the cob, a bun of white bread, and a large dollop of something that looked like creamed spinach. The others were already eating, so I picked up my fork and tried the salmon. The savory, steaming pink flesh was almost indescribably good - buttery, mildly smoky, crisply browned, and intensely warming to my chilled body.

  “Good?” asked Ginny.

  “Wonderful,” I said without exaggeration. “I’ve never had better!”

  She nodded her approval and then went back to her own meal. Other than Ginny and Arnie, the elders paid little attention to me. However, as they ate, the old men and women occasionally paused to eye Curtis and McKean with keen interest. When Peyton McKean took the orange-capped test tube from a pocket and allowed Alma Kingfisher to inspect it, the room grew quiet. Young and old alike watched her intently. When she smiled and handed the test tube back to McKean, the conversations resumed, quieter than before. It was clear the DNA test was of concern to every Makah, but Alma Kingfisher seemed to hold the deciding vote - perhaps due to her seniority.

  Chapter 3

  The general buzz of conversation escalated when some newcomers entered a side door and went to the right-front bayside corner of the room. This was a small group of young Makah children who looked excited and a little nervous. Each child wore a small version of a button blanket like the one I wore, and each held a small wooden canoe paddle painted with red and black native-style art. They giggled and fidgeted, and some scampered about heedless of the exhortations of a Makah woman in her mid-twenties who watched over them like a mother sandpiper.