by Thomas Hopp
McKean pointed at the lower right corner where a photographer’s note had been written in pen and ink. It read, Makah whaling, 1903.
“1903,” he murmured. “I wonder if those protesters realize how deepseated a tradition they’re fighting? And look at this - ” He moved to the picture at the next booth, which showed a scene of Makahs butchering a whale on the beach at Neah Bay, handing out portions of meat and blubber to tribe members. “It underscores the fact that whales were a part of the ancestral Makah diet, and whaling was a means to that end.”
“But we live in the modern world now,” I resisted. “Why don’t they just eat cheeseburgers?”
“Makah whaling,” McKean replied, “according to Leon Curtis, has been documented at least as far back as the archeological record at Neah Bay goes, and that’s four thousand years. It probably is much older.”
“Maybe so, but what’s more important nowadays, tradition or animal rights? Who says anyone should kill a whale, Makah or otherwise?”
“The Makahs’ treaty with the United States government, for one.”
“So, you’re on the Makah whalers’ side of the issue?”
“Answer: no,” McKean replied. “Nor am I opposed. I am a scientist. I’ll stay quite neutral on the subject until I have more data. But bear this in mind, Fin. Even though Neah Bay is part of the United States, Makahs are not nearly as assimilated as most Americans assume. Their traditions go back continuously to times long before American culture was born - probably long before ancient Rome and even before the Pharaohs. Those traditions, of course, include whaling.”
I returned to look at the Makah whaler poised for his lethal harpoon strike. As I stood there, a large sea swell made the ferry’s deck move under my feet, adding to my perception of the whale hunter’s experience. The motion also gave me a queasy feeling in the pit of my gut. “Too much sea spinach,” I muttered.
McKean chuckled. “You do look a bit green, Fin.”
“I’ve been through a lot today. I think I could use a little fresh air.”
McKean accompanied me through a forward passage and out to the front deck railing, where we stood with cool night air rising off the Snoqualmie’s bow like a stiff but refreshing gale. I leaned on the rail and observed the dazzling lights of Seattle as we passed the midpoint of the crossing. The city’s skyscrapers loomed against a deep-purple eastern sky with their windows reflecting the afterglow of sunset and painting shimmering, striped reflections of gold and turquoise on the dark water ahead of the ferry.
“The Emerald City,” I said. “I wonder who gave it that name?”
“Tourism promoters,” McKean replied. “For a city touted as green, it hasn’t got much in evidence - except when you consider that under all those towers lies a mountain of green compost.”
“Compost? What do you mean?”
McKean spread his gloved hands as if to embrace the panorama of gleaming buildings. “Grown by the Almighty Dollar.”
“Are you saying that’s a good or a bad thing?”
“This land was once covered in magnificent forest, exactly as the city’s nickname suggests. But the very trees that drew the pioneers here were viewed as nothing more than a money-making opportunity.”
“Sawmill timber, you mean?”
“Exactly. A lot has changed in the century and a half since the pioneers arrived. The world’s greatest rainforest grew here when the Denny Party rowed ashore at Alki Beach. The Amazon jungles were a collection of twigs by comparison. Douglas firs grow as tall as four hundred feet, did you know that? That’s forty stories, about half as tall as the tallest buildings you see in front of us.”
“Trees were the original skyscrapers around here.”
“Precisely, Fin. Now there’s hardly a tree to be seen on the east shore of Puget Sound. American culture, and now global culture, have sprouted skyscrapers where Douglas firs used to reign.”
I sighed. “That’s progress, I guess.”
“Contrast it with Neah Bay, which has the blessing of remoteness and therefore remains a small village surrounded by forests. Nature and tribal culture still hold the upper hand there - for the time being at least.”
“What a contrast,” I said. “The heights of civilization here, the deepest connection to nature there, only five hours apart.”
“Good insight,” McKean replied, “for someone not exposed to Washington State history as a child.”
“How did you know that - ?”
“From that faint midwest accent and from your minimal knowledge about our native tribes. I learned about them in grade school. It’s a short and not very sweet story from the native perspective. Starting in the 1850s their culture was swept away in scarcely a decade - but not by war. There were no Indian Wars of any consequence here. The Denny pioneers arrived aboard a schooner from San Francisco in 1851 and by 1861 the majority of natives in the entire region were dead of smallpox or measles. Their passing was as much a tale of global culture and its global epidemics, as of racism or war.”
“But I’ve heard some white settlers would give out smallpox-contaminated blankets to the natives - “
“Conceivably, but there really was no need for treachery. Viruses move through populations without anyone’s help. It was, I am sure, merely an outfall of globalization.”
“Globalization? That’s a modern phenomenon.”
“Not really. The era of worldwide communications, trade, and population movement began with the steamships of the 1800s. Those migrations were the earliest manifestations of globalization, and they brought the local natives down by a two-step process. First, native populations were decimated by epidemic diseases and the scourge of alcoholism. Second, a tidal wave of immigrants simply submerged the remains of their culture, especially in the Seattle area. Have you ever read Chief Seattle’s great speech?”
“No,” I replied. “It wasn’t a part of our curriculum in Chicago.”
“Old Chief Seattle spoke in Port Townsend, at a gathering of tribes for treaty negotiations with Governor Stevens” emissaries in the mid-1850s. They signed over most of their tribal lands to American settlers. Some tribal people disagreed and argued for war, but Chief Seattle became notorious for having argued that a land give-away was appropriate, because there were so few of his people left. He said he didn’t blame the settlers for the diseases, and he successfully argued that his people should move across Puget Sound from Seattle to the Suquamish Reservation, abandoning their home village in what is now West Seattle. In so arguing, he gave a speech that was full of references to disease, contagion, death and extermination. He said of the pioneers, “Your people are as many as the blades of grass, while my people disappear like a fast-ebbing tide.””
“Sad.”
“But predictable. This corner of the world was one of the last places reached by the global smallpox and measles epidemics. Europe had been decimated by such plagues in the time of the Romans, and China and Egypt suffered great calamities before that. Old-World peoples were disease-resistant, precisely because they had already suffered the kind of annihilation that Northwest natives had yet to experience. Chief Seattle was one of the last and most eloquent of those humans whose lot it was to observe a virus running rampant in a susceptible population. The apocalypse of the Northwest natives was really nobody’s fault. It had been coming for centuries. American settlers just happened to be the vehicle by which it arrived. I think Chief Seattle understood that.”
“He saw his place in the global spread of disease viruses.”
“Exactly.”
“Were the Makahs represented in those treaty negotiations?”
“No. They were so remote from the new towns of Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, that they weren’t involved. They signed treaties several years later, but not before they were devastated by disease the way Seattle’s tribe had been. Like Seattle, they gave up most of their lands, too. They did, however, win one point the other tribes had not. In exchange for land, they exacted a written promis
e from the Governor’s negotiators that they would retain the right to hunt whales forever. So you see, old Steel and the whalers feel they are protecting a legitimate part of Makah culture, one that is guaranteed by treaty.”
He turned to go inside. “I think I’ll have another mocha, even though it’s getting late. I’ll be in the lab past midnight getting a quick start on the DNA extraction procedure. You’re welcome to tag along and watch.”
I stayed at the rail. “No thanks. I’ve got just enough energy left to drive off this ferry and go back to my apartment. I’ll be asleep early.”
“I can walk off the ferry and be at my lab in five minutes,” he said. “You go home and get some rest, Fin.”
After McKean left me, I watched the city loom while sorting through all I had experienced: a grave, a corpse, the horror of Pete Whitehall’s death, the charm of the dancing children, and an introduction to a Makah beauty named Tleena Steel. My mind whirled.
Eventually the ferry terminal loomed. As the deck crew prepared to attach the pedestrian gangway that McKean would use, I hurried down in time to start my car and join the twin lines of vehicles exiting onto the city streets.
I drove home to Belltown, left my car in its garage space across the street and climbed slowly up the stone steps of the Denny Heights Apartment Building to my small second-floor studio apartment. As I scuffed up the staircase feeling absolutely fagged, the door across the landing opened chain-wide and my neighbor Penny Worthe peeked out at me. “Hi Fin. How was your day?” she asked.
“Don’t ask,” I replied, entering my apartment and closing the door. I figured I should eat despite a lack of appetite, so I microwaved a small meal of leftover ham, potatoes and broccoli scavenged from the refrigerator. I picked at it while sipping a glass of cabernet. After a while I gave up on eating and drank another glass of wine and then a third. Anaesthetized, I climbed the ladder of my loft bed feeling I had experienced far too much for one human in one day. I fell asleep and didn’t wake until morning.
Meanwhile, Peyton McKean labored late at Immune Corporation on experiments that would propel us into the heart of the Neah virus labyrinth.
PART TWO: LOST SOULS
Chapter 6
When dawn light spread across the hardwood floors of my apartment I awoke refreshed. I breakfasted and then went out and walked to the Pioneer Square District where my writing office is located in one of the old brick buildings. After a stop at Cafe Perugia on the ground floor, I climbed the stairs to my office punctually at 8:00 am with pastry and triple espresso in hand. But I wasn’t fit for a day at the computer. I grappled with writer’s block. I stared out the windows of my fifth floor garret at a sky that darkened with overcast. The patter of raindrops on glass promised another short, dreary Seattle late-Autumn day.
Then Peyton McKean phoned. “Can you come over right away? We’ve got some interesting results.”
Within seconds, I had grabbed my coat from the brass rack beside my office door, locked up, and hurried down to the street. I rushed the dozen blocks to Immune Corporation’s waterfront laboratory building. Although it’s no skyscraper, the concrete-and-glass structure nestles comfortably in the center of Seattle’s waterfront surrounded by the towers of banks that financed it, sharing their view of Elliott Bay from a lower vantage point. The old fish-storage building has been transformed into a modern biomedical research facility with large windows, brightly lit lab spaces and rows of scientists’ offices. As I signed in at the desk, the guard handed me a permanent pass. “What’s this?” I asked, not quite believing such a gem had been handed to a medical reporter.
“Dr. McKean got security to approve it. That’s all I know.”
On the elevator I pondered my good fortune. I supposed McKean knew the pass would increase his chances of being featured in my news coverage. Perhaps it was his way of garnering a little media attention for himself and escaping the shadows of his superiors at ImCo.
On the third floor, I followed a long hallway skirting windowed laboratories to reach Peyton McKean’s office, which was no elaborate affair. It was a small, paper-strewn, crowded scientist’s lair. I stopped outside the open office door and observed McKean in his natural habitat for a moment. He sat in a swivel desk chair with his back toward the door, his lanky frame dressed in a long white laboratory coat. He was facing a small, cluttered desk that abutted a window with a view looking straight into the mossy brick wall of a neighboring building. McKean could have heard my footsteps in the hallway, but if so, he ignored me. Absorbed by a photocopied scientific article, he underscored several sentences with a yellow highlighter. I rapped lightly on the doorjamb but even then he didn’t respond immediately. Only after placing one more highlight did he swing his chair around and look my way. “Hello, Fin,” he said, smiling. “Have a seat.” He pointed me into a guest chair crowded next to his desk.
“I thought you would enjoy seeing our first test results,” he said while continuing to read the article. “I extracted the DNA and set up the test last night. Janet has been busy running the procedure this morning and gathering the data. She’ll be here in a minute - in a second,” he corrected as the laboratory door across the hall opened and Janet came to join us.
Janet, a pretty brunette dressed in blue jeans, a pale yellow blouse, brown comfortable looking shoes and, of course, a long white lab coat, smiled and said, “Hi again, Fin.” She hummed cheerily as she sat at a side desk next to McKean’s and booted up a computer screen. “The data look nice,” she said as the screen displayed a magnified image of a DNA microchip, a square of metal and glass with hundreds of rows of green dots in a rectangular array. Some dots were bright against the chip’s dark background, others less bright and some quite dark.
I saw no pattern to the distribution of light and dark dots but McKean glanced at the screen and immediately said, “Ahh, looks like a solid, nominal experiment. So, what does it tell us about the subject?” He leaned toward the screen until his and Janet’s shoulders nearly touched. They began pointing at different dots and conversing in thick scientific jargon. Half-familiar terms like “single nucleotide polymorphism,” “allele,” “short tandem repeat,” “genetic marker” and “haplotype” flew between them in a dense discussion that quickly left me behind.
“So,” I interjected after a moment. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Is the guy European or Native American?”
McKean smiled confidently. “European, Fin. Spanish, as might be expected, with as close to absolute certainty as you can get with seven-hundred thousand autosomal SNPs.” He pronounced the term, “snips.”
Janet nodded her concurrence. “We’ve got multiple hits on European ethnicity probes, and none on New World probes.”
“Sounds like pretty strong evidence,” I agreed. “But how close to absolute certainty?”
McKean tugged at his angular chin with his long fingers and did a quick mental calculation. “The odds are approximately sixty-six-billion-to-one that he’s European. Don’t bet against it. Sixty-six-billion-to-one is about a hundred times more than the total number of people on earth at that time.”
“Pretty conclusive,” I agreed. “So, does this mean Leon Curtis gets to do his archeological work in peace?”
“Answer: yes,” McKean replied. “And I suppose we should inform him of that fact.” He punched a number on the computer keyboard and quickly was talking to Leon Curtis via a video connection. Curtis was in his office at the University of Washington, having returned from Neah Bay that morning. After Janet and I added our hellos, McKean said, “We’ve got great news. The skeleton checks out as Spanish.”
“You’re sure?” Curtis asked.
“Absolutely,” McKean responded. “How does one in six times ten-to-the-ninth-power sound for a probability?”
“Fabulous,” said Curtis. “I’ll call the Makah Museum right away for permission to start a thorough investigation.”
“Congratulations,” McKean said. “I’m sure the Spaniard’s story will unfold i
n a most intriguing way.”
“Speaking of which,” Curtis replied, “I found something very interesting inside the coffin yesterday. I was putting back the bones taken by the ravens when I spotted this.” He held up a small, curled, yellowed roll of paper. “It’s a letter. A handwritten note in pen and ink on what looks like parchment. It was tucked in at the foot of the coffin.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
Curtis laughed. “That will take time to figure out. The scroll is brittle and it’s rolled up pretty tight. It might crumble if I go at it too aggressively. I looked inside the length of the tube and I could see writing, but only a little. It’s written in an old-fashioned cursive script. I’d guess it’s an old dialect of Spanish, but I’m no Spanish scholar.”
McKean nodded thoughtfully. “Can you get some help from another department?”
“Yes, I suppose I could but - that’s a delicate subject at the moment.”
“How so?”
“Well,” Curtis said uncomfortably, “nobody knows I took the scroll from the coffin. Without tribal permission, that’s technically a violation of NAGPRA.”
“I see,” McKean replied. “So you want to keep this quiet until you find out what it says, and then get retroactive approval from the tribe.”
“Right. At the very least, I’d like to get it unrolled and photographed. After that, I’ll be able to go through proper channels and get all the help I need. For now, silence is golden. Okay Peyton, Janet, Fin?”
We agreed, and Curtis went on. “One little creepy thing - “
“Yes?” McKean prompted.
“I could make out just a couple of words and I checked them in a Spanish-English dictionary. ‘Almas,’ which means souls, and ‘perdidas,’ which means lost.”