McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  When we reached my Mustang waiting at the curb, McKean shoehorned his lanky frame into the back seat so Tleena, who would be our guide at Neah Bay, could take the front passenger seat. As I drove through the wet and busy streets of Seattle, Tleena asked me, “How did you get involved with Dr. McKean?”

  “Sometimes I think I’m just his preferred choice of chauffeur.”

  McKean said, “You’re being too modest about your role as a medical reporter, Fin - although it’s true you’re as bold on the road as an Indianapolis 500 racecar driver.”

  “If you were a Makah,” Tleena said. “You would probably be good with a canoe. Maybe you’d be a whaler.”

  I reacted poorly to the suggestion. “I can’t imagine myself doing such a thing.”

  She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “I meant that you would be brave, Fin. And I meant that you would be a good man. Whalers are heroes to most Makahs. They’re the good guys.”

  “Yes, of course. But Europeans used to hunt elk, deer, and even whales. We’ve changed our ways to eat beef and pork and chicken raised on farms. I don’t like it when Makahs slaughter one of nature’s most gentle creatures.”

  “You think we Makahs are savages? Do you, Fin?”

  “No, but - “

  “It breaks our hearts to kill a whale. But we have to think of our children.”

  “Children? How are they involved?”

  “They’re the whole reason for whaling, according to Father. He says Makah babies need vitamin W to grow strong. And that only comes from whale oil. He says the modern American diet is poison to Makahs.”

  “The modern American diet is poison to everyone,” I countered.

  We arrived at the ferry terminal with just minutes to spare. There was a dark rain squall coming in from the west. I bought a ticket at a kiosk, raced down the now-empty loading lanes and pulled in behind cars and trucks already loaded onto the ferry’s wide central deck. A deck hand put a block under my right rear tire just as the ferry’s horn blasted once for departure and the drawspan from the dock lifted. We were underway within seconds. The ferry’s rumbling engines pressed forward into the wind-whipped waves. The rectangular opening at the end of the car deck seeming like a movie screen filled with ragged gray clouds.

  Chapter 12

  We stayed in the Mustang for a few minutes, sheltering against a gusty cold wind that dappled a mix of rain and bow-spray on the windshield as the ferry gained speed and left Seattle behind. McKean seemed in good spirits, smiling as if he had put the stark realities of our situation out of his head. He said, “Tleena, have you heard about the parchment letter Leon found in the crypt last Tuesday?”

  “Father mentioned it. He said he told Grayson about it.”

  “Yes, and now Grayson is on the case.”

  “But Grayson is a blowhard.”

  “A blowhard with the authority to arrest people.”

  “Anyway, I’m on Leon’s side.”

  “Good,” McKean said. “Leon passed the manuscript to me before he became ill. I’ve looked it over so many times I have it nearly committed to memory. But it’s hard to translate in places. I’ve had trouble with some words that don’t seem to be Spanish. I think they may be Makah, so you might be able to help.”

  “What words?”

  “Kakalaklokadub.” He said the tongue-twisting word with remarkable ease. “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Kakalaklokadub,” she repeated carefully, and then thought for a moment. “Sounds vaguely familiar, but - sorry.”

  “Perhaps an herb of some kind?” McKean pressed her.

  She shook her head. “Father might know. But most of our language was destroyed when the BIA forced Makah children to leave their homes and attend English language boarding schools. That was in the early 1900s. Hardly anybody can really speak Makah now. Just Father and a few other holdouts.”

  “That’s a shame,” said McKean.

  “So tell me, Peyton,” I interjected. “If you’ve read most of the manuscript, have you found any other mention of the Lost Souls disease?”

  “Answer: yes. There was quite an interesting story about it. One passage even offers an opinion as to where the illness came from. A rather dubious and superstitious explanation I think, but intriguing nonetheless. It seems that our skeletal subject was the comandante of the fort, one Capitan Alejandro de Nuniez. And it was he who was to blame for bringing divine retribution down on the garrison.”

  “Divine retribution? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “According to the manuscript, Capitan Nuniez was accused of raping a young Makah maiden and getting her pregnant. He claimed the girl was willing but her father insisted she had been forced. This incident led to bloody skirmishes between the Makahs and the Spanish. Then, supposedly, a shaman by the name of Devilfish put a curse on the Spanish. He called upon Raven to visit a plague on them and the spirit bird obliged. Raven brought the Lost Souls disease, which made the Spaniards lose their minds. They shed their clothing and scratched off their skins with their fingernails. They ran through the forests naked and bloody and finally died like mad animals. Devilfish claimed their spirits had been stolen away from them by a forest demon called Pukwubis. The garrison was decimated. Ultimately their comandante, Capitan Nuniez, died as well. Given that he was the one said to have raped the girl, Devilfish was satisfied and lifted the curse with a great healing ceremony. After that no more Spaniards died. But the garrison’s survivors were demoralized. They burned the fort and sailed away, never to return.”

  “Amazing,” Tleena said. “So Raven took revenge for the sins of Capitan Nuniez.”

  “Yes,” said McKean. “One of the later passages is most intriguing. It confirms the man in the grave is Capitan Nuniez himself, and that he was the last victim of the Lost Souls disease. The Makahs found him in the forest like others before him, naked, bloodied and dead. The writer of the manuscript waxed rather religious toward the end. He wrote, ‘Know that his body had no soul when he died, and fear for your own. With the help of our prayers to the Holy Virgin, and Devilfish’s medicine made from kakalaklokadub, klochtap, and ba’akhbupt klupach, we were spared from the disease of the Lost Souls. We take leave of this Godforsaken place now and bid farewell to our beloved Capitan Alejandro de Nuniez. May his body and soul be reunited in the kingdom of heaven.’ ‘

  “So Gordon Steel is right,” I said. “There is such a thing as Lost Souls disease.”

  McKean nodded. “It is conceivable Pete Whitehall’s illness had been lying dormant since the seventeen hundreds. The fact that Makahs weathered the first outbreak while the Spanish suffered - that is telling us something. I wish I knew exactly what.”

  “But what do you want to know from my father?” Tleena asked.

  “The identities of kakalaklokadub, klochtap and ba’akhbupt klupach.”

  I interjected, “With modern medicines available, we don’t really need ancient cures, do we?”

  McKean looked thoughtful. “Most diseases arise spontaneously out of nature, and nature provides some of our best cures. Penicillin comes from a bread fungus. Medieval Europeans placed pieces of moldy bread on wounds to heal them. Where else should we seek a cure for an ancient malady like Lost Souls disease but among people who have dealt with it before?”

  As the ferry crossed Puget Sound a stiff headwind whipped spray off the waves and splashed it across the deck and the windshields of the cars, including mine. We got out and dashed through a hatch door and went up two flights of stairs to the windowed observation deck for coffee.

  At the counter, I bought Tleena a cafe latte and McKean a grande mocha, and got a double shot with sugar for me. Sipping our assorted brews, we strolled along the aisle of the observation deck until we came to the sepia-toned photographs McKean and I had seen before. We had by chance boarded the Snoqualmie again, and had the same pictures to look at. The picture of the harpooner and whale grabbed my attention, but Tleena went father along the aisle to a picture that M
cKean and I hadn’t noticed before. “He’s an ancestor of mine,” she said when we joined her. The photograph showed a canoe on the beach at Neah Bay with a man posing behind it, surrounded by a group of curious and smiling dark-haired children. The man was wrapped in a blanket with a thunderbird emblem on it and wore a crown-like leather headdress encircled with upright bear claws. His face reminded me of some I had seen in the Makah Elder Center - Native American with hints of Eskimo or Japanese lending a broad-faced, high-cheekboned, wide-jawed look. His complexion was dark. Wavy black hair flowed from under his bear-claw crown. His broad mouth was surrounded by the bristling dark hairs of a sparse mustache and goatee. He wore a pleasant smile.

  McKean read the picture’s title out loud. “Young Doctor with canoe and masks, Makah Reservation, 1903.”

  “My great-great-grandfather,” said Tleena. “He was a guardian of Makah culture at the turn of the last century.

  “Doctor?” I asked. “A shaman?”

  “Yes,” Tleena said. “He’s the one who taught Devilfish’s knowledge to Father.”

  McKean murmured, “Look at what he’s holding.”

  The man’s outstretched arms held two wooden masks propped on the canoe gunwale on either side of him. Carved and painted in geometric Northwest native style, they represented reptilian-looking creatures with fangs bared and long tongues extended. A chill rippled along my spine. “The two-headed serpent,” I said.

  McKean leaned close to the photo and inspected the sculptures. “I’ve begun to think these serpents are related to medicine somehow, like the two snakes of the caduceus.”

  “The caduceus? What’s that?” Tleena asked.

  “The symbol of the medical profession. I’m sure you have seen it - the winged staff of Mercury with two serpents twined around it.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Perhaps Young Doctor used the snakes as a totem of his medical calling?”

  “He did,” said Tleena. “Father says that’s one of the things Young Doctor told him about when he was little.”

  “A universal symbol of the medical profession,” McKean concluded.

  As McKean pondered the old photo, I noticed the drizzle had stopped streaking the windows and suggested we go on deck and take in the view. Tleena was game, but McKean remained silent, brooding over the picture. “You two go ahead,” he mumbled absently, staring at the medicine man as if communing with a kindred spirit.

  Leaving him to his reveries, Tleena and I went to the forward observation deck of the Snoqualmie, where a stiff cold breeze made me clutch the collar of my squall jacket. Tleena buttoned her coat but didn’t bother to close her collar. She seemed to revel in the way the wind blew her hair back.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked through clenched teeth, shuddering from a chill that quickly cut through my jacket and sank in bone deep.

  She smiled at how my hand clutched my collar. “Cold doesn’t bother us Makahs as much as you…city people.”

  “I can see that.” I marveled at how placidly she faced the freezing wind.

  “Father says we’re part whale. That’s why we stay warm without having to bundle up. We’ve got blubber in us.”

  “Blubber?” I allowed my eyes a quick sweep of her from head to foot. “I don’t see any blubber on you. You look - “

  “Yes?” Her smile prompted a compliment.

  I took the bait. “You look very shapely, Tleena Steel, and very beautiful.”

  She looked down modestly and then laughed. “Why, thank you, Fin Morton. I didn’t think you noticed.” She turned to the rail and looked out at the cloudy horizon, giving me a moment to collect my thoughts. I wanted to avoid saying or doing anything stupid. After a moment she said, “You have an honest face, Fin. It’s easy to see what you’re thinking.”

  “What am I thinking now?”

  She turned and looked up at my face carefully. I wondered what she was reading in my eyes. I had an urge to pull her close and kiss her, but the ferry’s whistle blew two deep blasts signaling our approach to the Winslow terminal. The spell broke between us.

  We went inside to collect Peyton McKean and found him still staring at Young Doctor’s photo. We went down to the automobile deck and climbed into the Mustang as the terminal loomed and the ferry’s engines revved in reverse to slow our momentum. The Snoqualmie gently thudded against the pier buffers and dayglo-jacketed deck hands lashed her to huge pier cleats with fat brown ropes as thick as a man’s arm. I fired up my engine as the ramp lowered to the deck like a drawbridge. A deck hand pulled the block from under my tire and directed me into the line of traffic leaving the ferry. As I drove up the pier and onto the road that led through Winslow, a light rain speckled the windshield.

  We fell into a comfortable silence as I drove across Bainbridge Island and the north Kitsap Peninsula and on across the Hood Canal floating bridge. The waves of Hood Canal were whipped into a froth and the wind carried foam off their crests and over the roadway, splashing the Mustang’s windshield. Continuing with my speedometer just above the speed limit, I traversed the forested foothills of the Olympic Range, passed Sequim and Port Angeles and sped on along the coast road. The highway narrowed by stages as we moved along the Straight of Juan de Fuca shore. The rain increased and dark green overhanging boughs of hemlock drizzled water down sickly yellow-green streamers of Spanish moss. Beyond the wet ditches, moss-covered roots and tangles of fallen branches looked like arms and legs jumbled in mass graves. Squalls of rain drove mudslides off the hill and onto the road. In one place a huge tree had fallen across the highway. It had been sawed through the middle to allow traffic to pass between the two circular ends. Beyond it, we came upon a line of stopped cars. I pulled up behind the last car and joined the line, slowly inching forward. Ahead on the left a Clallam County Sheriff’s car was pulled out on the shoulder with lights flashing. An officer was talking to motorists and directing them to turn around and go back the way they had come. Beyond the patrol car was a group of a dozen or so raincoated, soggy people carrying signs on the side of the road and calling out a protest chant.

  “Demonstrators,” Tleena said with disdain. “This is the reservation boundary. The police stop them here to keep them from causing trouble in town.”

  “Does this happen often?” McKean asked.

  “Every time we schedule a whale hunt.”

  We rolled up to a Sheriff’s deputy standing at the centerline. He put a hand up and motioned us to stop. I rolled my window down and he came to look inside the car.

  “Sorry folks,” he said, observing my pale face. “We’re not letting anyone but tribe members onto the reservation today.”

  “I’m a full-blooded Makah,” Tleena said. She dug into her bag and came up with a card that she flashed at him. “Enrolled tribal member since I was a baby.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he apologized. He took his hands off my window ledge and motioned us to go on. I moved past the demonstrators, keeping my window down to catch a few lines as we rolled by.

  “Shame - on - you,” they cried in an exaggerated cadence. “Whales have - rights - too. Shame - on - you. Whales have - rights - too.”

  Several waved their protest signs in front of my windshield. One read, “Your last whale was your LAST whale.” Another read, “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.”

  Tleena cried in outrage at one last sign. It read, “Save a whale. Harpoon a Makah.”

  “See what they think of Makahs?” she growled. “They’d rather see us dead than a whale!” She leaned toward my open window and shouted, “Shame - on - you! Makahs are - people - too!”

  This brought jeers from the crowd. Several men rushed after us but I accelerated and left them behind.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  Neah Bay was dreary. A constant rain wet the streets and a dull gray overcast hung low in the sky. However, the town was far from lifeless. A mother with two little kids in hooded parkas walked toward Washburn’s General Store. Two raincoated boys on bicycles shot across the r
oad in front of us with a soggy mongrel dog trotting in their wake. A pickup truck turned into the lot of a small waterfront restaurant. I drove along Bayview Avenue at a slow clip until, about midway through town, I heard the roar of boat engines and the echoing sound of a loudspeaker coming across the water of the bay. I opened my window to listen.

  “Makahs!” an amplified female voice shrilled. “We are not going anywhere. We’ll never desert our whales.”

  “They’re chasing the Makah Pride again!” Tleena pointed beyond the boat-filled marina and out across Neah Bay. Near the tree-covered silhouette of Wa’adah Island on the bay’s far side loomed the Righteous, just entering the bay and steaming directly behind the black-and-red dugout canoe, in which daylight glinted off half a dozen paddles moving in the hands of the Makah whaling crew. The men paddled their canoe toward the marina and their adjacent home pier while two other boats moving at high speed raced around them. An orange Zodiac sped along one side of the canoe and a yellow-and-blue jet ski cut across the canoe’s path, each boat splashing water on the whaling crew in passing. Behind all three came the Righteous, splitting the canoe’s wake with her bow, her stacks belching black diesel smoke and her loudspeaker blaring. Despite the harassment, the whalers drove their craft steadily toward the pier on an angle that would pass near the massive rock-works of the square breakwater surrounding the marina.

  I pulled the Mustang into the marina’s parking lot and stopped to watch the drama unfold.

  The woman on the mother ship’s bullhorn went on in her shrill tone. “We will never - repeat, never - give up. As long as whales are in danger, we will be here. You have committed your last murder.”

  The canoe pressed on toward the pier until the Zodiac and jet ski were forced to veer off to avoid hitting the giant boulders of the breakwater.

  “Your whaling days - ” the voice began again, but broke off. “Wayne? What are you doing - ?”

  “Look at that!” McKean exclaimed as the bow of the Righteous rose in sudden acceleration. With its engines gunning, the cutter followed a zigzag course that no pilot in his right mind would attempt. Swerving right and almost ramming the Zodiac, the Righteous hove left and rushed at the canoe, aiming to cut her in half. The canoe crew bent their backs to their paddles and their boat seemed to fly over the water but the Righteous came on at a clip that would crush them long before they reached safety. Tleena cried out in terror as the bow of the Righteous sliced through the water and approached the canoe’s starboard beam, but a call from the helmsman at the rear caused the whalers to paddle hard astern on one side while the helmsman himself swept his steering paddle wide, pivoting the canoe by ninety degrees just in time to miss being broadsided by the Righteous. Now paralleling the ship, the canoe was tossed by the Righteous’ bow wave but managed, through the skillful and coordinated paddling of her crew, to stay upright.