by Thomas Hopp
He spun around and walked toward the longhouse. He muttered, “I’ve got blubber to salt and meat to dry. I’ve got no time for them.”
“Father!” Tleena called after him. “At least take them inside by the fire!”
He spun. “No! Take them to the beach and let them die there. Let the sea carry away their bodies. Let the crabs and gulls and ravens pick their bones clean. Let them die like Makahs did!”
McKean toppled over and lay stretched out beside his boy, motionless. Without so much as a glance at him, Steel turned and disappeared inside.
Tleena and Archawat conversed in urgent tones but their words faded into the roar of the surf as I stared down at my fallen friend. My heart was breaking for him. Spasmodic trembling set in along McKean’s long prostrate body. The boy was motionless, wrapped in his blanket. As I watched their physical life ebb with the infection and the numbing cold wind, a deep sense of pity welled up in my heart. Sprawled on the sand I saw, not the world-renowned scientist on a quest to cure the Neah virus, but a father who dearly loved his son and had done everything possible to save him. I realized tragedy would win this day. McKean’s exertions for his son had come to nothing. Here on this remote beach, the Neah virus, and the wind, and Gordon Steel’s hatred would prevail.
I felt myself going numb - not just my hands and feet, numbed by the chill of the wind, but something deep in my soul grew numb as well. I felt my willpower draining away and I knew I would soon join Peyton McKean and his boy on the sand. As Tleena and Archawat continued their concerned discussion, my mind reeled at the enormity of the situation. McKean and the boy and I were only the vanguard of millions - perhaps billions - who would die. Unlike old Gordon Steel, I couldn’t find a shred of justice in it.
Unable to bear the sight McKean and his boy any longer, I turned and staggered out onto the cobbles of the beach. The surf raged in front of me. Gloomy clouds raced above me. The stark headlands loomed at the mouth of Spirit Cove like the gateway to Hell. Somewhere high in the dark forest a raven taunted, “Hrock! Hrock!”
My senses reeled. I knew I had come to the end of my time on earth. Here in this cold northwest corner of the world, the Lost Souls disease would take me. I decided to hasten the end by wading into the ice-cold ocean. As my feet splashed into the frigid breaker wash, the deeply cutting chill roused me from my mental paralysis. I looked out across cove and the last red glow of daylight illuminated something riding on the chaotic waters. When I recognized it, my heart surged in my chest. I turned toward Tleena and Archawat and shouted, “The harpoon!”
Chapter 23
In the middle of the surf line, where the waves rose six feet high and spilled over, I saw the harpoon’s shaft ride up on the crest of one blood-red wave after another, fifty yards out from where I stood. It disappeared into the froth of a breaker and then reappeared. It surged forward with each wave front and then drew back in the undertow. Wave-by-wave, it was being carried toward the mouth of Spirit Cove and the open sea.
Tleena and Archawat stopped talking and stared at the harpoon. Before they reacted further, something changed inside me. Perhaps the mania overtook me, perhaps some other delirious madness, but without a thought I shed my coat, kicked off my shoes, and splashed deeper into the surf. I was suddenly determined to bring back Gordon Steel’s trophy - for the satisfaction of plunging it into his hate-filled heart if for no other reason.
A big breaker drenched my chest with water so frigid it seemed to scorch rather than chill. I forced myself out farther despite numbness creeping into my arms and legs. Another wave crashed completely over me, leaving me choking. None of this mattered. My mind was fixated on the harpoon. A wave picked it up and hurled it at me in a six-foot wall of water that crashed over my head, forcing me down and filling my ears with an apocalyptic roar. I tumbled over and over in the purple depths and then came up sputtering and gasping. I flailed around for the harpoon, but it had vanished. Another wave drove me down again, taking me deep and dragging me out along the rocky bottom in its undertow. I struggled to the surface, gasping for breath. Spotting the harpoon beside me in the froth, I grabbed it just as another wave roared over me. I went under with the prize in my grasp and struggled to the surface again. The cold water drained the last warmth from my arms. My legs moved stiffly as I swam to the surface and drew another ragged breath. Immediately, a new wave drove me down to the bottom. The impact forced the air from my tortured lungs. As the undertow dragged me outward, buffeting me across the stones of the dark seabed, I grew too numb to do more than flail weakly with the last strength in me. Above me, the undersurface of the ocean was lit by the purple glow of failing twilight. The ocean’s cold sank into my chest, and I realized I had no strength left to fight my way to the surface.
Although I was drowning, I felt no fear. I ceased struggling and a strange peace came over me. The water no longer choked me. The ocean no longer chilled me. I floated weightlessly in a space that was neither warm nor cold. As my consciousness faltered, a sound came from far out in the depths - a whale’s song, distant and hauntingly beautiful. Other whales joined in a chorus of chirps and squeals and rumbling bass notes, as if beckoning me to join them, beckoning me to swim serenely in the ocean’s depths. I sank deeper, yearning to join the whale chorus.
Then something grasped my shoulder as powerfully as Thunderbird’s talons clutching the whale on the Makah totem. Although I wanted to swim out and join my new friends, I felt myself drawn upward and away from them. I gave myself over to the force pulling me out of the depths, and was hauled roughly from the water and dragged through the shallows. Gasping and sputtering back to life, I gaped bleary-eyed at my rescuer. This was no legendary Thunderbird. It was Andy Archawat.
Stripped to the waist, Archawat pulled me ashore like a soggy rag doll, hauled me out of the surf and dragged me up the shingle stones until we were above the surf line. Then he wrapped an arm around my chest and helped me stagger back to the longhouse.
He dropped me beside McKean. While I coughed and sputtered, he took from my lax hand the harpoon I had nearly died for. Stony-faced, he turned and held it out to Gordon Steel, who had come out of the longhouse to watch with Tleena as the drama unfolded. The old man took the harpoon reverentially and looked it over like it was a divine gift.
Tleena said pointedly, “You have Fin Morton to thank for that, Father.”
Steel grunted and glanced at me, but said no more. He went back to admiring his prize.
Tleena knelt beside McKean and gently picked up the boy. She sat on a low dune and pulled the blankets covering Sean’s face away, holding him across her lap like Mary cradling Jesus in the Pieta. Sean’s face was ashen and his lips were blue. His eyes were closed peacefully, as if in sleep.
“Look at him, Father,” Tleena said. Gordon Steel glanced at the boy. “He’s innocent,” Tleena said. “He never hurt a Makah. He’s not responsible for John’s death. He looks like a little angel. How can you let him die?”
Old Steel’s face pinched with pain, but he said nothing.
Suddenly Tleena’s eyes flashed fire and she shouted angrily at him, “Is that what it’s all about, Father? Is that what you want for Makahs? To be crueler to them than they are to us?”
Steel grunted as if receiving a body blow. Slowly, his scowl turned into a tormented grimace. Tears ran from his half-closed eyes. He dropped to his knees between McKean’s unconscious body and the place where Tleena cradled the boy. A low and mournful cry tore from his throat, rising into a shrill agonized wail. “Ha-a-ahhh! I’ll never forgive them for what happened to John!”
“Father!” Tleena shouted as if trying to wake him from a bad dream. “What if this was John right here?”
Old Steel raised the harpoon in both hands and held it up to the dark sky as if supplicating a cruel deity. “Why did you take him from me?” he cried. “Why did you send these people to me instead? Why?”
Tleena didn’t let up. “Will it make you happy to see this boy die? Will it bring Jo
hn back?”
“Haiiiyee!” Steel cried. He cast the harpoon aside and fell prostrate on the ground. Face down, he uttered horrific wailing cries, clenching fistfuls of sand and dumping them over his head. “I can’t forgive!” he raged. “No, Vi! No! Johnny! I won’t. I can’t…”
“You must forgive, Father! You’ll never heal yourself until you forgive! Hating babalthuds has ruined your life!”
Face down in the sand, old Steel wept like a child. He wept for a long time. McKean lay still, and I lay nearby, unable to rise. Eventually Steel’s cries subsided and I heard nothing but the roar of the surf. The whalers, alerted by the drama of my plunge into the ocean and the old man’s shouts, came and gathered around us. Without lifting his head from the sand, Gordon Steel said to them, “Take them inside. I’ll heal them.”
The chill had sunk so deeply into my skull that my vision faded almost to black, but when strong hands grasped my arms and hauled me up and forward with my feet dragging on the sand, I came partway to my senses. Half-carried through the raven doorway, I glanced back and saw McKean brought along by other young men. They were followed by Tleena, who carried Sean in her arms, and then by a silent and contrite Gordon Steel.
We were helped through the longhouse, passing two hot central fires, both of which hosted collections of kettles and cauldrons seething with blubber rendering into oil. In the walled-off living space at the far end, we were laid out on three cedar couches padded with woven cattail mats and warmed by a smaller hearth whose heat began to thaw my marrow bones. The square living space was crowded with even more totemic art than we had seen on our previous visit. Grotesque human statues, animal-human effigies, and gargoyle demons carved from cedar and painted red, black, and green, had been jammed into the space, while the carved image of the two-headed serpent dominated the wall above us. The four men who carried us in, including Andy Archawat and Billy Clayfoot, sat down in a corner on low seats around a large flat drum. They took up leather-headed mallets and began pounding a slow hypnotic rhythm - boom, buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom. Jerry Tibbut, wearing a headband of woven cedar bark fibers, led them in a droning incantation of strange, unintelligible words.
Gordon and Tleena moved around, gathering small bentwood boxes and packages of goods wrapped in buckskin, which they placed near the hearth. Old Steel vanished for a time and then reappeared in shamanistic regalia. His shoulders were covered by a black felt cape with a red-felt two-headed serpent design. The serpent’s body looped across the back of the cape and the necks came over the shoulders. The two heads filled the front with their fang-lined jaws gaping and their snakelike tongues touching where the cape was fastened with a rawhide cord over Steel’s heart. He wore an animal-fur headband from which bear claws projected upward in a crown-like ring, with two clusters of black raven feathers jutting from the sides. His scrawny bare chest was adorned with a dozen ivory amulets on rawhide-cord necklaces. Each amulet depicted a human or animal spirit. Bracelets with dozens of olive shells on rawhide tethers clattered noisily when he moved his wrists. Around his waist was a buckskin apron, fringed at the bottom with clattering shells and decorated on its front with more amulets hanging from leather ties. His thin legs and feet were bare except for anklets of olive shells.
Tleena left momentarily and returned in a ceremonial outfit as well. She wore a doeskin dress and a red felt button shawl with a black Thunderbird emblem on the back, and a leather headband decorated with porcupine-quill beadwork. A dozen tufts of white eagle down hung from the band, surrounding and highlighting her face, which shone in the firelight with the same great beauty that had mesmerized me when I’d first seen her. Haggard though I was, my heart thrilled when she leaned over me to fluff a pillow of animal fur under my head.
“Lie still, Fin,” she said. “Father is about to begin the tsayik.”
“The what?”
“The healing ceremony.”
“We don’t need a ceremony,” I murmured. “We need medicine.”
“You’ll get both.”
Gordon Steel examined Sean McKean closely. He felt the boy’s pulse and sweaty forehead. He said to Tleena, “The sickness has gone far in him. His soul is already in Pukwubis’ grasp. We’d better hurry.”
He went to another part of the longhouse and brought back a long strip of fresh blubber, which he coiled inside a bentwood cooking box about two-feet square and half filled with steaming water. Using a wetted, three-forked stick, he dug among the glowing coals in the hearth and came up with a red-hot, fist-sized stone. He dropped the rock to the cooking box and the water surged into a boil. He transferred more hot stones until the water was bubbling furiously. Thick steam wafted a muttony but not unpleasant aroma from the rendering blubber.
“You watch and learn,” he said to Tleena. He unrolled one of his buckskin bundles on the floor and gathered from it several handfuls of flattened, olive-green leafy material. “This is kakalaklokadub,” he said. “Dried crow-seaweed. It has the power to heal infections.” He dropped it into the cooking box and used a long, ornately carved wooden spoon to mix it with the blubber.
From a bentwood box, he picked up several long vines like dried sweet peas. He coiled these into the cooking box and stirred them in. “Klochtap, the beach clover vine,” he said. “It has the power to give visions and drive away evil spirits. Don’t use too much. It could kill them.”
He opened a second leather roll and took up handfuls of white roots with tan marks dotting their foot-long lengths. “Ba’akhbupt klupach,” he said. “Horsetail roots give strength.” He put them in the cooking box and stirred the mix awhile. He sniffed the rising steam. “It’s good sea spinach. Extra strong. It will summon the healing spirit, Quykatsayak.”
He stood and turned and bowed his head toward the image of the medicine snake on the wall. He shook his raven-shaped rattle in time to the slow beat of the drummers. And then, with great concentration, he began an invocation with an intricate native melody. “Hey-yey ee-yah hey, yah-yah hey-yah!” He shook his rattle to the side and in front and behind him as if driving back spirits that were crowding him, keeping time with the boom, buh-boom rhythm of the drummers.
“The fan,” he called softly to Tleena. She picked up a fan-shaped cluster of eagle feathers. Moving to Sean McKean first, she lightly brushed the fan over the boy’s cheeks, forehead, and upper body while Gordon sang his chant. She repeated the procedure over McKean and then over me.
“This will calm you,” she whispered, lightly whisking the fan over my skin. “It will prepare your spirit for healing.” Tleena’s gentle touch with the fan, Gordon’s droning song, and the slow drumming mesmerized me until my arms and legs felt warm and leaden.
Old Steel returned to the steaming box and set his rattle down. Still singing, he used a carved ladle to dip out a dark green, oily liquid that had gathered on top of the water seething in the box. Waving his free hand around himself as if fending off evil spirits, he took the ladleful to Sean, blowing on the liquid to cool it. He pulled the boy’s jaw open with a thumb and poured a hefty wash of the medicine into his mouth. Sean sputtered and gagged but Steel clamped his jaw shut, forcing him to swallow the dose.
Steel repeated the procedure on McKean, leaving him sputtering as well. Aware of what was coming, I opened my mouth compliantly and swallowed the potion in one gulp. It was much more bitter and saltier than the sea spinach I had tasted before. A strong muttony aftertaste made me gag. Gordon Steel watched me struggle to keep the stuff down with an amused expression. “It was sea spinach that kept you strong while others died, Fin Morton. This batch has a lot more klochtap in it.”
While the drummers continued their hypnotic beat, Steel made four rounds of the couches, administering additional doses to Sean, Peyton, and me. After the third dose, my body became numb all over. After the fourth, the effigies crowding the room began moving in time to the drumbeat. Old Steel took a portion for himself and then set the spoon aside. He watched my face for a moment. “You feel something?”
“Dizzy.”
“Good.”
As the drummers continued their rhythmic chant, he fetched a small bentwood box and took out a seven-inch-long piece of hollowed-out shank bone with a single eagle feather pendant from its middle. Intricate designs carved on the tube formed two serpent heads whose open jaws framed the opposite, open ends.
“A soul catcher,” Tleena whispered to me as her father knelt beside Sean. He made dramatic flourishes of his rattle around himself and the boy, and then placed one end of the pipe to his lips and the other near the boy’s mouth and nose. He inhaled deeply, drawing Sean’s fevered breath into his own lungs. Then he turned and exhaled forcefully through the soul catcher into the fire, which flared in reaction. He moved to McKean and repeated the process, and then did the same for me. I lay still as he performed his magic, unable to budge from my drug-induced paralysis. Steel repeated the ritual four times over each of us as if drawing out ethereal demons and exhaling them into the fire. Then he stood and approached the two-headed serpent on the wall, singing loudly in a thin, high-pitched voice. Tleena joined in with a harmony in a lower register. Continually shaking his raven rattle, old Steel sang for what seemed a very long time. As he did so, my hallucinations intensified. I became lost in a world of dancing effigies. The serpent, too, began writhing in time to Steel’s song.
Even old Steel became mesmerized. He seemed transfixed by the hypnotic stare of serpent’s abalone-shell eyes, just as I was. The drug effect deepened. A buzzing, electrical sensation rippled through my body, and I drifted in a world of reeling, dancing totem spirits.
Suddenly Steel shouted, “Haaiiiyeee!” He dropped his rattle and turned away from the serpent. He now wore the same look of abject horror I had seen on Pete Whitehall’s face. He ran from the serpent, which had begun to writhe powerfully in its place on the wall. In his panic, Steel collided with one totem effigy and stumbled into another, striking his forehead and stunning himself. His knees buckled and he fell into the firepit. I stared in horror as he fell flat-out on the coals, but I couldn’t move to help him. Shrieking in agony, he rolled across the coals and got up and rushed blindly toward the doorway, but instead struck another totem with his head. He collapsed to the floor and lay still.