Written in Stone

by Rosanne Parry

  It was beginning to get dark, and I was longing for the comfort of a campfire. What I really needed was cedar branches to keep dry. I dug the long knife out of the food box and searched the tree line for the profile of a cedar. Stubby shore pines edged the sand and alders clustered around a stream. Behind them I saw what I needed—tree of life. Western red cedar, the loggers called it.

  I walked up the streambed, looking for a game trail to get through the underbrush. I didn’t dare go deep into the rain forest. Even without the Pitch Woman and the Timber Giant, I might not find my way out. A close look at the stream bank showed pairs of moon prints from a mule deer. I searched the ferns and salal clustered on the ground for a game trail. It was less than a hand’s width wide and curved inland away from the stream. I stopped to listen for bears and wolves. I searched up in the tree branches for a cougar. I whispered a quick prayer and stepped into the woods.

  Plenty of fresh cedar branches littered the ground from the storm two nights ago. I hacked them into a manageable size with the long knife and dragged as many as I could behind me.

  I was back at the creek before I remembered the song to thank the cedars. The one that I knew was a baby song. My mother sang a different one, a more dignified song for women. I hadn’t been old enough to learn it when she died. I could only sing the one I knew. I did my best, but the forest swallowed up my song. I ran for the beach and did not look back.

  It began to rain. I draped the cedar branches over the canoe. They reached down to the sand and the water rolled off them the way a bird’s feathers shed rain. I climbed under my shelter, rolled up in blankets, and fell asleep listening to the waves.

  Hunger woke me, or maybe cold. I lifted my head and groaned. Maybe it was my aching body that woke me. It was hard to settle on a chief misery that morning. I stuck my head and shoulders out of the shelter and grabbed smoked salmon and berry cake from the food box. I propped myself up on my elbows and devoured breakfast.

  The cut on my head had a rock-solid scab with no oozing infection underneath. It was the only fragment of good news I could think of. A ribbon of light showed through the split on the bow of my canoe. I put on the rain cape and rolled out from underneath. From the outside, I could see it was an impact split. All the wood was still there. It was fixable. The notch broken off of my paddle was a lost cause. I could still use it, but I’d have to work harder for each stroke.

  It was still raining. Fog too. There was no sound of passing boats, and I wondered for a moment what would happen when Susi realized I had not gone to get a bigger canoe to bring Mr. Glen and his luggage to Grandpa’s house. The fog worked in my favor there. No one would try to travel in this weather. I might still have time to save my father’s dance masks, if I could make a patch for my boat out of pitch and pine needles. I turned away from the ocean. Pine sap, a fire, and a sheltered place to work had my attention for the rest of the day.

  There was a cluster of tall rocks beside the cliff at the north end of the beach. They would protect me from the wind. There was an hour before high tide. I took the knife and scored the trunks of a dozen shore pines to make the sap run free. When the tide was all the way up, I put my gear in the boat, dragged it to the water, and floated it to the north end of the beach. The rocks made my campsite feel more sheltered. I collected scraps of driftwood for my fire and dug around trees for dry needles. I made a proper fire ring with rocks, determined not to pass another night without the company of flames. There was a break in the rain, so I draped the blankets on the shorter rocks to dry in the wind and headed back into the trees.

  Collecting sap was a miserable job. No wonder Grandpa always made Charlie do it. I scraped and scratched and rolled for hours to get a wad of pitch half the size of a baseball. It was probably not enough. I cut a dozen more strips out of the bark, in case I needed more tomorrow.

  I passed a rosebush on my way back to the beach and picked a pocketful of rose hips for tea. There were brake ferns nearby, so I pulled up roots to roast for supper. Back on the beach, I built a fire. It took an hour to get it from flicker to heat. By the time the pitch was hot enough to work, it was nearly too dark to see. Before I quit for the night, I put the remains of the pitch up on a rock to keep the sand off. I set the roots on to roast and dropped a hot rock in a bowl for tea. A minute later, a downpour drowned my fire.

  “It is only rain,” I told myself. “God does not hate me.” I rolled up in a ball under my canoe and shivered my blankets warm. Bad dreams followed me into the dark. I heard my name called and I followed, but each calling led me to a stone that blocked my path.

  12

  The Discovery

  The next morning broke bright and clear. As soon as the sun was a handsbreadth over the mountains, steam rose all around me. I climbed one of the beach rocks to look over the water for passing boats. I had to scramble to find handholds. I pulled myself up slowly, resting my chest on the top while I swung a leg up over the edge of the stone.

  As I got to my feet, I saw a tiny pool of water by my hand. It was perfectly round, with a little island in the middle like the letter O. I straightened up, shaded my eyes, and looked over the breakers to the cluster of rocks where my boat had run aground a day and a half ago.

  Three seals lounged in the sun, the waves licking their back flippers.

  Which one raised his head to me? I wondered. Which one sent me here to the seal hunter’s beach? I smiled and almost waved at them. The wind pushed the rising mist off the sand and into the trees. All my plans seemed possible under this cold blue sky.

  I looked down at the rock and gasped. Sunlight reflecting on a dozen shallow pools of water shined like a shield of copper. Smoothly curved narrow channels of water, ovoids large and little, made a hammered jewel on flat rock.

  I knelt and dipped my fingers in. The edges of the pool were smooth, with crumbs in the bottom left over from grinding. I imagined a hand. A stone. A million strikes of the mallet—all done in some unseen past.

  I walked slowly around the edge of the shining pools of water. When my body faced north, I saw him: Chitwin, the face of the Bear with eyes, teeth, a square head, and small ears. The sight of him made every hair on my body stand up. It was the same face that looked out half-finished from Mama’s loom. The same face I had seen somewhere else long ago, glowing. I probed that memory, and after a few moments, it unfolded. Mama’s button blanket looked like this, with the face of Chitwin outlined in pearl buttons.

  I spread my arms, imagining the weight of a robe of power over my shoulders. I took a step to the north, slow and heavy, and then another. The face of Bear was my fire. I stepped quicker, lighter, turning my shoulders to face the fire and then the sky, as Mama had done. I remembered her dance and the story that each step told.

  I danced the whole story of Bear walking out of the mountains in spring to bring the summer berries. When I finished, arms out and face up to the sun, I felt light pour into my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, my hands in fists to keep that filled-up feeling in.

  “This is mine,” I announced to rocks and air. “Mine forever. No pencil-pointy, paper-thin stranger will take it from me.”

  I danced the story through again, singing the Bear chant this time to fix it in my mind. I stroked my finger around the outline of Bear’s face one last time and jumped down to the sand.

  Three more beach rocks stood in a cluster by my camp. Two were jagged on top, with white streaks from nesting birds. I circled them, but they were just rocks with no climb holds. The third was as tall as Grandpa’s house and flat-topped with a smooth landward face. At shoulder height, I saw a cluster of carved spirals, shallow and weathered at the edges. The south edge of the rock had a few outcroppings and a seam that ran nearly straight to the top.

  I tucked my skirt into my waistband and set one bare foot against the stone. I wedged my fingers into the seam and pulled myself up. I hunted with my toes for the next foothold, settled my balance, and wiped a sweaty hand on the back of my blouse. Fingers inched al
ong the crevice, and I shifted my weight to the upper leg to hunt for another foothold.

  I laughed out loud, loving the stretch and pull on my muscles, the wind flapping my clothes, the victory of leaving the ground. By the time I hauled myself over the top, I had white scratch marks on my knees and rock crumbs in my hair.

  I could see at once that I’d found a treasure. This rock carving was larger, sharper, maybe newer? I stepped carefully around the edge looking for right side up. This carving faced west.

  There was a whale, openmouthed with an upturned tail. Blue-green flakes of weathered copper were pounded into the skin to make it shimmer. Two canoes were underneath the whale, with three peaked hats in each to show whalers. On the landward side of the picture was a human face with its eyes closed and mouth open. Singing? Praying? I wished I knew.

  I studied the carving from all sides, drinking in the details, searching out the meaning of the maker. A whaler’s prayer, I decided. His hope. His need to feed his family. His legacy for his sons and grandsons.

  Did my father carve this stone? Did he leave it for his family, to say this is who I am, a whaler? I scanned the stone for some mark of the maker, a symbol, a signature style. I saw nothing familiar, but stone is not as easy to work as cedar. Still, some whaler made this. Spent his hours and months in the company of shorebirds and stone to say this to the sky forever.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?” I said aloud. It was odd. Why should this carving be a secret hidden from all who passed by but didn’t know where to look? Every other carving my family made—totem, mask, canoe—was a public work meant to proclaim the strength and prosperity of our name. Why would this stone carving be kept a secret from all but passing birds? I thought about what had brought me there. Why was my first impulse, when Papa’s masks were in danger, to steal them, hide them, and run away? Away to some white town—not Aberdeen, where people might know my family, but Seattle or Victoria or Vancouver. Someplace where my face would be nothing but another immigrant in the dozens that walked off every train and boat.

  I imagined that life. Me, alone in the city, working as a washerwoman or living in one of those orphanages where they taught you to be a white person. How to stand and dress and pray, until the bread-loaf brown faded from my skin and the words of my childhood were erased like chalk marks. What a grub they would make of me, a pale, blind weevil that thinks of filling its belly and nothing more. I raised a fist against that path. Something worse than the Pitch Woman would be waiting for me at the end of that road.

  I paced the edge of the whaler’s rock carving. It was the whale I loved first, with his ocean-green copper skin. The arch of his body stretched over the entire seaward side of the stone. I did not like the canoes as much. Something was wrong with them, a mistake. Their prows faced away from the whale. They did not lie side by side as boats in the ocean did to meet the current and wind straight on. They made a downward-pointing V.

  Unless.

  I walked around to the whale side of the carving. Unless the canoes were an arrow, an arrow that pointed to—the teller.

  I felt a rush of warmth in my hands and a drumbeat in my heart. This was the meaning of the openmouthed man. He was the teller, the one who went from family to family and even to other villages to tell the story. It was the teller who made whaling true. What happened at sea was a mystery. Only the ones who went on the hunt knew, but one whaler came home to tell and made every moment of the hunt real to all Makah who listened.

  Papa was that teller. I could be the teller now. I could make his life real. I could raise him out of the water with words. The thought sang through my whole body. Pearl Carver, daughter of whalers, tell this story.

  I scampered down the side of the stone, threw open my basket, and pulled out my diary. I flipped past the first three pages—the names of my family—and smoothed open a fresh page.

  Words rushed out of my pencil, the name of this place, the time of year, the position of the carved stones. Then I sketched each carving and wrote the names of Bear and Whale.

  On the Bear page, I wrote Mama’s song and the steps of her dance. I wrote the story her dance told, the design of her button blanket.

  I paused for a moment at the Whale page. A whaler guarded his knowledge, passing it only to grown sons. There were three men left in Grandpa’s family: Uncle Jeremiah, Henry, and Charlie. What if they went away to lumber camps or mining camps or army camps and never came home. I thought of the storyteller on the rock. I must not shut that open mouth. Who but me would do this?

  I scooped a more comfortable sitting spot in the sand and leaned against the warm side of the stone. I wrote small and filled the pages edge to edge, barely keeping up with the words that surged from my throat in whispers, songs, and shouts. I put in accent marks for clarity, and invented letters for Quinault and Makah sounds that didn’t exist in English. I left blank spaces for things I would need to ask Grandma about, facts and names I should double-check. My fingers tingled as I wrote the way they did high in the mountains. When I got stuck for a word, I drew footprints across the top of the page. My children’s footprints, my grandchildren, they were leading me now.

  I wrote for hours, until my pencil was an inch shorter and half the pages of my diary were full. I ate my food cold that night and didn’t bother with a fire. The stars and my words on the page were company enough. I put aside all thoughts of mending the boat and decided to spend at least a week walking the beach and looking for more stone carvings to record.

  That night, I dreamed of a boat. I was in a long canoe. It was as finely made as a whaling canoe, but it was no boat I had been in before. A tall cream-colored sail swelled with a steady wind and carried me west, the direction from which all good things come. The sail was covered top to bottom with words in my own handwriting.

  The next morning, I checked my reserve of food. There were two meals left in my box, three if I stretched them, but I could gather beach food from the tide pools if I got hungry. Sea urchin was not my favorite, but it was easy to find and fix.

  I decided to visit the Chitwin carving after eating. I scrambled to the top of the shorter beach rock. The morning was overcast but not foggy, and the lines of the Bear’s face were not quite as spectacular as they had been in full sun the day before. I loved them anyway.

  I searched again for a signature mark. Every artist did something. It might be the shape of the eye in a totem pole or a certain color always placed around the lid of a basket. Mama signed her weaving with a yellow-and-black nine-square checkerboard, very small in the right-hand corner. I saw nothing that resembled a maker’s mark, but maybe after I had found more of these stone pictures I would be able to read them better.

  Barking sounds from the ocean caught my ear, and I glanced out to the seal rocks. Two larger seals were fighting over a resting spot, or maybe they were fighting over the smaller female who watched them struggle with avid interest. In the middle of their shoving match, the female lifted her head, looked north, and gave a short bark. In the blink of an eye, all three dove and disappeared. By instinct, I did the same, jumping down from my watching place and hiding behind the beach rock to see what came from the north.

  It was Uncle Jeremiah’s canoe, the big one with the Raven carving on the prow. It was close enough to shore that I could hear Henry and Uncle Jeremiah’s muffled voices. Were they looking for me, or were they going to bring Mr. Glen to Grandpa’s house? I could have gone down to the water and called to them. They would have given me a ride. But I hated the idea of being rescued. The thought of explaining my reckless voyage and towing my broken boat home was too much to take. I weighed my pride. There was still time to fix the canoe and make it home before them, time to decide what to do about my father’s regalia. The notion of stealing it and running away seemed a hollow and foolish choice now. Something Ida would do, not me.

  I set my diary aside, promising myself it would only be for a day. A half hour of scrounging firewood and another hour of colle
cting pine pitch had me ready to work. It was a dull and messy business to warm the pitch on the end of a stick and then work it into the crack in the bow of my canoe. I filled the split and reinforced it with pine needles, working both from the inside and outside of the boat. Once the sap cooled and hardened, I tested the bond by pouring water over it, and then by dragging the canoe to the surf and holding the bow down in the water. It wasn’t a tidy-looking repair, but it held.

  I decided to skip lunch to get home before dark. Even so, the sun was only one fist up from the horizon and a soft rain was falling when I pulled onto the beach in front of the village. The sand was empty and doors were closed, but yellow lamplight spilled out of windows, and the smell of wood smoke, biscuits, and elk stew was welcome enough.

  I opened the door of Grandpa’s house to find the floor freshly swept and a table set for nine. Grandma was rolling biscuits for a second batch. Ida was hustling food to the table, and Charlie was filling the wood box. Aunt Loula flapped up to me with an apron in one hand and a soup ladle in the other.

  “Back already?” she said. “Where are the men?”

  “We came in two boats and mine is much lighter. I’m sure they’re only a little ways behind me.” I smiled, followed her to the kitchen, and started ladling soup into a long wooden dish. She believed me. What a relief. I would eventually have to answer for running off, but with a little luck it wouldn’t be tonight.

  Ida scampered back and forth between the table and the front door, and about a half hour later, she let out a squeak and began to jump and spin, shouting, “They’re home! They’re home!”

  Aunt Loula snatched off her apron and Ida’s, washed her hands, and smoothed her hair. Grandpa wrapped a button blanket around his shoulders, and Grandma looked pointedly at my sweaty blouse and stained skirt.

  I ducked into my room and snatched the only clean dress off the pegs on the wall. I could hear Uncle Jeremiah and Henry and Mr. Glen come in the door. Grandpa met them with formal style and made the introductions, quoting ancestors back five generations. I skidded into place behind Charlie just as Grandpa came to my lineage. He said the names of my mother’s parents and grandparents and the name of their village with as much pride as his own family line.