Mike sent the children off to gather windfalls—all they could find—while he showed me his cabin. There was a bookshelf full of books across one end of the main room, and an old leather chair. A muddle of stove, dishpan and pots at the other end, and a table. Then down three steps into his winter living-room, half below ground level. “Warmer in winter,” he explained. He saw us down to the boat, and accepted the two magazines. Then he went back to the cabin to get a book for me, which he said I might like to read if I were going to be in the cove for a few days.
“Stoort sent it to me for Christmas,” he said. I felt that I should have known who Stoort was. I couldn’t see the title, but I thanked him. The children were laden with apples—and full of them, I was sure.
Back in the boat, I looked at the book by flashlight. It was Why be a Mud Turtle, by Stewart Edward White. I looked inside—on the fly-leaf was written, “To my old friend Andrew Shuttler, who most emphatically is not a mud turtle.”
During the next couple of days I spent a lot of time talking to old Mike, or Andrew Shuttler—vouched for by Stewart Edward White as being, most emphatically, worth talking to. The children were happy swimming in the warm water, eating apples, and picking boxes of windfalls for Mike to take over to the logging camp at Deep Bay.
In between admiring everything he showed me around the place—I gradually heard the story of some of his past, and how he first came to Melanie Cove. He had been born back in Michigan in the States. After very little schooling he had left school to go to work. When he was big enough he had worked in the Michigan woods as a logger—a hard, rough life. I don’t know when, or how, he happened to come to British Columbia. But here again, he had worked up the coast as a logger.
“We were a wild, bad crowd,” mused Mike—looking back at his old life, a far-away look in his blue eyes. Then he told of the fight he had had with another logger.
“He was out to get me....I didn’t have much chance.”
The fellow had left him for dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. Mike wasn’t sure how long he had lain there—out cold. But the blood-soaked mattress had been all fly-blown when he came to.
“So it must have been quite some few days.”
He had dragged himself over to a pail of water in the corner of the shack and drunk the whole pailful...then lapsed back into unconsciousness. Lying there by himself—slowly recovering.
“I decided then,” said Mike, “that if that was all there was to life, it wasn’t worth living; and I was going off somewhere by myself to think it out.”
So he had bought or probably pre-empted wild little Melanie Cove—isolated by 7,000-foot mountains to the north and east, and only accessible by boat. Well, he hadn’t wanted neighbours, and everything else he needed was there. Some good alder bottom-land and a stream, and a sheltered harbour. And best of all to a logger, the south-east side of the cove rose steeply, to perhaps eight hundred feet, and was covered with virgin timber. So there, off Desolation Sound, Mike had built himself a cabin, hand-logged and sold his timber—and thought about life....
He had been living there for over thirty years when we first blew into the cove. And we must have known him for seven or eight years before he died. He had started planting the apple trees years before—as soon as he had realized that neither the trees nor his strength would last forever. He had built the terraces, carted the earth, fed and hand-reared them. That one beside the cabin door—a man had come ashore from a boat with a pocket full of apples. Mike had liked the flavour, and heeled in his core beside the steps.
“Took a bit of nursing for a few years,” said Mike. “Now, look at it. Almost crowding me out.”
He took us up the mountain one day to where he had cut some of the timber in the early days, and to show us the huge stumps. He explained how one man alone could saw the trees by rigging up what he called a “spring” to hold the other end of the saw against the cut. And how if done properly, the big tree would drop onto the smaller trees you had felled to serve as skids, and would slide down the slope at a speed that sent it shooting out into the cove. He could remember the length of some of them, and how they had been bought for the big drydock down in Vancouver.
I got to know what books he had in the cabin. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Plato, Emerson, among many others. Somebody had talked to him, over the years, and sent him books to help him in his search. He didn’t hold with religion, but he read and thought and argued with everything he read. One summer I had on board a book by an East Indian mystic—a book much read down in the States. I didn’t like it—it was much too materialistic to my way of thinking, using spiritual ways for material ends. I gave it to Mike to read, not saying what I thought of it, and wondered what he would make of it. He sat in his easy chair out underneath an apple tree, reading for hour after hour...while I lay on the rocks watching the children swim, and reading one of his books.
He handed it back the next day—evidently a little embarrassed in case I might have liked it. He drew his hand down and over his face, hesitated....Then:
“Just so much dope,” he said apologetically. “All words—not how to think or how to live, but how to get things with no effort!” I don’t think anyone could have summed up that book better than the logger from Michigan.”
Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s—he loved them. I would leave him a pile of them. At the end of the summer, when we called in again, he would discuss all the articles with zest and intelligence.
Mike’s own Credo, as he called it, was simple. He had printed it in pencil on a piece of cardboard, and had it hanging on his wall. He had probably copied it word for word from some book—because it expressed for him how he had learnt to think and live. I put it down here exactly as he had it.
“Look well of today—for it is the Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the variations and realities of your life—the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendour of beauty. For yesterday is but a dream, and To-morrow a vision. But To-day well lived makes every Yesterday a dream of happiness, and every To-morrow a vision of hope. For Time is but a scene in the eternal drama. So, look well of today, and let that be your resolution as you awake each morning and salute the New Dawn. Each day is born by the recurring miracle of Dawn, and each night reveals the celestial harmony of the stars. Seek not death in error of your life, and pull not upon yourself destruction by the work of your hands.” That was just exactly how Mike lived—day by day, working with nature. That was really how he had recovered from the fight years ago. And later how he had pitted the strength of one man against the huge trees—seven and eight feet in diameter and two hundred or more feet high. Just the right undercut; just the right angle of the saw; just the right spots to drive in the wedges—using nature as his partner. And if sometimes both he and nature failed, there was always the jack—a logger’s jack of enormous size and strength that could edge a huge log the last critical inches to start the skid.
He lent his books to anyone who would read them, but the field was small. For a time there was a logging outfit in Deep Bay, three miles away. They used to buy his vegetables and fruit. Some of them borrowed his books. He talked and tried to explain some of his ideas to the old Frenchman in Laura Cove—old Phil Lavine, who was supposed to have killed a man back in Quebec. After Mike was dead, old Phil commented to me, almost with satisfaction, “All dem words, and ‘e ‘ad to die like all de rest of us!”
But the next year when we called in to see him, old Phil had built book-shelves on his wall—around and above his bunk, and on the shelves were all Mike’s books. Phil was standing there proudly, thumbs hooked in his braces, while some people off a yacht looked at the titles and commented on his collection....Phil the savant—Phil who could neither read nor write.
Among Mike’s circle of friends—lumbermen, trappers, fishermen, people from passing boats that anchored in the cove—not many of them would have stayed long enough, or been able to appreciate the fine mind old Mike had developed for himself. And the philo
sophy he had acquired from all he had read in his search to find something that made life worth living.
I can’t remember from whom I heard that Mike had died during the winter. When we anchored there the next year, the cove rang like an empty seashell. A great northern raven, which can carry on a conversation with all the intonations of the human voice, flew out from above the cabin, excitedly croaking, “Mike’s dead! Mike’s dead!” All the cliffs repeated it, and bandied it about.
The cabin had been stripped of everything—only a rusty stove and a litter of letters and cards on the floor. I picked up a card. On the back was written, “Apple time is here again, and thoughts of ripe apples just naturally make us think of philosophy and you.” It was signed, “Betty Stewart Edward White.”
Apple time was almost here again now, and the trees were laden. But apples alone were not enough for us. We needed old Mike to pull his hand down over his face in the old gesture, and to hear his—“Well, well, well! Summer’s here, and here you are again!”
INDIAN VILLAGES
I THROTTLED DOWN THE ENGINE, LIFTED JOHN UP ON THE steering seat, and left the boat to drift idly under his care, while the rest of us unrolled the chart and tried to discover just where we were.
As far as the eye could see, islands, big and little, crowded all round us—each with its wooded slopes rising to a peak covered with windblown firs; each edged with twisted junipers, scrub-oak and mosses, and each ready to answer immediately to any name we thought the chart might like it to have. To the north-east, the snow-capped mountains of the coast range reached with their jagged peaks for the summer sky. And north, south, east and west, among the maze of islands, winding channels lured and beckoned. That was what we had been doing all day—just letting our little boat carry us where she pleased.
But we were looking for old Indian villages, and we had to find out where we were. So we turned the chart this way and that way, trying to make it fit what lay before our eyes.
“We came through there, and along there, and up there,” pointed Peter, whose sense of direction is fairly good.
So we swung a mountain a few degrees to the west.
But Jan, who is three years older, snorted, took her pencil and showed us—“This is where we saw the Indian spearing fish, and that is where we saw the Indian painting on the cliff.”
So we meekly swung the mountain back again, and over to the east.
Then the channels began to have some definite direction, and the islands sorted themselves out—the right ones standing forward bold and green; the others retiring, dim and unwanted. We relieved John at the wheel; the other two climbed up into the bow to watch for reefs; and we began to make our way cautiously through the shallow, unknown waters that would eventually bring us to one of the Indian villages.
We were far north of our usual cruising ground this summer: in the waters of the Kwakiutl Indians, one of the West Coast tribes of Canada. Their islands lie among hundreds of other islands on the edge of Queen Charlotte Sound, well off the usual ship courses, and many of them accessible only through narrow confusing passages. In summer it is fairly quiet and sheltered; but in the spring and fall the big winds from the open Pacific sweep up the sound and through the islands, stunting and twisting the trees. And in winter cold winds blow down the great fiord that cuts eighty miles through the islands and mountains to the north-east. And at all times of the year, without any warning, comes the fog—soft, quiet, obliterating.
We had found an old stone hammer on our own land the winter before. It was shaped more like a pestle, which we thought it was. But trips to the museum, and books from the library, and a whole winter’s reading, had made us familiar with the history and habits of these Indians. So we had made up our minds to spend part of the summer among the old villages with the big community houses, and try to recapture something of a Past that will soon be gone forever.
There is little habitation in those waters, beyond the occasional logging camp or trading centre hidden in some sheltered bay. The Indians living among these islands have the same setting that they have had for hundreds of years, and cling to many of their old customs. It seems to give the region a peculiar atmosphere belonging to the Past. Already we could feel it crowding closer. And the farther we penetrated into these waters the more we felt that we were living in a different age—had perhaps lived there before...perhaps dimly remembered it all.
Yesterday, we had passed a slender Indian dugout. An Indian was standing up in the bow, holding aloft a long fish-spear poised, ready to strike. His woman was crouched in the stem, balancing the canoe with her paddle—a high, sheer cliff behind them. Cliff, dugout, primitive man; all were mirrored in the still water beneath them. He struck—tossed the wriggling fish into the dugout, and resumed his pose. When was it that we had watched them? Yesterday? a hundred years ago? or just somewhere on that curve of Time?
Farther and farther into that Past we slipped. Down winding tortuous byways—strewn with reefs, fringed with kelp. Now and then, out of pity for our propeller, we poled our way through the cool, green shallows—slipping over the pointed groups of great starfish, all purple and red and blue; turning aside the rock cod swimming with their lazy tails; making the minnows wheel and dart in among the sea grapes. In other stretches herons disputed our right-of-way with raucous cries, and bald-headed eagles stared silently from their dead tree perches. Once a mink shrieked and dropped his fish to flee, but turned to scream and defy us. Perhaps, as Peter suggested, he was a mother one.
We turned into more open water, flanked with bigger islands, higher hills.
“Mummy! Mummy! A whale!” shouted Jan, and almost directly ahead of us a grey whale blew and dived.
“Two whales! Two whales!” shrieked the whole crew, as a great black killer whale rose in hot pursuit, his spar fin shining in the sun. He smacked the water with his great flanged tail and dived after his prey—both heading directly our way.
We were safe behind a reef before they rose again. The grey whale hardly broke water; but we could see the killer’s make-believe eye glare, and his real, small black eye gleam. Then his four-foot spar fin rose and sank, the great fluked tail followed...and they were gone, leaving the cliffs echoing with the commotion. The Indians believed that if you saw a killer’s real eye, you died. It seems quite probable.
John recovered first. “I could easily have shot them, if I’d been closer,” he cried, grabbing his bow and arrow.
Nobody else would have wanted to be any closer. Some tribes believe that if you shoot at a killer, sooner or later the killer will get you—inland, or wherever you flee. Other tribes hail him as their animal ancestor and friend, and use him as their crest. But we were not quite sure of ourselves yet—we were just feeling our way along. Perhaps in some former life we had belonged to one of these tribes. But to which one? We had forgotten, but perhaps the killer hadn’t. We would take no chances in this forgotten land.
Once more we went our peaceful way, our lines over in hopes of a fish for supper. The engine was barely running—our wake was as gentle as a canoe’s. We rounded a bluff and there, on a rocky point, a shaggy grey wolf lay watching her cubs tumbling on the grass. She rose to her feet, eyed us for a second, nosed the cubs—and they were gone.
The distant hills turned violet, then purple. We anchored in a small sheltered cove, made our fire on the shingle beach and ate our supper. Then, all too soon, the night closed in.
About ten the next morning, away off in the distance, we sighted the white-shell beach. A white-shell beach is a distinguished feature of the old Indian villages, and every old village has one. Its whiteness is not a sign of good housekeeping but rather the reverse. These Indians in the old days lived chiefly on seafoods—among them, clams. For hundreds of years they have eaten the clams and tossed the shells over their shoulders. The result is that the old villages, which are believed to be the third successive ones to be built on the same sites, are all perched high up on ancient middens. Earth, grass, fern and sti
nging-nettle have covered them and made them green, but down by the sea the sun and waves bleach and scour the shell to a dazzling white. The beach is the threshold of an Indian village—the place of greeting and parting.
We dropped anchor between a small island and a great rugged cliff topped with moss-laden firs that bounded one end of the beach. Then we piled into the dinghy and rowed ashore. The place was deserted—for it is a winter village, and every summer the tribe goes off for the fishing. So, when we landed, no chief came down with greetings, no one sang the song of welcome, only a great black wooden figure, standing waist high in the nettles up on the bank, welcomed us with outstretched arms.
“Is she calling us?” asked John, anxiously, shrinking closer to me.
I looked at the huge figure with the fallen breasts, the pursed-out lips, the greedy arms. It was Dsonoqua, of Indian folklore, who runs whistling through the woods, calling to the little Indian children so that she can catch them and carry them off in her basket to devour them.
“No, no! Not us,” I assured him. But he kept a watchful eye on her until he was well out of grabbing distance.
Behind the black woman, high up on the midden, sprawled thirteen or fourteen of the old community houses. The same houses stood there when Cook and Vancouver visited the coast. When Columbus discovered America, another group of buildings stood on the same site—only the midden was lower. Now there are shacks huddled in the foreground—the remaining members of the tribe live in them, white men’s way. But they didn’t seem to matter. One was hardly conscious of them—it was the old community houses that dominated the scene.
Timidly, we mounted the high wooden steps that led from the beach up towards the village platform. It was impossible to move anywhere without first beating down with sticks the stinging-nettle that grew waist high throughout the whole village. In the old days the tribe would harvest it in the fall for its long fibres, from which they made nets for fishing. We beat...beat...beat...and rubbed our bare legs.
The Curve of Time Page 6