After lunch we rowed across to the burial islands. When tree burial was forbidden by the government the natives took to putting their dead on special burial islands, piling up the boxes in small log shelters through which the wind could blow. Each family or crest had its own island. The first one we landed on belonged to the wolf crest—a great running wolf thirty feet long, made of boards and painted white, with red and blue extra eyes and signs, stood guard over the dead of his family. On the other island, a killer whale proclaimed that the dead of his family lay there.
It was important in the Indian mind to be buried properly with carefully-observed rites. People who were drowned at sea could not go to the next world, but were doomed to haunt the beaches forever. Sometimes they were seen at night shivering and moaning, wandering along at tide level, seaweed in their straggling hair and phosphorus shimmering on their dripping bodies. Poor miserable drowned people....
I decided that I had to leave before nightfall. If anything happened to us in this Land-of-the-Past—and drowning was the most likely—would we have to wander the beaches for ever—moaning and moaning? We were just visitors in this forgotten land—but how could we prove it, or who would believe us?
The sun was setting behind the hills when we left the old village—still so silent, still so indifferent whether we came or went. The thunderbird and the other carved figures still stared across to the islands-of-the-dead, where the last rays of the sun fell on wolf and killer whale. Silent, implacable, it was they who belonged here—we were only intruders; we would tiptoe away.
But as we rounded the last point, escaping, there was a hurried beat of wings, and our friend the northern raven flew croaking out of the dark woods and down to the edge of the cliff.
“What, going?” he chuckled....“Tch—tch—tch!”
THE SKULL
IT WAS JOHN WHO FOUND THE SKULL, OR RATHER THE bone that led to the skull. He was playing on the beach over in the corner near the waterhole, underneath a great old fir tree that grows on the edge of the bank where the solid rock slopes down lower towards the beach. This old tree doesn’t grow tall and straight the way they do in the forest. It sends out huge low branches almost as big as the trunk—as though it were easier to feed its hard won nourishment to the parts not too far away from the source. The great roots that embrace the rocks like an octopus and anchor the old tree to the bank are now exposed on the edge of the beach. The waves of the big winter storms have washed away part of the black earth mixed with shell, leaving the bare roots burrowing down into the sand.
“Mummy!” John called, as I came down onto the beach from the high knoll on the other side of the cove.
“I found a bone.” He crawled out from under the roots that framed a little house for him, waving a long, white bone.
Deer leg, probably, I thought, as I walked across to look at it...but it was no deer bone.
“I think you have found part of an old Indian.”
John dropped it, and wiped his hands on his shorts.
“Where did you find it?”
“In under that big tree.”
I took a piece of driftwood and poked about cautiously, close to where he indicated. Whoever it was had been buried before that tree existed. And the tree must be at least three hundred years old—the growth is slow on rock. Then, right up underneath the root crown I uncovered something broad and curved. I worked carefully with my hands, and finally lifted out a yellow skull, which looked at us wanly out of hollow sockets....
It was a flathead, the skull having been purposely deformed in infancy—usually with a board fastened so as to give continual pressure, or a cedar-bark pad while the bone is still soft. This one looked as though it had been bound with something as well, for it had a curious knob on the end. A flathead was a sign of nobility among some of the tribes on this coast, and only the upper class were allowed to deform their babies’ heads like that. I think this one had been a woman’s—it was too small and delicate for a man’s, but judging from the teeth, full grown. Who knows how old it was—the coast Indians didn’t usually bury their dead in the ground, but fastened them up in trees.
Just recently archaeologists digging in the big Fraser River midden have found proof (by carbon test, I presume) that Indians lived on this coast eight thousand years ago.
In the last twenty years, on southern Vancouver Island, every now and then someone finds a roughly carved stone head or figure. One, just a couple of years ago, was rescued from a man who was building it into a stone wall he was making. Another was turned up by a plough. I saw that one. It was carved out of coarse rough stone: elongated, pierced ear lobes, and rather Egyptian features. Both the stone and the carving called to mind some of the Toltec carvings in the museum down in Mexico. The present coast Indians don’t know anything about them, or who made them.
On examination, the land behind the little bay where we were anchored proved to be all midden—about ten or twelve feet deep. It lay exposed where a winter stream cut through. It was quite a small area, and probably just a summer camp. Across the main big bay, at what we call the Gap, are clam flats. The Indians most likely smoked and dried their clams for winter use, close to where they dug them. I don’t suppose they had any ceremonies in connection with the digging of clams—clams being immobile creatures, and not temperamental like the salmon. The salmon were treated with great respect. Once they started running—big schools on their way to the rivers to spawn—no venison must be eaten, lest the fish take offence and go off in another direction. After eating the salmon, the bones were carefully collected and thrown back in the sea—so that the souls of the salmon could return to their own country.
“We’re always getting mixed up with Indians and things, aren’t we?” said Peter, digging furiously.
“Specially me,” said John, holding tight on to his piece of old Indian.
MAMALILACULLA
IT WAS FAR TOO WINDY TO VENTURE UP KNIGHT INLET that day. After studying the chart we decided to put in the time by wandering through the maze of islands over towards Village Island. There is an old Indian village there, Mamalilaculla, and we had never been in there before. The village was always, at least partly, occupied in summer time; for it had a Church of England mission and a small six-bed hospital for tubercular Indian girls.
The chart marked a cove on the south-west side of the island as Indian Anchorage. Anchorage is always difficult to find in the waters off Knight Inlet. A terrific sweep of wind blows through there from Queen Charlotte Sound, with all the force of the open Pacific behind it. Also, you have tides with a range up to twenty-three feet to contend with.
We found the Indian Anchorage without any trouble—out of sight of the village, and quite a long way from it. We anchored in about three and a half fathoms. The water was not very clear, but I rowed all around and could see no sign of any reefs, or any kelp to mark anything. And after all—it was marked as an anchorage. It was too late to explore further that night. Jan said she had seen the roof of a house or shed in the next bay to the south—but all that would have to wait until morning.
We woke to an embarrassing situation. We found ourselves trapped in a little pool—lucky not to be aground—and surrounded by reefs that we could hardly see over, unless you stood up on deck.
While we were eating our breakfast, feeling very foolish, an old Norwegian appeared on top of one of the reefs and, looking down on us, asked if we were all right. “You won’t get out of there for two or three hours,” he said. “You anchored too far in.”
We gave him a cup of coffee and he helped us free our dinghy, which was balancing on the barnacles. He was in a punt, and we followed him back to where, just round the point to the south, was another bay with his float connected with the shore, and his fish-boat tied up.
He took us up to meet his wife. On the way we passed a frame house—a regular cottage with windows, doors, a verandah and chimney. Just as someone else might have pointed out another house on their property and mentioned casual
ly, “This is our guest house,” the old fisherman said, “this is our hen house.” It was full of hens—a hundred and fifty White Leghorns occupying a four-room cottage. They all crowded to the screened windows to watch us pass.
“Here comes the missus,” he said. I turned...down the hill came a stout, grey-haired, elderly woman with an ox-goad in her hand, followed by two oxen pulling a stoneboat with a water barrel on it. When she saw us, she turned and faced the oxen, said something to them and they stopped.
Only they weren’t oxen, they were cows. They were heavy, thick-set animals. They looked like small oxen and had rings in their noses. They gave milk, and cream and butter, and worked four hours a day when needed. They hauled the barrel to the well for water, carted all the wood for the winter from the forest, and ploughed and harrowed the garden. I had never seen cows working like this before, but the old man said it was quite usual on the small farms in Norway. They could be worked up to four hours a day without affecting the milk supply.
His wife was very Scottish and full of energy. They had a large garden with all kinds of vegetables and about half an acre of strawberries, protected from the birds with old fish-nets. The strawberries were just ripening, in the beginning of August, almost six weeks later than the south of the province. They had a good market for what they could produce in the summer, as well as eggs and milk all the year round. I wondered where on earth their customers lived in this land of apparently no habitation. There was the Mission, but the rest of the customers lived at distances from fifteen to twenty miles away—in logging camps, or the cannery half-way up Knight Inlet, and the store over in Blackfish Sound. If the customers couldn’t get to them, the old man in the fish-boat would deliver to them on his way to the fishing grounds. They always had orders ahead for strawberries.
We lay at their wharf for three days, waiting for the wind to drop. We bought milk and cream, vegetables and eggs; and helped them pick crates of strawberries in return for all we could eat ourselves. This was an unheard of luxury on board our boat. There were various places that we had got to know, over the summers, where we could get fresh vegetables—but strawberries and cream!
One afternoon, one of the missionary ladies walked over the trail from the Indian village and had tea with us. We all sat under the tree, up on the mound overlooking the wharf. She was a most interesting woman, and broadminded. She had been at the village for years, and was in charge of the little hospital. She and her companion were both English—I think the Mission itself was English.
She had many tales—there had been one old woman in the village who was slowly dying. She kept saying, “Me want Maley, me want Maley” over and over again. No one understood what or who it was she wanted. Even the other Indians didn’t seem to know. Suddenly this missionary had a brain-wave. She looked through all the old books and magazines she had—until she found a picture of the Virgin Mary. She pasted it on a piece of cardboard and took it over to the old Indian.
“You should have seen that old woman’s face, as she whispered ‘Hail Mary’,” said the Protestant missionary—adding, “I was glad to have made her happy.” As far as the Mission knew, there had been no Catholic priests in the district for over eighty years. These Kwakiutl Indians had resisted missionaries and civilization much longer than the other tribes on the coast. The old woman might have been captured from some other tribe.
“But it’s discouraging at times,” said the missionary. For just when, with the help of the nursing and the religious teaching, they thought they had the feet of the village well on the road to civilization, they would come across something that made them realize that, below the surface, the Indian trails were still well trodden. One winter’s day they saw some strange Indians arrive in the village by dugout. Ceremonies were held that night in the big community house. The sounds of long speeches, singing and the rhythmic beating of drums came down the wind—all night. In the morning the strangers left.
Inquiring cautiously, she was told that it was the ceremony of “The paying-of-the-tribute-money.” The visitors came from a little village up on big Gilford Island. Once it had been a large village, with a powerful chief. But the Indians of Mamalilaculla, forty years before, had raided it and killed and burned and plundered. They had lost many of their own warriors in the raid, and for that, the little village, which had never recovered, still had to pay tribute or blood-money to their conquerors—the village of Mamalilaculla.
The missionaries had tried to tell the people in the village that it wasn’t Christian to keep on exacting tribute all these years. But they could do nothing—the strange Indians still appeared every winter. She didn’t know how much they had to pay, or what the tribute was. The old men of the tribe would not talk about it anymore. It was a closed book, as far as she was concerned.
She asked us to walk back over the trail to see the village and the mission. It was a lovely walk through the tall hemlock. The path was wide and well-trodden; for it led also to the Indian Anchorage, which the Indians used in winter for their fishing boats. All the Indians were away now, only the sick people and the old ones were left behind in the summer time. Captain Vancouver and his officers, in 1792, had never understood all the deserted villages. They thought the people must have been killed off by battle or plagues—whereas they were just following their usual custom of going off for the summer, as they still do. These old villages are their winter villages.
Miss B. said she had done her best to have the young Indian girls learn the ancient arts from the old women of the tribe, but none of them were interested. She took us over to a small house to look at some fabric that an old woman was making. She was the only one left in the tribe who knew how—and the art would die out with her. Miss B. did not know what it was called: she had never seen any like it before.
We didn’t see the old Indian working—she was sick that day—but we did see her work....In the Kwakiutl village of Mamalilaculla, on the west coast of British Columbia, this old, old woman of the tribe was making South Sea Island tapa cloth out of cedar roots. The cloth was spread across a heavy wooden table—a wooden mallet lying on top of it.
I am not quite sure how tapa cloth is made. But I believe they soak the roots in something to soften them—lay them in a rough pattern of dark and light roots, and then pound them with a wooden mallet into paper-thin, quite tough cloth.
The early explorers often used to winter in the South Seas, and at times had some of the islanders on board their boats on these coasts. There must be some kind of a connection somewhere. Even the liquid sound of the name of this village, Mamalilaculla, is more like the language of those far away islands than it is of most of the Kwakiutl dialects.
KNIGHT INLET
IT WAS STILL BLOWING TOO HARD FOR US TO START ON the long Knight Inlet trip, but it was time I got my crew back on camp fare. We had all just finished making up my mind that, unless the weather changed, we would go on up to Kingcome Inlet in the morning, when we sighted a ketch working in towards the Indian Anchorage. The old fisherman hurried up onto the bluff and waved them round towards his wharf. The ketch went about, hauled down her sails, then “putted” into the wharf and tied up beside our boat.
We knew the people, and they were going up Knight in the morning. Weather that was too windy for our boat was just perfect for the ketch. Before the evening was over, it was all settled that we should transfer our sleeping bags to the ketch and make the trip together. We could leave our boat tied up just where it was.
We were under way by eight o’clock—with engine. Out by Eliot Pass and Warr Bluff to take advantage of the tide, which would be quite a consideration for the first ten miles or so. The ketch was about thirty-seven feet. With the four youngsters they already had on board, and my three, we were full up but still comfortable.
We had hardly cleared Battle Point when the morning wind caught up with us, and with it some quite unexpected fog—soft and rolling. It would roll down the open channels in great round masses—hesitate for an islan
d, and then roll over it and on. It would fill up all the bays—searching and exploring. It came on board and felt us all over with soft, damp fingers, and we hoisted our sails and fled before it. We escaped before we were very far past Protection Point, and left it rolling up Thompson Sound to see what it could find up there.
Then the sun came up over the mountains, and the wind increased until we were making six or seven knots running before it—quite fast enough if you want to enjoy the surroundings and not give all your attention to the sailing. Soon though, it was impossible to forget the sailing on Knight—which writhes along through the mountains like a prehistoric monster. With every next mountain or valley, the wind took a completely different direction. The big sail would jibe across with a “wha-a-am.” We would no sooner get it settled on that side when “wha-a-am” back it would go again.
A little farther on, the wind blew harder, but it was steadier. The mains’l, which had been hauled down, was hoisted again. The mountains grew higher and higher, and gossiped together across our heads. And somewhere down at their feet, on that narrow ribbon of water, our boat with the white sails flew swiftly along, completely dwarfed by its surroundings.
We slopped badly in a beam sea when we turned into Glendale Cove, and some of the crew felt a little squeamish. But we were soon out of it and tied up to a wharf inside a boom-log. We intended to spend the night there, for as far as we knew there would be no other anchorage until we were near the head. A little later, watching the big white combers rolling white and wild up the inlet, we decided that any sailing for pleasure up Knight had better be done in the morning.
The Curve of Time Page 10