“You are a strong man,” Khalpan said. He stood in the canoe, his arms across his chest. “We will leave you with your life.”
Chinlac
ATV tracks suddenly emerge and we cheer, trudging turns to walking and we start to look around. Bloated brown Nechako just to the right of the Slough of Despond now below us.
“I got to the truck keeping my arm up, and I called the ambulance when I got close enough, using the radio phone. Told them get here quick or I’m going to die. I got in and drove straight, that’s why I told you to turn around. Never know what’s going to happen.”
Above the tree line and still no birds. Esker is the next winding stage, slippery, like walking on the back of a snake. Peter says it’s about two thirds of the way there. Four different environments take us to the site, he tells us. First, boreal forest along the creek, then the meadow by the river, then the eskers and finally Chinlac, which is on a level plain thirty feet above the Stuart.
“Ambulance met me on the way to Fraser Lake. By then my boots were full of blood and I tried to tourniquet my arm. Lucky I didn’t or I would’ve lost it. We sped to emergency and the attendants were so quiet, I think I was yelling at them. The doctor, I still remember his face, he was tired, you know? And he looked at me like Oh my God but he saved my life.” Halted suddenly by gratitude, he stops and looks over his shoulder at us, blue boyish eyes. Sun starting to warm the edges of the day, we shuck a layer of coats, rain pants. Air some skin. Lean over trail edges around a sheer drop. River fills the whole frame, smudged green reflects on the brown. Peter takes our picture but it doesn’t turn out; we are blocked by light, just an outline of bulk and smiles.
He tells us that we are walking through a burn that looks recent, trunks tarred up to the edge of our ribs. But it was four years ago. Earth has not recovered. Spindly growth doesn’t absorb our voices; they fly like arrows in the silence.
“Notice anything different?” Peter quizzes.
Janice sees it right away. “The burn stops at the edge!”
“Yes! The burn stops at the edge, and that’s where the trail is, where it always has been. Carrier feet made the original trail that we’re walking on.” Burn is the natural border then as it is now. We are finally on the path and it feels like hauling onto shore after a long swim. Peter says something like you can still see footprints if you brush away leaves and topsoil, careful excavation revealing scuffs of toes and heels. Raw years marked with fire, tough feet holding to the edge.
Dene
As the Chilcotin departed, Khadintel, shaking badly, forced himself to stand straight as he could. Even so, his shoulders sagged like an old cow. But he howled his vengeance, that one day he would come like a nightmare to their village and avenge their marauding and the Chilcotin again jeered and laughed at him. The young men came silent as ghosts out of the forest and they all returned to the village. Everywhere there were broken bodies and the earth was bathed in blood. There were two long, sturdy poles planted in the ground and on thick forked sticks the bodies of children hung, ripped open and spitted through turned out ribs like drying salmon.
Chinlac
Fork in the road down a steep hill gives us pause. Yellow and pink ribbons separate, go their own way. I am really starving now. “How long till we get there?” I am plaintive.
“Thirty minutes from here if we take the pink line across the burn. Heard the yellow line is full of blowdown, it’ll slow us down. Though it’s by the river, way prettier.” He shows us the confluence of the sleepy skein of the Nechako slipping into the muscling Stuart; two rivers, negotiating curves and obstacles at their own speed, converging in a circling maelstrom.
“Why do they move so differently? A river’s a river, right?” I ask. No one answers. We all turn left to cut across; fastest is best this time. “This trail was done by GPS, should take us pretty close to the site. It’s not what I built, what I made took time, I considered the beauty, what was easier going in, coming out.” Peter’s voice is indignant, that the best way has been so quickly sidetracked by a machine. His Boy Scout energy is unflagging as ours starts to, out of hunger, weariness.
Land flattens, desert plain offering brief oasis. Death pulls stronger than life here, surrender to enormous force. Undertow of silence sharpens thin blades of grass tufting, clumps of scraggly growth. Earth listless, hasn’t recovered. Bright pink ribbon flashes in the blackened grey stalks, leafless branches. Sky brings heat on a frigid wave, season seems confused. Beneath us, dirt hardened by thousands of footsteps.
“See these holes?” Peter points out deep indents, about two feet down and around, packed close together, pockmarks on the level ground. There are twenty-two hundred of them, he tells us. “People from Chinlac smoked their food and buried it here. Generations used the same spot.” We are cutting through, so we’ll miss most of them, he says. If we circled the perimeter, we would lose our breath counting.
Dene
Khadintel surrendered to his fate, he burned all the bodies and saved the bones, placing them in leather satchels for the surviving relatives of the victims. For three years he sang and prayed and danced on the earth of the village, trying to bring it back to life. But his heart was full of pain and rage at his loss and he could not rest until the massacre was avenged. In the spring of the third year, he prepared to journey to Khalpan’s village with a war party built from allied bands in the area, from Stoney Creek, from Natleh. They travelled deep into Chilcotin territory and passed the night in a terrace above the long row of lodges where the Chilcotin lived. Though his men slept well in the dark, Khadintel lay awake and watched the stars of the night shift above him, knowing that if he slept he would have the nightmare of despair, of torn flesh and howling dogs that had tormented him for three years. The next day the Carrier soldiers moved stealthily through the forest to attack.
Chinlac
Final pink ribbon takes us to the edge of the swirling Stuart. Dead grass, blackened rotting trunks circle around us. Opposite bank is high and green, looks healthy in comparison. “Where do we go from here?” I ask. Rush of river is welcome after eerie hush.
“Chinlac is downriver ten minutes or so,” Peter is already scrambling over a log; bedraggled, we follow. All I can think about is food. Should have eaten more this morning but all I could handle was coffee and a bun. Silence spreads over us from the clearing in a mute wave. A hollow space, a vacuum the size of a baseball field. Knee-high grass. Yellow heads of wild daisies. At the centre a skeleton teepee stands, desiccated sage hanging from a string. Heading towards it, our feet feel out the edges of ghost buildings.
“Thirteen houses were built here along the edge of the bank,” Peter calls out.
“I thought the Carrier were nomadic,” I say.
“They were and they weren’t. I don’t know. Maybe after the massacre no one wanted to live here anymore, they became nomadic.”
“What’s with the outhouse?” Janice says. Dark green, modern, it looks odd, plopped down.
“It’s for Carrier ceremonies. There’re some white boards in the bush, they make them into bleachers.”
Chinlac was a thriving community for a thousand years before the massacre. A Ming dynasty coin was found in the dirt. Arrow tips, tools, made by knowing hands. No digging happens now; the Carrier won’t allow it. Enough has been uncovered and the land has gone back to sleep. Finally, we settle on the banks and Janice unpacks lunch, squished sandwiches, crushed cantaloupe. We are ravenous.
“Many people who come here say this is a sacred place,” Peter says. I’ve heard this before—how people are moved by it, like you are in a temple or a church, some kind of holy place. Across the river tall dead trees’ gnarled branches wave at us.
“Why aren’t there any nests there?” Janice says. We sit eating in restful silence. Wind blows wisps of grass between us.
Peter talks about how the Carrier kids in town should help him make a better trail instead of playing video games, watching TV. This is their heritage, after a
ll. He tells us that in his yard he has cut huge swathes of branches from a beautiful spruce near the top and the bottom in the Carrier way, so he can see what’s coming the way they did. Dried grey wood carried by the river collects at the tip of a narrow island just below us.
Dene
Khalpan was not in the village that day, but his younger brother, ‘Kun’qus, heard the marauders approaching as he was checking salmon traps and rushed back to the village. Kind, stubborn, strong, thick legs, round belly, his footsteps thundered on the earth. Rumours that had spread through the Chinlac village before its own demise had then spread through the Chilcotin village. ‘Kun’qus was wise and fortified his house. His first wife plastered the walls, watched over his adored son, but his second slave Carrier wife was sullen, threw stones and sticks at him. ‘Kun’qus did not sleep well the night before, feeling an uneasy sense of eyes watching from the forest, silent and cunning. As he approached his home, passing his Carrier wife crying and running to her people, he ran after her with his war club in hand, but he gave up and returned to the fight and to protect his first wife and young son.
Chinlac
Peter gets up to look for another trail out besides the one we took. He has been here many times and talks through the silence, so I’m grateful for the moment of quiet, a full stomach. Think about the eyes that watched the bank I’m looking at, watched the wood gather, the ones who named this place Chinlac.
“So. Was it worth it?” I ask Janice. We share a chocolate bar, melted a bit but still crunchy. “Absolutely! It’s beautiful but so quiet. Weird quiet.”
“I know. No birds.”
“And no birds sang,” she adds, like it is the name of a song, or book.
I get up to walk around, get a feel of the weight. Try to discern the pull. Trees only grow so close to the clearing, then stop. My feet feel out the edges of things, shapes of places that still take up space. When Peter was talking I thought I heard singing, a hearty male voice, but there was nothing when I paced the place. Maybe voices weave in when we’re not really listening, subtle like grass binding with flowers.
Peter is back, talking to Janice when I return, triumphant with a rusted tin can in his hand. “I found a midden! Which is a nice word for garbage pile. This must have been Borden’s stash. Probably a can of milk, you can see the punctures.” Charles Borden was the archeologist who excavated the site in the fifties, wrote a book, got famous. His book is lying on my living room floor, full of graphs and lists and maps.
“Follow me. I’ll show you where we come in by canoe,” Peter calls over his shoulder. We come across a stone just before the steep climb down to the water. A story is spelled out in Carrier shapes and symbols, round loops and straight backs. We stare at it dumbly. “English is on the other side!” Janice calls out.
“Here it says that the massacre was over women,” she says.
“I thought they had killed a chief,” I add. Stone says Chun-lac. “And it’s not Chinlac. We’ve been saying it wrong.”
Dene
‘Kun’qus’ wife sobbed as she helped him into his wooden warrior armour, the sleeveless moose-skin tunic slathered with glue and gravel. Fighting back tears he watched his people fall, shooting arrow after arrow, he squeezed his son between his legs but an arrow struck the young boy in the heart. ‘Kun’qus fought the urge to lie down with his dead son, let the earth take them both. Carrier warriors set upon him like hungry dogs, but he held them off with a stone dagger, slicing the air. Then one Carrier warrior dodged his lance and held it, and the avengers swarmed him, clubbed him between the eyes, bludgeoned his body. Dead children were butchered and splayed on three poles instead of two and then the marauders left the village.
Chinlac
It’s too steep and we’re too tired to go down to the river. Launch area is submerged but Peter points it out anyway, it will emerge when the water stops swallowing.Coming by canoe is the ancient way, how it was done for hundreds of years. We would see Chinlac the way the Carrier did, the way their friends and enemies did, by climbing up the bank.
“That’s what the Chilcotin did,” I say. “Paddled in quietly, got out with their bows, arrows, spears. Probably smeared paint on their faces, braced themselves for war. Just women and children were here, the men had gone fishing.” I stand on the edge, trying to imagine fierce warriors coming up the bank. Silence of shock, then running, screaming, some young men escaping the slaughter, trying to find their chief, Khadintel, whose misdeed was being avenged with such brutal force. Try to imagine Khadintel’s face changing as he sees them coming, alarm spreading through their lean limbs and into the ground.
Janice tells us it’s four and we should be heading back. Sun has relaxed, spread out across the whole sky. And we walk to where the emptiness meets the trees, from the in-between into the world again. There is no singing, bold voice swallowed up or stubbornly silent. We clamber over the same trees to get to the first pink ribbon. Peter points across a sand bar in the middle of the river. “That’s where Khadintel, the Carrier chief, danced for his life.” See him dancing and crying, dancing and crying, the Chilcotin chief taunting him. But were the men quiet or jeering who watched safe in the canoes? I can’t hear them. They had just flayed flesh, torched dried hides, dragged off young women to be their slaves, killed the old ones. Long history. Sudden stop.
Dene
Returning from his fishing trip, Khalpan sensed an unnatural silence as he approached the village that turned him cold, but then panicked yelps and howls of dogs crying for their masters broke through the air. Carrier had come, hunting for him. Smell of smoke-singed hair hovered above the clearing of the village, splashed with carnage and blood. Brother half swallowed by the earth, family dead, ripped arms and torsos strewn by vengeful storm. Lonely daughter taken as a slave. Greatly shaken, he set out with the other survivors to pursue the Carrier. No stealth in his shaking legs, feet dragging, clumsy. At a fork in the river the warriors were preparing to leave. They all stopped to stare at the chief, hollow-eyed, but it was Khadintel who stepped forward to meet him.
“They say that you are a man, and you call yourself a terrible warrior,” Khadintel said in Chilcotin. “If you are, come to meet me and do not retreat.”
Chinlac
Way back is always shorter than the way in. Body eases up and down, jagged corners become gentle curves. Sun helps, brightens things.
“The massacre happened in seventeen forty-five. After all the buildings and bodies were burned, the village was abandoned,” I tell Janice. Peter is up ahead, he has told us all of his concerns and is quiet on the way back.
“It’s strange that it is so empty,” I say. “After all that time, something should have grown there. Nature always takes over.”
“Nothing will ever grow there,” she says, like she is sure. Passionate gardener, she knows more about growing things than I do.
We stay on the high ridge back, edge around the Slough of Despond. I have given up on following the trail—I know it is waiting to be revealed when the water goes. And I trust Peter, he is gallant, apologizing for taking us through ATV tracks, deer trails and Carrier footsteps until he decides to check his compass, make sure we hit the wide trail near the Nechako.
“Do you know what a culturally modified tree is?” Peter asks. We have stopped by a spruce with a broken branch. Mosquitoes dive to our exposed skin.
“I don’t know!” I cry out.
“Yeah, the mosquitoes are bad,” he takes another bloody swipe at his face. “Anything that has been changed by people. See this branch? It was broken on purpose to mark a direction in the trail. Carriers did it all the time.”
“Like trees become part of the path,” I say, wanting to be a good pupil, but Peter has charged ahead. “What hasn’t been changed by people,” I tell Janice. Probably every step we are taking has been taken before. No part of here is untouched.
Dene
Khalpan moved on shaky legs, strength seeping out, gush of blood thundering his temples.
Enemy stood still, flexed, glaring and he could not face them, inched back to the forest, crying.
“Now, Khalpan,“ Khadintel, triumphant, bellowed, “when, all alone against your people, I was cornered on the riverbank and you wanted to kill me, I danced for you. If you are a man, dance now for me, as I did for you.”
Chinlac
When we finally make it back to my car Peter has declared our trip the worst ever in all his years. Day is marked by dubious honour.
“You were troopers, stellar, I tell you,” he says and we laugh, relieved to be sitting, safe from the bugs. Phoebe is huddled on her blanket, her white hairs are floating with the dust in the waning light. It’s six-thirty, two and a half hours back but it felt faster, like we were helped or hurried along. Heading back to the highway, lemon fields of alfalfa wave to us. At Peter’s house, he shows us the tree we can see through, cars speeding around a curve below. Canoes and kayaks in his garage.
“Don’t have a car. I walk or ride my bike everywhere, so Phoebe can come with me.” Smiles his boyish grin, goes into the dark of his house.
Dene
The Earth Remembers Everything Page 8