“You collecting artifacts?”
“I most certainly am not!”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Most of the villages off the Skeena River. Kitwanga, Kispiox. Kitsegukla. I’ve been here two weeks. I’m on my way back down river now.”
“How did you know where to go?”
“I read and I asked questions.”
He folded his arms. “So ask. Alfred Poole’s the name.”
His cockiness infuriated her, but he might know of a village she didn’t. “Where in your opinion are the finest poles?”
“No question. Kitwancool.”
“How do you get there?”
“Sixteen miles up a tributary from Kitwanga, but you can’t go there, lady. Gitksans are a fierce people. That’s why there’s poles left. They don’t want to see you. They don’t want to see anybody ain’t Gitksan.”
“I haven’t had any trouble in other Gitksan villages.”
“Pff.” A bit of tobacco flew out of his mouth. “Kitwancool’s different. You won’t find a place to stay. The missionaries been run out.”
“I have a tent.”
“You’d better have a revolver too, unless you expect that dog to defend you.”
She stood up straighter. Her hand pressed Billy’s head to her thigh. Lizzie had told her the same thing, and had taken her upstairs and opened Father’s bureau drawer where his pistol lay wedged between monogrammed handkerchiefs. “If you must go, in the name of God, take this with you.”
She’d picked off a handkerchief and said, “You’re right, Lizzie. I do tend to get the sniffles on trips.” The memory of Lizzie slamming shut the drawer made her smile.
“I’m dead serious.” The man opened his jacket enough to show the handle of a gun. “Indian unrest is heating up.”
“Are you offering your services or just trying to scare me out of sport? I’m more afraid of a gun than a Gitksan.”
“How ’bout an axe? They went after a party of surveyors with axes last spring.”
“I’m not coming for their land.”
“Maybe you won’t find what you’re looking for and you’ll go back to wherever you came from. Maybe you’ll see you made a mistake. The poles are all cracked or fallen or sold anyway.”
That word, sold, struck her as unctuous. The way it slid off his tongue told her why he was here, and that he wanted no competition.
“It’s a dying culture anyway.” He spit over the rail, as if to dismiss her and her purpose and the poles.
“No, it’s being killed. Hacked to pieces. There’s a difference,” she retorted.
She took hold of Billy’s collar and moved to the opposite railing. “Sometimes men are three parts beast to one part human,” she muttered. “Present company excluded.”
• • •
Encumbered by gear, she disembarked at Kitwanga, carefully stepping down the gangplank so as not to lose her balance.
“Hey, lady!” Alfred Poole called from the steamer. “Just remember, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She turned to see him hawk and spit again over the ship’s rail. She went back up for Billy and another load, ignoring him.
What a waste of good blood.
With only a glance at the forest of poles facing the wharf, she and Billy went into the Hudson’s Bay post to buy provisions, and overheard that a Gitksan teamster and hunting guide named Luther Moody was taking a load of planks and grain to Kitwancool that day and would return three days later.
“Where can I find him?” she asked the clerk.
“Turn around is all you got to do.” He nodded, pointing his beaked nose at a man examining a pair of long johns.
Emily approached the lean, long-haired teamster and asked if he would take a passenger. Grooves from the corners of his mouth and on his forehead all converged at the bridge of his nose, forming a permanent squint.
“Just you?”
“And my dog. And my gear.”
His tongue was industrious in digging food out of uncomfortable places in his mouth. “What’s it worth to you?”
She reached into her pocket for a five-dollar bill and held it out to him. He made a sucking noise and took it.
“Got no seats. Got to ride on a sack of oats.”
“That’s fine.”
He pointed out the window toward a horse and wagon under a tamarack near the narrow wooden wharf.
“When are you leaving?”
“By and by.”
She bought some mosquito repellent, apples, smoked salmon, and dog biscuits, and went out to the wagon. The lumber was shoulder high. “Now isn’t this a pickle. Got any ideas, Billy?”
She found some crates and buckets and an empty oil drum, and arranged them, the buckets upside down, in an ascending pile. “There now. A proper stairway.” Glad for her split skirt, she hoisted her gear, one item at a time, and came down for Billy.
“Now are you going to cooperate or am I going to have to shame you into obedience?” She planted his front legs on the lowest crate and pushed his rump. “Up. Up! Get up there!” He whined. “Yes, all the way. Allez-oop!” She gave one mighty shove. He barked and scrambled up, tipping over the bucket. “Good boy. I knew you could.
“But I’m not so sure about me. Not a soul here I’d want to give my plump rump a push.” How could she return the things to where she’d found them once she was up? She took back the buckets and oil drum, and kept one skeleton of a crate. Gingerly she stepped up, wedged her foot onto a protruding plank, did a few little hops which turned out to be false starts, and hauled herself up by her fingernails.
Bald eagles circled in the gray sky above the olive green river, while miners hurried to load their boats with supplies. An hour passed. If she went looking for Luther, she’d have to execute the ascent a second time. Nothing to do but stay put on her perch. Were they laughing at her in the Hudson’s Bay post, seeing how long she’d sit up here?
Actually it was a fine vantage point to draw the poles eye to eye instead of from the ground, the way she’d painted them when she’d come up river. It solved the problem of foreshortening, but did nothing about the bigger difficulty of Gitksan poles. Gitksan carving wrapped around the sides so neither a frontal view nor a profile showed the entire figure. She tried a three-quarter view.
A rattling, sputtering engine noise caught her attention and she looked up. The prow of a boat rounded the curve, chugging against the current, its crooked stovepipe topped by a coolie hat. A French flag snapped in the breeze. La Renarde Rouge!
“Claude du Bois!”
She stood up without thinking and smacked the top of her head on a branch. The horse lurched and jostled the wagon. She fell back onto Billy and the oat sack. Billy barked.
“Mademoiselle Courageuse!” he called, flinging his arms wide. “And the dog of no eyes!”
He secured the boat, turned off the deafening racket, and swung his legs over the side onto the wharf.
“La reine de la forêt on her cedar throne!”
With a flourish of the dock line, he executed a courtier’s bow and came over to stand by the wagon beneath her. “What are you doing up there?”
“Waiting, it seems.”
“For me? Quel changement! If I remember right, it was I who was left waiting for you.”
She could feel herself blush. All that running out of his tent. She’d been a damned fool. She wanted to heap kisses on him, he looked so good, but her position on the lumber prevented that.
“You certainly took a long time coming,” he said.
“I went to France.”
“Mon Dieu! A long way to find a Frenchman such as I.” He grinned.
“To study painting.”
“Not to look for me?” He pounded his fist over his chest. Dust billowed from the buckskin. “Oh, don’t break my heart the second time. Come down from there.”
“No. I had a devil of a time getting up.” She felt herself slipping into the spell of him. “I’m going to Kitwanc
ool.”
“Ho-ho!” He blew air out his mouth in bursts. “You certainly are une dame courageuse.”
“Yes, and I’ve been to a potlatch too. At Mimkwamlis.”
“Sh!” He held his finger to his lips and made a show of checking for spies. “Unbelievable.”
“And I’ve been to Alert Bay and Guyasdoms too. And Kispiox and Kitsegukla. Now I’m going to Kitwancool, any minute in fact. Have you been there?”
“No. They don’t . . .” His forehead tightened into a scowl. “The Kitwancool River is too narrow. Too many rocks. These poles aren’t good enough?” He waved his arm toward the ones along the bank, then rested his hand on her ankle.
“The best ones are in Kitwancool. I’m told.” Just the way he held on to her ankle, naturally, with familiarity, melted her resolve.
Luther Moody and two young men came out of the Hudson’s Bay post and loaded two small oil drums and a crate onto the front of the wagon to use as seats, and climbed up. Rats! Of all times for him to come.
Claude squeezed her ankle. “I can’t talk you out of going?” His voice was serious. “La Renarde Rouge would welcome you.”
His rugged smile peeking over his beard made her feel wanted. There he was, so close below her, a man of the moment, able to meet the elements with a song, full-hearted and free as a breeze.
“No.” Her voice sounded paper-thin.
“You can have the captain’s quarters.” He hugged his arms to his chest and rotated his shoulders. “It’s warm when you’re wrapped in furs. I’ll sleep in the skiff, yes?” His eyebrows popped up in hopeful anticipation.
His funny face and antics—she felt affection for him in spite of everything.
“No,” she said more firmly.
His pout pushed its way out of the shag of his beard. He scrutinized Luther, and said a few serious words to him in Chinook.
Claude looked up at her. “How long will you be gone?”
“Three days.”
“Attention, mademoiselle.” He lowered his voice. “Trust only dogs with no tail.” He shook her ankle gently until she nodded. “I’ll be here when you come back.”
He smacked the horse’s rump and the wagon lurched forward. She grabbed hold of Billy.
Claude took off his hat and waved it in an arc high in the air. “Adieu,” he called.
She raised her arm in salute, abandoning herself now to his exuberance.
• • •
The road became a path, then a braid of gullies. She had nothing to hold on to except the corner of the grain sack, and she lost hold of that with every jolt. The ride would have been far more pleasant if she’d been able to ride the horse instead of the wagon. She hugged Billy to her side, tickled by Claude’s surprise in seeing her here.
“Will it be all right if I set up a tent at the edge of Kitwancool?” she asked the driver.
“Not for me to say.” Luther spit tobacco juice and the breeze blew it onto her skirt.
One thing was certain. Luther Moody and his two young friends didn’t care whether she was going to Kitwancool or not. That narrow-headed shyster on the steamer was exaggerating. And Claude? What lay behind his urging her not to go?
Whatever it was, she would stay on guard.
“Are there poles in Kitwancool?”
“Some.”
So much for thinking Luther Moody would tell her anything. His surname suited his temperament.
They joggled in silence under the shade of aspens and tamaracks. When they passed a tall waterfall with bursts of silver-white spume trailing comet tails, she said, “Beautiful, eh?”
He only grunted. A few minutes later he added, “There are some poles in Kitwancool.”
Long after lunch of an apple and some smoked salmon, the wagon got stuck in a stretch of deep mud. The men climbed down. She took off her boots and stockings, hiked up her skirt, and slid down into swarms of mosquitoes. Her legs had fallen asleep and she almost dropped to the ground. The brown mud oozed up between her toes, and the suction resisted her at every step.
Two on a side, they placed planks, length by length, in front of the wheels and managed to get across onto drier ground where Luther gave her a boost back up onto the wagon. Dull thunder rolled in the distance and wind whipped the aspen leaves to a frenzy.
“Might rain, eh?” Emily said to Luther.
Apparently he preferred not to waste words on the obvious.
If the sky decided to crack open soon, the road to Kitwancool would turn into slippery muck. She wondered how rain would sound inside La Renarde Rouge.
Six hours later, when they arrived at Kitwancool, she found she’d scratched her bitten ankles raw. The bruise-colored sky pressed down on roofs and bent the tops of hemlocks. A woman took down flapping laundry and disappeared inside a closed-up house.
“Who should I ask to—?”
Wind howled louder than her words. The men on the wagon ignored her and hurried indoors.
She unloaded and looked around. Billy bleated a high, trembling whine. “Oh, stop sniveling. Help me think what to do.”
There appeared to be two Kitwancools a distance of some three hundred yards apart. The new village of small houses, each with a single window, was situated in a high meadow set far back from the river by a bluff. Judging from the woodpiles, clotheslines, pails, and trampled earth, everyone lived on the higher meadow. It wasn’t dangerous-looking, just poor and unfriendly. Nothing encouraged her to knock on a door. The old Kitwancool lay sunken and deserted along a riverbank. Down among the ruins of a pair of bighouses were more than twenty tipping poles—what she had come for.
She strapped her tent and bedroll onto Billy’s back, hoisted the rest of her gear, and trudged across the meadow. She lost her balance going down the bluff, and landed on her rump. Under the totems, she tipped her head back and let out a long sigh. Such a gallery of beings, human and animal, alive in the wood. These had none of that Alert Bay fierceness. No teeth. No claws. Only gentleness. An old man on one pole gazed at a sad-eyed bird, thin and anxious, with a drooping beak on another pole. The man’s wan smile was sympathetic toward the bird’s dismay. He had grown parental. They had a language beyond words. Alfred Poole was right. These were marvelous.
Across a grassy area overhung by willows along the bank she saw a group of curious houses no higher than four feet, surrounded by bedraggled gardens and enclosed by short picket or spindle fences. Were they raised tombs? Memorials? Grave houses? Some had windows and doors. One even had a chimney. She peeked through one window and could barely make out dishes scattered around a sewing machine. A woman’s grave.
Wind bearing the mineral smell of rain-to-come lashed willow branches against the grave houses and tore through her wool sweater. “All right,” she said. “You proved your point.”
A raindrop splatted on her hand. She ignored it. Then another, and another. She put on her potlatch hat. It blew right off. She chased after it. If she didn’t get her portfolio under cover soon, her work would be ruined. She unrolled the used tent she’d bought from a Klondike outfitter who had assured her she could set it up herself. “It’s only a one-man tent, ma’am. Easy as pie,” he’d said.
Wind flapped the canvas toward her, then yanked it away. She seized a corner, threaded a stake through a grommet and stamped it into the earth. A gust tore it right out. “Easy as pie,” she muttered, and tried again. Same thing. It had seemed simple, setting it up in the yard in Victoria, but it wasn’t now, not with rain pouring off her nose. Lizzie had watched her and declared that if the Lord intended women to sleep outdoors, He would have given them fur. Fur! She could be nestled in fur in Claude’s boat right this minute. She yanked the canvas angrily, wrestled with its stiffness, found the opening, and shoved everything inside. If she had to, she could crawl in too.
The abandoned bighouses offered nothing. One had no roof, the other only a few planks under which horses huddled. She looked at the new village through robes of rain. Closed up tight, and far away. She looke
d at the sodden graveyard. Close by.
She took hold of two corners of the tent and began to drag. “Come on, Billy.” He barked and skittered away. “Come!” Lightning cracked, trailing an electric hiss, and he charged toward her. She dragged the bundle to the largest of the grave houses, in through the picket fence, and opened the little door. It broke off its hinges. Billy growled. “Get over here.” She shoved the bundle through the door, yanked Billy by his collar, and backed in on her knees. He barked. Lightning made him jerk away. She caught him by the front leg, dragged him whining through the doorway, and blocked it using the door propped sideways inside.
“It’s all right, Billy. Calm down.” She put her arm around him. “I’m sorry, pooch.”
The blackness smelled of rotted wood, mildew, and the ooze of maggots. Her pulse pounded at the root of her throat. Rain battered the roof inches above her head, and willow branches scraped and rattled like skeletons knocking for entrance. Billy shook his wet coat at her. It made no difference. She was already soaked.
Slowly, the darkness grayed. Barely discernible, a man sat on a chair. She screamed. Billy barked. Rain swallowed their sounds. She clutched Billy’s neck. The outline of a hat touched the roof. He wore a shirt and pants, but on his face, when lightning flashed again, she saw the rough grain of wood. She let out her breath in one great gush.
“It’s only a carving of a man, Billy. A man whose son or grandson may have ridden on the wagon with us today.”
Mice scuttled around her feet, poles creaked in the wind, willows slapped the roof, thunder rolled like drums, rain roared like a freight train. She hugged Billy and cried into the lanolin smell of his wet coat. It wasn’t mink, but it was something.
Who did she think she was that she could march in here and do what she wanted? It was the question Father had asked whenever her imagination prompted some action she hadn’t thought through. Nympholept. Damn. Why did he have to be right?
She thought of Claude holding her ankle, trying to talk her out of coming here. Why had he let her?
Respect. For her. It had to be. He knew what she wanted most.
Lightning burned the outline of the figure of the Gitksan man into the blackness. She swallowed the lump in her throat and addressed him silently: Maybe you lived so long ago that you won’t recoil at the thought of a white woman who loves the poles here entering your grave house. I will not violate you, or the sacredness of your resting place. A temporary sharing of roof is all I want. I will leave you untouched.
The Forest Lover Page 21