Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [32]
The Indian lit a great fire for me on the beach; then he went back to his gas boat, and a wall of mist and rain cut me off from all human beings.
Skedans on a stormy day looked menacing. To the right of the Bay immediately behind the reef, rose a pair of uncouth cone-like hills, their heads bonneted in lowering clouds. The clumsy hills were heavily treed save where deep bare scars ran down their sides, as if some monster cruelty had ripped them from crown to base. Behind these two hills the sea bit into the shoreline so deeply as to leave only a narrow neck of land, and the bedlam of waves pounding on the shores back and front of the village site pinched the silence out of forsaken old Skedans.
Wind raced across the breast-high growth around the meagre ruins more poignantly desolate for having once known man.
A row of crazily tipped totem poles straggled along the low bank skirting Skedans Bay. The poles were deep planted to defy storms. In their bleached and hollow upper ends stood coffin-boxes, boarded endwise into the pole by heavy cedar planks boldly carved with the crest of the little huddle of bones inside the box, bones which had once been a chief of Eagle, Bear or Whale Clan.
Out in the anchored gas boat the Indian girl became seasick, so they brought her ashore. Leaving her by the fire I wandered to the far end of the Bay. Ginger Pop was still on the gas boat and I missed him at my heels for the place was very desolate, awash with rain, and the sea pounding and snatching all it could reach, hurling great waves only to snatch them back to increase the volume of its next blow.
Suddenly above the din rose a human cry. The girl was beckoning to me wildly. “Uncle’s boat,” she cried. “It is driving for the reef!”
I saw the gas boat scudding towards her doom, saw the Indian in the small canoe battling to make shore with our bedding and food.
“Listen!” screamed the girl, “it is my brother.”
Terrified shrieks from the gas boat pierced the tumult, “Uncle, Uncle!”
The man hurled the food and blankets ashore without beaching the canoe, then he stepped into the waves, holding the frantic thing like a dog straining on leash. He beckoned me as near as the waves would let me go.
“Water heap wicked—maybe no come back—take care my girl,” he said, and was gone.
Rushing out to the point above the reef, we watched the conflict between canoe and sea. When the man reached the gas boat, the screams of the boy stopped. With great risk they loaded the canoe till she began to take water. The boy bailed furiously. The long dogged pull of the man’s oars challenged death inch by inch, wave by wave. There were spells like eternity, when the fury out there seemed empty, when the girl hid her face on my shoulder and screeched. I stared and stared, watching to tell the Indians in the home village what the sea had done to their man and boy. How it had sucked them again and again into awful hollows, walled them about with waves, churned so madly that the boat did not budge in spite of those desperate pulling oars.
Then some sea demon tossed her upon a crest and another plunged her back again. The hugging sea wanted her, but inch by inch she won. Then a great breaker dashed her on the beach with the smashing hurl of a spoiled child returning some coveted toy.
The boy jumped out and made fast. The man struggled a few paces through the foam and fell face down. We dragged him in. His face was purple. “He is dying!”—No, life came back with tearing sobs.
Among our sodden stuff was a can of milk, another of beans; we heated them, they put new life into us. Night was coming. We made what preparation we could, spreading a tent-fly over a great log and drying out our blankets. There was no lack of drift wood for the fire.
The Indian’s heart was sore for his boat; it looked as if nothing