Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [7]
At one side of the Tanoo beach rose a big bluff, black now that the sun was behind it. It is said that the bluff is haunted. At its foot was the skeleton of a house; all that was left of it was the great beams and the corner posts and two carved poles one at each end of it. Inside, where the people used to live, was stuffed with elderberry bushes, scrub trees and fireweed. In that part of the village no other houses were left, but there were lots of totem poles sticking up. A tall slender one belonged to Louisa’s grandmother. It had a story carved on it; Louisa told it to us in a loose sort of way as if she had half forgotten it. Perhaps she had forgotten some, but perhaps it was the missionary’s daughter being there that made her want to forget the rest. The missionaries laughed at the poles and said they were heathenish. On the base of this pole was the figure of a man; he had on a tall, tall hat, which was made up of sections, and was a hat of great honour. On top of the hat perched a raven. Little figures of men were clinging to every ring of honour all the way up the hat. The story told that the man had adopted a raven as his son. The raven turned out to be a wicked trickster and brought a flood upon his foster parents. When the waters rose the man’s nephews and relations climbed up the rings of his hat of honour and were thus saved from being drowned. It was a fine pole, bleached of all colour and then bloomed over again with greeny-yellow mould.
The feelings Jimmie and Louisa had in this old village of their own people must have been quite different from ours. They must have made my curiosity and the missionary girl’s sneer seem small. Often Jimmie and Louisa went off hand in hand by themselves for a little, talking in Indian as they went.
A nose of land ran out into the sea from Tanoo and split the village into two parts; the parts diverged at a slight angle, so that the village of Tanoo had a wall-eyed stare out over the sea.
Beyond the little point there were three fine house fronts. A tall totem pole stood up against each house, in the centre of its front. When Jimmie cut away the growth around the foot of them, the paint on the poles was quite bright. The lowest figure of the centre pole was a great eagle; the other two were beavers with immense teeth—they held sticks in their hands. All three base figures had a hole through the pole so that people could enter and leave the house through the totem.
OUR FIRST NIGHT in solemn Tanoo was very strange indeed.
When we saw the Indians carrying the little canoe down to the water we said:
“What are you going out to the boat for?”
“We are going to sleep out there.”
“You are going to leave us alone in Tanoo?”
“You can call if anything is wrong,” they said. But we knew the boat was too far out beyond the kelp beds for them to hear us.
The canoe glided out and then there was nothing but wide black space. We two girls shivered. I wanted the tent flaps open; it did not seem quite so bad to me if I could feel the trees close. But Miss Missionary wanted them tied tight shut to keep everything out.
Very early in the morning I got to work and two hours later Miss Missionary came out of the tent. The boat lay far out with no sign of life on her. The Indians did not come ashore; it got late and we wanted breakfast—we called and called but there was no answer.
“Do you remember what they said about those Indians being asphyxiated by the fumes from their engine while they slept?”
“I was thinking of that too.”
We ran out on the point as far as we could so as to get nearer to the boat and we called and called both together. There was a horrible feeling down inside us that neither of us cared to speak about. After a long while a black head popped up in the boat.
“You must not leave us again like that,” we told Jimmie and Louisa.
The Indians would not do a thing for Miss Missionary. They let her collect rushes for her own bed and carry things. The Mission house in their home village stood on the hill