Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [8]
I often wondered what Louisa and the white girl talked about while I was away from them working. Because of the mosquitoes, they tied their heads up in towels and were frightfully hot. I offered Miss Missionary some of the mosquito stuff a miner had told me of—bacon fat (it must be rancid) and turpentine. She refused—she said I looked so horrible dripping with it. She was bumped all over with bites. If you drew your hand down your face it was red with the blood the brutes had stolen from you.
I MET THEM coming over the sand, Louisa hurrying ahead to get supper, Miss Missionary limping behind, draggled and weary. Away back I saw Jimmie carrying something dreadful with long arms trailing behind in the sand, its great round body speared by the stick on Jimmie’s shoulder.
“We’ve took the Missionary’s daughter hunting devilfish,” chuckled Louisa, as she passed me.
We ate some of the devilfish for supper, fried in pieces like sausage. It was sweet like chicken, but very tough. Miss Missionary ate bread and jam.
“Father would not like me to eat devil,” she said.
She told me the hunt was a disgusting performance. The devilfish were in the puddles around the rocks at low tide. When they saw people come, they threw their tentacles around the rocks and stuck their heads into the rocky creases; the only way to make them let go was to beat their heads in when you got the chance.
IT WAS LONG PAST dinnertime. Louisa could not cook because there was no water in camp. That was Jimmie’s job. The spring was back in the woods, nobody but Jimmie knew where, and he was far out at sea tinkering on his boat. Louisa called and called; Jimmie heard, because his head popped up, but he would not come. Every time she called the same two Indian words.
“Make it hotter, Louisa; I want to get back to work.” She called the same two words again.
“Are those words swears?”
“No, if I swore I would have to use English words.”
“Why?”
“There are no swears in Haida.”
“What do you say if you are angry or want to insult anybody?”
“You would say, ‘Your father or your mother was a slave,’ but I could not say that to Jimmie.”
“Well, say something hot. I want dinner!”
She called the same two words again but her voice was different this time. Jimmie came. Pictures of all the poles were in my sketch sack. I strapped it up and said, “That’s that.” The missionary’s daughter revived. “Horrid place!” she said, scratching viciously at her ankle.
Then we went away from Tanoo and left the silence to heal itself—left the totem poles staring, staring out over the sea.
WHEN WE BOARDED the boat the missionary girl put her clumsy foot through my light cedar drawing-board. Nothing about her balanced—her silly little voice and her big foot; her pink and white face and big red hands. I was so mad about my board that I looked across the water for fear I’d hit her. Louisa’s voice in my ear said,
“Isn’t she clumsy and isn’t she stupid!”
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY we were in rough water. Jimmie spread a sail in the bottom of the boat, and we women all lay flat. Nobody spoke—only groans. When the boat pitched all our bodies rolled one way and then rolled back. Under the sail where I was lying something seemed very slithery.
“Jimmie, what is under me?”
“Only the devilfish we are taking home to Mother—she likes them very much.”
“Ugh!” I said. Sea-sickness on top of devilfish seemed too much.
Jimmie said, “They’re dead; it won’t hurt them when you roll over.”
SKEDANS
Jimmie, the Indian, knew the jagged reefs of Skedans Bay by heart. He knew where the bobbing kelp nobs grew and that their long, hose-like tubes were waiting to strangle his propeller. Today the face of the bay was buttered over with calm and there was a wide blue sky overhead. Everything looked safe, but Jimmie knew how treacherous the bottom of Skedans Bay was; that’s why he lay across the bow