The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [40]
Until now, insofar as Melander and company could discern in their clamber down the precipice of coastline, not another human might ever have existed among these shore islands. Take the matter to truth, though, and their journey more resembled the course a late-of-night stroller might follow through slumbering neighborhoods. In tribal clusters, perhaps as many as sixty thousand residents inhabited this long littoral of what would become British Columbia: Tlingits, Haidas, Tsimshians, Bellabellas, Bella Coolas, Kwakiutls, Nootkas, peoples often at odds among themselves but who had in common that they put their backs to the rest of the continent and went about matters as if they alone knew the terms of life. For behind the rain curtains of this winter theirs was a Pacific-nurtured existence which asks to he called nothing less than sumptuous. In Spawning time the coastal rivers were stippled thick with salmon, veins of protein bulging there in the water to be wrested, fileted, dried for the winter larder. Abovestream the wealth was wood, particularly the cedar whose cunning these people knew how to set free; under their hands it transformed to capacious lodges, canoes the length of a decent trawler, and art, this most startling of art. Tree-sized columns of carvings simply offered the most evident form of how these tribes told stories of the creatures of timber and sea, sang and recited them, danced and acted them behind masks, in chill times wore pelts as if taking the saga animals into themselves.
Out of this vivid swirl wafted, inevitably, the reputation of these coastal people as canoe warriors and slave takers—plus illustrative talcs such as that matter of the bed of skulls. These four interloping Swedes knew no specifics of the downcoast tribes, but reason told them this much. If they never dipped paddle into a one of the populated coves where the rain season was being whiled away in performance and potlatch, so much the better luck.
Just now Braaf was the one of them to speak that dialect called if.
"Why's this out here, deserted? If it is."
"Likely they do as the Sitka Koloshes," Melander guessed. "Hunt from a summer village right around here, in winter pull back to a main village somewhere."
In the dusk, eagle poised eternally atop bear.
Whale stood on end in dive through contorted lesser creatures.
One being, possibly frog the size of calf, pranced merrily upside down.
Every sort of winkless forest changeling, they goggled in unison at the backs of the retreating men.
Later, the others breathing their rhythms of night beside the fire, Melander could not find sleep.
His memory was at a New Archangel market morning, hubbub of Sitka Koloshes and three or four dozen visiting tribesmen from somewhere to the north, Amid the newcomers hawking their wares squatted a seam-faced carver. Word had rippled through the settlement about this man's daggers: blades of power with each hilt carved as the rising neck of some alarming beast. The head topping a hilt neck sometimes was a bear with glinting abalone inlays of eyes and nostrils and teeth, sometimes a long-faced wolf, again a great-toothed beaver; always, angled and fierce and magical as dragons. The interpreter Dobzhansky tried to converse with the northern carver. Dobzhansky's first question received answer, then the native stayed silent. Me lander inquired what had been said, Dobzhansky related that he had asked how many years it took to obtain such skill.
"So long as I have lived, so long have I carved," the daggerman responded. "If the spirit people will let me, I will carve even after I am dead."
Even Melander could not have said why, but that response echoed around in the corners of his mind this night.
Just past daybreak the four men slide the canoe out into surf. Usual bruised-looking sky, tatters of fog in the tree tops. This coast's mornings are as if brawl hail gone on in the heavens all night.
As ever, trees push down to absolute waterline: boundless green, then immediate blue. You could reach