Heartbroke Bay (19 page)

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Authors: Lynn D'urso

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay
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In the time it takes to build the cabin, the earth tilts a bit more toward the sun and the days grow longer and brighter. Dawn comes before four, the sun falls into the western sea each evening after nine o’clock, and its tenure in the sky extends daily.
Michael discovers a small creek that flows in the shape of a fan across a flat slope of exposed bedrock before entering a pool. The new long days of sun heat the smooth, black bedrock, which in its turn warms the shallow water trickling across its face to a temperature suitable for bathing. After a long day of labor, the sensation of emerging from the warm water into the cool, crisp air delights Hannah’s skin in a fashion she experiences as exceedingly carnal.
One evening, Hannah sees a blue-backed swallow darting and skimming above the straw-colored grass, which has been exposed by the melted snow. She points it out to the men, who are busy sharpening axes and saws. The next day, Harky and Michael surprise her by trimming a small opening into an empty tin can, nailing it to a tall pole, and erecting the makeshift birdhouse beside the cabin. By evening a swallow has begun inspecting the offering. The next day it returns, accompanied by a mate. With this sure sign of spring, the prospectors begin to chafe with an eagerness to take the land by the scruff of the neck and shake the gold from its pockets.
Making a careful survey of the topography along the coast, they probe with pick and shovel wherever bedrock runs near the surface or a streambed forms natural riffles. “Scientific prospecting,” Hans insists, pouring over the resultant crudely drawn map, “is our only route to riches.”
Their hands grow dirty, then crack, splitting across the calloused pads like ground that is too hard and dry to grow crops. They shovel with simpleminded intensity, stooping endlessly over the sluice box, until their backs and shoulders ache. Dutch whines that they forgot an item of great importance, namely liniment for their muscles and bones.
Hope rises and falls like a tattered sail, as one carefully worked pan of sand reveals a cluster of small nuggets and the next five hundred shovels yield nothing. They scatter farther afield, prospecting alone into the openings of the forest and along the hills deeper into the fjord, but the fear of bears, whose tracks are seen often, confines them to the water’s edge. Hans damns their lack of rifles; only Harky is armed, and his pistol is too small. By general agreement the shotgun is left within Hannah’s reach at the cabin, a decision in which she takes no part, having no experience with firearms and a greater caution for their use than for the threat of marauding bears.
While the men dig and wander, Hannah works to make their lives more tolerable. She cooks, cleans, launders, and mends. There are socks to darn and oilskins to treat with paraffin. Finding an outcrop of shale that shears away in flat pieces, she undertakes to pave the cabin’s muddy floor.
When she sees a newborn mountain goat tottering behind its mother on a bluff across from the camp, she acknowledges the fullness of spring by carrying buckets of kelp up from the beach and mixing it into windrows of soil for a garden. There are soon potatoes, carrots, and cabbages pushing up thick rows of sprouts.
Buttercups or something like them begin to pop up in patches of ground warmed by the sun—and once, in the middle of the day, when the others are out of sight, Hannah looks up from the stove where she is preparing a large pot of beans and salt pork to see Michael in the doorway, a fistful of the yellow flowers in his hand.
“Just to say thank you, Mrs. Nelson. This work’d be much harder without such a fine woman to care for us.” He holds out his offering.
Hannah stammers, “Thank you.” When she reaches to take the flowers, there is a precarious mingling of their fingers, and she feels the heat of a blush cross her face.
June 21, the Summer Solstice
 
The summer is passing so quickly, dear diary, and I rarely have time to address you, as the work is endless. Our fortunes improve bit by bit. A swale of ground a mile or so to the north seems willing to yield its golden fruit at a tolerable rate. After three weeks of prospecting, the site has been chosen for erection of a “Long Tom” sluice box. My largest towel was appropriated to carpet the bed of the box—the action of the sluice settles the finest particles of gold into the weave, where it clings as the lighter soils wash away. Hans says invention and ingenuity are the hallmarks of the successful miner!
He also has improvised a scale from two of my spoons suspended from opposite ends of an arm by a bit of wire. It uses lead shot from one of Mr. Severts’s shotgun shells as measuring weights. Every evening we gather around to measure out the day’s “take,” which varies from a small spoonful to several ounces. My image of gold has always been glittering jewelry or shining nuggets like walnuts, but here it is of the smallest sort, dull, and fine grained. Only in the aggregate is it impressive looking at all. Were it not for the weight—it is very heavy in the hand—it would be possible to mistake our gold for something base and of little value.
Nonetheless, our little poke-jar will soon be full! Mr. Severts has donated a piece of canvas from which I am to sew small bags in which to place the rest of the season’s riches. Mr. Severts is ever the charming optimist; it is quite a large piece of canvas and will yield numerous bags. I joke with Hans that a few such bags should see our debts cleared, but he grows quite serious and says it will require at least a dozen.
Mining gold is not glamorous work. The men wear through their clothing at a fantastic rate. Every day I repair shirts, pants, or coats tattered at the elbows and knees. Our footwear shows considerable deterioration, and the tall rubber boots the men wear when working in the streams are already all but ruined. Harky suffers considerably from the cold water on his feet, but he does not complain. The men cut cards to determine who shall have first access to the bathing pool every evening. I prefer the solitude of mornings, when I may linger.
Yesterday a canoe of Indians entered the bay at high tide, but passed our camp without acknowledging us. As they entered, it appeared that they made some pagan ceremony, with one of the men rising to his feet in the bow of the canoe and assuming an attitude of prayer, holding his arms wide as he looked up and chanted to the sky in heathen language.
The vessel was quite remarkable, being easily as long as the cutter and paddled by more than a dozen men. It appeared to be highly decorated with carvings and painting. We speculate that they are a hunting party after the numerous seals that inhabit the ice at the head of the bay, for they proceeded in that direction and disappeared behind the small island, but whence they have come is a mystery. Hans showed consternation at the appearance of the Indians and was reluctant to leave me alone. Which concern was greater—that the Indians might molest me or that they should take the gold—I cannot say, for Hans is obsessed and talks of nothing else but gold. I promised to fire the shotgun as a signal if the Indians appear again.
TEN
A yellow buttercup lies pressed between the pages of Hannah’s diary. Beside it, from a second bouquet Michael presented her along with a tiny, pink-rimmed seashell, are a number of small blue forget-me-nots with pale violet centers. He comes regularly bearing small gifts and warm words. Hannah, telling herself he has no motive beyond kindness, ignores the coincidence of his visits with Hans’s absence, but she must admit to herself that at day’s end she looks forward to the Irishman’s return from the diggings rather more than her husband’s. No matter how tired he is, Michael asks after the small details of her day; Hans cares only for his dinner and the bed.
Hannah places the seashell on a shelf Harky installed for her on the front of the cabin. During good weather, she prefers to sit outside with a stump of wood for her chair while she darns and sews, peels potatoes, or writes in her journal. The shelf is handy for holding materials and cutlery. It also holds an arrangement of special bits of driftwood, brilliant blue feathers from the Steller’s jay that is constantly trying to steal shiny objects or bits of food, and stones or seashells of particular color or form. The pink shell nestles perfectly into the pearly cup of a lustrous, blue black mussel.
She is sitting on her stump, enjoying the feeling of sun on her back, sharpening a knife, and thinking of nothing but the rough, crisp feel of blade on stone, when she starts at a shadow passing over her hands, then jerks upright at the alarming rushing-water sound of a raven’s wing close overhead.
The ebony bird circles and rattles to a halt on the end of a roof pole, cocks its head from side to side—turning the obsidian blink of first one glittering eye and then the other on her—and lets out a rusty
KA-HAW
so unnaturally loud and piercing it brings Hannah to her feet with the knife and sharpening stone thrust out before her in a dramatic defensive posture.
This seems to amuse the raven greatly. It leaps up and down in a side-to-side trot, throws up its bill—which is black, heavy, and thick as a cigar—and shouts at her posturing.
A shake of her apron and a timid “shoo” serve only to further amuse the raven. It rears back, flexing and re-flexing its wings, as if in imitation of her impotent flapping.
Another flap, another “shoo,” and the raven pulls itself upright, regarding her over the chisel of its beak, as black and haughty as an Ethiopian king. The bird’s confidence is total, its attitude imperial, and of all the truths the bird knows, this one is certain: Kings do not “shoo.”
“What do you want?” asks Hannah. The raven does not reply.
There is a staring contest for a moment that ends with a blink of the bird’s black-diamond gaze. It tilts its head to the side, as if to look at something beyond Hannah, before leaping bodily down onto the shelf in a rustle of feathers.
Hannah has time to yell only, “Hey! That’s mine!” as the raven snatches up the pink shell from its blue mussel cradle and flaps into the air. She feels the wind from its wing lift her hair and ducks, yelping.
Hannah stumbles and rights herself, recovering first her balance and then her indignation, after which she begins to defame the bird in shrill language not usually learned from pastors or mothers. Anyone watching—and there are several someones, all of them black-eyed and amused—would have noticed the cock of her throwing arm as she spun about, prepared to hurl whetstone and invective alike. They would have heard her shriek as she stumbled for a second time and sat—with a cry oddly like the
KAWK!
of the raven—hard upon the ground.
The source of her new alarm is a creature garbed in a contrivance of furs, feathers, shell, and bones. The shaman stands stock-still, observing and abiding, as if waiting for the odd seizure that possesses this woman to fade.
She squawks again, this time like a frightened duck, then demands, with a touch of ire, “Who are
you
?”
Over the shaman’s shoulder, the raven struts along the branch of a spruce tree and tosses the pink shell into the air, then ignores it as it falls to the ground. A second raven whoops from a lookout in the crown of the tree.
The man’s face is wrinkled and dark as a nut. Fading tattoos mark his face from lip to chin, and his forehead is crossed with blurry lines. Nostrums befitting a wizard are hung or stowed about his person in bags and pouches sewn of animal parts, and he wears a conical hat of carved cedar. He remains unmoving, his visage neither comforting nor disturbing to look upon. Hannah suffers the odd sensation that he is not really there, that he is a cipher, incorporeal and ethereal.
The impression is enhanced by the lack of color in his eyes, which are black as his feathered familiar across the full orb and, having no irises or whites, give no indication of where he is looking. Hannah, discomfited, feels his gaze as one feels the stare of a blind man, the fix of an eye that sees nothing, or perhaps everything, through senses keen to the unknown and unknowable.
“Who are you?” she asks again, placing her hand on her heart, though there is nothing frightening or threatening in his presence.
The shaman makes a noise like that of his raven, a call that sounds to Hannah’s ear like “ne-GOOK.”
“What?” she asks, startled. Already used to the shaman’s silence, to hear him speak is astonishing.
The shaman’s eyes open a hair, and he says again, “Ne-GOOK, ne-GOOK.”
Hannah climbs to her feet, her breath returning, and says, “Ah, well, of course you do not speak English. I may as well be asking the raven.”
She speaks more to herself than to the apparition before her, and his reply sets her aback.
“You already been talking to the raven. Didn’t unnerstand a dam’ thing he said, either.”
She stares, openmouthed. Both ravens imitate her, opening their mouths wide, exposing red throats and spreading their wings.
“What? I mean.” Her mouth works at the words. “I beg your pardon?”
Negook—for that is his name—says, simply and clearly, “You asked him what he wanted. He told you, but you don’t unnerstand.” Then he waits a moment, hoping to avoid further insult to Hannah. Among the Tlingit people, even children have the courtesy to ignore stupid questions, because to acknowledge the ignorance of the one asking might embarrass that person. Answering an obvious question is rude and condescending. But Negook has some experience with white people and knows they do not understand much, least of all their own ignorance.

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