“Got any more?” the Yurok asked.
I pulled the second bottle out of our beat-up backpack and opened it, trying not to look at Pat, knowing he’d have that hermity scowl now big-time.
“You picnic like this pretty often?” she asked.
“Yeah, we always keep stuff in the trunk—wine, canned salmon, crackers. Gives us the option.” That was the other side of it: Pat was fun, and he let me have control. If I said let’s go, he said okay. That means everything if you spent twenty years with a stick-in-the-mud.
“You come here a lot?” she asked.
“No. This was a special trip.”
“It was supposed to be,” Pat fussed.
I hastily added, “Our beaches down around Santa Cruz and Monterey are nice, but we’ve been to them a thousand times.”
“Mmm.” She let me refill her cup. I had more too. Pat didn’t seem to be drinking.
“Now, the sea lion is a strange one,” she said. “There’s little it won’t eat, and not much it won’t do to survive, but it has no guile. It swims along, do-de-do, and has a bite whenever it can. It doesn’t hide or trick. It’s lazy. If it can find a place to gorge, it’ll do that and forget about hunting. It doesn’t seem to have the hunting instinct. It just wants to eat and swim and jolly around. Mate. Be playful.” She broke another piece of salmon off, holding it in fingers with silt and sand under the nails. “Whereas an eel is always lurking, even when it’s just eaten. It never just cavorts. It’s always thinking ahead, like a miser worrying how to get more.”
“Until it leaves home and washes into the sea lion’s mouth.” I concluded the thought for her.
“What the eel needs”—she sat up—“is a way to say, Hell no. Here it is, the smarter, stealthier creature. And what does nature do but use its own instinct against it. Favor some fat, lazy thing that’s not even a fish, it’s a mammal that lives in the water, that doesn’t really belong and yet has food poured down its gullet just for being in the right place.” She pointed at the sea lion heads bobbing in the waves. “Look at them. This is their welfare cafeteria. They do nothing but open their mouths.”
Pat put in, “You could say you’re like the seals. You’re out there with those steel-pronged things, spearing eels.”
I wanted to hit him. It seemed a rude thing to say.
“The Yurok are like the eels.” She removed her hat. Her dark hair, flattened on top, began to blow in the wind coming off the water. “The Yurok were king because the Yurok knew how to blend in. The Yurok thought always of food for tomorrow because Yurok nightmares were full of yesterday’s starvation. The Yurok were part of the dark bottom of history’s river, silent and ready. And they got swept out into the bigger mouths that waited-without deserving.”
She leaped to her feet. She looked majestic, her hair blowing against a background of gray-white clouds, her arms and chin raised to the heavens. “This is where the ancient river meets the
thing that is so much bigger, the thing the eel can’t bear to under
stand because the knowledge is too bitter.”
Behind me, Pat whispered, “This is weird. Look at her friends.”
On the beach, the Yurok men raised their arms too. They stood just like the woman, maybe imitating her to tease her, maybe just coincidence.
“Where the ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger, and the eel can’t understand because the knowledge is too bitter,” she repeated to the sky.
Pat was poking me now, hardly bothering to whisper. “I don’t like this! She’s acting crazy!”
I smacked him with an absent-minded hand behind my back, like a horse swatting off a fly. Maybe this was too much for a software engineer—why had I ever thought I could marry someone as unlyrical as that?—but it was a writer’s dream. It was real-deal Yurok lore. If she quit because of him, I’d push Pat’s unimaginative damn butt right off the rock.
She shook her head from side to side, hair whipping her cheeks. “At the mouth of the river, you learn the truth: follow your obsession, and the current carries you into a hundred waiting mouths. But if you lie quiet”—she bent forward so I could see her bright dark eyes—“and think passionately of trapping your prey, if your hunger is a great gnawing within you, immobilizing you until the moment when you become a rocket of appetite to consume what swims near—”
“What do they want?” Pat’s shadow fell across the rock. I turned to see that he was standing now, staring down the beach at the Yurok men.
They’d taken several paces toward us. They seemed to be watching the woman.
She was on a roll, didn’t even notice. “Then you don’t ride the river into the idle mouth, the appetite without intelligence, the hunger that happens without knowing itself.”
Pat’s anoraked arm reached over me and plucked the paper cup from her hand. “You better leave now.”
“What is your problem, Patrick?” I jumped to my feet. Big damn kid, Jesus Christ. Scared by legends, by champagne talk on a beach! “Mellow the hell out.”
My words wiped the martial look off his face. A marveling betrayal replaced it. “You think you’re so smart, Maggie, you think you know everything! But you’re really just a sheltered little housewife.”
I was too angry to speak. I maybe hadn’t earned much over the years, but I was a writer.
His lips compressed, his eyes squinted, his whole freckled Scot’s face crimped with wronged frustration. “But I guess the Mature One has seen more than a child like myself. I guess it takes an Artist to really know life.”
“Oh, for Christ sake!” I spoke the words with both arms and my torso. “Are you such a white-bread baby you can’t hear a little bit of Yurok metaphor without freaking out?”
He turned, began to clamber down the rock. He was muttering. I caught the words “princess” and “know everything,” as well as some serious profanity.
I turned to find the Yurok woman sitting on the blanket, drinking sedately, her posture unabashedly terrible. I remained standing for a few minutes, watching Patrick jerk along the beach, fists buried in his pockets.
“He doesn’t want my friends to join us,” she concluded correctly. From the look of it, he was marching straight over to tell them so.
The men stood waiting. A hundred yards behind them, desperate eels wriggled from their sand pits like the rays of a sun.
I had a vision of roasting eels with the Yuroks, learning their legends as the waves crashed beside us. What a child Pat was.’ Just because we’d fought a bit in the car.
“I know why he thinks I’m crazy,” the woman said.
I sat with a sigh, pulling another paper cup out of the old backpack and filling it. I handed it to her, feeling like shit. So what if the men wanted to join us for a while? Patrick and I
had the rest of the afternoon to fight. Maybe the rest of our lives.
“We came out here to decide if we should get married,” I told her. I could feel tears sting my eyes. “But the trouble is, he’s still so young. He’s only seven years older than my oldest daughter. He doesn’t have his career together—he just got laid off. He’s been moping around all month getting in my way. He’s an engineer—I met him when I was researching a science-fiction story. All he knows about politics and literature is what I’ve made him learn.” I wiped the tears. “He’s grown a lot in the last year, since we’ve been together, but it’s not like being with an equal. I mean, we have a great time unless we start talking about something in particular, and then I have to put up with all these half-baked, college-student kind of ideas. I have to give him articles to read and tell him how to look at things—I mean, yes, he’s smart, obviously, and a quick learner. But fifteen years, you know.”
She nibbled a bit more salmon. “Probably he saw the van on the road coming down.”
“What van?”
“Our group.”
“The’Yurok?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. They’re up in Hoopa on the reservation, what’s left of them.
They’re practically extinct.”
“We assumed you were Yurok. You’re all so dark. You know how to do that whip-spear thing.”
“Yeah, we’re all dark-haired.” She rolled her eyes. “But jeez, there’s only five of us. You’re dark-haired. You’re not Yurok.” Her expression brightened. “But the whipstick, that’s Yurok, you’re right. Our leader”—she pointed to the not-Yuroks on the beach, I wasn’t sure which one—“made them. We’re having an out-of-culture experience, you could say.”
Patrick had reached the group now, was standing with his shoulders up around his ears and his hands still buried in his pockets.
“How did you all get so good at it?”
“Good at it?” She laughed. “The surf’s absolutely crawling with eels. If we were good at it, we’d have hundreds of them.”
“What’s the group?”
Patrick’s hands were out of his pockets now. He held them out in front of him as he began backing away from the four men.
“You didn’t see the van, really?”
“Maybe Pat did. I was reading the map.” I rose to my knees, watching him. Patrick was still backing away, picking up speed. Up here, showing fear of a ranting woman, he’d seemed ridiculous. Down on the beach, with four long-haired men advancing toward him, his fear arguably had some basis. What had they said to him?
“The van scares people.” She nodded. “The slogans we painted on it.”
“Who are you?” I asked her, eyes still locked on Patrick.
“I was going to say before your fiance huffed out: what about the sea lions? They get fat with no effort, just feasting on the self-enslaved, black-souled little eels. Do they get away with it?”
The sky was beginning to darken. The sea was pencil-lead gray now, with a bright silver band along the horizon. Patrick was running toward us across the beach.
Two of the men started after him.
I tried to rise to my feet, but the woman clamped her hand around my ankle.
“No,” she said. “The sea lions aren’t happy very long. They’re just one more fat morsel in the food chain. Offshore there are sharks, plenty of them, the mightiest food processors of all. This is their favorite spot for sea lion sushi.”
“What are they doing? What do your friends want?” My voice was as shrill as the wind whistling between the rocks.
“The Yurok were the eels, kings of the river, stealthy and quick and hungry. But the obsessions of history washed them into the jaws of white men, who played and gorged in the surf.” She nodded. “The ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger,
the thing the eel can’t bear to understand because the knowledge is too bitter.”
She’d said that more than once, almost the same way. Maybe that’s what scared Pat: her words were like a litany, an incantation, some kind of cultish chant. And the men below had mirrored her gestures.
I knocked her hand off my ankle and started backward off the rock. All she’d done was talk about predation. She’d learned we were alone and not expecting company, and she’d signaled to the men on the beach. Now they were chasing Patrick.
Afraid to realize what it meant, too rattled to put my shoes back on, I stepped into a slick crevice. I slid, losing my balance. I fell, racketing over the brutal jags and edges of the smaller rocks we’d used as a stairway. I could hear Patrick scream my name. I felt a lightning burn of pain in my ribs, hip, knee. I could feel the hot spread of blood under my shirt.
I tried to catch my breath, to stand up. The woman was picking her way carefully down to where I lay.
“There’s another kind of hunter, Maggie.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “Not the eel who waits and strikes. Not the seal who finds plenty and feeds. But the shark.” She stopped, silhouette poised on the rock stair. “Who thinks of nothing but finding food, who doesn’t just hide like the eel or wait like the sea lion but who quests and searches voraciously, looking for another—”
Patrick screamed, but not my name this time.
“Looking for a straggler.” Again she raised her arms and her chin to the heavens, letting her dark hair fly around her. Patrick was right: she did look crazy.
She jumped down. Patrick screamed again. We screamed together, finally in agreement.
I heard a sudden blast and knew it must be gunfire. I watched the woman land in a straddling crouch, her hair in wild tendrils like eels wriggling from their pits.
Oh, Patrick. Let me turn back the clock and say I’m sorry.
I looked up at the woman, thinking: too late, too late. I rode the river right into your jaws.
Another shot. Did it hit Pat?
A voice from the sand cliff boomed, “Get away!”
The woman looked up and laughed. She raised her arms again, throwing back her head.
A third blast sent her scrambling off the small rocks, kicking up footprints in the sand as she ran away. She waved her arms as if to say goodbye.
I sat painfully forward—I’d cracked a rib, broken some skin, I could feel it. Nevertheless, I twisted to look up the face of the cliff.
In the blowing grass above me, a stocky man with long black hair fired a rifle into the air.
A real Yurok, Pat and I learned later.
A Scandal in Winter
GILLIAN LINSCOTT
Gillian Linscott (b. 1944) was born in Windsor, England, the daughter of a shoe shop manager and a shop assistant. Holding an Oxford degree in English language and literature, she worked as a newspaper journalist in Liverpool and Birmingham between 1967 and 1972, moved to the Guardian (Manchester and London) until 1979, then turned to broadcast journalism, reporting on Parliament for the British Broadcasting Corporation, for which she has also written radio plays. Her first novel, A Healthy Grave (1984), was set in a nudist camp and introduced her short-lived series character Birdie Linnet, a former policeman whom she described to Contemporary Authors (volume 128, 1990) as being no super sleuth: “in fact…[he] is remarkable chiefly for getting the point later than anybody else on the page. He’s well-meaning, none too intelligent, and frequently hit on the head.” As this description suggests, Linscott does not take the detective-story form too seriously, liking it because “it’s not pompous. In my view there are few books that couldn’t be improved by dumping a body in them somewhere. The mystery novel is a very artificial creation and I’m not greatly concerned with realism.” Linscott achieved her greatest renown, as well as possibly greater realism, when she moved from contemporary whodunnits to historical, first with Murder, I Presume (1990), set in the 1870s, then with the series about early-twentieth-century suffragette Nell Bray, beginning with Sister Beneath the Sheets (1991).
One prominent sub-category of historical mystery fiction is the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, once relatively rare and, for whatever reason, usually written by men. In recent years, following the bestselling success of Nicholas Meyer’s Seven-Per-cent
Solution (1974), new Holmes novels have become a cottage industry and several original anthologies have been filled with shorter adventures for the Baker Street sleuth. Some of the best of these have been written by women, including the work of L. B. Greenwood at novel length and June Thomson in a series of short-story collections. With her knowledge of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Linscott was a natural to write a Holmes pastiche. “A Scandal in Winter,” one of the best stories in the Christmas Sherlockian anthology Holmes for the Holidays (1996), gains some of its freshness and originality from the use of a narrator other than Dr. Watson.
At first Silver Stick and his Square Bear were no more to us than incidental diversions at the Hotel Edelweiss. The Edelweiss at Christmas and the new year was like a sparkling white desert island, or a very luxurious ocean liner sailing through snow instead of sea. There we were, a hundred people or so, cut off from the rest of the world, even from the rest of Switzerland, with only each other for entertainment and company. It was one of the only possible hotels to stay at in 1910 for this new fad of winter sporting. The smaller Be
rghaus across the way was not one of the possible hotels, so its dozen or so visitors hardly counted. As for the villagers in their wooden chalets with the cows living downstairs, they didn’t count at all. Occasionally, on walks, Amanda and I would see them carrying in logs from neatly stacked woodpiles or carrying out forkfuls of warm soiled straw that sent columns of white steam into the blue air. They were part of the valley like the rocks and pine trees but they didn’t ski or skate, so they had no place in our world—apart from the sleighs. There were two of those in the village. One, a sober affair drawn by a stolid bay cob with a few token bells on the harness, brought guests and their luggage from the nearest railway station. The other, the one that mattered to Amanda and me, was a streak of black and scarlet, swift as the mountain wind, clamorous with silver bells, drawn by a sleek little honey-colored Haflinger with a silvery mane and tail that matched the bells. A pleasure sleigh, with no purpose in life beyond amusing the guests at the Edelweiss. We’d see it drawn up in the trampled snow outside, the handsome young owner with his long whip and blond mustache waiting patiently. Sometimes we’d be allowed to linger and watch as he helped in a lady and gentleman and adjusted the white fur rug over their laps. Then away they’d go, hissing and jingling through the snow, into the track through the pine forest. Amanda and I had been promised that, as a treat on New Year’s Day, we would be taken for a ride in it. We looked forward to it more eagerly than Christmas.
But that was ten days away and until then we had to amuse ourselves. We skated on the rink behind the hotel. We waved goodbye to our father when he went off in the mornings with his skis and his guide. We sat on the hotel terrace drinking hot chocolate with blobs of cream on top while Mother wrote and read letters. When we thought Mother wasn’t watching, Amanda and I would compete to see if we could drink all the chocolate so that the blob of cream stayed marooned at the bottom of the cup, to be eaten in luscious and impolite spoonfuls. If she glanced up and caught us, Mother would tell us not to be so childish, which, since Amanda was eleven and I was nearly thirteen, was fair enough, but we had to get what entertainment we could out of the chocolate. The truth was that we were all of us, most of the time, bored out of our wits. Which was why we turned our attention to the affairs of the other guests and Amanda and I had our ears permanently tuned to the small dramas of the adults’ conversation.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 47
