Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel

by Heacox, Kim

  James looked at him with eyes gleaned of expression. “You’re not going to tell me what everybody else tells me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That it could be worse? My leg, my career, me, I’m lucky to be alive?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I hate it when people tell me that.”

  “The Haida, Deikeenaa, they chose this tree, long ago.” Keb patted the log. “You have to treat it with respect. You have to be quiet, and at peace, and purify yourself.”

  James ran his thumb over the cutting edge of the adz.

  “You have to get rid of your bitterness, your anger. Throw it away before you work on a canoe. Or else it won’t be right. You have to meditate and give thanks.”

  “I thought you—”

  “Shhh . . .” Keb said. “We’re meditating now.”

  James leaned against the log, put down the adz, and picked at his knee brace. After awhile he said, “Are we done yet?”

  “No.”

  “When then?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon.”

  “Later.”

  “Later than when?”

  “Later than now.”

  “How much—”

  “Shhh—we’re meditating.”

  Keb sat still while James picked at the knee brace.

  Remember Gavin Timmerman, the hoity-toity lawyer with the syrupy eyes of a dreamer? He came to Alaska to make something new of himself. A painter, he told Keb that the best art pieces are the ones that continue to have a conversation with you long after you create them. He had a painting in his home that showed a group of people staring at the sea beneath the stars. A caption on the frame said, “The people stared at the sea and the stars, and forgot themselves.” This canoe could be that, an art piece. The sea and the stars, a place to forget some things but to remember other things. How many minutes passed by then? Keb lost track. He took a deep breath and said to James, “You got the right tools?”

  “What?”

  “That adz, xút’aa. You want it?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have to hold it just right. Two-handed, near the blade, like this, and get low, on your knees.” Keb grabbed it cross-handed, made a cutting motion, and took a bite into the canoe. “This position gives you better consistency when cutting along the hull. You ever watch a crossbill eat seeds from a spruce cone?”

  “No.”

  “Watch sometime. Same technique.” Keb handed the adz back to James, who made a couple cross-handed practice swings. “You can have it,” Keb said, “but first you need to learn the language.”

  “The language?”

  “Tlingit.”

  James looked away. Keb knew what he was thinking. It was an old people’s language. The boy turned back and said, “Why?”

  “Words are tools too. They shape everything.”

  Keb could see that James was sick of rules and tradition. He could go with Robert and Lorraine and the poodle on Prozac, visit Las Vegas, the geography of nowhere. Cruise the casinos. Pick up girls. Play blackjack and the silver slots. Eat at the all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch buffet beneath big signs that said, “You Deserve It.” Watch sports on the big screen. Maybe stay. Get a casino job, a fast car, a swimming pool. But Keb could also see that James was not who he had been a few weeks ago. He had apologized to his mother. Not an easy thing to do. He no longer looked at the red cedar log with cold, indifferent eyes. One day he might stumble into somebody he could be. What happened on Pepper Mountain, well . . . the world was supposed to end after that, right? After the crushed leg? But here it was just beginning. And so Keb found in his heart the most unexpected of sentiments—hope—and gave his grandson his adz.

  “If I learn Tlingit,” James asked, “what then?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  a sharp sea breeze

  WHAT ARE WE listening for, exactly?” Ranger Ron asked as he rocked back and forth, foot to foot.

  “A summoning call,” Anne said, as she lowered the hydrophone cable over the side of her boat. She explained how humpback whales sometimes dive together under their prey and release bubbles that act like a net to corral the fish. “Near as we can tell, several whales spiral up and exhale slowly to release the bubbles, while a single whale summons the others with a high-pitched call. The whales join together and rise quickly inside the net, forcing the fish upwards until they run out of water. That’s when the whales lunge to the surface through the tightly packed fish and eat dozens at a time.”

  Anne watched the two men standing next to Ron shake the city dust from their eyes. They too were fish out of water, Department of Interior lawyers from the gray federal landscape of Washington, D.C., here to research and prepare arguments in the Crystal Bay jurisdiction issue.

  “So, the fish don’t swim through the bubbles?” asked Matt, the lawyer who reminded Anne of her genetics professor in Hawaii.

  “No,” Anne replied.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a fish.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I. I really don’t know. Nobody knows. The whales do it probably because the fish respond in a predictable manner. The bubbles are an impenetrable wall for them.”

  “That’s amazing. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “And get this,” Anne added, “only a select few humpbacks do it, and they’re not a family group. They’re not related. It’s one of the few cooperative non-family feeding strategies found in the entire natural world.”

  “And they teach it to other whales?”

  “We think so, yes.”

  Matt looked at his colleague, a huge, stern-faced man named Victor. He was something of a whale himself, Anne thought, a three-hundred pounder, a walking heart attack who smoked a pipe and pawed an iPhone. They were here to talk legal matters, not natural history, to strengthen their case and take a boat ride. The fourth man was Paul Beals, reserve superintendent at Crystal Bay, a tall, sandy-haired career ranger who, unlike Ron, wore no sidearm. Anne had warmed to Paul these past few weeks, the way he let a “by golly” slip through the cold acronyms of his profession. He worried her, though, how he seemed to sidestep conflict. The final guest, who the four men fawned over like schoolboys, was Kate Johnson, the first director of the National Marine Reserve Service, a former NASA astronaut and big celebrity, though Anne had never heard of her. She sat cross-legged on the engine cowling with her sharp-featured face turned to the shining mountains. “A summoning call,” she said. “I like that.”

  The four men nodded. A summoning call, yes, very interesting. Now that Director Johnson liked it, they did too, by golly.

  ANNE NEGLECTED TO tell her visitors that bubble netting was extremely rare among humpbacks in Crystal Bay. “Dazzle them if you can,” Paul Beals had told her by radio before the four men and Director Johnson arrived by floatplane an hour ago. Anne maneuvered the boat and worked the hydrophone and talked whales and kept the Maui Wowie squirreled away in her breast pocket. At least one person on board might one day smoke it with her—Taylor de la Croix, her boatmate since the Safety Committee had announced: “No NMRS employee will work on the water alone.” Of all the employees Anne could have assigned to her, Taylor was her favorite, a friend from Juneau, where they had attended Juneau-Douglas High School and studied marine biology, made field trips to Crystal Bay, and fell in love with wild Alaska and humpback whales. They still laughed like schoolgirls, even when things weren’t funny. Right now, though, Taylor was on her best behavior in her blue uniform, looking trim and poised.

  Seven people on a twenty-three-foot boat.

  Anne thought, Is this safe?

  “So, the name of your boat,” Matt asked her. “What’s it mean?”

  “Firn? It’s a glaciology term for an intermediate stage between snow and dense glacial ice. Many of the NMRS boats in Crystal Bay are named for glacial features: Arete, Serac, Esker II, Drumlin.”

  “So you guys are the o
nes who’ll argue this case?” Taylor asked Matt.

  “On the federal government side, yes,” answered Victor in a superior tone, turning as if noticing Taylor for the first time.

  Paul and Director Kate asked about the case, and Victor answered by quoting Samuel Johnson and Alexis de Tocqueville. Anne pointed out a cruise ship at a distance that was traveling down bay after visiting the tidewater glaciers. Matt said, “I’ve heard that people will save up their entire lives to make one trip to Alaska.”

  Paul pulled out maps and spread them on deck. The maps showed twenty Native inholdings in Crystal Bay. Paul pointed. “Here’s where PacAlaska wants to mine for gold and copper. Here’s where they’d probably build sportfishing lodges and tourist resorts, all in an environmentally sensitive manner, they say.”

  “Sportfishing in a marine reserve?” Taylor asked.

  “Probably not a reserve anymore, if PacAlaska wins,” Matt said.

  “Can they win?” Anne asked, feeling a kernel of fear harden in her chest.

  “In the Ninth Circuit, probably not,” Victor said. “It’s a liberal court. But if they appeal it up to the Supreme Court, which is more conservative, and the Supreme Court takes it, I think they could win. They’ll play the role of the displaced and disenfranchised to appeal to sentiments cultural and capitalistic. They’ll say they’ve unfairly lost their ancient homeland and their best business opportunities by not having access to Crystal Bay, and that the federal bureaucracy, in keeping them out, is just as cold as the glaciers that originally displaced them. Have you heard about the canoe in Jinkaat?”

  “No,” Paul said.

  “It’s a red cedar dugout canoe being carved by a Tlingit elder named Keb Wisting, the oldest man in town, father of Ruby Bauer. You certainly know who she is.”

  “Yes,” Paul said, “everybody knows who she is.”

  Anne felt her heart skip at the mention of Old Keb.

  Victor said, “It’s a clever stunt to gain sympathy and downplay corporate motives. The canoe represents the old ways they can’t have anymore because the callous federal government kicked them out of Crystal Bay. This is the argument they’ll use. One of many, actually.”

  What? Anne thought. “I don’t think so,” she said, as she pulled up the wet hydrophone cable, seawater dripping off her hands. They turned to look at her. She swallowed hard. “I know Keb Wisting. I doubt he has those intentions at all. Ethnically, he’s more Norwegian than he is Tlingit, and he’s not at all political. He’s a sweet old man.”

  “But culturally he’s Tlingit,” Victor said. “Maybe not everybody in Jinkaat prefers comfortable illusions to actual fact, I can’t be sure. And it’s wrong to paint an entire people with a single brushstroke, I know. But I also know that once a culture becomes a corporation, or a corporation a culture, it falls prey to industry capture and two cognitive tricks: self perception and subjective perception.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Kate asked.

  “Meaning the culture ignores valuable information that’s at odds with its worldview. It couples uncomfortable information with reaffirming facts in order to make itself feel better. That’s how the assailant sees himself as the victim, or the aggressor as the oppressed. That’s how PacAlaska sees itself in a way different from the way other people see it.” Victor paused and looked at everybody, as if waiting for them to catch up. Anne’s mind pinwheeled back to her own history of discomfort, her last day with Nancy all those years ago, the storm off Shelter Island, the boat capsizing . . . Dear God.

  “The trick is to make the court see it our way,” Kate said.

  “Yes,” Victor said.

  “Tell me more about this canoe,” Paul asked.

  “You can find it on YouTube. There’s lots of video shot by people in Jinkaat.”

  “Has the press gotten hold of it?” Kate asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Ron said, “We could send undercover rangers to Jinkaat.”

  Never one to make a big decision, Paul turned to Kate. “No,” she said. “No rangers in Jinkaat. Maybe later, but not now. And never undercover.”

  As Ron rocked nervously from foot to foot, Anne caught herself feeling sorry for him, even though he had a permanent job with full medical benefits and she did not. Ron had served in Iraq and inhaled so many toxins that he got that not-so-rare sickness the Pentagon said didn’t exist until one hundred thousand other guys got it. No Purple Heart or Silver Star, but he did qualify as a ten-point disabled vet who could get one federal job after another and milk that advantage for the rest of his life, much to the chagrin of applicants twice as qualified and three times more educated. He chose the National Marine Reserve Service, a new agency, because he liked boats, he said. He could be what he’d been in the army, a ranger. A “danger ranger,” Taylor called him, well-meaning and eager to please, but the kind of guy whose compass was half a bubble off-level. Spend a day with him and you knew all there was to know, Taylor said, and that was too much. Poor Ron, he wanted to be admired, and in this he would be forever disappointed. Anne thought her sister, Nancy would have liked Ron, were she still alive. Nancy liked everybody.

  Nancy, her lifeless, ragdoll body lifted from the sea all those years ago by Keb Wisting. . . . The water stinging cold, his powerful hands. Does he remember? Does anybody remember? I lived and she died. Why?

  Ron said, “Ruby Bauer had a nephew in Jinkaat who was a basketball star until he ruined his knee in a logging accident. He might have made it to the NBA; now he’ll end up flipping burgers at McDonald’s in Juneau.”

  “His name is James Wisting and he’s not flipping burgers in Juneau,” Victor announced. “He’s in Jinkaat helping his grandfather carve the canoe, along with a lot of other people.”

  “I think we’re too preoccupied with this canoe,” Paul said.

  “I don’t,” Kate said, rising to her feet, sunlight dancing off her graying golden hair. “If this basketball kid has charisma, and he and his grandfather and his clever aunt make a statement with this canoe, if anything related to this legal case pulls on heartstrings and weakens our position, we’ll have a public relations problem and I won’t be happy. But right now I’m hungry. I’m always hungry in Alaska. I propose that Ron and Taylor make lunch while Anne drives us up the bay and you gentlemen talk legal strategy so we can win this thing. We’re not going to lose the first major legal challenge to this important new agency. The oceans are turning acidic, and only six percent of the world’s marine fisheries are healthy. And now radiation from Fukushima could end up in Pacific salmon. On top of that, the North Pacific Garbage Patch, a miasma of floating plastics north of Hawaii, is twice the size of Texas. I’ve seen it and had nightmares about it.”

  “I’ve seen it too,” Anne said. “It’s horrible.”

  “Highly regarded scientists see the natural world failing everywhere, and at nobody’s peril more than our own,” Kate said. “If we pass any single tipping point beyond all mitigating strategies, we’ll never again have the bountiful world we once did. When I was a little girl watching TV, I rooted for the Indians, not the cowboys. I never liked Scarlett O’Hara on her big plantation, or Clint Eastwood with his big gun. This legal case isn’t anti-Native. It’s about big business buying whatever it wants, including our own government, and destroying the natural world. Well, guess what? We’re part of that natural world. And now big business wants Crystal Bay, the only national marine reserve in Alaska, home to salmon, sea otters, and humpback whales. Well, I have news for them—they can’t have it.”

  Kate’s pronouncement hit Anne like a sharp sea breeze. She looked at Taylor, who grinned. She was catching her breath when Kate asked, “There’s a tidewater glacier north of here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s go.”

  cold metal burning

  IT WAS A canoe, or the shadow of one. No denying it, Old Keb told himself. This wood was going to sea, and so was he. He rubbed his hands over it every day, many times a day. Dr
eamed about it at night, many times a night. He tried to remember how many years ago he had floated the log with the Haida, and gathered stories and blessings when they shot the gunwale lines. Were the lines still true? It’s no easy thing to make a dugout canoe. Your hands turn to leather, arms to pistons. Trees are living things and if done right, canoes are too. They grow with the rain, and run with rivers, and like all rivers, return to the sea. You had to get the cedar just right, on your side; know the grain as you know the rain, make it work with you. Bless the tree. Tell more stories. Give thanks and sharpen your adz. Plank it down, shape the hull, and from the planks make paddles, some for gifts. Hollow it out just right. Then fire-score it and steam it open. That would draw a big crowd. Add the raised bow and stern pieces, the thwarts and gunwale rails, maybe a mast or two, and simple cloth sails. Work with old tools in the old ways. They slow you down and make you think. Never mind outboard motors and aluminum boats and the empty faces of people who sit stone-still at the tillers and see little of what sees them.

  Every man should take an epic journey, Uncle Austin used to say. Paddle into his terror, the secret language of storms, back to a time before television and the chaos of too much stuff, too many things, too many gadgetgizmos, back before basketball, when we slept on the ground and the full moon needled us awake, when wintertime was story time and even the sky listened, when we belonged to no banner or monarch or team, only the kingdom of trees, a kingdom without a king. Remember yakwtlénx’? Big red cedar canoes. You could travel blue water in them. Steer by the stars until the stars made no sense and the senses made new maps and the maps made a new you, a you that feared to forget until you forgot to fear. Follow gray whales to the Arctic. Bring back stories of hintak xóodzi, the polar bear, and kooléix’waa, the underwater brown bear, or walrus. You could define yourself by your canoe; see it as a living thing, a steady companion.