Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  Recognizing that, she reminded herself that long ago she had decided she would avoid indulging in either delusions or negative feelings about others.

  And the prosperity wasn’t all that important to her, in any case. She had been on both sides of the convenience it brought, so she knew she would survive without it. She knew she could — and would — endure most anything and do the right thing. Isaac’s absence, and her resourcefulness in raising her children — so often by herself in that hostile country, really had given her the reassurance that she possessed a wherewithal more important than any contrivances money might buy.

  That realization, at least was a fair compensation.

  And such self-appraisal was not an overestimation of her abilities, she hoped. She knew that many who dealt with her during Isaac’s long absences had learned to respect her. She heard one person had even commented that “the steel in her tiny frame had a spring-like memory.” That gave her hope for better days to come.

  Despite all of that, on this day, as the fog moved back in over the strait, she again found herself looking out the kitchen window, towards the sea, watching for whatever might come. Friends or strangers. It was a habit now, an important one, she realized.

  Friends or strangers.

  Chapter Four

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Anah

  CONTINUED ASSAULTS!!!

  Fourteen savagely murdered; Six missing

  Officials at the Hudson’s Bay Company reported the tragic loss of another contingent of coal-miners on its Campbell River Coal Mining operation.

  The Vancouver Colonist - August 15th, 1857

  To know him was to fear him, whoever he was, the one they called “Black Wind.” Few outside of his small clan, however, really could identify him beyond a vague description as that of a tall, well-muscled, heavily tattooed warrior with an aggressive bearing and disturbingly dark presence. No one, neither non-native settlers nor the peaceful peoples along the coast, was safe from his predation. He and his clan seldom left tellers behind.

  Hlgahlas Tatsu (“Black Wind”) in Haida, Anah-nawitka-halo-shem, (“Has No Shame,”) as he was called in Chinook trading jargon by tribes up and down the British Columbia coast, had been raised by his father’s aging aunt. She took him on only at the insistence of a father grieving for his young wife.

  Anah’s mother had been lost to measles in the first wave of disease that hit the Haida after Protestant missionaries passed through the Charlottes, attempting conversion and, when that failed, bartering for specimens of tribal artifacts for sale to collectors in New York and London.

  The Haida and the Bella Bella called the malady “Tom Dyer,” after one of the sailors on the missionaries’ vessels. Thousands perished along the coastal areas over a two-year period before the epidemic burned out.

  Anah’s only siblings, two older sisters, had been taken away by “the Boston Men” when his father was away one spring hunting in the far north. The American fur traders had come to the village talking about buying small black shale totems that some women and older men carved during the winter months when they had to stay in the long houses. But instead, the traders took the pieces that had been displayed and then grabbed the two girls.

  Anah watched the entire event from the beach, the Bostons pulling his screaming younger sister by the hair into their boat and paddling to their big boat with sails anchored offshore. They didn’t take him, as sturdy a child as he believed he was, just the girls.

  When his father, Little Raven, returned, he was angry. Howling like a wolf, he beat Anah every day for a week. No one ever saw the girls again, although Anah saw them in his dreams, on the beach, running away from him.

  As he grew older, Anah became sullen and quick to hurt others for perceived wrongs, prone to long rages and howling violent demonstrations.

  By the age of twelve, he had killed two grown men in retribution raids against the Bella Coola along the inland straits off the big Island of Vancouver.

  Because he was tireless and accurate in his hunting and trapping skills, Anah was allowed to accompany his father and the elders of their small clan on a slaving run down into south Puget Sound, a coming-of-age honor that was not accorded other young men in that region. That caused some enmity between Anah and the young men who were not given the same privilege, but everyone already understood he was unique in a strange way that needed to be respected and, as well, given distance.

  To move as a man in the long boat, one had to push the oars fast in concert with warriors seasoned to successfully chase wounded prey and outrun the lumbering ships of the Brits and Russians.

  Taunting the Brits by paddling ahead just out of range of their cannons, in particular, was a great coup, and the Royal Navy had never caught a long boat with any of its sailing vessels stationed in British Columbia. The Haida, masters of the tides and currents all along the inland coast, loved to tell how they outwitted the King George Men and the Bostons, just as all neighboring and distant tribes had lore about how they had outwitted the Haida.

  The Brits, however, simply brooded over this frustration and requisitioned for improvements in their Northwest fleet, bigger cannons and faster ships, to finally catch the insolent marauders.

  When Anah was thirteen years old, in 1842, off Maury Island, on an early summer run deep into south Puget Sound, his clan’s long boats set upon The Pigeon, a small two-mast schooner caught in the morning’s windless drift five-hundred yards offshore.

  Anah was the first to board the hapless vessel, whose crew had been alerted to the Haida’s approach by their syncopated, grunting war song. The prows of the long boats had ornate, frightening clan carvings, and, standing behind the big-eyed figure-head on the lead boat was the shaman of the clan, Klixuatan, dressed in bear skin and capped with a huge, monstrous, long-beaked raven mask. Klixuatan stomped his spear onto the deck, blowing a whistle and singing in a high-pitched whine.

  The oarsmen pulled the boat forward, paddles dipping the water in synch with the stomping beat.

  No shots were fired because the schooner crew carelessly had left their powder to molder outside over night in a wooden bin.

  Because the sound carried well across the still of the morning, the terrified men had had at least five minutes to prepare themselves for the onslaught, and a ferocious knife fight ensued on deck, seven desperate men against two large converging long boats, each carrying twenty-five warriors.

  Anah killed two more men that morning and took a head, his first ever, as a prize, that of his biggest opponent, an orange-bearded, long-haired man with a knot braided in the Chinese style. For the first time, Anah saw the difference between the angry, terror-filled eyes immediately before an opponent’s death and the flat colorlessness caught in those same eyes when all life had drained away.

  The dead eyes on his prize were different than those of one who had simply given up living, as he had seen on his hobbled aunt the year before. He thought about how her eyes had become bottomless black holes — tired, taking in no more. The eyes of this sailor, however, were without color, as if the spirit released with the beheading had carried their hue away with it.

  After the killings, one of the long boats stayed behind to ransack, then set the sloop on fire while the second boat proceeded southward.

  Anah crowed his pride for an hour after the killings.

  Maury Island, a triangular land mass roughly three miles across, was separated from adjacent Vashon Island by a small waterway, passable during a medium tide, which led into a natural harbor bordered by each island.

  Vashon, the larger of the two, had recently been swept by a seasonal forest fire, so the local Suquamish natives who remained had moved their encampments onto the higher northeast bluffs of Maury, to positions that presented easy access to the beaches below, as well as a 280-degree view of the entire sound. From their huts they could see all the way from the
big mountain “Tacomat,” later called “Rainier” by the explorer Vancouver, up along the Cascades and the white-haired woman mountain called “Kulshan” by the Lummi, over to Whidbey Island, and then westward to the sacred peaks of the Olympic Mountains.

  The Suquamish watched the brief, bloody battle below between the Northerners and the schooner’s crew. They knew about the Northerners and, for generations, had heard verbal renditions from elders who, like many tribes along the Puget Sound, also had contended with them.

  The Suquamish women, fearing a landing by the marauders, spread out into the dense forests of Maury, looking for hiding places for their children and for their settlement’s few valuable possessions. However the men of the clan, encouraged that this was a small war party moving in only two long boats, plotted an ambush.

  The leader of the Suquamish clan, Na ma t’shata, argued that they outnumbered the raiders and had many more craft, and because their own boats were smaller than the raider’s boats, they were much more maneuverable.

  He noted that the smaller of the raiders’ two long boats had passed through the narrow channel on an outgoing tide, while the larger one lingered, its warriors busy dismembering the stricken ketch. All the Suquamish knew that the tidal flats between the two islands extended for almost a mile, and when the tide moved out, it did so swiftly, leaving all but the smallest of craft attempting to pass through stranded and immobile for hours.

  Na ma t’shata argued that an attack against the small lead Northerners’ boat in the deep harbor by several of the Suquamish craft would easily overwhelm it, especially if they could hurl the large boulders they had collected for a purpose like this into the Northerners’ canoe.

  Over the previous four years, since the last time Northerner raiders had passed through, the Suquamish elders had carefully selected the stones. Anticipating a return by the Northerners in the future, they had conferred on each huge stone a name for incantation during the dangerous approach to the marauders. Heaved by two men from a smaller canoe, they reasoned that the stones would punch holes into the bottom of the war canoe, then the Suquamish, from their smaller craft would be able to surround and spear or drown the Haida warriors in the water. Then, Na ma t’ shata predicted, they could go back and finish off the remaining warriors in the larger boat immobilized by the outgoing tide in the shallow channel.

  Observed by Suquamish who remained on the shore, the fierce battle in the harbor lasted less than fifteen minutes.

  Anah was in the first Northerner boat through the channel, carrying his war trophy still dripping the blood of the beheaded sailor. In the same long boat, his father, Little Raven, had directed the warriors to head toward the south shore of the harbor, where several years before they had found a rich Suquamish village with racks of drying salmon, some metal utensils and axes, and stores of fresh water. They reached the shoals but saw that the village was gone, so they started moving into deeper water out of sight of their second boat that was dismembering the schooner. As the Haida moved around a small peninsula, the Suquamish attacked, fifteen small four-man canoes moving in on the longboat from three sides.

  Anah, seeing two warriors in one of the approaching canoes struggling to stand up with a massive stone, immediately understood the tactics being advanced. Ducking arrows and spears, he barked to the warriors in his boat to stop paddling and instead commanded them to use their long oars to stave off the smaller canoes.

  As they did so, Anah impaled his severed trophy head onto a pike and pushed it into the faces of the oncoming attackers in the closest boat.

  Anah knew the Haida were great swimmers. He ordered several of the warriors to leap into the water and pull on the gunnels of the lead Suquamish boats, which already were rocking unsteadily as their occupants struggled to stand with the large stones.

  Three of the Suquamish canoes tipped, including Na ma t’ shata’s, and the rest of the tribe, seeing this, broke off the attack.

  Anah and Little Raven’s long boat moved back to the shoals where the other Northerner long boat was wallowing in the mud.

  The Suquamish made no further attempts. Na ma t’ shata, untouched but very dead, washed up on Maury two days later.

  By the time the Haida raiding party returned to its small village on the Queen Charlotte Islands three weeks later, the thirteen-year-old Anah had acquired three more heads and a reputation for mutilation of the dead.

  This form of barbarism was not the custom of his clan, and it embarrassed his father, Little Raven. But it did not matter, for everyone understood thereafter that Anah had a brilliant dominating presence that made him special in the tactics of war and survival. Klixuatan, who had witnessed Anah’s actions during the battle with the Suquamish, pronounced that the vigor of the clan was with the young teenager.

  Although his aging father, Little Raven, remained chief, Anah became the resonant leader of the Haida Northerner clan. His reputation among the numerous Haida and other tribes grew over the next seven years, rivaling the formidable tyees, the chiefs of the Tsimshian and coastal Chinook tribes, whose warriors numbered in the thousands. And, because of Anah’s proclivity for rape and occasional cannibalism, even the Spanish and Russians, who rarely sailed this region anymore, knew his name and steered alert in the Hecate Strait that ran between the Queen Charlotte Islands and the mainland. Only a few of the Portuguese ships, those that bartered for slaves bound for the brothels and mines of Brazil, ventured into the Queen Charlottes.

  The British Hudson’s Bay Company, given exclusive domain over the area by the Crown, soon put up a bounty for Anah and raised it twice, but no one was foolish enough to bribe his way into the Charlottes to go after it. Anah’s mobility on and off the Queen Charlotte Islands kept him out of the grasp of the frustrated Brits.

  In 1850, at the same time the territorial British governor, Douglas, was personally leading retribution excursions against dormant and well-established Nootka and Bella Coola clans, he also dispatched three survey expeditions out of Esquimalt with accompanying contingents of Royal Marines, expressly for the additional task, should the opportunity present itself, of capturing and hanging Anah.

  Each time, though, he and his most loyal accomplices had enough forewarning from Tlingit allies along the coast to move out of reach, abandoning villages and then taking new ones if the Brits found their winter encampments.

  Anah’s elusiveness made a mockery of the Brits’ efforts. He continued his predation, occasionally even raiding the tribes protected by British garrisons.

  Slaving was profitable for Anah, more so than the miscellaneous pickings from the Qualicum, Suquamish and Bella Coola villages he ravaged.

  As the fur trade died out by midcentury and increased pressure was brought to bear by the Brits against slavery, Anah learned the value of selling women for other purposes than labor. He found ready buyers for his healthier captives from the Portuguese and Russians, and also from a few American ships venturing up from Oregon.

  And his personal appetite was voracious. It was rumored that he kept several women, fair and dark-skinned, red- and raven-haired in his own entourage. Few slaves sold by his clan escaped his mark, especially the young women and boys.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  In 1853, in the twenty-fourth year of his life, Anah traveled with his father and a huge raiding party—composed of several Haida, Tlingit, and Skidegate clans—far, far south along the coast into northern California.

  When they returned, they had acquired an immense amount of wealth with miscellaneous trading items, including over one hundred captives: young women, children, and a few healthy male teens, many of whom had fair hair and complexions. They had been snatched in quick raids on six peaceful, unprepared Umpaqua and white coastal settlements between the Rogue River and Mendocino.

  Anah kept two young Scandinavian twin sisters for himself, kidnap bounty from a Coos Bay emigrant settlement, and distributed half of the
other captives to his followers. Anah was fascinated by the twins—not with the respectful reverence many aborigines held for such children, who were a rare occurrence among Northwest Indian tribes, but with a defiant contempt for the powers that created this anomaly.

  The girls, ravaged repeatedly by Anah, were both pregnant within a fortnight.

  One week later, he traded the rest of the exhausted captives for a small mountable cannon and several breech-loading rifles to an enterprising Portuguese slaver, who sailed south again profitably depositing the remaining victims with buyers in Panama, Chile and Brazil.

  By this time, Anah had collected six wives, none who were Haida, and from them, twenty children. With the cannon mounted on his largest cedar canoe, he began waging war on anyone who wasn’t Haida or Tlingit, attacking several villages the next year.

  The terror was great enough that the Qualicum and even the fierce Kwakiutl moved their long houses far away from the shore so the distance between these dwellings and their previous location came to be called “Madman land.” Still, armed as he was with his own cannons on a fleet of eleven long boats, Anah was wise enough to continually evade any confrontation with the Brit navy ships.

  The prestige he gained from his predation, measured in part by the fear he read in other men’s eyes, stimulated an insatiability. Anah continued his raids well into the winter when other clans had moved to their winter long houses. His Raven clan was the first out in the early spring.

  In Victoria, as the terror along the coast increased, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s balance sheets reflected the impact of Anah’s raids to the company’s mining and trading operations. By 1852, emigrant settlers and indentured operatives, protesting for the safety of their lives, increasingly refused to move to remote coastal outposts. These events did not go unnoticed by the company’s London investors and insurers.