by Gar LaSalle
Levi then professed he knew the region well, having travelled it in his quest to spread the Word of the Savior. And he had survived living alone in the wilderness for six years.
“Very well,” Emmy said, looking over the man carefully. “Please show me your hands.”
Levi stepped forward and, again looking for Jojo and Edween’s reaction, put his hands into Emmy’s. She looked up into his eyes.
“You, Senor, are hired. You may leave now.” Emmy said.
Levi, stunned by her decision, nodded and backed his way out of the door.
“Mrs. Evers...the woodsman...” said Edween.
“We should wait for more volunteers to show up,” Jojo protested.
“You know we don’t have time to wait, Jojo,” Emmy said emphatically. Turning to the innkeeper, her voice was commanding: “Mr. Edween, that carpenter you provided has no woods experience and would eat all of his rations in the first day, and then likely will start on ours.”
Edween, embarrassed by Emmy’s conclusion, nodded numbly.
“The second man, your ‘woodsman,’ Emmy continued, “is an obvious alcoholic. I have no desire to attend to a man’s rum fits.”
Looking now at both Jojo and Edween, she said firmly, “The third, this Marano Levi, who dresses like a priest, but you say is not ordained, has honest hands and an honest face.”
“Mrs. Evers — ” Jojo protested again.
“I’ve made up my mind, Jojo,” Emmy said. “Mr. Edween, please inform Mr. Levi that we leave before sun up.”
“I’ll do me best, Mu’um,” the innkeeper said. “Nobody knows where he sleeps.”
Overhearing this, Sarah looked out the window. It was snowing again.
Jojo was disturbed by Emmy’s decision, despite understanding that Levi was likely the best of a weak lot, and despite the need for an extra set of hands to help them paddle the canoes. Jojo believed his own job had just been made all the more difficult by her stubborn decision. Levi was known throughout the region and was left alone by all the tribes, for he was a touched man.
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It was raining lightly the next morning, and the snow from the previous week had turned into a slushy nuisance that made their transport of supplies to the canoes on the river below slow. Some morning light silhouetted them as they pushed off. That concerned Jojo, who had wanted their departure to go unobserved.
He knew that gossip might betray the small size of their party, unaccompanied as it was by any soldiers. And they had to make time. On a spring or summer day, the journey would take a week and a half at most, but in the winter it could take three times as long if the river was frozen anywhere along its length leading to the tributary forks that defined Three Spirits.
In his winter travels along the rivers in that long winding valley, Jojo had found ice obstructing canoe passage only twice, and the plateau where the Tsimshian encamped during the winter was seldom, if ever, snowbound. But he knew that if it was, it would be disastrous for their quest, and not just because of the dangers of the cold.
Survival in a winter shelter would not be a problem, nor would the winter starvation that killed many travelers trapped by blizzards. They could forage easily. The deep rivers forming and emanating from Three Spirits were bountiful with edible life, and the winter cold made it less likely for them to encounter wolves, bear, or cougar, although he had seen plenty during this time of the year in the past.
It was being late for the potlatch that would hurt them.
The first two days bode well for their passage. Jojo was pleased and told Emmy that if they made as much progress, taking them past the big gorges forty miles upstream without encountering snow, they would likely arrive a few days before the potlatch. That would give them the opportunity to meet with Ksi Amawaal and possibly have the shrewd tyee himself do the negotiating on their behalf, without the slavers knowing who was really doing the asking.
While making camp on the third day, Jojo pulled Emmy aside. “If your son is with other slaves . . . if the Northerners show up to do trading and he is with them . . . it is best that you not be seen. Because that will show them the value of your son. They may not know his family is looking for him.” He saw Emmy consider her alternatives.
“I may have already betrayed the secrecy you wanted, Jojo,” she told him. “I asked the innkeeper to spread the word about this search. For all I know, he might have told listeners that it was being commissioned by a naive white woman carrying a sizeable reward.”
Jojo nodded quietly, troubled at this news.
“Will this Tsimshian tyee take advantage of us?” Emmy asked, breaking the silence.
“Ksi Amawaal is honest, but he is also very clever, Mrs. Evers. I have watched him trade with the Brits and with trappers. He is known for always winning.”
“Will he help us?”
“He will understand the value your son brings right away. If we ask him to do so, he will take the chests you bring and all the gold you carry, consider its value, and will offer half of it to the Northerners for all their slaves, making them think he wants to give the slaves as gifts to his family and guests during the potlatch.”
“I don’t really care if he offers all of it to them,” Emmy said.
Jojo shook his head. “The slavers may be insulted at the offer because they know the slaves are very valuable, but they will not fight with anyone while they are there. Ksi Amawaal will argue loudly for his position, but I have seen him do this with others—it will be a bluff.” He laughed.
“It will be his game,” Jojo continued, “and he likes to play like this. After he calms the Northerners down, he will make them another offer, and then, to show off his wealth to all the guests and visitors during the potlatch, he will reduce what he asks for the same amount he offered. You will get your son. He will get half the gold. Everyone will see him to be a wealthy and generous tyee, and the slavers will go away thinking they have outsmarted him—but only if they do not know he is acting as a trader on your behalf.”
He saw Emmy pondering and then brighten a bit over what he predicted would happen.
Then, as if to dampen the brief glimmer of hope he sensed he had given her, with a solemn, sad expression, Jojo said, “But, if they discover us before we reach the Three Spirits, if they know you are there—carrying gold—the Northerners will come after us, kill me, and take you and your daughter as slaves. If they do not kill you, too.”
Jojo watched Emmy’s reaction to his words. She was quietly nodding, looking up at the darkening sky, and by that, he saw Emmy understood that this would be much more complicated than she had expected.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
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Anah
Anah had given Little Raven the footstool he knew he deserved. Word had come from the south that he had indeed delivered the right and vengeful coup by taking the head of a grand tyee. He had also captured the tyee’s only son. Still not understanding the ultimate value of this child, he thus held back on what he might have otherwise done to any other white captive.
There were other reasons for Anah’s restraint.
Three days after his canoes reached the Campbell, a small three-masted ship flying a Portuguese flag anchored in the tight harbor off the river.
On the shore of the rocky beach, Anah and Klixuatan displayed their ware - thirteen bedraggled female and four male captives, all taken in Northerner raids up and down the Vancouver coast and Puget Sound straits against native and settler encampments over the previous five months.
Four armed Europeans landed in the first boat while the sailors in a second boat kept off shore, far enough out of reach of the Haida, that the trading goods in it would safe. On the beach, the ship’s mate, a tall, thin, swarthy man, conducted the Portuguese bartering with the help of an old Tlingit translator.
“Has he ruined all of
these, as he did with the batch we purchased two years ago?” the mate asked the translator, while inspecting each of the women, lifting up their skirts as he did so.
“He wants to know if Anah has made any of these ones pregnant,” the translator said in Haida to Klixuatan and Anah.
Klixuatan glanced at Anah.
Anah smirked.
The mate didn’t wait for an answer but pointed to six of the young women, the prettiest ones, two of whom were white, two black, and two natives, then nodded for his mate to hand a small bag of gold coins over to Klixuatan. He then motioned for the skiff holding off shore to land and unload its goods - a small cannon, several leather bags of grape shot, and a dozen barrels of powder.
Referring the seven women and the four men not chosen, he laughed, “He can keep these ones and try to pedal them at the Tsimshian potlatch at Three Spirits.”
Then he noticed Jacob.
Jacob, a collar around his neck, was tethered next to the Haida long boat by a chain.
Walking over to long boat, the mate leered, looking Jacob up and down.
“And what about this little one?” he asked the translator.
Jacob withdrew a step as the mate attempted to touch him on the thigh. When the mate persisted, this time attempting to fondle him, Jacob gasped.
Then suddenly Jacob recovered and rushed the surprised mate.
“Leave me alone!” Jacob screamed, biting the man on the hand, then doubling him over with a kick in the groin.
Klixuatan, laughing as the embarrassed mate picked himself up, pointed to two of the Haida warriors who had bandages on their hands.
“This little wolverine is the son of a powerful white tyee,” he said to the translator. “Worth much more than your Portuguese can pay.”
“They call him Little Wolverine,” the translator told the mate, who was still recovering from the blow. The mate had started to reach for his knife, but withdrew it when he saw Anah’s warning expression.
“A fresh one, eh?” the mate said to the translator, when he finally righted himself from the blow. “I’d take the little son of a bitch off their hands. I’d break him good.”
“My father will come and kill you!” Jacob yelled.
Anah and Klixuatan exchanged a look, smiling.
“Not for sale,” Klixuatan said.
While watching the Portuguese slavers rowing back to the ship with their new possessions, the shaman said to Anah, “You must harness the little wolverine’s rage, Anah. It is powerful.”
Anah did not disagree. From the time he had defeated Isaac, the big tyee, and looked into his dying eyes, Anah knew he had killed one with a special magic who had bestowed a curse onto him. Fascinated in a way he did not understand, he now knew he needed to watch Jacob to see if he had the same power as had the tyee, his father.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
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Anah and Jacob
On the fourth night in safe harbor, Anah brought Isaac’s decaying head into the tent where Klixuatan’s wife kept Jacob drugged and bound. He compared the blackening face of the trophy to Jacob’s sleeping visage. He returned the next night as well, again bringing the head right next to the boy’s face. And it was there—the same sweep of the brow and deep-set eyes, the determined jutting jaw, strangely similar between the grimacing movements of a child in his drugged dreams and the now exaggerated, stretched features on the trophy.
The smell from the head was becoming putrid, and he would have to skin the face and scalp off soon, then tan it quickly if he were to keep it from rotting. There would be some value to that skin, he thought. Perhaps he could seize some of the tyee’s power with it.
In the cold three weeks from the time they landed by the Campbell and then moved farther north to the inland side of the channel, as Klixuatan had advised, Anah observed Jacob as often as he could. There was something about the boy.
Anah could not comprehend what it was, but it was related to the curse, he was certain. And thus while watching, sedentary during the healing of the deep chest wound from the death struggle with the boy’s father, Anah began to think of his own early childhood, a period of his life that remained confusing to him.
He had always been ashamed that he had been unable to grow up fast enough to protect his family, and yet, he missed the happier times when he was a child, when the colors were softer. The pervasive, seething anger he felt from the time he lost his sisters had evaporated his childhood, like the way the bitter fog of a sudden cold Southerly immediately smothered a spring’s early morning sun.
Early on, before most men, Anah had become an adult, with all his adult appetites at once accelerated and intensified, but with none of the wisdom or temperance necessary that would allow him to live safely with other men.
Despite adherence to a strict warrior’s discipline, taught over the years by the harsh lessons of Little Raven, Anah had never learned civil restraint because Little Raven and Klixuatan encouraged him to indulge all his passions, believing that would promote the reinvigoration of their clan.
As Anah watched Jacob, he wondered whether this boy might grow up quickly as he had, driven by a desperate need for survival and vengeance. Was this boy a replica of himself? Was this somehow part of the curse?
On the fifteenth day of Jacob’s captivity, he ordered Klixuatan gradually to begin reducing the drugs. He told the shaman to untether Jacob two days later and, with Klixuatan, watched to see if the boy would flee.
He did not.
Still, Anah and Klixuatan continued watching the boy, unsettled, for Anah had observed what Klixuatan had seen. He understood that Jacob had a smoldering fire in him, which the shaman told him was likely ready to burst forth if left uncontained.
In the hours after his capture, the boy had fought so vigorously that Klixuatan had had to strike him repeatedly and then bind him tightly to try to stop him from provoking retribution from others. All of the men now referred to him as “Little Wolverine” because of the painful bites and scratches Jacob had given them.
One warrior’s deep bite marks from Jacob had festered, despite the poultices the shaman had applied. Drugging Jacob was the only thing that had worked to keep the boy down.
Klixuatan, for his part, would have killed any other child with such venom. But he knew about the curse the five year old’s father had made on Anah. Killing the boy would only make it worse.
They had to contain his spirit.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Jacob was watching them, also.
As his delirium dispersed and his exhaustion diminished, he began to understand his dilemma. And then, after looking without success for the other boy he had seen in the tent on the journey up the sound, he realized he now was the lone white in the encampment.
He became aware of the difference between those who were enslaved and those who had the freedom to move about freely. But the difference was more than the tethers; it was the depressed countenances and fearful actions that distinguished the captives when they were spoken to by others. And they never fought back when pushed or shoved.
On one of the few times he saw any resistance from one of the slaves—a heavily tattooed young native woman who looked the same age as his Aunt Corrie—he saw her receive a severe beating that left her in a bloodied mess. After the beating, the old crone, Klixuatan’s woman, who had been in the boat with him, went to her and helped her up, berating the woman while she administered water and covered her with a blanket.
When the slave pushed Klixuatan’s woman away and angrily spit out several bloody teeth at her, he saw the shaman stand and quietly walk over, pull the hapless captive’s head back by the hair, and cut her nose off right down to the flat of her face.
After witnessing that, Jacob kept quiet.
And he watched.
In the night, shivering in the tent under a lean
-to that looked like it had been present for many seasons, he thought back over the events that had brought him here, a dark passage, and he was alone. With each breath, his ribs hurt from the kicks he had received from one of the men he had bitten. He held himself from coughing to avoid the stabbing pains beneath a deep black bruise on his right side. For two days after that beating, his pee was dark brown.
Despite all that he had seen, Jacob told himself he was not afraid.
At first, he tried not to look at the line of rotting heads impaled on tall poles surrounding the encampment, placed there, he realized, to protect the tribe from enemies and keep its slaves trapped inside. But after a few days, he was able to look up at the totems. And on the fourth day, he forced himself to consider the features of the spiked head closest to his tent.
It was covered with flies and maggots, and much of the skin and deeper flesh had been eaten away, exposing all the teeth on the left side of the face. The hair was a silky black and straight, short enough that it must have been a man’s head.
From his tent, he stared at it for a long time.
The next day, he walked up to each of the other heads, ten in all, and studied each of them, each one in a different state of decomposition. All were males, but he could not tell their ages or their races, except for the three that had beards, the heads of white settlers most likely.
The head he thought he had seen when they had first landed—the one that looked like his father’s—was not among them. It had to have been a dream. His father was too strong and great a fighter to have succumbed, he tried to reassure himself.
Jacob watched and knew he was being watched by everyone in the camp.
He saw that the big warrior who had the chest bandage had to be their tyee, for when that man spoke or gestured, everyone turned to him, some stooped, and a few cowered.
Jacob felt contempt for them. He wasn’t going to be afraid of that man.
And every night he reached into his pocket and felt for the reassurance of the small collection of treasures that had been there the day he was captured. He pulled them out when he was sure he was alone, reexamining them one by one: a piece of sand-polished blue glass from the beach near his home, the beak of a downed eagle he had found one day while walking with Sarah, a lead musket ball his father had given him while molding bullets, and a small ball of multicolored twine with a hundred knots tying the bits and pieces together.
