Ernie moved the items about with his toe. “Looks like they’re moving in,” he whispered. “That’s typical,” he said as he turned and walked away.
“Chop, chop, Cookie!” Mr. Cameron called out to the Chinese man, as he removed his bowler hat. He mopped his balding head with his handkerchief. “My throat is as dry as those wooden gods we’ve come to photograph.”
The cook pulled together a triangle of beached logs and built a fire for his iron kettle in the middle. The soldier and the tattered man set about erecting the tents.
As they supped their tea, Jonny eavesdropped on their conversation.
“You don’t think they actually worship those poles?” the elder nun asked in horror.
“You cannot fail to notice that they give them a place of honour,” the priest said. He pointed to the new pole with the spread wings in front of the chief’s lodge. “It is a slightly different shape but it is the cross.” He turned to the young nun. “We will give them rosaries. Sister Bernice will teach them their Ave Marias.”
The woman undid the ribbons of her straw bonnet and removed it. “How wonderful not to have to concern oneself with the right bonnet for the right occasion,” she said. She pulled her dark hair from the tight knot at the nape of her neck and shook it loose. “It will be a relief to remove this ridiculous clothing.”
“I suppose she will be traipsing about in man’s pants while we’re on shore,” the older nun said with a sniff.
The younger nun sipped at her tea in silence.
“The custom that dictates women put on as many layers as an onion is ridiculous,” the hatless lady retorted, having overheard the remark. “By the time one gets dressed, farmers have finished half their work in the fields.”
“Your gear is safely stowed,” the tattered man said to her as she removed her sou’wester. “I’m just not sure which biscuit tin holds yer plates.”
The soldier placed a box of shells next to him on the log, and proceeded to clean his double-barreled rifle with a greasy rag.
“The one tied with string,” the woman said. “I’m afraid the wet will have tightened it.”
“Here,” the tattered man said to the soldier, “lend us your pocket knife.”
“Who spoke?” The soldier asked, looking up and around at the air. “Was it that gold-digging dog from Dawson?”
“Yep,” replied the man, “and as proud of it as any man in a uniform.”
“Ask that little heathen haunting our camp for his hatchet,” the soldier replied.
Jonny’s hand automatically went to the head of the hatchet hanging from his belt. To cover his understanding of what the soldier had just said, he pretended to brush away an imaginary spider crawling up his leg.
But the eyes of the gold miner narrowed.
I just gave myself away, Jonny thought, turning and heading back to the lodge. He knows I understand English.
16
Old Tom
Silver Cloud and Tommy-Two approached the group of visitors as the sun set.
“Welcome to our village,” the chief’s son said.
“Hip, hip, hurray!” Mr. Cameron said, speaking past the pipe stem in his mouth. “He speaks the King’s English.”
“This is Silver Cloud,” Tommy-Two said. “She is our medicine woman.”
Mr. Cameron lowered his pipe. “I thought all you people had medicine men.”
The lady photographer stepped forward and clasped Silver Cloud’s hand. “A woman of medicine!” she exclaimed. “How delightfully unconventional for 1862.” She directed her gaze to Mr. Cameron. “I am sure her patients won’t refuse to patronize her because she is a woman.”
“Silver Cloud is the greatest medicine woman of all,” Tommy-Two said. “She captured my lost soul and returned it.”
“Did you hear that, Sister Cecile?” the elder nun hissed. “How utterly ridiculous.”
“Do they even know the Lord’s Prayer?” the young nun asked.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Silver Cloud,” said the woman. “My name is Agnes Atkinson. I am travelling through your beautiful country creating a collection of photographs.” She glared at Mr. Cameron as she said, “Even though I am not a man, perhaps you will let me take your picture?”
Silver Cloud turned to Tommy-Two and murmured a few words. He nodded. Silver Cloud grunted and nodded as well.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the man in the bowler hat. “I am Phillip Reginald Cameron, Knight of the Primrose League, on special assignment to the British Government.” He opened the small tin in his hand and offered it to Silver Cloud, “Menthus pastille?”
Lowering her eyes, Silver Cloud shook her head. Mr. Cameron shrugged and returned the tin to his vest pocket.
“My father, the Chief, invites all of you to attend a celebration in honour of your visit,” Tommy-Two announced. “Please come to his lodge, tomorrow at sunset.”
“That means we won’t have to eat bacon and bannock for dinner,” Mr. Cameron said, thumping his chest. “I’m sick of this heartburn.”
“Will there be meat?” the elder nun asked. “We can’t eat meat on a Friday.”
The tattered man, who Jonny now knew was a gold miner, approached Tommy-Two. “Tell the chief, we will all attend and thank him most gratefully for the honour of the invitation.”
Tommy-Two smiled. “We will begin the preparations,” he said and turned to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” the gold miner called out. “What’s your name?”
Tommy-Two hesitated for a moment. “They call me Tommy-Two,” he said.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” the gold miner said, slapping his thigh. “My name is Tom, too. I guess you’ll have to call me Old Tom so as not to confuse anyone.”
Tommy-Two grinned. “Old Tom it is,” he said shaking the man’s hand.
“Where does the kid with the hatchet live?” Old Tom asked.
“Jonny Joe lives in the forest,” Tommy-Two said. “He’s only here for a while.”
The gold miner, to Tommy-Two’s surprise, spoke in the Native tongue. “Tell him,” he said, “to meet me at my fire on the beach tonight.”
The sun sank in a crimson splendour. The low-hung moon hid off and on behind the clouds when Jonny approached the miner’s campfire. “Klahawya cheechako,” he said.
“You can drop the game with me,” Old Tom said. “I already figured you speak English as well as I do.” He gestured for Jonny to sit.
“No tent for you?” Jonny asked.
“Naw,” the man said. “The Chinaman sleeps beside their fire. I sleep beside my own.” He patted the sand. “Tell me what a blue-eyed kid like you is doing in this neck of the woods. How come you speak traders’ language and not Native?”
“English is my first language,” Jonny said. “I just learned the other at school.”
“You must have had a white mother,” the miner said. “A mother always talks to her child in her own language. If your mum had been Indian, you’d know it better.”
“I have no idea who my mother or father was,” Jonny said, relieved to be speaking so plainly. “I only knew the priests and nuns at the orphanage.”
“So you were a foundling,” the miner said. “No wonder you’re not letting on to that old wooden priest and his two saintly sisters. Your secret is safe with me. Just grunt and shrug whenever they ask you anything.”
The gold miner poked at his fire with a stick. “My mother was a Native,” he said. “My father belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company. He went back to the old country when I was seven and left me with my uncle to be educated. But, since I was a sikum si’wash, he put me to work on the woodpile from morning to night. When my father returned, he almost killed his own brother for spending the money that he’d left for my education.”
“So you don’t know how to read or write?” Jonny asked.
“Don’t know a B from a hornet,” Old Tom said with a grin, “even though my father tried to teach me.” Reaching into his wide-brimmed
hat on the sand, he took out a duck egg. He used the stick to crack the shell and swallowed the contents in one gulp. He threw the shell into the fire and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “My father took me with him to the Hudson’s Bay Company post,” he said, “I tried my hand as an apprentice to a blacksmith but I turned out to be a pretty good scout, knowing how to pick up on nature’s clues.”
Jonny stared into the fire. “Did you really mine for gold?” he asked.
Old Tom picked up his stick and drew in the sand. “The news of the strike on Yukon fields flashed around the world by wire, mouth, and moccasin telegraph. Steamers flowed into Athabasca. From there, gold miners travelled by raft, dugout, scow, and canoe to find their fortune in Dawson. I decided to take my chance with the rest of them.”
“Did you find gold?”
“I found plenty, knowing the lay of the land better than most. I could dress just as fancy as that pompous Mr. Cameron, but I’m spending all my money on land.”
“What kind of land?”
“Land of the Great North,” the miner said. “I’ve had my fill of living in a public house, living on bacon and tea.” He looked out at the starry sky and sighed. “Dawson City is nothing but opera houses, dance halls, and saloons full of whooping drunks.”
“White men?” Jonny asked in surprise. The priests said only Indians behaved that way.
They sat for a moment watching the stars.
“Where are you planning to go?” Jonny asked.
“Well,” the old miner said. “Just before Miss Atkinson pointed out your smoke, I saw a piece of land that interested me.” He pointed his stick across the bay. “Right across the bay,” he said, “there’s a fine seam of coal exposed on the river bank. Tar, too, oozing out of every fissure.” He rubbed his hands together. “A piece of land like that would keep me busy during the day and warm at night. You know anything about that land?”
“I’ve only been there once,” Jonny said in truth. “But we could investigate tomorrow.”
“Sounds good to me,” the old miner said stretching out on the sand. He put his hat over his face. “I’ll meet you on the beach at sun-up. We gotta be back in time for our big party.”
Jonny raced back to the lodge. “Ernie!” he shouted. “That old miner wants to go across the bay. I thought you’d like to go, too.”
“You sure you don’t just need me to paddle?” Ernie said, rubbing his friend’s head.
17
Photographs
The villagers stared at Miss Agnes Atkinson when she strode by them the next morning in trousers and a sou’wester. She climbed a large rock along the shore and sat down staring out at the waves. “The water is so blue,” she said with a loud sigh. “If only I could catch it in my photographs.”
Sister Bernice sat on top of a log. She held her bible as if she was about to give a sermon. Father Luke covered a rock with an embroidered cloth to make an altar and dressed it with a little bell, his bible, and candlestick.
The Chinese man busied himself at the mouth of the river that flowed down from the mountain. He scooped sand into a flat pan, held it below the surface, and shook it, looking for gold specks. “No!” he yelled as the cloud of sand that floated away left nothing but rocks.
The soldier laughed out from the beach.
Sister Cecile handed out rosaries on the beach. “The rosary,” she explained to a group of young mothers examining the beads, “is what you say to the Mama of neiska Papa.”
One of the children snatched a rosary from his mother’s hand and ran off down the beach giggling. The mother turned to watch and smiled.
“These Indian parents are too easy on their children,” Sister Bernice complained in a loud voice. “A critical part of any child’s rearing is breaking their wild nature.”
From her perch Agnes spied a woman lifting a cedar plank from a big hole in the sand. She climbed down, walked over, and peered into the pit of hot coals and rocks covered with steaming seaweed and grass. The plank had three grooves carved into it. The woman bent the soft wood along the grooves to form three sides of a box. In fascination, Agnes watched the woman as she pegged in the fourth side. “That’s ingenious,” she remarked, as the woman fitted the base and attached a lid.
“It’s a cooking box,” Tommy-Two said from behind. “When she puts hot stones in, they boil the water.”
“You mean the box is water tight?” Agnes asked. “I’d give the shirt off my back for a box like that.
Tommy-Two glanced at Agnes’s striped shirtwaist blouse fastened with tiny pearl buttons. “That would be a good trade,” he said with a glint in his eye. “My mother would be happy to find you one with a decorated lid.”
“I’d like to photograph the process,” Agnes said. “This is a far more interesting subject than Miss Mary Elizabeth Buckingham next to her music stand,” she murmured.
The half-naked child carrying the rosary kicked sand up against her trousers as he dodged a playmate. “Or,” she added in a loud voice, for the benefit of the nuns, “children in clothes so tight they can’t breathe.”
Agnes kicked apart the legs of the tripod and planted them firmly into the sand. She lifted the polished mahogany box from its oilskin cover, removed the top panel, and mounted it. Using the small brass knob, Agnes pulled the camera into place. A hush came over the crowd when she raised the hinged panel at the front and reversed the large round lens.
“It’s just like a big eye,” she said to Tommy-Two. “All the chief has to do is look at it.”
Tommy- Two watched his adopted father adjust the carved bone clip that fastened his cloak. He smiled with affection as the chief leaned forward to stare the eye down.
“He looks too fierce,” Agnes said as she raised the back panel and lowered the first glass plate. “Tell him to smile.”
Agnes lifted the black cloth and stuck her head into the box. As she turned the focus knob, she gave muffled directions out to Tommy-Two.
“Tell Mrs. Chief to get closer,” she said. “And tell her that her hat is a bit crooked.”
Finally, all was to her liking.
“Ready?” she asked as she clicked the shutter.
“Wonderful,” she said to the chief’s wife. “Why would I want to spend my day posting letters and playing the piano when I can take photographs like this?”
Meanwhile, Sister Cecile withdrew a carved figure of the Virgin Mary from a blue velvet bag, and placed it on a rock. “Sagalie Mama,” she told the women watching.
The women caressed the bare feet of the splendid carving and gestured to theirs. They stroked her blue tunic and touched her crown of stars.
The chief’s wife moved away from Agnes to see what the women were praising. Her face filled with pain as the nun explained, with the help of Tommy-Two, that the woman held her empty palms upward because her son had been taken from her. The chief’s wife turned to Tommy and issued orders.
“My mother wants to build a small house for this unfortunate woman,” he said. “She does not want her to be left to the weather like the other carvings in the village.”
“A shrine,” Sister Cecile exclaimed clapping her hands. “Yes, we will build a Sagalie illahhee for the Virgin Mary, Holy Mother of God and Queen of the Angels, a shrine, right here on the beach.”
The women spent the afternoon erecting a platform of wood, walls of smooth beach stones, and a roof of evergreen on the beach. The nuns, followed by a procession of villagers, carried the statue of Mary to the small home on the pebbled shore.
“We will now say the Lord’s Prayer,” Sister Bernice instructed them once the Mother of God was in residence. Folding her hands in prayer, she began, “Neiska Papa, klaksta mitlite kopa saghailie.”
The women put their hands together like hers and repeated her words.
When they were finished Sister Cecile turned to the other nun. “Their love of Mary is so evident,” she said. “I wish we had a statue of her for every house. She could preside over and govern these dea
r innocent people.”
“They might even cease production of these wooden idols,” Sister Bernice remarked.
Mr. Cameron, like all graduates of the Woolich Military Academy, drew topographical maps with the utmost care. The villagers watched as he worked on his survey of the coast.
The youngest nun glanced at his map. “I have such a remarkable inability to draw,” she said as she fanned her face with a branch of aspen. She turned to Agnes. “I assume you travelled to the Alps and Italy sketching.”
“I am incapable of reproducing the slightest fragment of the universe using a pencil,” Agnes replied. “As a girl, I was not allowed to venture far from the courtyard of my family manor. In the winter, the cold kept me close to the fireplace in the library.”
“Whatever made you decide to travel?” the wide-eyed young nun asked.
“My father’s books taught me that there were a thousand different places in the world and I ached to see just one. When I found The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Talbot, I thought, by the title, I would teach myself how to draw. But the book was about photography. From then on, all I wanted to do was travel the world taking photographs.”
“We travel to bring the word of God to the wilderness,” Sister Beatrice said in a cold voice. “It is our duty.”
“It is my duty,” Agnes responded, “to bring the wilderness to God’s people.”
Seeing Silver Cloud approach, Agnes called out. “Cookie, bring me a pail of salted water.” She took the branch of aspen from the young nun and said, “Sister Cecile, get me a sheet of your writing paper.”
Agnes bathed the sheet of writing paper in the salty solution as Silver Cloud, the nuns, and the villagers looked on. Then she took a vial from her biscuit tin and covered the paper with a solution. She laid the aspen branch on the paper and put it on a rock to dry. Within moments the paper darkened. When Agnes removed the leaf, an exact replica of the branch remained behind.
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