I Heard The Owl Call My Name

by Margaret Craven

  PART TWO

  The depth of sadness

  8

  NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME since Mark’s coming, the whole tribe was in residence and all the men were home from the fishing. Three days before Christmas, one of the seiners had brought the young people — those in their teens — from the church residential school at Alert Bay, and two of the largest canoes had met them at the float and brought them up-river. They had arrived at slack tide before the snowfall, the canoes grounding on the sandbars, the men climbing out into the icy water to shove, and push, to carry the girls to the bank, everyone laughing and the girls clutching the presents they had made at school for their parents. Mark had thought he had never seen such a joyous burst of bright-eyed youth.

  But after Christmas, when the snow turned to slush and the rain fell, the children were kept inside and the men played La-hell in the social hall long into the night, Mark felt a strange little wind of dissent which seemed to whisper in the firs, to precede him, to follow him wherever he went.

  He spoke of it to old Peter, the carver, who was down with a cold.

  ‘Peter, what is it? What is this unease that is now in the village?’ and the old man looked at him long and carefully before answering.

  ‘It is always so when the young come back from the school. My people are proud of them, and resent them. They come from a far country. They speak English all the time, and forget the words of Kwákwala. They are ashamed to dip their food in the oil of the óolachon which we call gleena. They say to their parents, “Don’t do it that way. The white man does it this way.” They do not remember the myths, and the meaning of the totems. They want to choose their own wives and hus­bands.’

  He faltered as if what he was going to say was too painful to utter.

  ‘Here in the village my people are at home as the fish in the sea, as the eagle in the sky. When the young leave, the world takes them, and damages them. They no longer listen when the elders speak. They go, and soon the village will go also.’

  ‘Kingcome will be one of the last to go, Peter.’

  ‘Yes, but in the end it will be deserted, the totems will fall, and the green will cover them. And when I think of it, I am glad I will not be here to see.’

  On the little organ in the church Mark had left a carton of books his sister had sent for Christmas. One day he noticed the lid of the carton was up and a book missing. The next day the book was back and another gone, and when he went into the church on the third day, one of the boys who was home from school was sitting on the bench by the organ reading.

  It was Gordon, whose father had been lost in a heavy sea in the Queen Charlotte straits. He looked up. He stood up and came forwards with the book. He was not embarrassed. He had even forgotten to be shy.

  ‘This word,’ he said eagerly, ‘what does it mean?’ and Mark explained the meaning and he said, ‘I have some other new books you might enjoy seeing. I’ll leave them here for you.’

  He took over the books the next afternoon and found the boy waiting. On the pew beside him was a mask. ‘It’s the giant mask,’ Gordon said. ‘The thong that ties it on is broken. Peter is going to mend it for me. They will need it in the dancing.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  The boy held it up.

  ‘Yes. See how thin it is. The modern ones are thick.’ He added, shyly, ‘It is my great-grandmother’s hair.’

  The mask was black with red lips and abalone eyes. When Mark took it into his hands, he felt almost as if he held a strong, proud, living face, so beautifully was it carved.

  ‘My father was offered three thousand dollars for it,’ Gordon said, ‘but we do not want to sell it.’

  ‘No — only to a museum where the world can see it —only then.’

  Just before the end of the holiday, Mark heard in the village the first sound from the world outside. A jet plane broke the sound barrier. At first he thought it was a slide on Whoop-Szo, and he ran out of the vicar­age. The sound caught in the inlets, tossed from one steep mountainside to another, echoing and reverberat­ing, and receding slowly to echo and re-echo far, far away. It lasted several minutes, and he looked around to see a curious sight.

  None of the older Indians had come out, only the young, the children, running excitedly up and down the path, the young people in a group by themselves. And Gordon.

  Gordon stood motionless, head up.

  Mark went over to him slowly.

  ‘When I was a small boy I used to visit my grand­mother in one of the little prairie towns in the mid-continent,’ he said. ‘And the sound I listened for was the long, shaky whistle of the freight train in the night. It was the eeriest sound I ever heard, and it seemed to call to me from the big world, and even then I knew I would answer it. I would go. Is this not the way you feel now?’

  The depth of sadness in the boy’s eyes deepened, as Peter’s had deepened when he spoke of his village, and he said, ‘Yes.’ That was all.

  On Sunday after church the young people returned to school. Many of the tribe went to the river’s edge to see them off in the canoes. And the young people regret­ted going and wanted to go, and the elders wanted to keep them and were relieved when they went. The little dissent went with them, and the village was at peace.

  But not for long. When the January storms tempered a little, Mark managed to reach the other villages for the first time in a month, and he stopped at the float store to pick up the mail sack for the village.

  On the evening of the day he returned, Keetah knocked at the vicarage to tell him that Mrs Hudson, her grandmother, was ill.

  He found the old matriarch sitting very straight by her fire, her breath coming in short gasps, and he knew her well enough by now to guess that Mrs Hudson was more upset than ill. He asked how she was. She was bad. It was her heart again. She was sure of it — she was determined she was not long for this world.

  ‘And what is it that has upset you?’ he asked her, and Mrs Hudson shook her head, making a strange little aye-aye-aye sound that must have come down through centuries in a chant of sorrow, and she told him sadly that her granddaughter, Keetah’s sister, had written (and he himself had brought the letter in the mail sack) that she was going to marry a white man.

  ‘But this happens often and frequently very success­fully. There are even white women who have married Indians and been asked to sit on the councils.’

  Mrs Hudson did not hear him. ‘She will no longer be an Indian. Legally she will be white. She will have no right to come here, except as a visitor.’

  But you can go and visit her.’

  ‘Yes. And when we go, she will say, “Not today, grandmother. Come tomorrow. My husband is home today.” And her husband will say, “Do not ask your grandmother tomorrow. I do not want my aunt to see her.” ‘

  ‘No,’ Keetah said. ‘No. My sister will not leave us. My sister is not like that. I know her. She will never, never be ashamed of us.’

  Mrs Hudson lifted her fine old head.

  ‘Of this I’m not afraid,’ she said simply. ‘What I fear is that we will be ashamed of her,’ and she was silent.

  Mark sat beside her. When her breathing had eased and quieted, he told her of the Navaho, one of the great, proud tribes who lived in the southwest of the United States, so many hundreds of miles distant.

  ‘One of the great chiefs of the Navaho said to his tribe, “We can hear the white man talking, but we can­not reach him. Education is the ladder. Take it.” ‘

  Mrs Hudson said, ‘You do not understand. My grand­daughter goes to a world of which she knows nothing. It will destroy her and I cannot help her. To watch her go is to die a little.’

  And Keetah took the old hands in hers and said, ‘She will come to us. I know she will come, and she will not change. You will see.’

  9

  THIS WAS THE TIME OF YEAR when the deepest beliefs of the tribe were relived in the dances; no stranger asked, no photographs permitted. When Mark walked along the path past the long house,
he could see masks in readi­ness, but he asked no questions and was told nothing.

  In January the men of the tribe went to Gilford vil­lage to dig dams, and returned to Kingcome each week­end. Now the tide dominated all life. When the tide was out, clamming was on. When clamming was on, all else waited, even church.

  One late afternoon when Mark and Jim were going to the most remote of the villages, they were passed by seiners headed for Gilford, and Mark was asked by radio-telephone if he would hold Evensong in the long house before a dance-potlatch to be given that evening by an elder in preparation for his own death.

  When they reached Gilford village, many boats were tied up at the float, and when they entered the long house, more than three hundred Indians were waiting, the old carved house posts casting their shadows by lantern light, and by the light of the fire burning on the dirt floor in the centre of the great room. And when Evensong was over the coffee was served, Mark saw that almost all the tribe from Kingcome was here. With Keetah was her sister.

  She was a pretty girl, her hair carefully cut and waved, her fingernails red, the heels of her slippers very high, and on her face that radiance of fulfilment, of all the wonders of the new life she was about to enter.

  The two sat apart, talking earnestly, and though Mark could not hear the words, he was sure he knew them.

  ‘Nothing will change. Tell me — tell me you don’t feel I have deserted you.’

  ‘Of course not. You know that. I want you to go.’

  He watched their faces, and he knew each meant desperately what she said because they loved each other, and deep inside surely each knew the words were false, that the true words were those unspoken. Which was the braver, the one who left, or the one who stayed?

  He said to Jim, ‘Which is the man Keetah’s sister is going to marry? Is he here? I want to meet him.’

  ‘There is only one stranger. He is with the men from the forestry boat who are friends of the tribe.’ But in the flickering light of the fire and the lanterns Mark could not see clearly the face.

  Then the potlatch began. In the back of the room was the orchestra — the hollow log with the painted ends which was the drum, propped on a wheelbarrow, and the older men with the carved batons and the ancient rattles. The elder pounded on the ground with his long talking stick and welcomed the guests in Kwákwala and the orchestra began its rhythmic beat.

  The women danced first, dressed alike in their red and black ceremonial blankets, with the two-headed serpent on the back or the fir tree outlined in handmade buttons. They turned right because the wolf turned right. When they shook their headdresses, the air was filled with duck-down, and the light caught on the blankets, the ermine-tail robes and the spread aprons.

  Then came the Grouse Dance, brought to the tribe by marriage from River’s Inlet. When the elder introduced it, Jim translated his words :

  ‘A little boy went to the woods to snare grouse and he was sure he had caught one because he could feel it pulling and jerking. But each time he lost it, and thought someone had taken it. The little boy lay down under a fir and went to sleep, and he could hear the grouse still drumming in the snare. This dance is his dream.’

  ‘Now watch carefully. The first character wears the door mask, and when it opens the grouse will enter call­ing softly. If you were an Indian walking beside a stream in the woods, knowing the woods as only an Indian knows them, everything you saw would come to life in this dance with all its meaning and its beauty.’

  The dance lasted three hours, and there were twenty-six characters, each with his masks, his songs and his dances. In came the old stump looking for its trunk, a little green spruce growing from its top. In came the mossy log, the fish swimming up-stream, the long face, the laughing face, the giant and the skull of the man lost in the woods. Through it all the Indians sat with­out sound or movement, utterly attentive.

  Last was the Moon Dance, performed in pantomime by two men, the Full Moon and the Half Moon. Which would come out tonight? ‘I will come out tonight. I am more powerful than you.’ But I will stay out longer.’ They taunted each other, fingers to noses, and this time the audience shrieked with laughter, taunting each in turn, and applauding the favourite.

  When the dance was over there were refreshments and gifts of china, linen and cutlery, and a fifty-cent piece for each guest except the family of the host.

  ‘Where is the man Keetah’s sister is to marry? I can­not find him,’ Mark asked Jim.

  ‘He is gone. Keetah’s sister is taking him to Kingcome tomorrow. You can meet him there.’

  They walked down the wet, dark path to the float, climbing over the railing and the deck to a seiner to reach their boat, and in the galley they discussed the potlatch. Was it true that in the old days the gifts had been so lavish they had beggared whole families and tribes, and made others rich?

  Jim agreed it was true. ‘Even when I was a small boy stoves, refrigerators and washing machines were given as gifts. It is true that families gave all they had. But when the government forbade the great dance-pot­latches, it gave us nothing to take their place, and changed the deepest purpose of our being. Once they were like the coronations of a king, or the inauguration of a president. They were the great rituals of my people, solemn and important. Now the meaning is gone.’

  ‘But Jim, isn’t it true they were based on a chief’s desire to shame his rival, even if it meant his tribe and his children went hungry?’

  ‘Yes, and it was based also on generosity. My people have forgotten how to give. You do not understand how it was once. When I was seven my grandfather taught me my family’s dances, and he gave a dance-pot­latch in my honour, and asked the tribes of the other villages. Whether they came was not important. It would have been discourteous not to ask them.

  ‘The guests were billeted in the houses of Kingcome, twenty or thirty to each house, to be fed, to be cared for, and boats came up the inlet, and the canoes brought the guests up the river. Each night one of my relatives gave a great feast of seal, duck or salmon, and a tremendous quantity of gifts was brought from Alert Bay. Each night in the big house there was dancing.’

  ‘Did you dance the Grouse Dance?’

  ‘No, I danced the hamatsa. I remember that for three days my mother kept me shut in my room because the young man bewitched by the cannibal spirit must not be seen until he returns from the woods. I did not understand this and I resented it. On the night of the dance my family hid me in the woods, and when it was dark, I returned to the village calling the hamatsa cry. I have never forgotten it. It was the greatest moment of my life.’

  At dawn with the tide, the forestry boat and the seiners of the guests from the other villages left Gilford. At eight, Mark was summoned by radio-telephone to Tumour Island to transport a sick child to the hospital, at Alert Bay, and when this was done, a gale was blow­ing, and it was too rough to return to Kingcome, so they tied up at the dock, the boat rolling in the swell.

  The next morning after breakfast they started home, the wind still strong, the sky leaden, the snow thick on the mountains. When they came up the inlet they knew that the tribe had returned for the weekend; the float was thickly moored with boats.

  It was very cold on the river, as it was always bitterly cold on the river in the winter. Mark could feel the wind biting through his parka, and because the tide was wrong, they grounded and had to pull the boat over a sand bar. When at last they waded ashore in front of the vicarage, they knew at once something was wrong.

  Farther down the river’s bank they saw a group of the oldsters packing one of the larger canoes with great bundles of clothing as if for a long trek. Mrs Hudson was one of them and when she saw them, she did not speak.

  The village was very quiet, as it had been the day Mark had arrived. But its silence lacked peace. Al­though this was a Saturday and the children were out of school, not a child showed, no Indian hound came running to greet them.

  Mark motioned to Jim that he was going on to the vic
arage, and Jim nodded, and said, softly, ‘I will find out. I will come and tell you,’ but when he came to the vicarage, it was a long time before he spoke.

  ‘Keetah’s sister brought her man to the village the morning after the potlatch. He had his own boat, and her family was proud she had come, and welcomed him. While she showed the women her red fingernails and her new clothes, and told them of her new life, her man was with the men of the family.’

  ‘Yes. And what did he do, Jim?’

  ‘He gave them liquor. When Gordon’s uncle was very drunk, he sold the giant mask. The white man paid fifty dollars for it, and the uncle wrote him a bill of sale. In the morning before it was light, the white man left, and the girl with him.’

  ‘It is possible she did not know of it.’

  ‘Her family does not think so. The old of her family are leaving. They are leaving in shame and sadness. They are going to a deserted village.’

  But how will they live?’

  ‘As my people have always lived. They will live on fish, and clams, and seaweed. Later they will pick berries.’

  ‘I must stop them.’

  ‘You can’t stop them.’

  ‘Then I must go to them. I must talk to them.’

  ‘It won’t help.’

  When Mark walked along the bank to the place where the canoe waited, he knew it was useless. They were ready to go — the old of Keetah’s family, warmly wrap­ped against the cold, and sitting very straight on the narrow wooden seats. As he approached, Keetah and Mrs Hudson came slowly through the black sands, stop­ped, and Mrs Hudson lifted her proud old face and spoke to him slowly.