I Heard The Owl Call My Name

by Margaret Craven

  How much had he accomplished? If he asked him, he knew what the Bishop’s answer would be: ‘You may never know, or perhaps something you have done will reveal itself in Keetah’s child, in Gordon’s life. You have done your small bit.’

  And what had he learned? Surely not the truth of the Indian. There was no one truth. He had learned a little of the truth of one tribe in one village. He had seen the sadness, the richness, the tragic poignancy of a way of life that each year, bit by bit, slipped beyond memory and has gone. For a time he had been part of it, one of the small unknown men who take their stand in some remote place, and fight out their battles in a quiet way.

  When Mark was well into Knight’s Inlet, he came on a strange sight. Two loggers were moving their float camp to a new location. The dwelling houses, the machine shop, the garden and the loading floats, made a double row, all enclosed by boom-sticks, joined end to end with chains. A tugboat had attached its towing cable to the gill-poke at the end of the A-frame float, and was pulling valiantly.

  But the tide was running, and when Mark slowed his boat and drew as close to the tug as he dared, he was sure that the little community was scarcely moving at all, and he opened the cabin door and hailed them.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ and the tugboat captain yelled back they’d made twenty-five miles in twenty-three hours, and four more to go, and Mark yelled back that he’d help with the tow.

  He stayed with the haul for six hours, sometimes at the wheel of his own boat, when a man from the tug relieved him, in one of the dwelling houses on the floats. The Scottish granny Of the two brothers who owned the camp made sandwiches and a pot of tea. The three children showed him the tiny schoolroom where, every morning, Granny taught them. The two wives showed him the light plant, the washing machine, the refrigerator.

  The smaller girl put in his lap Robert Burns, the tomcat, respected by all because last summer when a large brown bear had walked a boom log onto the dwelling float, he had greeted him with such an out­raged screech that the bear had fallen off the log and into the chuck.

  The float camp seemed to stand still, while the green sides of the inlet moved by, slowly and majestically. When the new site was reached and the boats stopped, the two loggers discussed with him for a bit the new logging methods, the greater number of logs, the higher costs. When he left them, these staunch and kindly people, he felt somehow that he had known them all his life.

  Now, beside the compass, he placed the map he had taken from under Calamity’s pillow, watching for the narrow finger of the sea on the left side of the inlet, found and entered it, slowing the boat until it barely moved, seeking the cove Calamity had marked with a cross. When he saw it, he stopped the engine and let the boat drift slowly in.

  At flood tide no eddy moved, no ripple marred the surface. On the water Mark saw reflected the cliffs that rose above the narrow fingerling, the green spruce and cedar, and one huge hemlock that must have been growing when Christ was a little lad. Here he gave the ashes of Calamity to the sea, and when he came to the last words of the committal, ‘Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord,’ he heard the echo of the words come back to him from across the narrow channel, softly and eerily, as if from another world. Then there was no sound but the soft mewing of the gulls nesting in the cliffs.

  ‘Calamity, my friend,’ he thought, ‘you have had a funeral finer than a king’s and this is the way it ought to be, and I have seen it once,’ and he started the engine and went on up the fingerling to its end and anchored there for the night.

  In the morning after breakfast, he started back to the village, and when he passed the site where he had left the float camp, he sounded the whistle and the Scottish granny and the children rushed out of the house to wave and call to him. After that he saw no one; he passed no boat.

  All day long he moved down the longest, and loveliest of all the inlets, and it seemed to him that something strange had happened to time. When he had first come to the village, it was the future that loomed huge. So much to plan. So much to learn. Then it was the present that had consumed him — each day with all its chores and never enough hours to do them. Now time had lost its contours. He seemed to see it as the raven or the bald eagle, flying high over the village, must see the part of the river that had passed the village, that had not yet reached the village, one and the same.

  All day long, on his way back to Kingcome, because he was alone and receptive, the little questions. the observations he had pushed deep within him, began to rise slowly towards the door of the conscious mind which was almost ready to open, to receive them, and give them words: ‘You are tired. You have told yourself that it was due to the winter which was hard on every­one. Deep inside haven’t you known it was more than this? When the Bishop came to the potlatch and lingered after the others had gone, and went into the church by himself, didn’t you guess then it had some­thing to do with you? And your sister? When you took the boys down and lunched with her, did you not see the sadness in her eyes? And in the hospital, don’t you remember the doctor’s face, the look of quiet resignation upon it, and the way he hesitated an instant before answering your questions? And when the Bishop told you of the village, how carefully he did so. Did you not think, “He is anxious I go there. Why”.’

  It was dusk when he entered Kingcome Inlet and moored the boat at the float, and climbed into the speedboat. When he entered the river, the stars were shining, the moon bright also, and he went slowly.

  Soon the huge flights of snow geese would fly over the river on their way back to the nesting place, the spring swimmer would come up the river to the Clearwater, and on the river pairs of cocky, small, red-necked saw-bills would rest, the father flying off when Mark passed and the mother pretending she had broken a wing to lead him away from her little ones. And each would feel the pull of the earth and know his small place upon it, as did the Indian in his village.

  He went slowly up the river. In front of the vicarage he anchored the boat and waded ashore. He trudged up the black sands to the path and stopped. From the dark spruce he heard an owl call — once, and again —and the questions that had been rising all day long reached the door of his mind and opened it.

  He went up the path and the steps, through the liv­ing room and into the kitchen. The lights were on. At the stove Marta was preparing his dinner.

  ‘Marta, something strange happened tonight. On the bank of the river I heard the owl call my name, and it was a question he asked, an answer he sought.’

  She did not say, ‘Nonsense, it was my name the owl called, and I am old and with me it does not matter.’ She did not say, ‘It’s true you’re thin and white, but who is not? It has no importance.’

  She turned, spoon still in her hand, lifting her sweet, kind face with its network of tiny wrinkles, and she answered his question as she would have answered any other.

  She said, ‘Yes, my son.’

  21

  IN THE NIGHT THE HEAVIEST of the spring rains fell in torrents as the young vicar struggled with the one fact of his life about which no man has doubt and yet is never ready to meet. One of the thoughts that com­forted him was from his life here on the up-coast, the simple memory of the many times on the boat when he and Jim had seemed to be heading straight into a cliff or a steep island side only to find at the last moment some little finger of the sea waiting to lead them on. But almost as big as the fact of death was the thought of leaving. How could he return now to the far country he no longer knew, where, while awaiting death, he would be a stranger?

  In the morning the rain had stopped, and the grey sky was broken by sun shining through soft white clouds. In the alders called the ravens, high over the river flew a flock of small birds he had come to know. As yearlings they had passed over the village in the fall, crossing lands they had never seen and with no older bird to guide them. Yet they had known their way to the southern valley where their kind had win­tered for untold centuries, as now they knew their way back to the nesting place.
/>
  He walked slowly to the river bank. All was the same. The children too small to be in school came running to greet him. The older men were emptying rain water from the canoes, and Mrs Hudson was poling out into the current to dump her garbage. The dark eyes held their usual sadness, the voices gentle, the mouths quick to smile, the hands lifting in the usual greet­ing.

  ‘Good morning, Mark.’

  ‘What a rain we had. Did you hear it?’

  ‘The village has become a sponge.’

  ‘But the morning will be splendid.’

  ‘It will not last. We will have another storm by night.’

  They did not know, and how could he tell them? How could he face the pity that could come to the sad eyes? And he tried desperately to speak as usual, and he turned slowly away and walked past the vicarage, and the church, past the Cedar man at the foot of the great totem, following the main path through the quiet vil­lage. When he had passed the last house, which was that of Peter, the carver, he took the little narrow path through the deep wet woods, fragrant from rain, to the glade that was once the old burial ground.

  There he stood alone in the world that had become a waiting room, and when he turned at last, he saw Keetah watching him. She came to him slowly and put her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘I have come to speak for my people, Mark. There is something we wish you to do for us.’

  ‘But of course, Keetah. Anything I am able to do, I will do gladly.’

  ‘Stay with us. Marta has told us. We have written the Bishop and asked that he let you remain here to the end, because this is your village and we are your family. You are the swimmer who came to us from the great sea,’ and he put his arms around her and held her close, find­ing no words to say thank you for the sudden, unex­pected gift of peace which they had offered him in their quiet, perceptive way.

  In the late afternoon of this day there occurred one of those minor emergencies typical of Mark’s life in the village. A young logger, long in the woods, reached the beer parlour at a float store, drank too much, too fast, stole a small motor boat, and headed happily for the straits, despite gale warnings, and predictions of a storm by nightfall. Since his boat was the fastest, Mark was summoned to aid in the search.

  Jim received the message by radio-telephone on the boat and came for Mark at once, and together they went down-river, past the snags and the log jam, and trans­ferred to the larger boat at the float. They went out of the inlet, Jim at the wheel, Mark perched on the stool, binoculars in hand, ready to search the rocks, the reefs, the hidden coves.

  In two hours they had not found the drunken logger. When they reached the place where the boat began to pitch in the tidal sweep that came down from Queen Charlotte Sound, they received word by the radio-tele­phone that the young logger had been found peacefully sleeping it off, his boat neatly stuck between two rocks not three miles from the float store from which he had started.

  ‘And here we are in the cold, wasting oil, and supperless,’ Jim said. ‘I hope he has the good grace to drown himself.’

  ‘He won’t even have a sniffle in his nose. I’ll make us some coffee.’

  They went back in silence, as they had so many times. When they entered Kingcome Inlet, Mark was at the wheel, Jim beside him watching for drift logs in the searchlight.

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I am no longer in the village, take care of Keetah. When you want coffee, don’t bang on the table. Say please and when she hands you the cup, say thank you. You’ll find it most efficacious.’

  ‘What is this efficacious?’

  ‘It means it works. And when you build Keetah a house, let her plan it with you. And don’t leave her alone in the village too long. Take her and the chil­dren with you sometimes on the fishing, and each year take her outside until it is familiar to her. Someday, when the village is no more, you too must cross the bridge.’

  ‘You ask me to do this for Keetah? Why?’

  ‘Because I care for her also — and for you.’

  Then neither spoke, the wake from the bow white in the night. As they neared the float thunder sounded overhead, and lightning cut the sky and struck a tree at the top of the inlet forty yards ahead of the boat and high above them. The tree fell upon the trees below and, weakened by the heavy rains, they fell also, slowly at first, then faster and faster, end over end, until a long jagged strip peeled from the inlet side, and the whole world exploded into sound.

  22

  IN THE VILLAGE THE TRIBE heard the roar of the slide, prolonged and intensified as it was tossed from one steep inlet side to another until, even after the last of the trees had fallen and the waters begun to calm, the echoes still rumbled in the far distance, growing slowly fainter until they too were gone.

  The tribe heard it and knew what it meant as had their ancestors. The sound lay in the oldest, deepest memories and in the myths. The sound was in the name of Whoop-Szo; ‘and the gods that lived on Noisy Moun­tain saw the enemy coming down the river and sent a huge slide to destroy it’.

  In the little cedar houses the men did not wait to light the lamps, but pulled on their shirts and trousers, their jackets and gumboots, seeking their tools and their lanterns. Footfalls sounded softly on the path that led past the dark vicarage to the river bank in a night suddenly starkly still. The water splashed as the men waded to the boats, a woman’s voice following them, ‘Be careful — be careful,’ and the outboard motors sputtered and caught.

  Then they were gone. The women were alone with the young, the old, the sick, as women have been left to wait through all the ages everywhere.

  All night long the women waited. In the morning of the next day one of the men returned to bring news and take back food. The boat of the vicar had been caught in the slide and its wreckage sighted, and from the wreckage they had heard a voice call but they could not draw close enough to identify it. The RCMP had been summoned, the Bishop notified. The logging camps had sent men and boats to help.

  All day long the women waited. But Keetah could not wait quietly with the others. When the bluejay called its name, ‘Kwiss-kwiss-kwiss-kwiss,’ it seemed to ask, ‘Which one? Which one?’ and Keetah went through the village, through the dark, wet trees to the slope of the mountain that rose back to the village, and she climbed to the far-seeing spot from which it was possible to see down the river to the inlet.

  She did not know that her great-great-grandmother had come long ago to the same spot. No one in the tribe remembered now that in the days of the great tribal conflicts, before taking his place in the war canoe each man had blown his breath into a strip of dried kelp, tied the strip into a ring, and placed the ring around the neck of his wife saying, ‘Guard well my breath’. Keetah’s great-great-grandmother had hung the ring at the head of her bed and when she had returned to the house to check it, and found the kelp ring flabby, she had come to this spot to watch for the returning canoes, to see if her husband was in his accustomed place. And she had called loudly upon all the gods, the guardian spirits of the tribe, to help her. ‘Come wolf, come swimmer. Come raven, come eagle’; even upon the cannibal who lived at the north end of the world.

  But Keetah could not choose between Mark and Jim. She prayed for both, waiting hour after hour. When she saw the canoe enter the river and the blanket-wrap­ped figure who sat on the centre crosspiece, she could not tell which he was, and she started back to the village, down the smooth shale, through the dark trees, the devil’s club scratching at her arms.

  When she entered the village, she saw the old men gathered by the ceremonial house, and as she passed them, she heard their voices.

  ‘We must plan carefully. There is much to do.’

  ‘But the Bishop will not come for two days. This gives us time.’

  ‘Yes, but others will come with him. There will be visitors from all the villages and many guests to be housed and fed.’

  ‘We have time. The RCMP has not yet given the permit, and the boat has
not yet brought the box from Alert Bay. It will be late tomorrow before they bring the body and by then all the searchers and the fisher­men will be home to help us.’

  Keetah walked slowly to the vicarage and up the steps to the door, afraid to open it, dreading whichever truth waited her. Then she went in. At the kitchen table sat Jim, his head buried in his arms. He lifted it slowly.

  ‘You have been crying.’

  ‘It is the salt water that stung my eyes. I have not cried since I was eight and made a mistake in the dance, and my mother scolded me.’

  ‘You have been crying because you loved him also. What will you do now?’

  ‘I will fish on my uncle’s boat. In the fall when the fishing days are almost over, I will put up the sides and roof of my house, and in the winter I will finish the inside of the house, and I will ask you to plan it as you wish.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Once I would have sent my sisters to bring you to my house, and thus you would be my wife. Now I will wait. When you come I will not bang on the table when I want coffee. I will not leave you too much alone in the village, and each year I will take you out and show you the big world, because Mark said that when the village is gone, we too must be able to walk across the bridge.’

  ‘When the house is ready, I will marry you.’

  In the evening every house in the village was lighted and there was much talk.

  ‘Who will dig the grave? Who will cut away the underbrush from the path?’ And the young men answered, ‘We will do it.’

  ‘And who will cut the cedar for the wreaths? Who will search the woods for the new green ferns?’ And the children answered, ‘We will go.’

  In the house of Mrs Hudson the young matrons said to her in Kwákwala, ‘There will be many guests. What meat shall we prepare for them?’

  ‘Roast beef.’

  ‘And how much?’