by Thomas Hopp
PART ONE: NEAH BAY
Chapter 1
Neah Bay is a Makah Indian village at the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, which itself is the northwest tip of Washington State and the contiguous United States of America. Five hours from Seattle via ferryboat and a series of ever-narrowing roads, I pulled my Mustang off Bayview Avenue onto a graveled parking area on the brink of an embankment between the beach and the construction site where the grave had been discovered.
It was about noon. The bay was a serene semicircle of smooth water ringed by low banks and flat seaweed-strewn beaches, overlooked by small houses with a backdrop of tall dark evergreen forest. The weather matched our morbid business. A slow, cool breeze off the North Pacific Ocean was laden with billows of gray fog.
Peyton McKean got out of the passenger side and stretched his lanky limbs as though folding himself like a pretzel in the Mustang’s front seat hadn’t agreed with him. Soon, however, he was moving around excitedly. As is his habit at murder scenes and places of strange happenings, he strode along the front of the lot with his bony hands clasped behind his back like a gangly schoolteacher, pondering the lay of the land. His olive-green Stetson safari hat and canvas field coat protected him from the weather, but I felt a chill and zipped the collar of my windbreaker under my chin to keep out the damp air. The bulldozed construction site across the road from our parking spot was a miasma of dark brown muck after days of drizzle. I warned McKean, “I don’t want a speck of mud on this car.” The pristine midnight-blue metallic paint on its hood was dotted with tiny drops of clean rainwater.
He turned and glanced at the Mustang. “The guys in the repair shop did an excellent job,” he remarked.
“They did,” I replied.
“Your shiny toy is in no danger on this trip,” he said. “Even if this turns out to be murder, the perpetrator will have been dead for two centuries. I promise you, Fin, no car chases this time.”
McKean’s dark eyes took on a faraway look as though another thought were crowding into his prodigious mind. He turned a complete circle, gesturing at the neighborhood around us. “I can see why the Spanish chose this site for their fort,” he said.
“Fort?” I joined him in the middle of the empty street, looking vainly for signs of a ruin. “You never mentioned a fort. Especially not a Spanish fort.” I saw nothing but a row of modest cottages, most weathered by sea air and some in need of repair and all splotched on their sides and roofs with green moss. A hillside beyond the houses was thick with lichen-draped bigleaf maple and Sitka spruce trees. “I’ve never heard of any Spanish settlements at all in Washington State.”
“Then your knowledge of local history is inadequate,” McKean replied, “although quite understandable given that nothing remains to suggest a fort ever existed. Its walls were built of timbers, which would, of course, have moldered into the ground long ago. But the entire western end of Neah Bay was once a Spanish stockade.” McKean held up a long, pedantic forefinger. “Capitan Salvador Fidalgo built the fort here in 1792. It was the farthest Spanish outpost north of California, and a fine choice of location.” He swept the area around us with the palm of a hand. “Beach frontage, a stream to provide water year round, and a hillside from which a few cannon could defend the bay against British warships.”
“Why didn’t they stay?”
“They evacuated under mysterious circumstances just a few years after they arrived. They burned their stockade and left no traces - aboveground, anyway.”
“And the grave we came to see? Where’s that?”
“It should be over here somewhere.” McKean moved onto the lot motioning me to follow, which I reluctantly did. The lot was a rectangle of dark brown mud crisscrossed with the tread marks of the bulldozer that had cleared it. That huge, mud-spattered yellow hulk was parked at the back of the lot beside a jumble of giant stumps it had scraped from the land. We went past several stacks of two-by-fours and pallets of construction materials intended for framing a house, and as we picked our way among the water-filled tread marks I chided, “As usual, Peyton, you didn’t warn me about what we’d be getting into.”
“Sorry,” McKean tossed back casually. “Those running shoes were a poor choice compared to my more practical hiking boots.”
Near the center of the lot we approached a dark hole that went straight down into the mire. Its opening was partly covered by a heavy rectangular slab of stone that had been knocked aside by the bulldozer. Inside the triangular opening was the top of a stone staircase that had once been sealed off by the slab.
“Hello!” McKean called into the hole.
“Hello! Hello!” came back a muffled, friendly response from the depths. A moment later, a mud-streaked yellow plastic construction helmet emerged atop the head of a blond-bearded fellow so heavyset that he had to worm his way out of the opening by twisting and turning his body to squeeze past the slab. He wore a yellow Mackinaw raincoat, well filled by a robust chest and smudged with reddish-brown mud. Smudged too were yellow rain pants on his thick legs and black rubber boots and gloves. Once fully emerged from the opening, he stood as tall as lanky Dr. McKean, but carried a weight advantage of about two-to-one. He greeted us with a wide, even-toothed grin and a twinkle in his blue, bespectacled eyes. “Peyton McKean!” he exclaimed, pulling off a glove and thrusting out a stout-fingered hand. “I’m glad to see you!” They shook hands, and then the man turned and clasped my hand in a warm, strong grip. “Phineus Morton, right? Peyton told me he had a driver.”
“Driver and news correspondent,” I corrected, rankled by the notion I was no more than Peyton McKean’s chauffeur.
McKean said, “Fin, this is Leon Curtis, the UW archeology professor who called us here.”
“Welcome to my mud bath,” Curtis said with a grin. Everything about him was streaked with muck, including some traces in his curly blond beard.
McKean gestured down at the opening. “Anything new to report?”
“Sure,” Curtis replied. “Plenty.” His wire-rimmed, slightly fogged glasses had their own smudges of mud. “I’ve been clearing the entry so you guys can get in without getting too dirty. I tried to get Pete Whitehall to move the slab - ” He pointed toward the bulldozer, where I now noticed a small man wrapped in an army-green hooded poncho standing beside it. The man stared at us without moving, with no expression on his face.
“Pete’s having a hard time this morning,” Curtis explained. “Acting kind of weird. Not making too much sense. I think he’s a little spooked. He says Gordon Steel warned him the spirits of the dead would escape if he left this place uncovered. Told him to bulldoze over the hole and go home.”
“Gordon Steel?” McKean asked. “Who’s that?”
“An old Makah buzzard who claims to be a shaman. He’s made it his personal business to meddle in this project. Hangs around here constantly. He’s got Pete pretty nervous about ghosts and spirits. Personally, I think Pete’s gotten himself a little drunk or stoned. He doesn’t look too good.”
Even at a distance of fifty paces Pete Whitehall’s face looked rigid and ghastly pale. He stood stalk-still, as if waiting for someone or something to set him in motion.
McKean was more interested in the crypt opening. “Where are we in relation to the rest of the fort?” he asked.
“Near the center, I think,” Curtis replied. “Under the floor of a storehouse, judging by some traces of wood foundations I found.”
McKean leaned his long frame over the stone slab and peered at it down his long, shepherd-dog nose. “From the looks of that lid,” he said, “someone wanted to keep this place sealed tight. That’s a local type of stone, Cape Flattery conglomerate, I believe. It appears rather hastily hand carved into a slab that
might weigh half a ton. Sufficiently massive to keep anyone from getting in.”
“Or out,” I remarked, glancing again at Whitehall’s spooked expression.
“That’s about right,” Curtis agreed. “And it was sealed and forgotten for more than two centuries. Then last Tuesday, Pete’s dozer knocked the slab off while he was clearing the lot for the builder. You know the rest.”
McKean nodded. “Controversy over whether the burial is Native American or European. Jurisdictional fights between the tribe and the land owner. And, inevitably on a reservation, NAGPRA issues.”
“NAG-what?” I asked McKean, who had pronounced the acronym “Nagpra.”
“N-A-G-P-R-A,” McKean spelled it out. “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, approved by the U.S. Congress in 1990. It restricts what can and can’t be done with Indian burial sites.”
“And makes life difficult for archaeologists,” Curtis added. “Although it has its bright side - fines and imprisonment for illegal collectors and grave robbers.”
“It’s NAGPRA that brought us here,” McKean explained to me. “The DNA tests I intend to carry out will settle the Native-versus-European issue once and for all. Shall we proceed?”
Curtis turned and began to descend the staircase, motioning for us to follow. He wriggled his big body past the stone block as he had done on his way up but when he was about chest deep, an angry shout came from the woods beyond Pete Whitehall. “You there! Keep out of that place. It’s sacred!”
The man who made the outcry emerged from an animal trail and brushed past Whitehall, who remained frozen in place, and came at us. He was a frail old man who hobbled, steadying himself with a tall walking stick. His body was wrapped in a black bearskin cloak that he clasped at the front with his free hand. His forehead was bound by a red felt scarf, tied headband style, and his long gray hair flew wildly on the breeze. Below the cloak his scrawny bowed legs were bare. He was barefoot too, despite the cold and mud.
“Meet Gordon Steel,” Curtis said to us under his breath as the old man approached. The strange old bird stopped a few paces away, wheezing like he had smoked too much over a long lifetime. He let out a guttural, disapproving grunt. A harsh scowl drew his bushy gray eyebrows together. His eyes shone intelligently, but there was no hint of friendliness in his wizened Native American face. His upper lip and chin bristled with wiry gray whiskers. His mouth turned down at the corners pugnaciously. He pointed an arthritic finger at Curtis.
“I thought I told you don’t come around here no more.”
“Tribal elders told me otherwise,” Curtis replied.
Steel’s expression grew darker and his eyes narrowed to slits. “You can get some of those old fools to agree to anything.” Gesturing at McKean and me with his cane, which was topped with the carved head of a raven, he demanded, “Who are these guys?”
“Doctor McKean came from Seattle to get a DNA sample,” Curtis explained, indicating McKean with a gloved hand.
Steel fixed his beady eyes on McKean and glared. As I watched them staring each other down, it dawned on me that McKean had once again sweet-talked me into the path of trouble. My hackles rose at the old man’s hostility.
Steel flinched first and glanced away. “More babalthuds from Seattle,” he muttered angrily to Curtis. “Who says they can take anything from the grave?”
“You know who,” Curtis replied. “I’ve already got permission from the Tribal Council, the Makah Museum, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
“None of them speak for all Makahs,” growled Steel. “Not even the Tribal Council. None of them keep the old ways like I do. They don’t live at Spirit Cove. They don’t hear the wind talk. They don’t see the ocean move. They use babalthud electricity, babalthud cell phones, babalthud garbage trucks and sewers. They eat and drink babalthud poisons. What do they know about what’s important to a Makah?”
“Babalthud,” I interjected with my tongue stumbling on the pronunciation, in which Steel had voiced “lth” as a single consonant with air escaping out the sides of his mouth. “What’s that word mean?”
The old man looked at me with disdain equal to that he had shown Curtis and McKean. “It means, ‘Those whose homes are on the ocean.’ It’s our name for white people who came here on sailing ships - and black and yellow and brown people who came with them. All you newcomers. All you Americans. All the outsiders and Johnny-come-latelys.”
“I get the picture,” I said.
Curtis gestured at McKean. “My friend here is a careful investigator. He won’t disturb anything - “
“He disturbs everything just by being here!”
“He’s an internationally recognized scientist. He’s developed the best DNA tests to distinguish one tribe from another - “
“DNA!” Steel shook his stick at McKean. “Go home to Seattle, DNA man! Leave our ghosts alone. And you!” He turned to me, all but thumping the raven-beaked head of his walking stick on my chest. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m a medical reporter,” I said, restraining my rising anger.
“Newsman, eh?” The whiskery corners of his mouth curved down deeper in distaste. “You write stories about us big bad Makahs killing them innocent whales?”
I shook my head in the negative.
His expression moderated slightly. “Too many stories been written about us killing whales. Brings boatloads of protesters. They don’t know nothing about whales or why we hunt them.”
I shrugged. “Not my kind of story. I write medical news.”
He thought a moment. “Plenty of medical reasons why we hunt whales.”
“Come on, Gordon,” Curtis cajoled. “What harm is there in taking just a small DNA sample?”
“Harm? Seems like everything a babalthud does harms a Makah one way or another. You wouldn’t get no DNA if I had a say in it.”
“Hrock! Hrock!” A loud bird call arose at the back of the lot in the trees above Pete Whitehall. Two large ravens left their cover in a bigleaf maple and swooped down to land on the muddy ground just behind Gordon Steel, one on either side of him. Their alert dark eyes added an eerie, demonic feel to an already unsettling scene. When one called its low-pitched “Hrock,” again, Steel broke into a peg-toothed smile. “Raven sends his greetings,” he chuckled. “These birds are here to keep an eye on you guys.”
Curtis let out an exasperated sigh and took a step down the stone staircase, watching Steel carefully. “I believe this is a Spanish burial, not Makah,” he said.
“And I believe you’re desecrating a sacred Makah place!” The ravens joined Steel with a chorus, “Hrock! Hrock! Hrock!”
Curtis continued his descent until only his head and shoulders were above ground. He said pointedly to McKean and me, “Coming, guys?” Then he disappeared into the hole. McKean went down after him and I followed, avoiding the old man’s angry stare. I half expected a blow from his walking stick, but he let me descend unmolested. I twisted my body carefully to avoid the slab and the muck-smeared edges of the hole, joining McKean and Curtis in the dim light at the base of the staircase ten feet below ground.
“An interesting place,” McKean remarked as Curtis shone a flashlight around the chamber. It was a small stone vault with an arched ceiling made from large blocks of the same dark brown conglomerate as the lid. The place smelled dank, but the stonework was dry except where slimy seeps wetted the walls and puddled the stone floor. The corners of the ceiling were draped with cobwebs that moved on ghostly air currents.
“A very interesting place,” Curtis agreed. “Definitely not Makah construction.”
“It has the look of a bunker,” McKean observed as Curtis moved his light around the claustrophobic space, scarcely ten feet on a side. “Perhaps it was the garrison’s powder magazine, built strong enough to withstand a bombardment by British naval ships.”
“There were no powder kegs down here,” said Curtis. “Nothing at all - except this.” He shone his light on a large stone bier
in the center of the chamber. About three feet high, it supported a dusty rectangular box about three feet long, by two feet, by two feet.
“A Makah funeral box,” McKean remarked.
“That’s right,” said Curtis. “Kerf-cornered, bent-cedar-plank construction, traditional Makah style.” The archeologist played his flashlight over the surface of the box. “It’s built according to classic Northwest native techniques. Split a single large plank from the heartwood of an old-growth cedar tree. Score it crosswise and bend it to make the four sides of a box from one continuous piece. Attach the top and bottom planks with wooden pegs, carve some totem symbols, stain red with berry juice, black with charcoal, and green with oxidized copper.”
McKean inspected the images carved on the sides of the box. “It’s decorated in a most un-Spanish style,” he murmured. The front panel bore the image of a two-headed serpent-like creature whose body undulated across the width of the box, and whose twin reptilian heads doubled back to face each other. McKean circled the box and I followed. “The same design, repeated,” he said.
“Serpents on all four sides,” said Curtis. “And a raven on top.”
“Spirit guardians, no doubt.” McKean studied the images closely. “To keep evil spirits out, perhaps.”
“Or in,” I suggested.
The pupils of the serpents’ and raven’s eyes were inlayed with pearly shell that glinted in the dim light. Staring into those cold pupils, I became acutely aware of the dank chill in the tomb’s air.
Curtis shone his flashlight at a back corner of the box. “Have a look here, Peyton. The coffin is in great condition except for this one gap.” His light illuminated an opening in the rear of the box where dry-rotted wood had sagged away from the lid. Through the gap, dry gray bones were visible, stacked in a crisscrossed pile. The skull sat on top with its dark eye sockets staring at those who had disturbed its slumber.
“A typical Northwest Native reinterment,” said Curtis. “The flesh was allowed to rot away on a raised platform or in a canoe left in the woods. Once the bones were cleaned by birds, they were gathered and put in the box. But have a closer look inside.”
