I could see that he was trying to help me and distract me from focusing on the scare and the injury. “Okay, then,” I struggled out, but my breathing was shallow because it hurt to flex my rib cage.
“Let’s get him up to the campsite where we stayed last time we fished. He will feel better if he can lie down flat.”
“Wait,” Tetszo interrupted. “Rinse off that wound with some of this fresh water. The salt must be stinging like a whole nest of hornets.” He poured most of the remaining water from the macócqwer over the wound and I winced in pain. The two men carefully supported me as we made our way up the beach. Ascopo danced around, trying to be useful. A short way into the forest lay an opening with a ring of stones for a fire.
“Ouch!” I gasped as they helped me to lie down. “Okay. Herbs.” I made myself focus on the problem of which herbs would be best for this type of injury, imagining I was someone other than myself, someone who was nearly eaten by a shark. “See if you can find some willow bark for me to chew on. It will dull the pain. If you find willow, there should be some elderberry nearby since both like fresh water. Gather enough leaves to cover the wound.”
The brothers looked at each other. Keetrauk volunteered, “The only fresh water is over the big sand dunes. I will go with the macócqwer and get more water for us to drink and look for the willow bark and elderberry leaves. Ascopo, you come with me.”
“Agreed,” Tetszo said. “I will stay here with Skyco. Where are those other men? I thought they were right behind us!”
Keetrauk replied with some irritation, “I noticed they went north, closer to the inlet. They are probably spearing fish there. If they don’t paddle down here soon, I’ll go up and get them, but first, water, willow, and elderberry.”
Once I lay down in the shade, I began to feel a little better. By the time Keetrauk and Ascopo returned, I was even feeling drowsy as the effects of the scare wore off. I sat up, drank more water, and chewed the willow bark while Keetrauk pounded the elderberry leaves as I told him. The wound was barely bleeding now, but we covered it with the leaves and wrapped it with my loincloth.
“I think if I rest here for a while, I will feel better,” I said to Keetrauk. “I am so tired now; my energy has been sapped.”
“Yes, rest. We’ll go find the other men and will be back shortly. Ascopo, you stay here and guard him. Get him whatever he needs.”
“Yes, sir,” Ascopo said. I thought he was glad to have something to do, but then he continued as soon as the men were out of earshot, “First a bear and now a shark! You’ve even been on a war raid! How come you get all the great adventures? Roncommock said you will go on a spirit quest before you have even finished the husquenaugh. It’s not fair!” Ascopo stomped his foot and plopped down on the sand beside me.
I looked over at him in astonishment. “You have got to be kidding! You can have all my great adventures, Ascopo! That thing nearly ate me! Go away and leave me alone.”
I turned away, rolling over on my uninjured side, and must have fallen asleep because I awoke suddenly to the smoke from a fire and the delicious smell of cooking fish. I was very hungry. Several men were around the fire and two were farther up the beach testing a repaired net.
“Hey! Welcome back, Skyco. How are you feeling now?” Keetrauk asked me as I started to sit up and move around.
“Much better, thanks. It only hurts when I move or breathe,” I chuckled out and immediately regretted sitting up and talking at the same time. I found out quickly that if I kept my torso rigid, barely turning my shoulders or hips, I could move without a lot of pain. It ached, but the sharp burning was gone. Walking, I discovered, was not much of a problem, but I took small steps.
“Skyco, Tetszo and I think we should stay here on the banks themselves, give you a little time to scab over, before we head back to the main camp. Are you okay with that plan?”
“Sure,” I said. “I think I will be alright. But I also think I will stay out of the water.”
“Good idea!” Tetszo agreed with a smile. “This is not normally what fishing is like. Usually we catch the fish instead of the fish going after us!”
“Yeah, Skyco. I have never before seen such a big shark in one of our traps. I guess the hole made by the chigwusso was too small for him to swim through, but when we started to repair that wall of the pen, he decided to turn tail and head out of the entrance. Thought he might pick up a nice morsel when he smelled that blood on you, too. He was a grown one, alright. Did you see how big? And the size of the teeth on that thing!”
I started feeling a little sick again as I remembered the scenario and Keetrauk poked his brother in the ribs.
“Really, though. We’ve had some tiny sharks in there, and we’ve had big fish, but that is weird how a big shark was in there and we didn’t even know it.”
“Some fishermen you are!” I joked back, but then worried they would take it the wrong way. I hadn’t meant to insult them. The statement came out of my mouth before I thought about it.
Luckily Keetrauk just laughed and Tetszo joined in too. “You got us there, Skyco. A fish bigger than any of us and we didn’t even know it was in the pen. Bad form!”
“Where is Ascopo, anyway?” I asked. I felt a little bad about ignoring him. It was just that his timing was poor.
“He has been out fishing this afternoon. Speared his first pashockshin with his brother and Chaham, I heard. You should congratulate him, Skyco.”
The men kept the fire burning long into the night, and I rested beside the fire after wolfing down several of the cooked fish I smelled when I awoke. Warm and full of fish, tired from the enervating events of the day, I drifted off to sleep again listening to their fishing tales.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt much better. The wound had formed a brown scab and, though ugly, at least it wasn’t raw and bleeding. I still felt sore, but could move more-or-less normally. I asked Tetszo if I could walk over the big sand dunes and see the ocean and he agreed, but only if both brothers attended me, so the three of us set off immediately.
“Hey, Ascopo, would you like to come along?” I asked, but he replied, “No, Skyco. I am going fishing again with Chaham. We expect to have some fish in the weir before long, and you aren’t allowed in the water. I’ll have to do it.”
I could sense that he was proud to be doing something that I was not, so I let him go without any further comment.
The great dunes were even more spectacular than I had expected. The sand rolled from one dune into another, swallowing up a forest at some distance on each side. The vast expanse of sand was so impressive that it was hard to comprehend the width and height of the whole area until I looked down from the top of one dune to Keetrauk standing at its bottom and finally realized the immensity of scale. There were no plants, just sand, until the dunes sloped down to the forest, the sound, or the sea.
From the top of the highest dune, I could see back across the sound to the mainland in one direction, and out to the horizon in the other. The water in the sound was brownish and calm. The inlet north of us was clearly visible, and I could even follow the channel and the sandy shoals that swept in the inlet’s mouth. The slipway where the other men had pulled up their canoes close to the inlet was a flat, white path. Where the sea met the land on the beachfront, wave after wave crashed, casting a line of white foam onto the beach that curved around and into the inlet. Past the beach and the breakers, the blue of the ocean water met the blue of the sky along the thin horizon and seemed to stretch away into infinity.
This is a place to contact the spirits, I thought, and wondered whether Eracano or Roncommock ever came here. I am higher than a hawk! And I feel just as majestic, perhaps even more so. I have a white loincloth instead of a white tail like an eagle—the nahyápuw—but close enough.
I hated to leave the dune-top, but Tetszo was motioning me to join him down at the bottom. As I walked down, my
feet sank into the sand, and although I felt like I might topple over, I never did. Tetszo and Keetrauk awaited me at a muddy pool, where a few stunted trees and shrubs grew. As I walked up to its edge, the ground started hopping, and unbelievable numbers of tiny frogs erupted from the damp ground. The pool itself was thick with tiny, black tadpoles. What an amazing place!
“This is where you must come to get fresh water, Skyco. It pools up here in this depression between the big dunes and the forest. You may have to dig down to it, but it is always here.”
We climbed back up a shorter, but still impressive, dune and worked our way through a stunted forest before we finally emerged on the open beach. More wonders awaited me there. As far as I could see in each direction, up and down the beach stretched a ribbon of white sand. It actually burned my eyes to look in the direction of the sun because so much light was reflected off the sand and from the waves. And waves! I had seen plenty of choppy white-capped waves during windy periods on the sound, but nothing like the magnificent rollers spilling onto the beach. And their sound! The surf was rumbling like a great beast’s stomach during a hungry time. It spoke clearly to me of the spirit world. The white foam flew up as each wave crashed onto the beachhead and hissed like a great snake as it retreated. I walked down to the edge and gasped as the spray from a wave struck me. What a place!
I knew then that I had found the sacred place, the location of my quest to enter the spirit world. The spirits were nearby. Is this what Roncommock meant when he said that I should follow my instincts? I knew this place was important. The sea, the dunes, even the inlet, held significances greater than I could imagine.
My Spirit Quest
As Roncommock had predicted, we stayed at the fishing camp through the full-moon period of good tides. I spent as much time as possible on the sandy banks, but I had to help with drying the fish and tending the fires at the main camp. Whenever I had the opportunity, even if it meant giving up a fishing expedition, I explored the bank, waiting for contact or some indication of the spirits. Ascopo spent the whole time fishing. Only once did he visit the dunes and the sea with me. He said there were no fish to catch there.
The striped bass—the mesickek—swept in the inlet in huge numbers, and when a school came through, the men stayed busy hauling them out of the trap. I didn’t see any giants that were as long as a man is tall, but we caught several fish that were as long as Keetrauk’s legs and dried them over the fire. Our fishing party ate most of the smaller fish, but we smoked and dried the larger ones to take back to the village.
One afternoon, Ascopo and I finally fished for blue crabs—the training we were to have received before my fishing accident postponed the crabbing adventure. It was fun because the bait carcasses attracted more than just blue crabs. We did indeed catch blue crabs, but we also caught hermit crabs that lived inside whelk shells or other shells that they carried on their backs and retreated into when they were disturbed. Some of these crabs had brown, striped legs and were big. Others had white legs and were smaller. After a while, we attracted a few of the big, round crabs—the seékanauk—and hauled them up on shore. When we turned them upside down in the sand, they struggled to right themselves by folding their tail-spike forward, thrusting it into the sand and then using the anchored spike to pole themselves upright. When a small shark with a rounded head came to the carcass, I quit fishing. The little shark was not so scary with its gently rounded head, and I couldn’t even see its eyes and mouth, but the rest of it looked too much like the monster that attacked me.
Ascopo already knew how to prepare a fish carcass for use as crab bait. He tied a rope through the gills and around the head, tossed it out into the water, and then tied the free end to a stout branch that he’d broken from a tree. He said we should be patient, but it was hard to wait and wonder what was happening to that carcass in the deep water. Before long, Ascopo pulled in the line very slowly, hand over hand, with the carcass still attached. As it gradually appeared out of the depths, we saw that two large blue crabs were clinging to the head while tearing away bits of fish-flesh with their pincers and passing them to their busy mouths. The sight of the two big crabs so excited Ascopo that he gave the rope a jerk, pulled too hard, and the wary crabs dropped off and scuttled back into deep water. Disappointed, he turned over the line to me, and I tossed the carcass back out into the water. After a short time, I slowly and steadily pulled it back in. The crabs were again feeding on the carcass, so I continued my slow and smooth retrieval until the carcass, with the crabs still attached and feeding, began to clear the water as I pulled them up onto the beach.
Once the bait was clear of the water, Ascopo used a forked tree branch that he had already stripped of its leaves to rake the crabs off the carcass and cast them high on the beach. The beached crabs scuttled around angrily, snapped their upraised claws, and frothed madly at their mouths, thoroughly intimidating both of us.
“Okay, Ascopo. Get them!” I yelled.
“No way! Do you see those claws? If they pinch my finger and make it bleed, I won’t be allowed in the water to work the weir. Those crabs are fast.”
“Well, how are we supposed to pick them up? Aren’t you the one who has been fishing? What have you been learning from those fishermen?”
“How to catch fish, not crabs! I’ll get Keetrauk. You keep the crabs up here on the beach.” Ascopo ran down the beach to the camp. I left the branch on top of the crabs to slow their scuttles and to provide a target for their aggression.
Keetrauk sent back Kaiauk instead, who was happy to show off what he knew, and then we learned that the hardest part of crabbing was handling and cleaning the catch. Their claws were sharp and the crabs were fast. Kaiauk showed us how to pin the fearless crabs down to the ground with the branch, which they aggressively attacked with their jagged claws, firmly grab each menacing claw from behind so that the crabs couldn’t pinch our fingers, then to snap the claws free of the body. Pulling off the other legs was easy, but wedging the carapace loose from the body was a bit of a trick. Kaiauk jabbed his thumb below the edge of the shell between the crab’s eyestalks and pulled up until the shell tore free of the body, but I thought that was a little gruesome. The crabs were looking at you when you ripped off their backs. He also showed us that you could peel up the belly flap and wedge your thumb there to pop off the shell. I preferred that technique.
Some of the females, with rounded belly flaps instead of the triangular ones of the males, held reddish eggs, which we scooped out and ate without bothering to cook. We boiled the rest of the body over the fire in a clay pot with seawater. Picking the cooked crab meat from the body took some time to learn, but it was so sweet and delicious that it was worth the effort.
I noticed that the other men brought back whole live crabs in a basket, dropped them into the boiling seawater, and then cleaned them. Kaiauk was just showing off by cleaning them alive, challenging us to handle them without getting pinched.
By our third day on the banks, my wounds were healing and I felt much better. I wanted to return to the dunes, but needed to convince Ascopo to join me. While we picked flower buds from the prickly pear cacti, I began my effort to get Ascopo to go to the dunes with me. Kaiauk showed us a sandy spot that was loaded with the prickly cacti and left us with a basket to fill. As we picked the flower buds, I said to Ascopo, “These buds are rather small. The fruits, the metaquesúnnauk, must not yet be ripe, because I know they are larger than these buds. I hope these taste good when we roast them tonight.”
“I agree,” Ascopo grumbled. “I’ve never eaten buds before and I don’t really like the fruits either. It is more fun to dye sticks red with the juice than to eat the fruits full of those little black seeds that you must constantly spit out, even if the juice is sweet. Those men, especially my brother, are always finding something for us to do so that they don’t have to.”
“Aren’t you getting tired of them?” I asked, setting the trap.
“Well, then, Ascopo, let’s get away for a bit. We can spend the night up on the dunes and not have to clean up after the evening meal. The men can do it themselves.” Ascopo realized he was caught. “But we are here to fish, Skyco, even if it means that we have extra work because we are the youngest. If we leave tonight, the men might go without us tomorrow and I wouldn’t get to fish.”
I’d thought he would bring up fishing, and I was ready to parry. “Since we will be up high on the dune, the sun will wake us early, and we can run back to camp before the men set out. You know they like to get up slowly. The last two mornings we had to wait on them for a long time before the fishing started.”
I stumped Ascopo with this. I could see he was thinking.
“Oh, come on, Ascopo. You won’t miss a thing, plus you will get to see the sun rise out of the sea, something I know you have never seen before. What could be better than that?”
“Oh, all right, Skyco. If you promise we can come straight back, first thing, in the morning.”
After our evening meal, we climbed to the top of the highest dune and pushed our bodies down to form a slight depression in the sand, which held a little warmth. The sun had already set and drained the sky of color. Because it was past the full moon, the sky grew completely dark before the moon rose and during those first few hours of complete darkness, the stars were incredibly brilliant.
Ascopo asked, “Do you think the husquenaugh is as difficult as Kaiauk suggests?”
I answered, “I don’t think it will be easy! It is a training time for our minds and our bodies. It’s supposed to make us tough enough to withstand war raids and hunting trips.”
Spirit Quest Page 12
