The Forest Lover

  “What is she? A witch?” Emily murmured.

  No answer. Tillie had gone back to the shore for a second load. Wind whistled, and it started to rain.

  Separate from the bighouses, across an open space, stood a small white clapboard house with windows and a peaked roof, the mission house. “Come on, Billy. This way.”

  In a minute, he said with his nose in a puddle scummed over with algae.

  “Billy! Now!”

  When Tillie turned Halliday’s key in the lock, something scuttled inside. In the damp, dim interior smelling of mildew, Emily dug into her food box for a candle and matches. Tillie found some wood and built a fire.

  “Won’t the missionaries expect that wood to be here when they come back?”

  “We only use a little. I’ll get some new tomorrow. It will dry by and by they come back.”

  They baked potatoes at the fire’s edge which they ate with smoked salmon and apples. Tillie handed her a shiny brown something spread with what looked like congealed tapioca pudding. “Herring eggs on kelp,” Tillie said. “It’s good.”

  Emily bit down on the cool, rubbery surface which squeaked in her mouth but was relatively tasteless. She scratched her face. It was impossible to ignore the tingling, and rubbing her cheek on her sleeve had only made the irritation worse.

  “I saw you fall into the jumjumclum,” Tillie said. “Alder bark’s the Kwakwaka’wakw way to get rid of the sting, but I didn’t see any. Use, you know, from your nose. Not as good, but always with you.”

  “Kwakwak . . . ?”

  “Our tribe. We say Kwakwaka’wakw. You say Kwakiutl. More easy for you.”

  Tillie pantomimed blowing her nose into her hands and spreading it on her face. Emily followed her instruction. It helped a little.

  “You remember me from a time ago? You made pictures on the beach.”

  “Did I draw you too?”

  Tillie nodded. “I kept it for long time. My little brother Toby ripped it. It made him sad.”

  “I’ll do another now.” She took out a small sketch pad, and penciled in the shape of Tillie’s face, as round and brown as an earthenware plate. A braid hung forward over her shoulder.

  “What’s that woman? That big carving?” Emily asked.

  “Dzunukwa.”

  “What’s Dzunukwa?” Her tongue struggled with the deep buzz that launched the name.

  “She lives in the forest.” Tillie’s voice became husky. “When mothers hear her call, huu, huu, they so afraid they act like trees. Arms out but they can’t move.”

  Emily remembered Sophie telling Tommy about a Wild Woman of the Woods, but Sophie had used another name, Kak-something.

  “What does she do?”

  “She carries off children in her basket and smokes them to eat them.”

  “Why does she have eagles’ beaks on her nipples?”

  Tillie was silent in her pose.

  “If she’s bad, why do people put her in their village?”

  “Not always bad. Sometimes she gives good things.” Her voice was soft with awe. “If you chase her she turn to smoke.”

  Emily sketched Tillie’s hair. Where it was pulled tight from a center part, she rubbed in highlights with her India rubber.

  The fire crackled, her pencil scratched, Billy snored, and the wind moaned, but still she heard another sound, like an owl hooting only lasting longer. “What’s that?”

  “Dzunukwa,” Tillie said.

  “Is she crying?”

  “No. She doesn’t cry. Mothers with dead babies cry. She of the Woods, she just calls, huu, huu, and takes the babies.”

  A harpy! She thought of Annie Marie, Tommy, and the unnamed one, a mere fluttering, short-lived as a moth. “Do many babies die in Alert Bay?”

  “Some. My brother did. Not Toby. And two cousins too.”

  “Were you afraid of Dzunukwa when you were little?”

  Tillie nodded minutely. “When I went too far away, Mama told me Dzunukwa will get me.”

  Emily shaded under Tillie’s brows to get that intensity and fear into her eyes so pinched together.

  “Is Dzunukwa still alive?”

  “Yes. She dead hundreds of times, but she can put herself together again. She always comes back and sings, ‘I have the spirit power.’ ”

  “What’s her spirit power?”

  Tillie lifted her shoulders. “Many stories.” She ate a strip of kelp with tiny, thoughtful chews. “Only some people can tell them. Not me.”

  Emily put down her pencil and gave the drawing to Tillie. Her eyes glowed and her wide smile expressed her thanks.

  They let the fire die down. Cold night crept in through the window that had become a square black hole. Tillie pulled her blanket over her. Billy was restless. Emily sympathized, but the sound of his nails tappety-tapping on the wooden floor was annoying. “Billy. Lie down.” She pointed to the floor by her bed. Tillie’s breathing took on a gentle rhythm. Maybe that would give Billy the idea.

  The call of a loon pierced the light thrum of rain, asking and asking, urgent in the darkness, otherworldly, the loneliest sound she’d ever heard.

  Emily felt the ogress with her fierce beak breasts staring in at them with whatever eyes she had. Tomorrow, she’d stand before that Wild Crone until her every feature was seared into her memory, and she’d make of her a thing of terrible beauty.

  • • •

  By morning the rain had stopped. She walked around the nettles to the rocky bluff above the sea which gave her a fine view of Dzunukwa, as if this Forest Fury had just stepped out from the trees behind her. Wisps of vapor floated above her head. Tense stillness engulfed Emily and the figure. Emily stared. Dzunukwa stared back. This hideous, mighty Queen of Dark Places stared back. She had to wrench her eyes away from the clutch of Dzunukwa’s empty sockets in order to study the other features of her face. Wide whitish circles around her eye holes. Thick black brows over them. Round ears sticking out. Gruesome cheek cavities in scooped-out red ovals. The mouth—that garish, ghoulish mouth with red bulging lips pushed out in an O as if she were howling that low huu, like the sound made by blowing across a bottle, a chill, keening hoot.

  And those eagle breasts. Those beady black eagle eyes. That sharp hook of a beak on each nipple ready to snatch and tear. What did it mean? In spite of what Tillie had said, this Hellhag was pure savage.

  She could see this Wild Cedar Woman wasn’t afraid of anything—suffocating forest, lightning, torrential rain, cougars, isolation, vastness. She was of it. She could see in the dark, stride through bogs, race wolves, fight bears, penetrate the impenetrable, be alone. The only one of her kind, having no mate, she could look upon raw life or death and not shrink from either one. She could even rise from the dead and put herself back together again. If only an ounce of that raw power could become hers. She felt the pull of Dzunukwa’s extended arms. Were they itching to steal a child, or were they reaching for her, taking her to her bosom?

  Dzunukwa’s mystery deepened along with the darkening sky. Rain threatened. She’d have to work fast. That meant watercolor, not oil. She pulled out two large sheets and placed them vertically to accommodate the tall figure. Before such a ferocious creature, she had to talk herself through the process. Simplify the shapes. Use Fanny’s long, loose strokes in burnt sienna for the torso. Exaggerate to express. Build up a chromium oxide shadow on her arms to take on the forest colors behind her. Highlight her breasts with a smear of cadmium red medium for expression, like Gibb would do. Make it lurid, like his nudes. Lay another smear on her cheek. Surround the black hole of a mouth with a thick, pale Indian yellow ring for lips. Outline the ring in cadmium red deep. Outline the eyes, the ears, the arms in black.

  What about the nipples? A momentary pause. A catch in her rhythm. Later. Keep the rhythm going. Do the surroundings now. Make the nettles lick Dzunukwa’s legs like green flames. Use Fanny’s long strokes in Prussian green and viridian. Highlight with shorter, narrower strokes of yellow ochre. Do shadows in
ultramarine. Outline in indigo and black. Simplify the trees in the background into overlapping triangles.

  The beak nipples. She stopped to think it out. How could she paint what she couldn’t understand? But if she didn’t paint them, no one would know that they were there. And if she did, Fanny’s prediction would be right—her own expression would vanish in her awe of the totem, and the eagle faces would be wrong, too tight considering the broad, sweeping lines of the rest of the painting.

  Dzunukwa’s lowing came again. Huu, ah, huu. Who are you? she seemed to be hooting. Recorder, or artist?

  It had been easier to simplify in France because she didn’t care about preserving the details there. They didn’t mean anything to her. But here, whatever they meant to the Kwakiutl, to her those beak breasts suggested a Beldame Nature not benign. The nipple that fed could also scratch and tear. She slashed a thick dark line, curved outward and downward toward the nipple, like a scythe. She painted the reverse shape on the other side of the nipple to make a point at the bottom. She did the same for the other breast and added two black dabs on each pointed nipple. Let them suggest what they may.

  The haunting call of the loon resounded, as though it were the lowing Dark Forest Goddess herself. Emily unleashed her own unearthly call, yodeling and hooting, back to the wilderness.

  22: Raven

  “A secret,” Tillie’s mother, Beatrice James, said softly on the beach at Alert Bay where Emily was painting. A full-bosomed woman wearing large abalone-shell earrings, Beatrice carried herself with authority. “Chief Wakias got an invitation for you to Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi’s potlatch.”

  “A potlatch! Me?”

  “Sh!” Tillie scowled in exaggerated seriousness. “You can’t tell them at the mission house.” Then she grinned.

  “Tell Mrs. Hall that my husband, Mac James, is taking you to paint at Quatsino. Then they go wrong way to find us.”

  What would Claude think of this? Would he be there? He’d be surprised to see her. His eyebrows would pop up.

  Lizzie would be starched silly if she knew, but Victoria was more than two hundred miles south. Emily imagined a missionary society meeting in the family parlor and Lizzie announcing crisply, As long as those Indians still do their cannibal dances at pagan revels and then go to church afterwards, there’s plenty of the Lord’s work left to do. We’re not finished until we’ve rooted out all heathen practices and backsliding.

  Whatever they did at potlatches, it had to do with totems, Claude had told her. If she was ever to paint the poles with expression or understanding, she had to find out what they meant to the people who created them. Whether potlatches were illegal or not, she’d be a fool not to go.

  “What’s the chief’s name again?”

  “Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi.”

  “That’s quite a name.”

  “Means great big bonfire,” Beatrice said. “What do you do if you are too close to a bonfire?”

  “Back away.”

  “That’s what other chiefs do too if they want to give a potlatch. They know they can’t give one big like he can. You will see. Many things he will give.”

  • • •

  At each tide, family by family left, as if they were going fishing, or to their summer berry-picking lands. On Sunday Reverend Hall would look across empty pews and see only the infirm and the residential school children from St. Michael’s. His beard would tremble in anger when he gave the invocation. If William Halliday happened to be here, he’d bolt out of the church, head south in his gas boat to the BC Provincial Police. Without knowing where this potlatch was among dozens of islands, it was unlikely that the BCPP would arrive in time to stop it—she hoped.

  Only after Tillie’s father pushed off their canoe two days later and they were well out into Johnstone Strait did anyone mention the name of the place—Mimkwamlis on Village Island up Knight’s Inlet.

  Toby arched his back and said, “Mimkwamlis mean Village with Rocks and Islands in Front,” a slight tone of showing off in his voice. He giggled at Emily’s expression and added, “The Mamalilikala Band of the Kwakwaka’wakw people live there.”

  Emily whistled at the words. “Thank you, Toby. Now I understand. But aren’t most potlatches in winter?” Emily asked.

  Toby turned to his mother. “One year ago the chief at Mimkwamlis died,” Beatrice said. “A disgrace if the new chief does not raise a pole for him now. He can’t have old chief’s rights until he does.”

  “The police won’t expect one now,” Mac added.

  Emily looked at the two boys nestled asleep against Billy in the canoe, Jack, maybe four years old, and Alphonse, a little older, Tillie’s cousins. “Are their parents already there?”

  “No. They were arrested for potlatching so they can’t come.”

  “You mean they’re in jail?”

  “No, just can’t go to potlatches. No worry. They don’t put white people in jail. Yet.”

  Something in Emily’s look made them all laugh. Worry crept up her spine.

  The family sang the paddling song, “Si-whwa-kwa, si-whwa-kwa,” to keep the rhythm across open water until they entered a narrower waterway. Mac tipped his head in the direction of a great blue heron feeding in the shallows. He let the canoe glide toward shore, small waves licking its sides. “We camp here tonight.”

  Emily looked at the sliver of beach frilled with foam and scattered with dried sea lettuce, a rough-textured rocky outcropping at one end, a snag rippling the current at the other. Drooping folds of hemlock sheltered this long-necked bird balanced gracefully on legs delicate as fern stems. When the canoe touched the shore, it flew off with a loud grak.

  “A blue heron always does a person good,” Emily said.

  Mac smiled. “A good sign.”

  • • •

  They approached Mimkwamlis late the next morning. Boats came from all directions. “Won’t they know it’s a potlatch with all these boats?” Emily asked.

  “They’ll hide some, and we have lookouts,” Mac said. “Meanwhile, everybody has plenty good time.” He looked at his son. “And Toby sees his first pole raising.”

  Sixteen poles, one in front of each bighouse, reached above the rooflines, facing the beach. One house had an enormous raven, bigger than Halliday’s gas boat, sitting on the roof peak. A single male figure with outstretched arms, and an oversized head, wearing a tall, tapered hat, stood separate, close to the shore.

  “Is that the new pole?” Emily asked.

  “No. It’s a speaker’s figure,” Beatrice said. “You’ll see.”

  The minute their canoe touched the white clamshell beach, she heard words chanted in Kwakwala coming through the figure’s wooden mouth. Billy barked back at it and they all laughed.

  Tillie put her arms around Billy’s neck. “It’s only to welcome us, Billy.”

  On shore, two lines of men formed to carry the thirty-foot canoe into the woods. Emily kept Billy on a short leash so he wouldn’t get in the way. She lifted his chin to face her. “Now don’t go putting your nose into everything. We’re guests.”

  He blinked, struggling to be patient.

  “I can hold on to him if you want to draw,” Tillie offered.

  “Thank you. He thinks everyone is gathered here for him.”

  She set to work on a watercolor sketch of the welcome figure, then found another one, without a hat, standing near a crazily crooked staircase up to the bighouses. “This place is spectacular. Everywhere I look, I see another painting subject.”

  They climbed the stairs and dodged some boys playing games to get to the new pole resting on blocks and covered by tarps. That was disappointing. She would have loved to get a close look. It lay flat on the ground, the base overhanging a fifteen-foot slanted trench. Ropes were draped loosely over a temporary scaffolding erected near its base. She couldn’t think how such a heavy weight could be brought upright.

  In front of Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi’s bighouse, hundreds of folded blankets were stacked as high as th
e roof. Next to fifty-pound sacks of flour and sugar, there were crates of china, pillars of buckets and wash basins, twined and painted spruce-root rain hats, carved and painted bentwood boxes, baskets, gramophones, even treadle sewing machines. Apparently, if the police boats came this far, no amount of hiding goods would help. There was food too—baskets of dried salmon and halibut, five-gallon cans of oolichan grease, baskets of bannock and berries.

  “Blackberries, Saskatoons, black gooseberries, and stink currants,” Tillie said, gesturing to each proudly.

  In front of the stacked goods, men wearing bowler hats and suspenders, some with gold watch chains, and women in colorful print dresses faced two men and a third who had some function between them. “It’s haana-aa, I Will Change Your Mind. A game. They bet about where are the bones.”

  The players were stoic, but the people watching, urging one choice over another and giving warnings, were laughing. No one was trying to hide what he or she was doing. That did not make Emily relax.

  A matron whose jacket buttons were ready to pop served whipped soapberries from a two-foot canoe. The girl standing beside her handed out small paddles that people used as spoons. A toothless man wearing suspenders slurped up the froth and grinned. “Indian ice cream. Easy to eat,” he said. Emily dipped her paddle into the canoe for a dollop of the soft pink foam. It tasted bitter and sweet at the same time. Toby and Alphonse and Jack came running to get their share.

  Tillie laughed. “Afraid they’ll run out?”