“Look!” Bubbles said, pointing to the silvery ribbon that twisted at the base of the breaks, where the high ridges broke out over the river. A squatty girl, Bubbles belonged to Sunmiet’s auntie and uncle. She rode just ahead of Sunmiet. She gripped the mane of her horse and slid off to walk beside him, shook her head. “Steeper each year,” she said. “I am persuaded to walk.”
The pack on her horse slid forward. Her animal hopped and bucked until she pushed the pack, her rearranging causing a delay in the line behind her.
“Hurry up!” a boy yelled from farther back. Bubbles shouted something in Sahaptin to him using the name “Koosh” then gripped her horse’s mane and swung up on its back. Sunmiet and Bubbles shared a joke and the girls laughed. Smaller children walked back and forth in the line. Dogs sniffed and darted after rabbits. The boy, Koosh, yelled something about dusty magpies. The girls laughed behind their fingers and I remember I felt something warm and familiar with no name.
Ahead of us, the band of ten or eleven families continued down the ridge, each head lower than the one behind it then higher as they followed the trail up some ravine, back down; to the inside of the ridge, then the outside ledges. Few trees dotted the bare hills. Lava outcroppings, that looked like hog-fat crackling, dribbled at the outside edges of the ridges where the winds and winter snows had exposed then washed away the shallow soil.
The red globe of the sun had already set behind the breaks by the time the band moved through a narrow cut in lava rocks that opened, finally, onto the river. In the pink of the sunset, I caught my breath at what lay before me.
Rusty rimrocks surged up from the water lining the narrow canyon with solid rock. Like blood-red split-rails pushed upright, the lava rocks stood as silent sentinels watching the river roar. Flat rocks resembling hotcakes butted up to the upright rails. The river cut its way noisily through the center of the flat stacks. It surged and twisted like muscle and tendon through a narrow sinew of rock no wider than a Conestoga wagon. All the water of the river rushed through that cut, then plunged into a deep pool that swirled and twisted for hundreds of feet. Rushing again, the water surged on through other, slightly wider wedges of rock, tumbling over and over, twisting at the base of the high ridges and canyons making its way north to the Columbia River and then the sea.
I had seen the high waterfall close to the Columbia River which the Indians called Multnomah. It hung like a bridal veil over a cliff and it was what I thought all waterfalls were like. This falls was different: it was a twisting rope of rushing water that spewed out of the river into a narrow cut then dropped and churned and dropped and twisted, pounding and spraying as it surged for a thousand feet or more.
Nothing green lined the river or the canyon. Only flat rocks—that now our horses stood on—and lava chunks broken up by eons of freezes and thaws dribbled in shades of brown and red toward the water. In the middle of the falls, silver flashes leapt suspended and then plunged back, upstream.
“Chinook!” I heard Koosh shout and opened my mouth in astonishment. The barrenness of the canyon made the brilliance of the water and its bounty all the more astounding, all the more alive.
Across the river, at the narrowest section, toward the end of the roaring cascade of water, lay a single log bridge.
I slid off Puddin’ and stood beside him, no longer aware of the soreness in my legs nor how tired and hungry nor how hot and sultry. Instead, the river’s power mesmerized me, held me captive in a way I wasn’t sure I wanted.
A sea gull swooped, called, and dipped low enough for me to hear it, but no other sounds broke into the roaring of the river. I could feel the power of it through my feet and into my chest as it beat against the rocks. I could smell it, felt the wetness of the spray as the water fought for space in the narrow gorge and splashed like an ocean wave, pounding the rocky bank.
Sunmiet walked softly, stood beside me, said nothing. When I became aware of her, I leaned ever so slightly toward her until I felt the softness of the girl’s slender arm press into my own.
In the background, rising above the roaring of the river I heard snatches of conversation. I turned to watch families making fires on the narrow rocky flats. I heard them yelling to their children, being vigilant so close beside the deepness of the river. Hair stood up on the back of my neck. They must be careful with the children.
We walked past the horses stomping in the hastily made hemp corral. I smelled the scent of the first fires. And for the first time in a long time, I felt quiet inside, the beginnings of a bandage forming over my heart.
“In the morning,” Sunmiet said, “we will cross the river then gather up our poles to build the fishing platforms.” She looked carefully at my face. “You do not need to fear, here,” she said softly. “For this is our place of belonging and you are welcome to make it yours.”
ON THE WINGS OF AN EAGLE
It was hot at first light. With daylight to guide us, the band crossed the swirling river single file on the narrow log bridge, one animal at a time.
Papa had talked of this bridge built the year before by a man named Todd, though Sunmiet said the log had always been here. Papa thought it a waste of time and money since no one but Indians would probably ever use it and “they’d be happier to canoe across upstream.”
I’d heard once that twenty years or so before, a wagon train had gotten lost near here and that the Indians had taken settlers across the river in canoes, then helped sling ropes to bridge the narrow gorge and slide their wagons over the water. The Indians had given the travelers wind-dried salmon and berries. Still many settlers had died as they lost their way in the maze of ravines before reaching the Columbia. There had been no bridge—nor even a trail—then.
I did not look down, tried to block out the pounding water rushing beneath me, imagined each step my animal took, setting each foot, safely, firmly. I held my breath and let loose my clamped teeth when Puddin’s feet touched the solid rock of the other side.
The band moved downstream, then, along the rocky shore which gave way eventually to a ravine cut down its center by a creek flowing into the Deschutes. “Buck Creek” they called it for the huge mule deer that made their home near the sagebrush and scrubby juniper. It too teemed with fish. We sloshed across the mouth of it to a grassy field. Here the band would camp for the months ahead.
“Come, páwapaatam—help us!” Sunmiet shouted. She had already dismounted.
The old wrinkled-face woman said something as she walked purposefully close by me, spurting dust on my bare feet as I stood next to my mule. The woman’s thin mouth smirked, looking back over her shoulder as she responded to Sunmiet’s request for help.
Sunmiet’s mother and several other women worked together to set the ridgepoles for the teepees and I joined them at Sunmiet’s direction.
In Sahaptin, the old woman said something directly to me as I stood beside her. I looked at Sunmiet for translation. “ ‘Help here, or go watch those fat, crabby babies’,” Sunmiet said.
Sunmiet must have noticed the look of pain that crossed my face for she pulled me away from Kása and into the other side of the circle of women preparing the poles, lacing the ends and standing the bases in a wide circle that would become our home.
“Don’t let Kása bring you tears,” Sunmiet said under her breath as we spread our hands together over the hide strip being laced to the poles. “Her tongue is sharp but holds no poison.”
“She is your grandma?” I asked, recognizing, finally, what kása meant.
“Not as with your people,” Sunmiet said, pulling on the buckskin to get it centered on the poles. “She is my mother’s auntie.”
“And her children?” I asked.
“She has no children of her own.”
“But you call her kása?”
Sunmiet nodded as if to say, “So?”
Confused, I said, teaching, being right, “To be a grandmother, you need to have grandchildren.”
“And she has,” Sunmiet said. “Me, Sa
me-as-One, Bubbles, to name a few.”
The relationships confused me and I changed the subject. “Your kása doesn’t like me,” I noted, wiping sweat from my forehead. I figured she probably remembered the time I lost Pauline to the trees. She would scowl even more if she knew how I had lost Pauline this time, for always.
“She means no harm,” Sunmiet assured me.
I shook my head, to dispel the guilt and sadness and looked instead at what happened around me.
Each of the family members seemed to know their parts and perform with a minimum of instruction. Eventually, I gravitated toward the younger children who, like me, seemed to be having difficulty staying out of the way. Kása watched me as I warily played with the children, not sure of my place. Without smiling, she nodded her kerchiefed head. I thought it an approval and was surprised at how warm her nod made me feel. The old woman’s beaded earrings bobbed against her lined throat as she sat some distance away working bear grass and corn husks into a basket while her family formed the teepees into a semicircle facing east.
Beyond the camp, Eagle Speaker, a tall Indian, and a broad-shouldered one wearing a white man’s hat with an eagle feather in the brim, worked to dig out caches in the rocks. Placed there the year before, they handed more poles and boards to waiting hands of other men who now laced the boards together into platforms that soon jutted out over the river. The pole stilts seemed so spindly I couldn’t imagine anyone standing on them let alone leaning out over the water from them with their nets!
Such nets! “These catch the giant fish returning to their place of beginning, upriver,” Sunmiet said. She showed me baskets made of similar material, in a tighter weave.
“For the eels my father and uncles gather up at night,” she said. “We will hold the baskets,” she added proudly stacking several next to the family’s large dun-colored lodge.
“We will hold them?” I asked, surprised that girls would be allowed to help.
“You have big hands,” she said, pleased.
“What keeps us from slipping into the water?”
“The men tie ropes around their middle and attach it, there.” She pointed to rock points. “Sometimes others hold them, to catch them if they slip or if the Chinook does not wish to be caught. It is the way their fathers and their father’s fathers have always netted,” she said matter-of-factly, “each in his own place along the river. It is dangerous. We will stay back, away. Everyone keeps his eyes open and his thoughts of only fish and nets and eels. Then few are lost.”
I watched as a wide-faced, heavy man moved gingerly down the rocks, closer to the roaring water. He looked a little different than the others, lighter skinned and held a spear instead of a net.
“He is Hupa. Fish Man,” Sunmiet said, explaining. “Fish Man travels many days from the giant red bark trees where the Hupas and Euroks argue over land. He leaves the arguments to fish with us each summer.”
As we watched, he plunged his spear into the surging water and caught a fish without benefit of platform or the rope. “Ayiee!” he shouted in delight. Others, seeing his success, cheered him on then hurried themselves to the seasonal work necessary to net the big Chinook.
I could have stood for hours, watching, breathing shallow like a watchful deer, listening to the surging falls in the dense heat. It was all so wonderful and strange seeing each do his part to fish and then bring the bounty to the women for skinning and cleaning and forming each into two giant filets. Pink rows soon dried on racks beside each teepee.
The tall, handsome Indian I’d seen earlier walked toward us. “Standing Tall,” Sunmiet said as she eased her way closer to the opening of her family’s lodge.
Standing Tall derived his name naturally. I imagined he could touch the low branches of the firs when he reached his long brown arms upward so tall was he. He was taller than Sunmiet’s father, taller than Fish Man. “His uncles are all tall too, but they are big men, and fluffy,” Sunmiet said holding her arms in a circle to mark their round size. We giggled.
“Sometimes Standing Tall lets his height speak too strongly,” Sunmiet told me in a whisper. “His smaller mind loses control over his tongue,” she added, giggling. “He did not want me to bring you here. He thinks I am too young to be alone with you, a ‘non-Indian.’ He is a Wasco and thinks himself wiser than me or my family,” she said with some disgust.
She mimicked her conversation with him the morning she invited me to spend the summer. “ ‘You should not go beyond the eyes of your father or his friends who wish to protect you’ he told me. He smiled his lopsided smile, the left side of his mouth rising higher than the other as it always does, always has since he entered the world that way, contrary and resisting.”
As he approached us, I saw that one of his eyes was also more lopsided than the other, though one noticed more the strength of his arms, his sure stride moving beneath his buckskin leggings.
“I told him I would speak to my father not a rude boy who does not know when to close his lips to bridle his unruly thoughts,” Sunmiet continued. “And my father gave me permission to invite you.”
She looked annoyed as the man approached, and something else. “He should not even be here now, bothering our morning fire,” she said, and turned her back on him.
Small children scampered about, Sunmiet’s little brothers, twins. Their bare bellies pooched out like melons over firm brown legs as they threw sticks for the puppies to chase. Her mother stepped out from the cool of the lodge to stir the embers of the small flames, her body soft, round on thin legs, inviting, like the dough of the fry bread she prepared to drop into the hot pan leaned into the fire.
Sunmiet’s father hunched away from the heat then stood to face his guest and future son-in-law.
“I would take your daughter for a ride,” Standing Tall said, acting like Sunmiet was not present, “as I am not yet busy with the nets.”
I felt Sunmiet stiffen next to me. She wore a dress of tanned buckskin that pulled tightly across her young chest then dropped over her hips and stopped just inches above the already dusty earth and her beaded moccasins. Her eyelashes jumped with irritation on her cheeks, pink now. “I am someone more to be with than merely filling time,” she said to her father. “Huckleberry Eyes and I have things to do of value even if some do not.”
Standing Tall’s face flushed. Eagle Speaker looked at me and coughed and covered his mouth with his hand concealing a smile, eyes flashing quickly over his daughter’s head to Standing Tall.
The quick gesture seemed to make the men holders of some secret and I saw Sunmiet’s cheeks begin to burn.
“Oh, hayah!” she said, her voice strong, “Come Huckleberry Eyes. Surely my tall friend has more important work to do than ride with a mere girl-child.”
“You should not be alone with her,” Standing Tall said, moving to stand beside Sunmiet as though that were his right, his place. “The cloud-face children shoot the long rifles,” he said, scowling at me.
“Small boys learn to shoot the rifles here,” Sunmiet said, “Perhaps that is not so on the Big River where the Wascos live. Do you see her holding a rifle, Father?” She kept her eyes from Standing Tall’s. Her words were insults, reminding him he was a Wasco who did not know all the ways of the Warm Springs, Sahaptin-speaking people. “I do not need a boy’s protection from a small girl who is my friend.”
Sunmiet added: “I am my father’s daughter who knows well how to defend herself.”
Eagle Speaker smiled openly now as his daughter’s long braids bounced on her breasts as she turned. She straightened her shoulders in finality. She pushed herself to full height which still barely reached Standing Tall’s shoulder. “Come, Jane,” she said, deliberately using my English name, “we have things to do.”
Standing Tall seemed to know there was no recourse and he turned abruptly, his moccasins leaving a deep impression where he spun in the dirt. His black hair swung well below his waist as he stomped off. “He is a young eagle harassed by a mere magpie
of a girl,” I heard Sunmiet’s father say to her mother.
“Later, we will clean the fish, roast the eels,” Sunmiet said, avoiding the encounter. “Now, the rocks call our name. Come. Put on moccasins I make for you. I show you my place.”
While the men set more platforms to jut out over the river, and Fish Man set his feet on solid rock, anticipating his next Chinook, I slipped the soft hide over my bare feet, laced them about my ankles and followed Sunmiet up the rimrocks. “Step carefully,” Sunmiet shouted, breathing hard, over her shoulder. “Father rattlesnake likes resting in the sun.” She grinned at my wide eyes reminding me, “We make too much noise. He moves.”
We climbed for more than an hour with k’usik’usi panting and bounding above us, then below, urging us on until we reached the top of the ridge on the east side of the river. Over rock outcroppings and shale slides of broken lava rocks, and past ravens’ nests, we climbed higher and higher until even the birds swooped and dipped below us. “There,” Sunmiet pointed. “See where the wagons made tracks in the earth?” Such a steep ridge to bring wagons down! No wonder the settlers were tired and got easily lost.
When we reached a swale near the top of a bare hill, we rested. There we sat, nestled into a hollow depression in the earth, protected from the cooling breezes with Captain Hood’s Mountain straight across from us, once again in view. In the quiet, with the river and the world of the band below us, k’usik’usi soon fell asleep at our feet.
I watched the men on the platforms, amazed at the streams of water that ran like braids over the rocks and around the stilts they’d lashed to hold them steady. The water poured across the flat rocks, poured back into the river. From our perch, the falls seems not as mighty until I imagined these men leaning out over it to net fish. I could not tell who was who as the tiny dark figures moved below us. I could see them, standing close, the ropes and nets coiled like giant snakes beside them, as each family prepared their platform and planned how they would work together to net the fish, feed their families, stay alive.