Winter Brothers (28 page)

“In Northwest coast art, perhaps more than in any other art, there's an impulse to push things as far as possible.”

“Haida artists worked mostly within a rigid, formal system, but occasionally burst out and did crazy, wild things which out-crazied the other people of the Coast.”

“They weren't bound by the silly feeling that it's impossible for two figures to occupy the same space at the same time.”

As accompaniment to Swan's notes on Haida art I have been reading
Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: A Dialogue on Craftsmanship and Aesthetics
, by Bill Holm and Bill Reid. In my kingdom, the pair of them will be the highest priests. Holm of the University of Washington's Burke Museum and Reid himself a Haida artist, they sat to discuss item by item one of the great exhibitions of Northwest Indian art—the Haidas, Kwakiutls, Tlingits, Tsimshians, Bella Bellas, and Bella Coolas created so much there has come to be a kind of academic sub-industry based on numerous museum holdings—and the talk of Holm and Reid as they pass back and forth incredibly carved pipes and dagger hilts and ceremonial masks is as exuberant and nuanced as their topic. The quotes are from Reid, who has done a carving surely as great as any of those of his ancestors: a depiction of Raven, as the Haida legend vows, discovering mankind in a clamshell; the clever bird poised atop, wings cupped out in shelter—or is it advantage?—while tiny mankind squirms to escape the birth-shell, pop forth from the sea-gut of the planet. Reid's insights make me wish for more rumination from Swan while ensconced at Masset, with those dozens of carved poles looming as skyline around him. What Swan does say of that most soaring of Haida art is this:

These carved columns are pictographs, and the grouping of animals illustrate Indian mythological legends....They are all made of the cedar (Arbor Vitae), which abounds on the Islands and attains a great size. In order to relieve the great weight of these massive timbers they are hollowed out on one side and the carving is done on the other or front side, so that what appears as a solid pillar is in reality but a mere shell of about a foot in thickness, thickly covered with carvings from base to summit....These columns are generally mentioned as “totem poles” without regard to their size some of which are six feet in diameter at the base and ninety feet high, and to call such great monuments poles is as inapplicable as to apply the term to Pompeys pillar or Cleopatras needle or Bunker Hill monument.

Monday, the eighth of August 1883, 8:30 that morning, a plash of canoe paddles at last. Swan, Johnny Kit Elswa and Deans push off from Masset, in company
with Edinso and his squaw, three men and two boys. I am to pay Edinso $1.00 per day. His wife and the three men 75¢ each and the two boys 50¢ each and canoe 50¢ per day...which makes a total of $5.50 per day,
plus rations.

 

The expedition's start had not been promisingly smooth. Edinso
did not give instructions about stowing the things and when I got in I found myself perched up on some boxes with Mr. Deans. Old Edinso asked in a curt manner why I sat so high up. I told him...if he wanted me to stow his canoe I could do
so. I then ordered several packages placed properly and made myself comfortable and we proceeded on....

After that bit of bramble, the canoe rides before
a fair but light wind
west past Wiah Point, its passengers let out fishing lines
with spoon bait and trawled them astern and soon caught three large salmon. Edinso's squaw had about two gallons of strawberries and a lot of red huckleberries and she gave us as many as we could eat.

The floating picnic crosses Virago Sound by midafternoon and a stop then called
to cook a meal for the canoe crew. Mr. Deans and I lunched on strawberries, sardines, bread and cold coffee.

They go on to make their first-night camp at a village called Yatze;
little to recommend it even to Indians,
Swan thinks. The Haida villagers of Yatze are gone somewhere, a few wan potato patches and one lonely carved monument the only signs of life. Human life, that is.
Mosquitoes and gnats were plentiful and...quite lively.

As if not wanting another clear look at the place, the canoers paddle out of Yatze the next morning before dawn. Edinso complains of having sprained his back while launching the canoe and, Swan notes perhaps a bit apprehensively, is
quite cross
, but the expedition progresses west several miles to the Jalun River before breakfasting.

The queer beach there impresses Swan as
a singular exhibit of volcanic action in which the lava had burst up through the upper strata of rocks as though the region had boiled up like a pot. The lava...of a brick color and a pale sulphur yellow in places, filled with boulders and pebbles of stone blackened outside with the heat and looking like a gigantic plum pudding. This is the first instance I have seen of such an evident volcanic action on the direct sea beach.

In early afternoon Pillar Rock is passed, and Swan hurriedly pencils a sketch which shows it as a ninety-foot-high spike of stone driven into the offshore shoals.

A few hours later the canoe eases ashore at Edinso's own village, Kioosta, deserted except for
many carved columns the handsomest of which are in front of Edinso's house.

 

Swan is in his tent after supper this second night out from Masset, possibly congratulating himself on the expedition's unruffled progress, when Edinso drops by to inform him of new terms of canoe hire: he and the crew desire hot biscuits and coffee to be served them every night.

I knew the old fellow put on considerable style with strangers and I determined to settle our status at once. I told him I did not wish him to dictate to me what I should do, and he knew that since we left Masset we had no time for any cooking but the most simple kind, and it was no use to talk to me about hot biscuits till we got to camp where we would have leisure.

Edinso huffs from the tent and Swan falls asleep to the mutters of the crewmen debating the biscuit issue.

In the morning the dietary squabble wakes with them.
Had a good blow up with old Edinso,
Swan's pocket diary begins forthrightly. This time the chief tries Swan on the angle that the canoe crew wants to eat with him
and they want flour and potatoes and pancakes, and want Johnny to be their cook.

They might as well have wanted Swan to pare their toenails during supper every night, too. If there is one matter in the cosmos that Swan has a clear doctrine about, it is the sanctity of his meals. He fires back to Edinso and the other Haidas the ultimatum—bluff, more likely—that
if I heard any more complaints I would return to Masset and get another crew....When they found I was determined they gave up and all became good natured.

 

Good-natured or not, Edinso defers on biscuits and hotcakes and begins showing Swan and Deans the long-awaited shores of his North Island, today's Langara.

He takes them first to a site called Tadense, a deserted village rapidly expiring back into the forest.
Even the more recent houses built fifty years ago are fast decaying: the humidity of the climate causes a growth of moss which, freezing in winter
and seldom or never dry in summer, rots the soft cedar and rapidly reduces it to a pulpy mould.
Then from the oozing-away village, along the waterline to a burial cave.
A dry cavern some 60 feet in length,
as Swan jots it,
the entrance to which is 25 feet above high water mark and approached by a rough path over conglomerate boulders.
Edinso, who is proving to have a rhetorical formula for every occasion, assures them that no white eyes ever have seen the hallowed spot before this instant.

They clamber in among
some 28 or 30 burial boxes of various sizes....In one of the boxes of skeletons which had been opened by age, a puffin or sea parrot had made its nest....Some of the burial boxes were ornamented with the crests of the occupants carved and painted in colors, others were merely rough boxes. Some of the bodies were rolled in Hudson Bay blankets, and some of the heads were mummified like AZTEC mummies....That of a Chief or doctor, was well preserved the hair tied in a knot on the top of the skull, and the dried ears still holding the abalone shell ornaments....

Yet one more stop in this funereal day: Cloak Bay, sheltered by a small island which thrust up a conglomerate cusp of cliff astoundingly like a round medieval tower,
everything but the want of windows made this appearance complete.
Sharp rocks fanged around the island. One pinnacle displayed a hole bored through by the ocean's action. Edinso at once advertises the cavity as the work of an immense fish gnawing a doorway to its house. That reminds him that he hasn't adequately explained the castellated island, and he relates to Swan and Deans that here lived an Indian slaver named Teegwin,
and for his misdeeds he was turned into this big stone, and his sister coming to see him was also turned to stone.

After this recital we hoisted sail and returned to camp.

 

Two days after that, on the tenth of August, Swan makes a find which is among the oddest in his thirty years of nosing along the Pacific shoreline. Edinso and crew had steered Deans and him to the deserted village of Yakh, there to see the burial place of a medicine man named Koontz. Inside his plank box, Koontz in a shirt of caribou skin reclines in full dignified length,
not doubled up as is the practice. Bodies of doctors alone being allowed to remain in the position in which they die.
Deans potters around the corpse a bit, but Swan is less interested in Koontz's posture than a pair of items among the skaga's burial trove. Two large curved teeth which he thinks resemble those of a beaver, but which seem too long, too...odd. The baffling incisors, he subsequently learned
were tusks of the African wild hog...probably procured from the wreck of a Japanese or Siamese ]unk which was lost on Queen Charlotte Islands in 1833.

 

Swan has on his mind even another mystery of Africa-in-the-North-Pacific. Back at Kioosta he noticed among the carved column figures a creature with a rolled-up snout. Except for the lack of tusks it looked for all the world like the head of an elephant. Beginning to wonder about the pachydermic enthusiasms of the Haidas, Swan at last questions Edinso and is enlightened when the chief points toward a flutter on a nearby bush. The carved creature was a colossal butterfly, the snout its proboscis.

Swan of course asks for the legend, Edinso of course has it ready:
that when the Hooyeh or raven was a man, he lived in
a
country beyond California, that he got angry with his uncle and lit down on his head and split it open. Then fearing his relatives he changed to a bird and flew to Queen Charlotte Islands where he was told good land could be found. The butterfly, a creature as big as a house accompanied him and would fly up in the air and when he saw any good land he would unfold his proboscis and point with it.

Just the way, Edinso drives the point home to his white questioner with a tap of mockery,
Johnny was going with me showing me places.

Recited in turn by each of Swan's three sets of diary pages during their early weeks in the Queen Charlottes, a legend, a belief, and a lore:

 

Towats was a great Haida hunter, and once while hunting he found the house of the king of the bears. The king bear was not there but his wife was, and Towats made love to her. Arriving home to a much disordered house the king bear charged his wife with unfaithfulness. She denied all. But the king bear noticed that at a certain hour each day she went out to fetch wood and water and was gone long. One day he tied a thread to her dress. By following the thread through the forest he came upon his wife in the arms of Towats. The king of bears slew the hunter Towats by tearing out his heart.

 

Called on Kive-ges-lines this PM to see her twins which were born on the 10th. They were pretty babies but the Indians are sure to kill one.
Next day:
One of the twins died during the night as I predicted. The Indian who told me said...”It died from want of breath” which I think very probable. These Haidas like the Makahs have a superstition that twins bring ill luck....

 

Old Stingess...came to my house and...I asked her to tell me about tattooing and when the Haidahs first commenced tattooing. She said it was always practiced...as long ago as the most ancient legends make any mention. Formerly the Indians procured the wool of the mountain sheep which was spun into fine threads which were stained with some black pigment either pulverized charcoal and water, or with lignite ground in water on a stone, as at present, then with needles made of copper procured from the Sitka Indians, these fine threads were drawn under the skin producing indelible marks. When white men
came they learned the art of tattooing with steel needles from sailors on board the vessels, and have adopted that plan since...here the old woman became tired and went home.

 

How elliptical, literally, the past becomes. Stingess culls from what may have been an evening-long narrative an answer for Swan. Who chooses as much of it as he thinks worth cramming into his diary pages. At my hundred years' remove, I select lines from his and frame them in trios of editing dots. From her Haida tradition to Swan's white tribe to my even paler version. The logical end of the process signaled by my ellipses, I suppose, might be for the lore of Haida tattooing to compress down to something like a single magical speck of print, perhaps the period after the news that Stingess has got tired of all the chitchat and hobbled home. But I've heard it offered that a period is simply the shorthand for the dots of an ellipsis. That a story never does end, only can pause. So that would not complete it either, the elliptical transit from Stingess to Swan to me to whomever abbreviates the past next.