Hannah & the Spindle Whorl (4 page)

I shut the diary, turn off my light, and just start to doze off when Chuck leaps in through my bedroom window and lands on my stomach.

“Ow,” I yell. “Can’t you just land on the floor like a normal cat?” He ignores me, curls up at my feet and falls asleep immediately. His paws are wet and he smells a bit fishy. No doubt he’s been snooping around Ben North’s boat. In the half-light, I can see the spindle whorl across the room, the moonlight highlighting the beautiful carved salmon on the smooth shape, which casts an odd circular shadow across the wood of my table. After a while, the stars disappear and it begins to drizzle again. I fall asleep to the sound of raindrops splashing against the tin roof of our houseboat.

I close my journal and shove it under my bed this time, behind the box of dolls and stuffed animals that I just can’t seem to get rid of. It’s Saturday! I remind myself. I love Saturday mornings. Usually, I take my cereal and go out on the deck if it’s nice and warm. That’s when all the other houseboaters do the same thing, and it can get quite chatty. After about an hour, the whole shoreline wakes up, and the fish market and the Toad start booming with people. Later, the weekend strollers swarm the craft stores and restaurants. Now that summer is pretty much here, the weekends just seem to get busier and busier. I’m glad to see all the action after months of rain and dark grey skies. Sometimes it gets a little bleak and lonely on a houseboat during winters on the coast. That’s when I read a lot.

Today I toast an English muffin and go outside with Chuck. Sadie, Ben North’s African grey parrot, is sitting on my dad’s deck chair, preening her feathers. I like Sadie a lot, even though she always looks kinda shifty to me.

“Hey Sadie,” I greet her. “Better watch out … there’s a cat on board.”

But I laugh out loud, because everybody knows that Chuck is terrified of Sadie. Maybe it’s because she’s too big to tackle, or maybe it’s because she can imitate the bark of a Rottweiler, Chuck never sticks around when Sadie visits. Today he takes one look at her beady eyes and darts back into the house to take cover once again in the laundry basket.

“Kitty on a stick … Kitty on a stick!” Sadie mocks. It took Ben two months to teach her to say that.

I give her a piece of my English muffin and kick off my sandals. It’s really warm for the middle of June. I can hear my dad bumping around in the kitchen, grinding coffee beans and opening and closing the fridge. He takes the wooden spoon out of the drawer and raps on the stair railing.

“Come on, lazy bones! Up and at ’em!” He calls to me.

“Too late! I’m already up!” I call back.

He looks outside sheepishly, and then adds, “Well, if you’re up … where’s my coffee?”

“Caffeine is bad for you. I don’t want any part of your bad habits,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Oh. Morning humour. How I love it,” Dad says, shuffling outside wearing a navy blue sweater with holes in the elbows and a pair of jeans with paint on the knees. “I’m going to call the museum in an hour or so. You talk to Max last night?”

“Yep. I told him we’d pick him up on the way out. He’ll be ready. He said he wanted to come with us even if we can’t go to the museum. Just to, you know, hang out.”

“Great. Make yourself useful for an hour or so, and we’ll make a plan in a little bit.”

He settles into a chair beside me. Sadie steps from the back of the chair to his shoulder and immediately begins preening Dad’s hair … or, what’s left of it anyway.

“Crazy bird,” Dad says, smiling. “Why don’t you go visit Riley. He’s got enough hair to keep you busy till you croak.” Riley Waters lives on dock nine and has a grey ponytail that hangs halfway down his back. Wherever Riley goes, a bag of shelled sunflower seeds goes too. There are often little trails of seed husks going from his houseboat to the bait shop, to the coffee shop, and back again. Sadie has yet to venture as far as dock nine, but if she ever discovers that head of hair, and a constant supply of sunflower seeds, she’ll be in parrot heaven.

A bit later, after Dad calls the museum and gets the thumbs up from someone called Mr. Sullivan, he puts on better jeans, grabs his manuscript and travel mug, and yells for me to hurry up! I’ve learned that when Dad wants to leave, he means immediately. Nothing is worse than making him wait when he’s got a plan. Waiting makes him really cranky and then he drives like a lunatic, so I hurry. This guy is going to meet with us, even though it’s a Saturday, so it’s the least I can do.

Our Jeep is pretty old, but it’s very comfy, even though the stuffing is coming out of the seats here and there, and it kinda smells like an old tent. We’ve had it ever since I can remember. When I was six, Mom and Dad and I drove it all the way down to Arizona to see the desert. Both Dad and I have a thing about lizards. We saw lots of different kinds of geckos when we were there.

When we pull up to Max’s house, his mom is on the front steps with Max’s little sister Chloe. It looks like she’s brushing Chloe’s hair and putting it into braids. I kind of feel twisted up when I see that, because I remember Mom doing that to me just before she died. Dad looks over at me and I can tell that he knows exactly what I’m thinking. He chuffs me under the chin and winks. I feel like I have a giant grapefruit stuck in my throat. But then Max comes tearing up the walkway and climbs into the Jeep before I let my memories get the better of me.

“Hi Mr. Anderson. Thanks for letting me come along,” he says as he climbs into the back seat.

Dad glances back over his shoulder. “No problem. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Miller.”

“Same here. Hannah? Can I see the whorl?” Max looks eagerly at the floor between us where I put my backpack.

“Sure … check it out,” I say, taking it carefully out of the old green towel and placing it on his lap.

“Whoa … this is awesome! It’s hardly wrecked at all, except for this one bit here.” He examines a part of a fish fin — an area where the grooves are smooth and flat with wear.

“Who’s going to look at it?” he asks.

“Dad talked to him this morning. A man named Graham Sullivan. He’s the head of … what is it again, Dad?” I ask.

“Archaeological acquisitions at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. He was so excited about the whorl; he agreed to see us today, even though it’s Saturday!”

I’m impressed and, even better, so is Max.

The Royal British Columbia Museum is next to the Parliament buildings right downtown near the water. After a visit, I love to sit by the totem poles in the park near the museum’s entrance and watch the horses trot by pulling their carriage-loads of tourists. I wait for the carillon bells to chime in the courtyard.

We park a block away, near Beacon Hill Park, and walk over. We’re about twenty minutes early, so we decide to use our family pass and wander around inside for a bit. Of course, I want to go into the simulated coastal forest and so does everyone else. I stand in the middle of the exhibit and try to figure out just how they make the light the way it is, as if it’s really early in the morning and there’s still a fine mist in the air. You can hear birds waking up and a woodpecker tapping away in the distance.

I cross over the floor and hang over the railing to peer at the stuffed cougar the way I always do. It’s kind of sad seeing him just lying there, all stiff and stuffed. What awful thing did he do to wind up in a museum, filled with sawdust? But he’s pretty convincing, even though his eyes remind me of the prize marbles I keep in an old pickle jar at home in my room.

Behind me is the grizzly bear, his huge claws made to look as though he is ripping apart a rotted stump in search of grubs. Each claw must be about four inches long. I hope I never get the chance to meet claws like those up close for real! There’s also an elk standing among the maple saplings. He’s almost twice as high as I am.

I’ve seen elk before, not too far from Cowichan Bay, up behind Shawnigan Lake. They’re usually tagged because they’re Roosevelt Elk, protected on Vancouver Island; it’s illegal to hunt them, but sometimes people do it anyway. Not far from the elk there’s this little red Douglas squirrel, like the one that chattered at me so angrily on the trail before I found the spindle whorl. It looks like he’s running down the trunk of a big cedar, and his tail is sticking straight up like a sail.

“
COME ON, GUYS,
time to go,” my dad whispers from the red velvet rope in front of the white-tailed deer exhibit.

We follow him out to the escalators and ride down to the foyer. The offices for the museum staff are in an adjoining building. Mr. Sullivan’s door is open, but Dad still knocks before sticking his head in. Mr. Sullivan is sitting by a huge stack of books; he has a big beard and wears small round glasses. He’s dressed in a turquoise T-shirt with a picture of a big Komodo dragon climbing up one side of it, faded jeans, and some seriously worn hiking sandals on his feet. All around his office are posters and photographs of dig sites, ancient tools, fossils, and artifacts and stuff. On the window ledge sits a sculpture of a South American native pan flute player and there’s also a bunch of woven baskets on another shelf across the room.

“Ah, the Anderson clan!” Mr. Sullivan says as he gets up to shake our hands. “Glad you could make it. It’s great to meet you.”

His hand is warm and big and on his finger he has a silver ring with a bear carved into it. He sees me staring at it.

“Like it?” he asks me.

I nod.

“Tlingit. From the southern Yukon, up north,” he tells me.

“Tling … I could never pronounce that,” I tell him, and he laughs as we all sit down. Mr. Sullivan looks really excited, and keeps smoothing out his jeans over his knees.

“Well, let’s have a look at what you’ve got there,” he says, drumming his fingers rapidly on his desk. I reach into my backpack, pull out the green towel and carefully unwrap the spindle whorl. When I place it into his hands, he holds it without saying anything. Mr. Sullivan looks more serious now, as if he’s looking up a really difficult word in the dictionary. Pulling a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer, he holds it up to the whorl, right in front of his nose. It takes forever before he says anything, and I try not to squirm in my chair.

“Well, Miss Anderson, what you’ve found here is something that many archaeologists could search for over their whole careers.”

“Were we right?” I ask. “Is it a spindle whorl?”

“It certainly is. And you were also correct about it being Coast Salish.”

“How old do you think it might be?” Dad asks Mr. Sullivan.

“Well, I can’t tell you that right off the bat, but I would say that it could be close to one hundred and fifty years old.”

“That’s so cool!” Max says. “When can you tell us for sure?”

“Not until we’ve done further analysis,” he says.

“Radiocarbon dating?” I ask, secretly pleased that I have a chance to use the term, even though I don’t really know what it means.

“No,” Mr. Sullivan explains. “Not this time. We only use that method on things that are much older.”

“Just what is radiocarbon dating, anyway?” I can’t help asking. I want to know. It just seems amazing to be able to find out that something you stumble on might be thousands of years old.

Mr. Sullivan explains, “Well … here’s a simplified version. Scientists have been using this method for about sixty years. Radiocarbon dating measures the amount of carbon-14 in a fossil or artifact. Carbon-14 occurs naturally in particles in the atmosphere. As plants and animals use the air, their tissues absorb some of the carbon-14. After they die, they no longer absorb the carbon-14 and their tissues begin to decay. So, measuring the amount of carbon-14 left in a fossil tells us its age. The results are fairly accurate.”

Max and I look at each other. I notice that one of his eyebrows is raised. He does that a lot, I’ve discovered.

“So is it true that there have been people living on Vancouver Island for, like a gazillion years?” I ask Mr. Sullivan, who is leaning forward over his desk and staring intently at the carved images on the face of the whorl.

“Well, human occupation of the east coast of the island goes back several thousand years,” he tells us. “Archaeologists have found evidence of shell middens, what you might call mounds, as well as stone tools which prove that there have been people here for a long time.”

“And radiocarbon dating was used to find out the age of that stuff?” Max asks, his eyes glued on a big stuffed owl that’s sitting on the end of a bookshelf. I notice that it has the same kind of out-of-focus marble eyes as the cougar in the museum.

“That’s right,” Mr. Sullivan says.

“So were the first people here on the island spinning and knitting wool hundreds of years ago? Where’d they get the sheep?” I ask.

“Not sheep. Dogs,” says Mr. Sullivan.

“Dogs?” I think of Quincy, Nell’s dog, who is wiry, smelly and oily, and is constantly scratching himself. I can’t imagine knitting a sweater out of his hair. I mean … I like dogs, and I like Quincy, but … gross!

“Not regular dogs. Little woolly white dogs. The Salish kept them specifically for their coats and sheared them like sheep. They’re not around anymore; they became extinct long ago.”

“And they knit sweaters from that dog hair?” I ask, wrinkling up my nose.

“Mmmm … it was weaving back then. On looms. The knitting didn’t start until settlers showed them how,” Mr. Sullivan says.

“The Cowichan sweaters!” I exclaim. Aunt Maddie has one, a gift from when she was at university.

“Yes. The Coast Salish were — are — great weavers, so it’s only natural that they would take to knitting as well.”

Max looks at me and grins. I know what I’m doing for my BC history report.