The shaman turns and stares at the bloodied Dutchman
.
Hannah tries to press a handkerchief to Dutch’s wound, but he ducks away, whining, “Christ, all I done was ask a feller about a bear.”
“What bear?” asks Hans, his voice shaking with suspicion and anger born of fear.
The shaman answers for the wounded man. “
Klute-utardy tseek
. The bear has come down from the glacier.”
Dutch probes at the laceration with a tentative finger and curses. “Damn that fella. I seen that bear skin in his house there, and thought I’d get him to sell it to me for my bed.”
A rock
thunks
against the roof; everyone but Negook flinches. Michael asks, “What’s that, Negook? That bear you’re talking about?”
The shaman’s lips turn down like an overturned bowl, and matted gray locks of hair jangle about his face as he mutters, “
Tseek-noon
. The people are angry about
tseek-noon
, the bear coming. Because you keep digging,
tseek-noon
came down from the mountains and showed himself to you.” It is not safe to mention the Bear God Kah-Lituya’s name out loud or explain to these people how the silver bear comes as his messenger.
Michael looks at the others, the puzzled look on his face asking if any of them understands.
“What the hell did you do, Dutch? What’s this about bears?”
Dutch shakes his head and takes the handkerchief Hannah offers, wipes it across his face, and whimpers at the blood.
“Jesus, all we was doing was talking back and forth, him in his heathen siwash, and me trying to talk American so’s he’d understand. I told him about that odd creature I seen, that gold color bear on the beach. Just being friendly, you know, telling a couple of stories. And mother-a-god, he got all agitated and hit me with a paddle.”
Harky nods in agreement. “That’s right. Dutch and that Indian were just dickering over a bear hide, then Dutch starts in with that wild story. Next thing you know, the Indian’s knocked Dutch over the head and is trying to club him. He’d of killed him if I hadn’t showed my pistol.” The hulking Texan shakes his head in wonderment, either at Dutch’s endless folly, the warrior’s unprovoked violence, or both.
Negook stares at Dutch without expression, then sighs and nods to himself. Mumbling, he digs into a dark corner piled with oddments of animal parts and skins and emerges with a bag knotted about the throat with a cord. Kneeling, he groans, opens the bag, and upends the contents into the dirt. Teeth, vertebrae, shells, and colored stones rattle onto a pile. There is a coin stamped with the Russian eagle, a spent bullet, and a splintered bone. Seeds mixed with birds’ beaks and pearly bits of abalone shell filter from the bottom of the bag. Negook shakes it empty, then probes at the mixture with a finger.
Moaning and keening, he stirs the pile, picking out bits and pieces, rattling them like dice in his hand before spitting gently on the selected parts and pouring them out in a curving line across the ground. The prospectors stand frozen, disbelieving, but nonetheless waiting for the primitive divination to render a forecast or sentence.
Negook nudges the spent bullet from the line of fetishes and inspects it before sitting back on his heels, purses his lips, and blows a long sigh. When he speaks, he whispers, “The bear will give you what you want.”
The shaman’s eyes shine like wet coal as he peers up at the miners, who cluster like quail. Turning his back on them, he shuffles away, motioning for them to come.
“Where we going?” asks Dutch, anxious at the thought of paddle-wielding warriors beyond the sheltering walls. “Where you taking us?”
Negook replies, “I’m going to show you gold. Lots and lots of gold.”
And, as if he can see the quizzical looks exchanged behind his back as he pulls aside the rag door, he says, “That is the best way to punish you.”
TWELVE
A steady breeze stirs the feathers knitted into Negook’s matted hair into elliptical flutters. A finger of black bedrock splits the stream in which he stands into two parts, flowing left and right around its base before joining again into a single run of water. He whispers; the stream answers in low murmurs. The miners dig, shoveling gravel into buckets and pouring the buckets into the Long Tom sluice box the shaman insisted they erect on this spot. Believing, they dig. Disbelieving, they dig harder.
While Harky and Hans shovel, Michael and Dutch divert water from the stream into the sluice. The flow slurries gravel the length of the box, driving it over the wooden riffles with a hissing sound. As the water runs, Michael and Dutch take turns rocking the box, shaking a post nailed upright to one corner. Tools clang on hardpan, water gurgles on stones, gravel rattles and grates down the boards in a rhythm of labor that hypnotizes the men with its consistency of motion.
While they work with mud and cold water, Negook reluctantly instructs Hannah in gathering various foods in the forest. There is the leaf and stalk of
l’ool
, the bright, tall-flowered fireweed, with its crimson and purple blossoms;
K’oox
, the chocolate lily, whose root is like rice; cloudberries—
n’ex’w
—and tart thimbleberries called
ch’eex’
, which can be mixed together, pulped, and thickened by adding
k’eikaxetl’k
, bunchberries with the seeds removed.
None of this will do any good, he knows, but when the spirits of divination had whispered to him what the Bear God has in store for them, his anger toward the whites had abated. Because
T’ak
is coming—
T’ak
, the terrible child-dying time, when even the waterfalls are frozen and no living thing stirs in the land. When winter is at its worst, Kah-Lituya will destroy these people, but first he will raise them up on dreams of gold and drive them mad. And for that Negook pities them. He shows Hannah how to wrap a whole salmon in a broad leaf of skunk cabbage and cover it with coals, steaming the delicate flesh until it flakes in buttery pink layers. “Eat the head and the eggs,” he tells her. “Lots of good fat there.”
The men shovel and sluice; the shallow trench they dig grows to the depth and size of a grave. Michael stands upright in pain, clutching at the small of his back, then forces himself to bend to his shovel again. Harky whistles a tuneless melody, imitating the buzzing calls of southbound thrushes and kinglets flitting through the trees.
When evening comes, Hans calls out, “Let’s clean up!” and pickets his shovel with a stamp of his boot. As he washes the concentrated fines from the riffles by pouring water carefully down the sluice with a can, the others gather round, watching as the slurry is gathered in the nap of the towel, the towel folded and lifted from the bed, then the concentrate carefully divided into waiting pans.
The largest is a shallow dish two feet across. In Harky’s giant hands it looks like a butter dish, and he dips it carefully into the running stream, using the kiss of the current to wash away the soil. Swirling and rocking, he distills the contents, boiling off the silica and sand.
The sun dips behind a thin band of cloud, losing its intensity, and at that moment he sees it: a solid rim of gold glittering along the edge of the pan. The sun reemerges, illuminating the crescent with the glow of a blacksmith’s molten cauldron. Harky cannot breathe, he cannot speak, and the others are afraid to look until he holds out the pan. Heads together, Hans, Michael, and Dutch bend to stare into the amalgam. The glimmer pierces each in turn, stabbing deep into that part of every man that is a thief, firing the greed in their veins.
“Jesus,” says Hans.
“I told you,” says Dutch. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Michael just stares, acutely aware of the sound of his own breathing, the chuckling of the stream, the play of the breeze on his face.
Dear Diary,
The advance from rags to riches has been swift. Thanks to the Indian Negook, we have at last achieved our goal of striking “pay dirt.” The strike is wonderfully rich, yielding four or five times as much gold as any ground we have previously worked. At the present rate of recovery, we shall all be very well off by the time autumn forces us to retire to Sitka.
The days now grow rapidly shorter as winter approaches, and Hans, Harky, and Dutch work from daylight until dark, while Michael hunts. Hans speaks of working by torchlight, but the others decline to work any harder, as they already return to the cabin at night, exhausted and bleeding from their palms.
The men’s days are strictly scheduled: Breakfast before daylight, work until dark, bathe in the pool (which grows chillier these days, but is still the best part of my day; I have my bath after the men have left in the morning), then the evening meal, after which the take is weighed before we retire to our bunks. Dutch crows and struts like a banty rooster each evening as Hans weighs out the take, but it is easy to forgive him his unseemly exultations, for he has been richly vindicated by Negook’s strike.
Michael is proving to be a fine huntsman, adept at bringing fresh meat to the table. The flesh of the goats and sea lions is often stringy and tough, but he has fashioned a mallet from a spruce knot with which I beat the meat tender.
Only Harky seems untouched by our fortune, but he is always such a silent man it is difficult to say whether or not he shares the exuberance of the strike.
I must admit that the gold ignites grand dreams in my own mind, dreams of a fine home and nice things, but it stirs a certain fear as well, an uneasiness I cannot define. But until we are done here, it remains for me to pick berries, till the garden, and gather greens from the forest just like any primitive Indian woman (only the Indians are much more adept at these tasks than I).
Canvas bags of gold are piled on the table like so many sausages. Outside the cabin, the night air is thick with mist. A cold wind sucks a swirl of bright sparks from the stovepipe and sends the glowing fireflies fleeing and blinking into the forest to extinguish themselves on damp foliage. Michael and Hans figure and refigure estimates of the company’s worth in columns and tables penciled on a page cut from Hannah’s journal.
The open door of the stove casts a glowing light that dances across the floor and over the faces of the cabin’s inhabitants. The jump and swirl of the fire shadows remind Hannah of the flight of birds, the sudden uprush and circling of pigeons in Trafalgar Square, or the dance of swallows in the burnt umber air of London after it has gone thick with coal smoke in late evening.
The shadows retreat as she turns up the lantern, hangs it from a roof beam, and angles a skillet into the light to inspect it for cleanliness.
“Goat meat again, Mrs. Nelson?” asks Dutch. The question makes him feel very homey, almost as if he were inquiring of his own wife what they are having for dinner, and he wishes he had a pipe to smoke or a dog at his feet.
“That and a salad of greens,” replies Hannah. “I’ve taken the last of the kale from the garden. It was going to seed.”
Dutch leans back on his stump-chair and crosses his arms. “Be time to dig the potatoes, too, I imagine.”
Hans looks up from his figures and sighs. “Meat and greens, meat and spuds, meat and meat. The menu is getting rather bland.”
Negook’s voice startles the miners as he steps through the door. “Plenty of white man’s food in Sitka.”
The wind enters with the wizard, eddying angrily about his feet before grabbing the open door and slamming it. Beads of mist cling to the shaman’s hair, glittering in the lantern light. His legs are bare, muddy to the knees, and he carries a walking stick carved from the rib of a whale.
His voice is low and mixes with the sound of the wind as he points with the bone at the sacks stacked on the table. “You got plenty now. It is time for you to go.
Andai.
Now.”
No one is able to reply. The sudden appearance of the shaman from out of the darkness seems to bring all of the wilderness into the tiny cabin, and they are suddenly, keenly, aware of the space beyond the walls, the immensity of a world filled with unbreachable mountains, fierce churning storms, the rumble of glaciers, and the mourning of wolves.
Hans looks down at the paper worked with figures and clears his throat. He feels ridiculous and small, sitting like a bank clerk with the pencil in his hand as he
ahem
s and says, “Well, we were just discussing this,” knowing as he says it that the shaman has been listening outside and will recognize the words as a lie.
Pressing ahead, enslaved by the craving for more gold, Nelson claims, “We’ve tallied the take. And we need to keep going.”
Negook fixes him with a black-eyed stare. Unnerved, Nelson turns the paper toward the shaman, as if offering it for his inspection, and taps it with the pencil.
“Eight thousand. That’s what we’ve got so far.”
Negook continues to stare. Hans shuffles, fidgets, taps the paper again.
When Negook speaks, there is barely controlled rage in his voice. “You got lots of damn gold. Now you must go. Storms are coming. Winter is coming.
T’ak
will be a very bad time for you.” He slices the whalebone through the air like a sword. “Enough gold. Leave before the Bear comes again.”