Monkey Beach (2 page)

Find a map of British Columbia. Point to the middle of the coast. Beneath Alaska, find the Queen Charlotte Islands. Drag your finger across the map, across the Hecate Strait to the coast and you should be able to see a large island hugging the coast. This is Princess Royal Island, and it is famous for its kermode bears, which are black bears that are usually white. Princess Royal Island is the western edge of traditional Haisla territory.
Ka-tee-doux Gitk’a’ata
, the Tsimshians of Hartley Bay, live at the mouth of the Douglas Channel and surrounding areas just north of the island. During land claims talks, some of this territory is claimed by both the Haisla and the Tsimshian nations—this is called an overlap and is a sticky topic of discussion. But once you pass the head of the Douglas Channel, you are firmly in Haisla territory.

Early in the nineteenth century, Hudson’s Bay traders used Tsimshian guides to show them around, which is when the names began to get confusing. “Kitamaat” is a Tsimshian word that means people of the falling snow, and that was their name for the main Haisla village. So when the Hudson’s Bay traders asked their guides, “Hey, what’s that village called?” and the Tsimshian guides said, “Oh, that’s Kitamaat.” The
name got stuck on the official records and the village has been called Kitamaat ever since, even though it really should be called Haisla. There are about four or five different spellings of Kitamaat in the historical writings, but the Haisla decided on Kitamaat. To add to the confusion, when Alcan Aluminum moved into the area in the 1950s, it built a “city of the future” for its workers and named it Kitimat too, but spelled it differently.

If your finger is on Prince Rupert or Terrace, you are too far north. If you are pointing to Bella Coola or Ocean Falls, you are too far south. If you are pointing in the right place, you should have your finger on the western shore of Princess Royal Island. To get to Kitamaat, run your finger northeast, right up to the Douglas Channel, a 140-kilometre-long deep-sea channel, to its mouth. You should pass Gil Island, Princess Royal Island, Gribbell Island, Hawkesbury Island, Maitland Island and finally Costi Island. Near the head of the Douglas, you’ll find Kitamaat Village, with its seven hundred Haisla people tucked in between the mountains and the ocean. At the end of the village is our house. Our kitchen looks out onto the water. Somewhere in the seas between here and Namu—a six-hour boat ride south of Kitamaat—my brother is lost.

My mother answered the phone when the Coast Guard called. I took the phone from her hands when she started crying. A man told me there had been no radio contact since Saturday, two days earlier. The man said he’d like to ask me a few questions. I gave him all the information I could—that Jimmy had phoned
us from Bella Bella on Friday. He told us that 36 hours’ notice had been given for a Sunday opening for sockeye salmon in Area 8. Josh had been planning to move the seiner closer to his favourite Area 8 fishing point. No, I didn’t know where the point was. Jimmy had said that since it was a boring sit-and-wait kind of job, the crew was splitting up. The three senior fishermen in Josh’s crew were staying in Bella Bella and taking a speedboat to join the
Queen
early Sunday. Jimmy had the least seniority so he had to go with Josh.

The man told me that Josh had called his crew in Bella Bella to say the engine was acting up so he was stopping over in Namu. When the crew arrived at the Area 8 fishing site, they couldn’t find the
Queen of the North
. They searched all afternoon. No one in the fishing fleet reported seeing the
Queen
. No one knew if she’d gone down or if she’d just broken down and was holed up somewhere. Area 8 was large, the man said. There had been no mayday, but he didn’t say if this was a good or a bad thing. Did I know of anything else that could be helpful? No, I said. It wasn’t really a lie. What I knew wouldn’t be particularly useful now.

There are no direct flights to Namu from the Terrace-Kitimat Airport, so Mom and Dad are traveling to Vancouver on the morning flight. From there, they’re flying into Bella Bella and then going by boat to Namu to be closer to the search. I shouldn’t have told them about the crows. At least I didn’t tell them about the dream: the night the
Queen of the North
disappeared, I
saw Jimmy at Monkey Beach. He stood at the edge of the sand, where the beach disappeared into the trees. The fog and clouds smeared the lines between land and sea and sky. He faded in and out of view as the fog rolled by. He wore the same clothes he’d had on the day he left, a red plaid shirt, black jeans and the John Deere baseball cap Dad had given him. I must have been on a boat, because he was far away and small. I couldn’t see his face.

When we were kids, Dad would tell us about B’gwus, the wild man of the woods. They were stories that Ba-ba-oo had told him. Jimmy’s favourite was the one where these two trappers go up into the mountains near Monkey Beach. At one point, they had to separate because the trail split. They put a Y-shaped stick at the crossroads. The trapper who finished his line first would point the stick in the direction of their camp.

The first guy who finished checking the traps heard something big moving in the bushes ahead of him. He caught a glimpse of light brown fur through the leaves and thought it was a grizzly. Keeping his gun pointed in the direction of the shaking bushes, he left the trail, moving backwards as quietly and quickly as he could, thinking that if he stayed downwind, it wouldn’t notice him.

So he wasn’t paying attention to what was behind him when he broke into a clearing. He heard a grunt. He spun around. In front of him were more than twenty very hairy men. They looked as surprised as he was. They were tall, with thick brown hair on their chests, arms and legs. Their heads were shaped oddly, very large and slanted back sharply from the brow.
One of them growled and started towards him. He panicked and bolted back into the bushes, and they began to chase him.

They were fast. He was quickly cornered at the foot of a cliff. He climbed up. They gathered at the bottom in a semicircle and roared. When they followed him up, he raised his gun and, knowing he’d probably have only one shot, picked the leader. The trapper shot him in the head, and the creature landed with a heavy thump at the bottom of the cliff. As the other sasquatches let out howls of grief, the trapper ran.

After he reached the beach and realized that no one was following him, he made his way back to camp. His partner wasn’t there. The sun was setting, and the trapper knew that he was going to have to wait until morning before he could go after him.

He broke camp, put all the stuff into their boat, anchored out in the bay and spent the night wide awake. At first light, he headed up the mountain. When he got to the crossroads, he saw his partner, battered, bloody and most definitely dead. Before he could get to him, the howling started all around, and he turned and ran.

“You’re telling it wrong,” Ma-ma-oo had said once when she was over for Christmas dinner. Every time Dad launched into his version, she punctuated his gory descriptions with, “That’s not how it happened.”

“Oh, Mother,” he’d protested finally. “It’s just a story.”

Her lips had pressed together until they were bloodless. She’d left a few minutes later. Mom had kissed Dad’s nose and said family was family.

Ma-ma-oo’s version was less gruesome, with no one getting shot and the first trapper just seeing the b’gwus crossing a glacier, getting scared and running back to the camp. Me and Jimmy liked Dad’s version better, especially when he did the sound effects.

Either way, when the trapper got back to the village, he had an artist carve a sasquatch mask. At the end of the story, Dad would put on a copy that his father had carved and chase us around the living room. Jimmy would squeal in mock terror and pretend to shoot him. If Dad caught us, he’d throw us down and tickle us. Ma-ma-oo frowned on this. She said it would give us nightmares. Sure enough, Jimmy would crawl into my bed late at night when he thought I was asleep and curl into my side. He’d leave before I awoke, tiptoeing out.

Jimmy took the story as if it were from the Bible. He bought himself a cheap little camera one day, and I asked him why he was wasting his money.

“I’m going to make us rich,” he said.

I snorted. “How? You going to blackmail someone?” I’d been watching soaps with Ma-ma-oo and knew all about cheating husbands and wives who were photographed in awkward positions.

Jimmy shook his head and wouldn’t tell me. “Want it to be a surprise.”

All that week, he begged Dad to take him to Monkey Beach.

“How come?” Dad said, getting annoyed.

“Because that’s where the b’gwus are,” Jimmy said.

Dad raised an eyebrow.

Jimmy squirmed. “Please, Dad. Please. It’s important.”

“Jimmy,” Dad said. “Sasquatches are make-believe, like fairies. They don’t really exist.”

“But Ma-ma-oo says they’re real,” Jimmy said.

“Your grandmother thinks the people on TV are real,” Dad said, then glanced at me, rolling his eyes. After a moment, he leaned in close to Jimmy, whispering, “You don’t really want to get eaten, do you? They like little boys.”

Jimmy went pale. “I know.” He looked at me. I rolled my eyes upward.

Only when it looked like Dad wasn’t going to give in did Jimmy pull out a copy of the
World Weekly Globe
. He showed us page 2, where it said that the
Globe
would pay up to thirty thousand dollars to anyone who got a picture of a sasquatch.

“We’ll be rich!” Jimmy said, so excited he began to hop. “We can go to Disneyland! We can get a new car! I bet we could even get a new house!”

Dad stared at him. He patted Jimmy’s shoulder. “If you finish all your chores this week, we’ll leave on Friday.”

Jimmy whooped and ran to tell Mom. I giggled. He was only a year and a half younger than me and he was still such a baby.

“Well,” Dad said with a wry smile, “cockle season’s starting anyway.”

Dad’s uncle Geordie and his wife, Edith, dropped off equipment for the trip that night. Jimmy was furious that they were coming with us until they both promised that he was the only one that would be taking pictures. They were, Uncle Geordie assured him, coming along only for the cockles.

We left early Saturday morning. It took forever to get going. Me and Jimmy watched cartoons while Mom made herself up in the bathroom. She never left the house without at least wearing lipstick, and even though no one was going to see us, she got up extra early to do her hair and makeup. Dad was adamant that when we built our new house, she’d get her own bathroom.

I poured myself some Puffed Wheat and pushed them around my bowl, feeling time crawl slowly across my skin, an agonizing eternity of waiting for Mom to get ready. She finally came downstairs in carefully pressed jeans, a white shirt and jean jacket, and with a blue kerchief over her hair. Dad wiped his hands on his pants before he kissed her good morning and said she looked great.

At the docks we had to wait for Aunt Edith, who was bringing fresh bread. Mom had mortally offended her a few months earlier by buying her a bread machine for Christmas. Dad tried to warn her, said she’d appreciate an electric knife a lot more, but Mom insisted because she knew Aunt Edith’s arthritis was getting worse. Just recently, she’d had to cut her long hair into a bob because she couldn’t braid it any more. Uncle Geordie conceded that Edith did use the machine for the kneading part, but everything else was still done the old-fashioned way. Her bread was absolutely the best: cotton-ball soft inside, so tender the butter almost made it dissolve, with a crust as flaky and golden brown as a croissant’s. Mom later got back in her good books, at Ma-ma-oo’s birthday party, by baking a slightly tough, heavy loaf and then casually asking what Aunt Edith thought she’d done wrong.

Uncle Geordie’s rattly old truck pulled into the bay, and Mom shooed me and Jimmy inside the cabin, where we fought over the captain’s seat. Dad had bought the gillnetter,
Lulu
, for two hundred dollars.
Lulu
was long and heavy and so slow that the only way we’d run into anything was if it was trying to hit us. When we went anywhere, I could count the logs on the beach, the trees on the mountains, the waves in the ocean. Her only saving grace was that she was big enough to give us tons of elbow room. But the smell of the old boat was so strong that we’d have it in our clothes for weeks after we got home.

Uncle Geordie came on board first. He looked fierce, with his eyebrows hanging over his eyes and his hollow cheekbones and his habit of frowning all the time, but whenever he baby-sat me he carved me little seiners and gillnetters out of corks. I told him he should sell them, but he always shook his head. Once we were under way, I sat in his lap while he explained the tides to me and let me steer
Lulu
. The engine was as loud as a jackhammer, and everyone had to yell to be heard. When I got bored of steering, I lay on the lower bunk under the bow and read a
True Stories
I’d filched from Mom’s bedroom. She said nine years old was too young to be reading trash, so I hid it behind my comic-book covers.