"I made it in the workshop. What do you think? A good joke, huh? I changed the name. Father Zurriga helped me and we made a new name. See."
He held it up. The plaque was painted in white letters. It said
Island Girl.
Mando was pleased with his little joke. "
Boston Boy. Island Girl.
That's a better name, huh?"
"For Karana?"
"Named for you," Mando said. "For you, my sister. Because all you talk of is going to the island."
He nailed the plaque to the stern of the boat and we set off again. At the end of the lagoon where it meets the sea there is a long spit of land, curved like a saber. The spit breaks the force of the waves and we had no trouble rowing to the end of it and into the open sea.
We did not go far, but rowed along the shore, just outside the line where the swells begin to gather and break. And as the sun grew hot we headed back for the lagoon.
Chapter 3
A
LL THE
beachcombing we did for the next week was to find things for the boat—some rope, a cushion, a blanket, a box of fishhooks inside an empty wine barrel, a heavy piece of iron, two bottles the right size to fill with drinking water.
The next Sunday morning we did not leave the lagoon. We took the boat and turned it upside down and covered the bottom with tar we had heated in a pot. The tar had washed up on the beach in long strips. I do not know where it came from. Mando said it was sent by Mukat, but this I doubt. The boat had leaked a little before, but now that the bottom was covered with tar not a drop came in.
The following Sunday we picked up the heavy piece of iron where we had hidden it and fastened it to a chain I had found and fastened the chain to a rope. Now we had a boat that did not leak, that had two oars, and an anchor that was so heavy it took both of us to lift it.
"We should go somewhere now," Mando said. "Maybe around the world like Columbus."
"Columbus did not go around the world, Mando."
"Then we will be the first to go."
"Magellan went around the world first," I said, showing off the knowledge I had learned in the Mission school.
"Maybe we can go somewhere not as far," Mando said. "Maybe to the island."
"What island, Mando?" I knew the island he meant. The idea had been in my thoughts even at the moment I had first seen the boat. I thought about it all the time.
"To the Island of the Blue Dolphins," Mando said. "We will find Karana and bring her home." He paused and his face lighted up. "We could put a sail on the boat and sail sometimes when the wind was blowing. Then we could row when it was calm. We could do both. We could row and sail. In two days or three we would reach the island."
"Maybe she is not there now," I said.
"Maybe she is dead," said Mando. "Maybe wild dogs ate her up."
"It is possible," I said to put an end to these thoughts. "But the white man, Captain Nidever, saw her footsteps in the sand when he was there last year."
"Why did he not follow the footsteps? That's what I would like to know."
"There was a storm coming up and he feared for his boat."
"I will ask Mukat and Zando about these things. Then we will know. And maybe Father Merced also. No. Not him. Father Vicente? Maybe he will come with us. It would make it easier with three of us. Then I could fish while we sailed along. It would be easier even if I did not fish. But I am afraid of what Father Merced will say. Likewise Father Vicente. They may not allow us to go."
I felt angry. "We will go anyway, whatever is said. We are not chained to the earth. We have a boat and oars and an anchor. What are they for? They belong to us. To go out in San Felipe lagoon, is that what they are meant for?"
I had already made up my mind to make the voyage beyond the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, out to the far island, where no one went, even the Chumash Indians in their red canoes. Nobody ever went there except the ship that came to rescue our tribe, except Captain Nidever, who was a hunter and went to the island to hunt otter. But we would go, my brother and I, now that we owned a seaworthy boat with two oars.
Yes, we would go and we would go soon. It was why I had come to Mission Santa Barbara in the first place. When Mando and I lived far to the south in the Cupeño village of Pala I had decided this.
That was the day two padres came to our village. They came on foot in their sandals and long robes and talked to our chief. They talked for a long time, all that day and into the night. There were more than a hundred of us and most of us listened.
One of the padres said, "Your people will be treated well. They will have plenty to eat. The work will not be heavy and they will have a good place to sleep, better than you have here." He paused to look around at our brush huts. "And we will teach you to speak Spanish and introduce you to our God, who will bless you and look over you."
"We have enough to eat," our chief said. "The huts you look at with scorn are not to our liking. Where we came from, where we lived before the Spanish and the white man drove us away from our meadows and springs, we had better places to live. And our gods, though they are different from yours, bless us with rain and sun and many places where we can go."
This was true.
Every year in the early summer we went to the sea and put up brush huts and fished. We ate some of the fish we caught and abalones we gathered on the rocks, but most of them we put on blankets in the sun and dried for winter.
We stayed on the beach, which was pretty and had white sand, and fished and dug for clams. We netted wild birds that came to a lagoon near where we camped and roasted them in a pit that we dug and covered with seaweed.
Until late summer we lived there on the beach. Then we gathered up our dried fish and our abalones and went back into our hills, which lay close against the mountains. There in the hills we women gathered acorns from the oak trees.
There was a great stone ledge and on this ledge we soaked the acorns and then let them dry in the sun. On the ledge were hundreds of holes that many women during their lifetimes had dug. In these holes, using stones, we ground the acorns to flour. We made many sacks of this flour.
With this flour and the abalone and fish we had gathered and the deer that our hunters ran down and killed, we lived through the winter. Our food sometimes ran low late in the spring. Then we dug roots and lived on those until it was summer and time to go to the sea again.
As we stood around our chief listening very carefully, he said, "They have a home there in a place they call Santa Barbara. It is cool in summer and warm in winter. They have fields where they grow things like melons and the sea is not far off. They want us to come and live with them."
"What if we do not like this place?" the chiefs son asked. "What if the sun does not shine like they say? And the sea is far away and has no fish in it?"
"We will come home then," the chief explained. "If it does not suit us we will take the trail and return."
One of the padres said, hoping to persuade us to leave, "The time has come for us to gather together, the Church and the Indians—both of us. And we must gather about the Missions, which, as you know, are many, a day apart on horseback from San Diego in the south to San Francisco in the north. They were meant to be forts, if need be, and so they are."
The other padre said, "First, the Mexican government took thousands of acres of our Mission lands. Then a war came between Mexico and the gringos, which the gringos won. Then the gringos took your lands and much of what was left of the Mission lands."
"The time has come for us to join together against the gringos, and the greedy Mexicans, and Spaniards," the first padre said. "Otherwise, there will be nothing left, not one acre, for any of us. Nothing! The white men and the Spanish women they married will have it all. They and the rich Mexicans and Spaniards. You will have nothing. Even less than you have now."
After that the two men talked for another day and on the third day seven of us went with them. We took everything we owned, some even took their dogs, though the padres said that it would be better if we left them behind in our village.
Mando went because he liked the sea and fishing. My friends Rosa and Anita went because they thought it all sounded adventurous and they would meet many boys. Everyone had a different reason for going, different from mine.
Mission Santa Barbara, where the padres were taking us, was near the Island of the Blue Dolphins. People, after my mother died, told me about my aunt who lived on this island and that she had lived there for many years alone. That was when I thought of going to Santa Barbara. I knew that there were Indians close by the Mission who owned canoes. Perhaps if I went there I could find one who would help me reach the island and bring Karana back. It was a wild thought, but it was why I left my home in Pala and followed the padres to the Mission at Santa Barbara.
I had never known my aunt, Karana. I was very young when my mother talked about the sister she loved, so I have forgotten most of the things she said.
But from what people said I did remember that Karana had leaped from the ship that had come to rescue our small tribe from the Island of the Blue Dolphins and take it to the mainland where it would be safe from the Aleuts who sailed down from far in the north and killed our people. She had leaped from the ship because in all the excitement of leaving, their brother had been left behind and she swam back to search for him.
But the captain of the ship would not wait. He was afraid of a storm that was coming and would not stay until Karana found him. It was in this way that she had been left behind on the Island of the Blue Dolphins.
And yet I wondered sometimes if Karana would want to live here at the Mission, although it seemed to me that she must have yearned for the place where her people had gone. I wondered because some days I liked living at the Mission and there were days when I longed for our village in the mountains, far from the sea and the men who went around quietly in their sandals and Enrica who told us what we could do and not do.
But because of what I had been told I had grown up with my mind set upon finding Karana. It was a silent promise I had made to myself. This was why I went to the Mission Santa Barbara with Father Vicente and why I stayed there when I was homesick for the mountains. It was the only way I could ever hope to find Karana, who was the last of my kin, except for Mando.
I remembered Captain Nidever who had made a voyage to the Island of the Blue Dolphins and had seen Karana's footsteps in the sand and had seen her fleeing up the cliff. Perhaps he would tell me about his voyage and give me advice that I could use.
Chapter 4
T
HE NEXT
day I took Father Vicente's burro and went to see Captain Nidever. He lived in an adobe shack on a cliff not far to the south. From his house there was a steep trail down to the shore.
On this morning I found him there sitting in the sun. He was carving a ship out of a small piece of wood. He was making the ship inside a bottle, putting the pieces together with glue. I had never seen a ship with masts and sails on the inside of a bottle in my life before.
I waited until he paused and looked out at the sea. Then I asked him about my aunt, Karana.
"I never talked to her," he said, holding the bottle up to the sun and turning it first one way, then another. "She ran like a catamount over the rocks, up the cliff, and disappeared."
"But you saw her with your own eyes?"
"Saw her and her footsteps, too."
"It could not be a man that you saw?"
"Men don't look like women even on that island. No, I saw her and her footsteps. Plain as day."
I then asked him what I had come to ask. "How did you go, señor, when you went to the island? Did you go to the south of Santa Rosa or to the north?"
"To neither side. As you know there are two islands there, Santa Cruz on your left and Santa Rosa on your right. There is a channel, a narrow channel, between them. It is through this channel that you go."
He put the bottle on the blanket spread out before him and gave me a quizzical look. "You don't have any real idea in your head about sailing to Dolphin Island, do you?"
"Yes."
"In what?"
"A whaleboat. It floated ashore in the storm."
"How long is she?"
"About six strides long."
"About eighteen feet, then. They're seaworthy and tough, these whaleboats. Who's going with you?"
"My brother."
"How old is he?"
"Twelve." I stretched the truth only a little.
Captain Nidever picked up the bottle and said nothing for a long time.
"You and your brother," he said, "in an eighteen-footer. You've got more nerve than I have. There's a lot of water out yonder and heavy winds and rocks and reefs. What kind of a sail do you carry?"
"None."
"How do you get there?"
"We will row."
Captain Nidever snorted. "You know how far it is to Dolphin Island?"
I shook my head.
"Sixty miles if it's a foot. Have you ever rowed sixty miles through waves that sweep down from Alaska and a wind that seldom blows less than twenty-five knots?"
"No."
"Have you ever rowed six miles?"
"No."
Captain Nidever dabbed some glue on a splinter of wood and put it in the bottle using tweezers, holding his breath while he did so. Then he put the bottle down again and gave me a careful look.
"You're a strong girl," he said, "and your brother is strong too. But my advice is to stay home. You'll never make the island, what with heavy seas, fog and wind, no sails, and no experience."
I listened and was silent, but what Captain Nidever said did not change my mind. I got up and shook the sand from my skirt and thanked him for his advice.
"I'll be going out there one of these days," he said. "Got a deal with the Chumash, who live down the beach, for a couple of their big canoes. If it goes through I'll be leaving for the island sometime before summer's end. And this time I'll find your aunt. She's a regular mountain goat, the way she climbs cliffs. She has a dog as big as two dogs and she runs like a deer but I'll find her."