Winter Brothers (17 page)

 

The Indians of Cape Flattery
took Swan more than two years to write, and his constant deskmate was interruption.
In order to have the work go on as rapidly as possible with the Government buildings I have been obliged to sink the teacher into the caterer for the mess,
Swan reported to Baird in the midst of the school-house construction,
and a person arranging for the appetites of six hearty men who must have three full meals per day cannot find much opportunity for belles lettres.

But on the thirteenth of April 1865, Swan could jubilate that
I have finished my paper on the Makah Indians at last and packed it with the sketches which accompany it in a snug parcel....

“Paper” barely described the work: a 55,000-word ream of manuscript about how the Makahs lived and spoke and believed. Swan's fetish for fact is on the finished result like a watermark. He describes the Makahs' canoes, how they fished and hunted seals and whales, what their ceremonies and legends were, how their masks looked, the tribal ailments, what games the children played, what the tribe ate and wore, how they told time, what they called the months of the year: think of a daily moment of life and Swan probably has set down for you how a Makah spent it. And what an interplanetary meeting of wordmen it is to imagine Spencer Baird being introduced, courtesy of Swan's pen, to Captain John:
About three years ago he had lost the use of one of his feet, probably from paralysis, but which he attributed to a “skookoom” or evil spirit, entering into it one day while he was bathing. He had been confined to his house for several months, and was reduced to a skeleton. I saw him during this sickness, and thought he could not recover. One pleasant day, however, according to his account, he managed to crawl to a brook near his house, and, while bathing, heard a rustling sound in the air, at which he became frightened, and covered his face with his blanket, whereupon a raven alighted within a few feet of him and uttered a hoarse croak• He then peeped through a corner of his blanket and saw the raven with its head erect, its feathers bristled, and a great swelling in its throat. After two or three unsuccessful efforts, it finally threw up a piece of bone about three inches long, then uttering another croak it flew away. Remaining quiet a few minutes, till he was satisfied that the raven had gone, he picked up the bone, which he gravely informed me was of the
Ha-hek-to-ak.
He hid this bone near by, and returned to his lodge, and, after relating the occurrence, was
informed by the Indian doctors that it was a medicine sent to him by his tamanawas, and this proved to be true, as he entirely recovered in three days....
Swan now steps into the narrative with a bit of exegesis:
The tale of the raven alighting near him is not improbable, as ravens as well as crows are very plenty and very tame; nor is it impossible that the raven might have had a bone in its mouth, and finally dropped it; nor is it entirely uncertain that the circumstance so affected his superstitious imagination that it caused a reaction in his system, and promoted his recovery. The same effect might perhaps have been produced by a smart shock from a galvanic battery.

 

The Makah manuscript done, Swan leaned back to await publication by the Smithsonian. It began to be a long lean. In the microfilm's blizzard of lines a year passes, two, three. Swan is writing heavier and heavier nudges to Baird. The second of November, 1868:
Can you give one any encouragement that it will appear within the next decade?
Yet another year: sixteenth of November 1869:
When that Makah memoir is published??!!! I should like some copies to send to several officers at Sitka who are much interested in Indian matters....

Either the deprivation of the Sitka officers or the explosion of punctuation did the job. At the start of 1870
The Indians of Cape Flattery
, even yet the primary source on the historical Makahs, came into print.

Time spent today in the words of other westerners, to try to see Swan within his lineage of frontier ink.

 

The journals of Lewis and Clark while their expedition sheltered in winter quarters at the tiny stockade called Fort Clatsop, just south of the mouth of the Columbia River. Like Swan, Captain William Clark marks the daily weather scrupulously, but his has a terrible soggy sameness: in four months at Fort Clatsop it rained every day but twelve. A late February day in 1806 begins with typical lament:

we are mortified at not haveing it in our power to make more celestial observations since we have been at Fort Clatsop, but such has been the state of the weather that we have found it utterly impractiable.

Then the captain brightens and as Swan so often did, turns sketch artist.

I purchased of the Clatsops this morning about half a bushel of small fish
—they were candlefish, an oily little species—
which they had cought about 40 miles up the Columbia in their scooping nets, as this is an uncommon fish to me and one which no one of the party has ever seen, on the next page I have drawn the likeness of them as large as life....

The candlefish swims delicately there among the words, eternally angled along the flow of Clark's handwriting as if feeding now and again on stray periods and apostrophes.

 

In Stegner's
The Gathering of Zion,
an excerpt from the trail diary of the Mormon girl Patience Loader. In the overland migration to the far half of America opened by Lewis and Clark she was pilgrimaging west to Zion with one of the handcart brigades of 1856, the travelers' tumbrils in heavy groaning tow all the thousand miles from the Missouri River to Utah. Having trudged six hundred of those miles Patience Loader and weary others began to ford the North Platte River in Wyoming:
...the water was deep and very cold and we was drifted out of the regular crossing and we came near being drounded the water came up to our arm pits poor Mother was standing on the bank screaming as we got near the bank I heard Mother say for God Sake some of you men help My poor girls....Several of the breathren came down the bank of the river and pulled our carts up for us and we got up the best we could...when we was in the middle of the river I saw a poor brother carreying his child
on his back he fell down in the water I never knew if he was drowned or not I fealt sorrey that we could not help him but we had all we could do to save ourselves....

 

In my own scrawl, in one of the 4 × 6 hip-pocket notebooks which traveled western Montana with me the summer before last:
Day 2...Gateway Gorg, Yosmit-lk rock c thrusts browing b o us....
Curious to compare, I've dug out these notes of the backpack hike Carol and I made into the Bob Marshall Wilderness (and already notice two mighty alterations from Captain Clark's West and Patience Loader's West: now it is the wild places which are the enclaves hewn into America's geography, and now we count our “wilderness” experience by days instead of seasons). From my mix of speedwriting and single-letter Russian prepositions those scenes of the Rockies translate for me again:
mountainsides of colossal reefs and deeps like the ocean bottom tipped empty and left on its side...canyons everywhere...high narrow table of trail above the South Fork...Gateway Gorge, Yosemite-like rock with thrusts browing in on us....Me: There's frost on the outside of the tent. Carol: It's on the inside....4th day of no people....Made Badger Pass at 12—only slight incline to cross Continental Divide there then climb for 1 hour over ridge to North Fork gorge. At top a sleet squall hit, we took shelter in trees; pellets of hail convinced us to put wool jackets on. Ate trail food, drank water and waited out squall...sound of rocks avalanching to the south...Another 10 mile day....From the top of Family Peak through a notch to the east, farmland pattern of the plains could be seen....
We came out of the mountains not having seen any other humans for five days; had not been dined on by grizzlies or entrapped by sleet; and felt a joy as huge as the peaks behind us.

 

Clark's winter of black rain brightened by a candlefish, Patience Loader's wade through horror; our own brief plunge into what-is-left-of-wilderness, to see how we would fare in it. Reminders to be kept in view while I saunter within Swan's orderly ledger that the edge of America can also be a brink.

A silver-bright day. Air clear and cold, ready to crinkle like silk, and for the second night in a row frost has daubed its way all across the ground and up into the first branches of the evergreens.

I have a queer edgy clarity in myself, consequence of so few hours' sleep: a grittiness like diamond dust. Luckily, sleeplessness comes to me in small seasons, two or three nights in a row then vanishes, else I cannot imagine what my daily mood would be like. These strange beings, ourselves. Needing the night but sometimes entirely at odds with it. My nights when sleep will not be coaxed I roll like a driftlog on one of Swan's beaches, and between last bedtime and early morning I wallowed a deep trough in the dark. In the bed beside mine, Carol's breathing form calmly ingested the blackness, channeled it on its smooth underskin routes. While my mind was a black blaze. Anything makes fuel; a walk taken around the neighborhood after supper, the day's writing, a letter from a friend. I steadily try a number of sleepmaking stunts. Breathe deeply, with forced regular rhythm. Let my tongue loll like a loosened strap. Try to sheet the mind with a white blankness. And have the success of a man attempting to win attention to his coin trick against the roaring backdrop of a three-ring circus.

The frustration is double. Sleep at best is a sharp cost of time, not-sleep is a cost to both. Yet not always; there is this morning's cold clarity, as if the white duff of frost had crept into me during the night too.

 

Swan on the Makah version of restlessness:
Last evening Peter wanted his Squaw to go home with him, she was then in Tahahowtls lodge. She refused, whereupon Peter pitched into her, pulled her hair and blacked her eye. Tahahowtl interfered
and Peter went at him and they had a hair pulling match and finally separated to get their guns but friends interfered....

 

Noon. The morning would not be calmed, kept shoving aside Swan's logbooks for its own. I let the hours roam back along the entire wordstream of this winter so far, turned them loose on the question of why the West takes hold of a James Swan, an Ivan Doig. Notions—they are not answers yet, if they ever grow up to be—tumbled like the scenes in yesterday's retrieved notebook of the Marshall Wilderness days:...
Perhaps the choice of place is in our body chemistry simply as other patterns of taste are, regulating me to dislike brussel sprouts, the color pink, and square miles of pavement....The west of America draws some of us not because it is the newest region of the country but because it is the oldest, in the sense that the landscape here—the fundament, nature's shape of things—more resembles the original continent than does the city-nation of the Eastern Seaboard or the agricultural factory of the Midwest. As for so much else, mountains account for it. They, and the oceans, are virtually the last pieces of earth we have not someway tamed, transformed. Although we are striving. Go in an airplane above the Cascade Range to see clearcut logging like countless patches of fur shaved off. Study the logging roads which incise the high edges of the Olympics....Or are we drawn west, or merely deposited? The way, say, spores drop into a forest: some spot is found in the immense environment, life is stubbornly established and clung to, whether the site turns out to be rich humus or up a tree?

Enough. What counts for now, this winter, is to keep the question open, let the hours chase at it when they will.

The fifth of April 1866, in the elegant ledger diary:
Yesterday, Ahayah killed the first whale of the season....

The next day:
I was muck amused last evening with Johns moves. It seems he feels ashamed that he has not filled any whales and has concluded to go through the ceremonies to constitute him a skookum whaleman. Which ceremonies consist of going without sleeping or eating for 6 days and nights, to bathe in the salt water and run on the beach to get warm. John went into the water with his accoutrements on but soon got so cold that he was glad to come and warm himself by my fire. He had gone all day without eating and I think his courage was failing him for he admitted that he thought he could not stand it more than two days and if that would not suffice to make him a whaleman he could kill sharks. He intended to stop by my fire all night and occasionally go out and wash in the bay, but when I got up this morning he was gone and I learned that he was afraid to sit alone by my fire and had sneaked out about midnight with his courage completely cooled and has concluded that from shark he will be content with killing dogfish.

God, how the blood strums in such weather. What it tingles out is: be truant.

Which I am. I woke with the sense that this would be another day brought pure by the cold and that I needed to be out in it at once. When daybreak came, a dry crackle of light onto the frost, I already had arrived here at Shilshole, a bay favorite to me for its head-on view west across the Sound to the wooded headlands and mountains. The Olympics, clouds caped on their backs, as yet are pale, wraithy, in the beginning day. Snow gods, asleep standing up, like horses. Going past is a big seagoing tug, in from the north and in a hurry. It seems to ride the floe of white water pushed up by its impatient bow. Freighter traffic is starting to procession past. Two ships inbound to the Seattle dockfront, two out. Three of the fleet are outlined in traditional lines of superstructure, masts and plow-pointed bow. But the fourth is squatty as a huge barge, some new fangle of containerized-cargo vessel. Swan would enter in his diaries' ship list an occasional
herm brig
; hermaphrodite brig, with a square-rigged foremast but a triangular schooner sail on its mainmast. The day now of the herm freighter?