Written in Stone (11 page)

I let the word throb in my head. Life.

I took up my paddle and sat tall like a whaler. The
wind was against me, but the tide was in my favor. I clamped my chattering teeth shut and dug in. The seal ducked down, showed his tail, and disappeared. All the extra water made my boat heavy. I gained the beach by inches. I was drenched. The muscles of my arms and back burned. Finally, I could see the sand under the breakers. I rolled out into chest-deep water and walked my boat in. I was so exhausted when my feet hit level sand, I collapsed in a heap with the dead kelp.

The October breeze got me on my feet. I tipped the water out of my canoe and searched for the tide line. A weathered beach log stuck out of the sand above the high-tide mark—the start of my shelter. I took the basket and food box out of the boat and stashed them by the log. My wet clothes sucked strength out of my body. I lifted the lid of the clothes basket. My things inside were dry.

“God bless Aunt Loula and her watertight basket,” I whispered, and kicked off my wet things.

The shabby, hand-me-down wool blouse and skirt never looked so good. I rubbed as much of the water as I could off my bare skin and then shivered into the dry clothes.

The blankets were wet at both ends but dry in the middle because Grandpa had rolled them in an old cedar rain cape. I threw the cape over my shoulders and pulled on the fur mitts Henry had given me. When I sat with
my knees hugged to my chest, the cape made a warming tent that reached the sand. I shivered and rubbed my arms and legs to bring up the heat of my blood.

When my hands were warm enough to move freely and my shivering slowed enough for a steady hand, I reached for the cut on the crown of my head. The wound was two fingers long, starting at the edge of my hairline above my left eye. The cut was spread open and bleeding, but not as fast as before. I probed it gently, feeling for splinters. There was nothing in the wound but the pillow of swelling underneath and the throb with each blood beat.

I closed my eyes to concentrate and squeezed the edges of the cut together.

“Skin wants to bond,” Grandma always said when she was tending a knife wound. “It just takes patience.”

I remembered once when Papa cut his hand carving, she held the edges of the cut together for an entire day. Then she bound his hand to the opposite shoulder for a week, so he would not break the new skin.

I forced my muscles to relax as I waited for the bleeding to stop. I leaned back against the log and took in the sky. The fog was clearing, but heavy clouds were coming in. It was going to rain. Probably after dark, when the tide was low. I thought over my needs. A fire was what I wanted, for noise and warmth and company, but shelter
was what I needed, and time to make it. I couldn’t measure how long it was until sunset with the cloud cover. Judging by hunger, it was late afternoon.

I released the cut on my head. The sides of the wound sprang apart and bled again. I kicked at the sand, fighting the urge to cry. I did not have time to wait. I squeezed the cut together again and brushed my hair over my shoulder. Even moving my hair made my scalp sting, but it gave me an idea. I carefully separated three small strands of hair around the cut and made a thin braid that pulled together the sides of the wound. The stickiness of the blood held my hair in place. It wasn’t perfect. The end of the cut that went below my hairline was still open, but it stopped the bleeding. I took a deep breath and allowed myself a few tears of relief. Then I rubbed blood out of my hands with sand and thought about a shelter.

I checked the headlands at either end of the beach. Sometimes there was a cave or an overhanging rock above the tide line. No such luck, nothing but bare cliffs with a crown of stunted shore pines on top and a yellow-green dusting of lichen on the vertical sides. I tugged the canoe up the sand to the driftwood, flipped it upside down, and propped one end on the log. I mounded up sand around the bottom and stuck the basket and wet clothes underneath. The food box had a lid and would be fine left out in the rain.

It was beginning to get dark, and I was longing for the comfort of a campfire. What I really needed was cedar branches to keep dry. I dug the long knife out of the food box and searched the tree line for the profile of a cedar. Stubby shore pines edged the sand and alders clustered around a stream. Behind them I saw what I needed—tree of life. Western red cedar, the loggers called it.

I walked up the streambed, looking for a game trail to get through the underbrush. I didn’t dare go deep into the rain forest. Even without the Pitch Woman and the Timber Giant, I might not find my way out. A close look at the stream bank showed pairs of moon prints from a mule deer. I searched the ferns and salal clustered on the ground for a game trail. It was less than a hand’s width wide and curved inland away from the stream. I stopped to listen for bears and wolves. I searched up in the tree branches for a cougar. I whispered a quick prayer and stepped into the woods.

Plenty of fresh cedar branches littered the ground from the storm two nights ago. I hacked them into a manageable size with the long knife and dragged as many as I could behind me.

I was back at the creek before I remembered the song to thank the cedars. The one that I knew was a baby song. My mother sang a different one, a more dignified song for women. I hadn’t been old enough to learn it when she
died. I could only sing the one I knew. I did my best, but the forest swallowed up my song. I ran for the beach and did not look back.

It began to rain. I draped the cedar branches over the canoe. They reached down to the sand and the water rolled off them the way a bird’s feathers shed rain. I climbed under my shelter, rolled up in blankets, and fell asleep listening to the waves.

Hunger woke me, or maybe cold. I lifted my head and groaned. Maybe it was my aching body that woke me. It was hard to settle on a chief misery that morning. I stuck my head and shoulders out of the shelter and grabbed smoked salmon and berry cake from the food box. I propped myself up on my elbows and devoured breakfast.

The cut on my head had a rock-solid scab with no oozing infection underneath. It was the only fragment of good news I could think of. A ribbon of light showed through the split on the bow of my canoe. I put on the rain cape and rolled out from underneath. From the outside, I could see it was an impact split. All the wood was still there. It was fixable. The notch broken off of my paddle was a lost cause. I could still use it, but I’d have to work harder for each stroke.

It was still raining. Fog too. There was no sound of passing boats, and I wondered for a moment what would
happen when Susi realized I had not gone to get a bigger canoe to bring Mr. Glen and his luggage to Grandpa’s house. The fog worked in my favor there. No one would try to travel in this weather. I might still have time to save my father’s dance masks, if I could make a patch for my boat out of pitch and pine needles. I turned away from the ocean. Pine sap, a fire, and a sheltered place to work had my attention for the rest of the day.

There was a cluster of tall rocks beside the cliff at the north end of the beach. They would protect me from the wind. There was an hour before high tide. I took the knife and scored the trunks of a dozen shore pines to make the sap run free. When the tide was all the way up, I put my gear in the boat, dragged it to the water, and floated it to the north end of the beach. The rocks made my campsite feel more sheltered. I collected scraps of driftwood for my fire and dug around trees for dry needles. I made a proper fire ring with rocks, determined not to pass another night without the company of flames. There was a break in the rain, so I draped the blankets on the shorter rocks to dry in the wind and headed back into the trees.

Collecting sap was a miserable job. No wonder Grandpa always made Charlie do it. I scraped and scratched and rolled for hours to get a wad of pitch half the size of a baseball. It was probably not enough. I cut a
dozen more strips out of the bark, in case I needed more tomorrow.

I passed a rosebush on my way back to the beach and picked a pocketful of rose hips for tea. There were brake ferns nearby, so I pulled up roots to roast for supper. Back on the beach, I built a fire. It took an hour to get it from flicker to heat. By the time the pitch was hot enough to work, it was nearly too dark to see. Before I quit for the night, I put the remains of the pitch up on a rock to keep the sand off. I set the roots on to roast and dropped a hot rock in a bowl for tea. A minute later, a downpour drowned my fire.

“It is only rain,” I told myself. “God does not hate me.” I rolled up in a ball under my canoe and shivered my blankets warm. Bad dreams followed me into the dark. I heard my name called and I followed, but each calling led me to a stone that blocked my path.

The next morning broke bright and clear. As soon as the sun was a handsbreadth over the mountains, steam rose all around me. I climbed one of the beach rocks to look over the water for passing boats. I had to scramble to find handholds. I pulled myself up slowly, resting my chest on the top while I swung a leg up over the edge of the stone.

As I got to my feet, I saw a tiny pool of water by my hand. It was perfectly round, with a little island in the middle like the letter
O
. I straightened up, shaded my eyes, and looked over the breakers to the cluster of rocks where my boat had run aground a day and a half ago.

Three seals lounged in the sun, the waves licking their back flippers.

Which one raised his head to me? I wondered. Which
one sent me here to the seal hunter’s beach? I smiled and almost waved at them. The wind pushed the rising mist off the sand and into the trees. All my plans seemed possible under this cold blue sky.

I looked down at the rock and gasped. Sunlight reflecting on a dozen shallow pools of water shined like a shield of copper. Smoothly curved narrow channels of water, ovoids large and little, made a hammered jewel on flat rock.

I knelt and dipped my fingers in. The edges of the pool were smooth, with crumbs in the bottom left over from grinding. I imagined a hand. A stone. A million strikes of the mallet—all done in some unseen past.

I walked slowly around the edge of the shining pools of water. When my body faced north, I saw him: Chitwin, the face of the Bear with eyes, teeth, a square head, and small ears. The sight of him made every hair on my body stand up. It was the same face that looked out half-finished from Mama’s loom. The same face I had seen somewhere else long ago, glowing. I probed that memory, and after a few moments, it unfolded. Mama’s button blanket looked like this, with the face of Chitwin outlined in pearl buttons.

I spread my arms, imagining the weight of a robe of power over my shoulders. I took a step to the north, slow and heavy, and then another. The face of Bear was
my fire. I stepped quicker, lighter, turning my shoulders to face the fire and then the sky, as Mama had done. I remembered her dance and the story that each step told.

I danced the whole story of Bear walking out of the mountains in spring to bring the summer berries. When I finished, arms out and face up to the sun, I felt light pour into my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, my hands in fists to keep that filled-up feeling in.

“This is mine,” I announced to rocks and air. “Mine forever. No pencil-pointy, paper-thin stranger will take it from me.”

I danced the story through again, singing the Bear chant this time to fix it in my mind. I stroked my finger around the outline of Bear’s face one last time and jumped down to the sand.

Three more beach rocks stood in a cluster by my camp. Two were jagged on top, with white streaks from nesting birds. I circled them, but they were just rocks with no climb holds. The third was as tall as Grandpa’s house and flat-topped with a smooth landward face. At shoulder height, I saw a cluster of carved spirals, shallow and weathered at the edges. The south edge of the rock had a few outcroppings and a seam that ran nearly straight to the top.

I tucked my skirt into my waistband and set one bare foot against the stone. I wedged my fingers into the seam
and pulled myself up. I hunted with my toes for the next foothold, settled my balance, and wiped a sweaty hand on the back of my blouse. Fingers inched along the crevice, and I shifted my weight to the upper leg to hunt for another foothold.

I laughed out loud, loving the stretch and pull on my muscles, the wind flapping my clothes, the victory of leaving the ground. By the time I hauled myself over the top, I had white scratch marks on my knees and rock crumbs in my hair.

I could see at once that I’d found a treasure. This rock carving was larger, sharper, maybe newer? I stepped carefully around the edge looking for right side up. This carving faced west.

There was a whale, openmouthed with an upturned tail. Blue-green flakes of weathered copper were pounded into the skin to make it shimmer. Two canoes were underneath the whale, with three peaked hats in each to show whalers. On the landward side of the picture was a human face with its eyes closed and mouth open. Singing? Praying? I wished I knew.