Written in Stone (13 page)

As soon as I’d fixed the tea, I got my diary and pencil from my room. I shaved a sharper point with the folding knife and settled on a bench near Henry, where I could hear what Grandpa said without being noticed. I set a bundle of sweetgrass beside me on the bench so I’d look busy, and wound the first few coils of a basket.

Grandpa worked with the short knife, forming a mouth and teeth on the Wolf mask. He explained with care how he harvested fresh wind-fallen cedars and let the logs dry for many months before working them.

I started a new page in my diary and tried to keep up with Grandpa’s voice. I left blank spaces where I wanted to ask a question. I managed to fill four pages edge to edge, but Mr. Glen didn’t appear to be listening.

“He’s not very curious, is he?” Henry said quietly. He leaned closer so he could see my page. “He’s certainly not as curious as you.”

I flipped the book shut and slid it under the pile of sweetgrass. There was probably a rule about who was allowed to write, and if it wasn’t women’s work, I didn’t want to hear about it.

Henry glanced at Mr. Glen to be sure he was ignoring us, then said, “A businessman in town keeps a record of everything that happens in his shop. It makes it hard to steal from him.” He nodded in the direction of my book. “We should do the same. It’s good business.”

“I don’t trust him,” I said.

Henry smiled. “Susi mentioned that when we were down getting Mr. Glen and his luggage. She said he wanted to buy your father’s Raven regalia.”

“I don’t want to sell it,” I whispered, forcing my voice to be soft and my expression calm. I glanced at Grandpa
and the visitor again. “I don’t care. I’ll go get a cannery job to make up the money if that’s what’s important.” I wanted to go on and tell him how those masks and dance robe belonged to my sons and grandsons and nobody else had a right to them, but I was pretty sure I would cry if I did.

Henry thought for a moment and said, “I don’t trust him either. In fact, I’m not sure he is an art collector at all. On the ride up here, I asked him about Boas and Eammons and a few of the other famous art collectors from a dozen years ago. He didn’t seem to know any of them.”

“What’s he doing here, then?” I whispered back.

“We’ll have to follow him to find out,” Henry said. “I have an idea about how to learn if he’s an art collector and keep him away from your dad’s Raven masks at the same time. Want to help?”

I nodded.

“I need to talk to Mr. Glen in private. If you see me leave the house with him, find an excuse to tag along.”

I nodded again, and we both went back to looking busy with basket weaving and repainting the carved lid of an old cedar chest.

We didn’t have a chance to test Henry’s idea until the next day. It was still raining, not a storm but a steady cold rain that hinted at winter storms to come. Uncle Jeremiah and Aunt Loula had done their best all morning
to interest Mr. Glen in basket making and the process for steam-bending cedar boards to make a chest.

Henry came in from hauling water and said, “It’s clearing up. Would you enjoy a walk?”

Mr. Glen jumped at the offer like a dog that hadn’t seen a bone in a week.

“You’re almost out of maidenhair ferns for the baskets,” I said to Aunt Loula. “I’ll go pick some more.”

“And hemlock bark,” Grandma said, looking up from her basketwork. “We don’t have near enough with cold and cough season coming on.”

“I’ll bring back plenty of both,” I said, skipping toward the door.

Henry took us only a dozen yards or so from the house to an open woodshed that stood at the edge of the rain forest. It had four pillars, a roof, and one wall.

“Is this a whaler’s bathhouse?” Mr. Glen asked eagerly.

“Obviously not,” Henry said, looking pointedly at me. Henry would never take someone, not even Charlie, to such a secret place. I wondered how a man smart enough to work at a museum could mistake a shed full of half-worked wood for anything else. Henry went to the back of the shed and picked up a bundle wrapped in oilcloth.

“I understand you are interested in buying the Raven regalia belonging to my uncle, Victor Carver,” he said.

My heart lurched. He wouldn’t.

“Yes,” Mr. Glen said. “A colleague described it. Many years ago, he saw the Raven stories danced up in Alaska. It was, how did he call it, a transformation mask.”

“We must be secret about this,” Henry said, stepping closer to the man. “My parents and grandparents are very traditional.”

“Yes,” Mr. Glen said even more eagerly. “I noticed that.”

“Here it is,” Henry said with a flourish, and he unveiled his own Owl mask.

I gasped, and Mr. Glen took the hint and gasped as well. What was Henry thinking? He would never pull it off. A child of three could tell you an owl has a curved beak and a raven a straight one.

“Does it transform into a man?” Mr. Glen asked in an awed whisper.

“Of course.” Henry turned the mask so we could see the inside. “This is the string and toggle that go under the cedar neck ring and down the dancer’s sleeve.”

“And when you pull the string?” he asked.

Henry pulled the string and the mask opened like a mouth, showing another mask underneath. “The face of a man.”

“Beautiful,” Mr. Glen breathed. “Do you have any idea what this is worth to the right buyer?”

I shook my head in disbelief. How could anyone not know that the Moon goes with the Owl story? The inner mask was too round to be a man’s face, and it was painted white.

“Name your price,” Mr. Glen said.

“What will your buyer pay?” Henry asked.

Mr. Glen paused to calculate. “There was a second mask,” he said, “and a cape of black feathers.”

My heart skipped a beat. Henry had nothing he could pass off as the Raven cape. There was no other regalia even close.

“A feather cape doesn’t last,” Henry lied. “Vermin get into it, and fleas. After a few years it falls apart.”

Mr. Glen nodded as if he were receiving bad news from a doctor. “But the second mask, the Raven’s head that transforms into the Sun?”

I knew the one Mr. Glen meant. It was the most intricate mask my family owned. It split along four lines to make eight points of the Sun’s rays. Each point was lined with burnished copper that caught the firelight when my father danced. It burst open at the part of the story where Raven released the Sun.

“It’s damaged,” I blurted out. “Burned. It wouldn’t be worth anything now.”

Mr. Glen glared at me.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s true.”

“It was old,” Henry chimed in as smoothly as if we had planned this. “I can make you another. Its twin exactly. Advance me fifty dollars for copper plate and you can have it in a few weeks’ time.”

“It will be the one my buyer remembers?” he asked.

Henry promised, and Mr. Glen heaved a sigh of relief.

“That’s very good news.”

“Come,” Henry said warmly. “You’ve been cooped up inside for two days, and I can tell you’re eager to see our land. Let’s walk.”

We took a short trail to the beach and turned north. We hadn’t gone half a mile when Mr. Glen took out pocket binoculars and studied the shore for several minutes. Another half mile, and he did the same. Henry and I stepped a few yards away from him to talk.

Henry leaned toward me and whispered, “He can’t possibly be what he claims to be. He doesn’t speak a word of our language or any other worth knowing. He has heard about your father’s Raven dances from somebody, but he’s plainly never heard our stories. I remember those other museum men who came when I was little. They knew about us, and they were very competitive with each other.”

“Look at him, though.” I tilted my head in the museum man’s direction. “He’s looking for something. Do you think he’s a grave robber?”

It made my skin crawl to think of it. There used to be museums that would pay ten dollars for an Indian skull, twenty dollars if all the bones came with it.

“We have to find a way to let him look for what he wants without letting him keep what he finds,” Henry said.

“He thinks he’s smarter than we are,” I said. “Maybe we can make that work for us.”

Henry smiled. “Let him think we’re trusting and defenseless. We’ll show him in the end.”

Trusting, I thought. I put that personality on like a costume. I slumped my shoulders and walked up to Mr. Glen with a gait more like Ida than Aunt Susi. I looked him straight in the face.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.” I gestured to the sweep of silver-green forest combing the low clouds that came off the water.

“Mmm.” He nodded. “It’s so pristine and empty.”

I struggled to keep a blank face. I had never in my life thought of our land as empty. The Quileute lived a few miles south of us, and the entire Makah nation bordered us to the north. On our short walk, I’d already seen elk and bear tracks and the face of a raccoon in the trees. I had heard tree frogs and a dozen kinds of birds.

“I’ve traveled to more than thirty of our forty-eight
states, and I must say, Miss Pearl, this is the most lush and rugged landscape I have seen.”

“What did you do in all those other places?”

Mr. Glen hesitated a moment and looked over his shoulder to see that Henry was several steps behind. “I must confess,” he said quietly. “I am something of an artist myself.”

That was the whopper of all lies. Mr. Glen had the artistic sense of a banana slug. Something had to be behind that claim.

“I thought you might be,” I said with an encouraging smile.

“Photography,” he announced. “Landscape photography, mostly. I’ve amassed quite a collection in my travels, and I hope to make a name for myself.” He shrugged and added, “I am a rock hunter as well, a minor hobby for my own personal collection.”

“So you want to see our best landscapes and most interesting rocks while you’re here?”

“Exactly.” He smiled. “Discreetly, of course. My official mission is to collect cultural artifacts.”

“I see,” I said, stalling a little to form a plan. I drew him a few more steps ahead of Henry, who took the hint and dropped farther behind us.

“I could take you where you want to go in the
afternoon. Tell my grandfather …” I searched for a plausible lie and remembered the herb gathering Grandma had asked me to do.

“Tell him you are taking a survey of medicine plants. I know all of Grandma’s herbs, and she would rather have me do it than walk around in the cold herself.”

“An ethnobotany,” Mr. Glen murmured. “Yes, that would work.”

He turned to me and smiled a narrow, pointed smile. “You are a clever girl, Pearl. A photographer’s assistant makes a half-dollar a day in the city. I propose to pay you for your services.” He stuck out his hand.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from cringing and shook his bony fingers.

If I had known that a photographer’s assistant had to lug the camera gear around, I would have made Charlie do it. I spent the next three afternoons carrying a canvas knapsack full of gear up and down trails and beaches. Mr. Glen had a metal tripod to use with his camera and something that seemed to be a one-eyed binocular. Whenever Mr. Glen used it, he wrote columns of figures in a palm-sized notebook with a fountain pen. When he thought I was busy picking chanterelles or gathering herbs, he would unfold a map of the coast and make marks on it.

He did take pictures, plenty of them. He favored open sites for the natural light, and he paid particular attention to the lay of the land and any unusual rock formations.
He taught me to take pictures so he could be in some of them. But I didn’t need to wait for the prints to see there was nothing artistic about his photographs.

On the fourth afternoon, Mr. Glen said, “We should have a look at the land above what you call Shipwreck Cove.”

I was afraid he might ask to go there. There were many places nearby I was allowed to go, trails that led to camas meadows or berry fields, but the area above Shipwreck Cove was a burn site five generations back and off-limits to everyone. Even Grandpa didn’t go there. The skeleton of a 150-year-old pirate ship marked the beach. No one ever explained how such a large ship had run aground there. The hints were dark.

I put him off with a lame excuse about being too tired to walk that far.

“Fine,” he said. “If you don’t want the four bits I’m paying you, I’ll go on my own.”

“It’s dangerous up there,” I said. As soon as the words were out, I regretted them.

“Your demon stories don’t scare me,” he said. “And I’m surprised that a girl your age who’s been to school would give such silly superstitions a thought.”

“Yes, sir.” I ground my teeth and swallowed back a proud answer. Let him go. He could find out about evil all on his own. A few minutes later, when Mr. Glen had
left the house, Henry hurried over with his spare shirt in hand.

“I’ve lost a button,” he said loudly enough for Grandpa to hear over at his carving bench. “Let’s take it outside where the light is better.”

Once we got to the front porch, he whispered, “You let him get away alone! What’s going on?”

“He wanted to go up above Shipwreck Cove,” I whispered.