Winter Brothers Read online

  What regulates this periodic cat, besides the day’s warmth sliding in through his fur, or any other of the cats I have watched past my writing-room windows for the past dozen or so years, I have no conception. They are the most constant animals I see and the most out of camouflage: they pace through our wooded backyard in robes of color entirely unsuited to hunting. Harlequins against the green. Yet unlike the neighborhood’s dogs which lollop around the street in dizzy concern for human attention, cats are thoroughly in place within their routes. Only other cats stir their imagination. Those aloof encounters by day when any two, stalking like muffed-and-coated heiresses, will ostentatiously keep the full length of my backyard between them, then the shrieking rites by night when they try to murder one another as inventively as possible. Otherwise it takes the profoundest kind of intrusion to nick into a catly routine. The gray-and-white wanderer who one day tiptoed into the garden dirt, scratched a hole, daintily settled atop the tiny pit in hunched but poised position—Queen Victoria on a thunderbox—to do the necessary, did it, scratched the lid of dirt into place, gandered uneasily around, spotted me watching from the window, and fled as if aflame. (No such episode from the tan cat; it would not be lionly.) Probably the mind of cats is territory we are better off not knowing. The winter Carol and I lived in London, I stretched back from my typewriter one morning and looked directly up at a cat on the ceiling. Our flat was the below-stairs portion of a Georgian townhouse, a long warren of rooms with plumbing pipes and electrical wires vined along the walls like root systems and a splash of daylight at the rear, a kind of glassed-over porch with frosted panes as its roof. The cat was roof-sitting. Ceiling-sitting, from my point of view. Into the middle of the roof-panes of glass a light fixture had been webbed, on the English electrical principle that unless the electrician has been specifically told by the householder not to expend 238,000 miles of wiring he will proceed to rig a bulb to the underside of the moon, and the light as it glowed threw upward a small circle of heat. By some instinct the cat had gravitated up from the alley to curl itself to the warmth. (Is it Eiseley?—“In the days of the frost seek a minor sun.”) The rest of the day I would glance overhead every so often and find the cat absorbedly licking its paws, its midnight-and-snow face dabbing in and out of focus through the frosted glass. That time of an alley tabby in wavery orbit over me convinced me forever that whatever their thousand daily pretences, cats all are secret Cheshires.

  To Swan of Port Townsend now, another here-again-gone-again countenance of my wintering. His effort to woo the railroad was mostly told in spare pages of the ledger diary he had used at Neah Bay, evidently a special effort to keep straight the skein of blandishments being tried on the Northern Pacific executives. Otherwise, the Port Townsend years are an era of pocket diaries: lines jotted instead of composed. Low water in the forty-year river of words. Scrawled small as they are, these entries will be day upon day of decipherment. But beyond doubt, worth it. I lift pages to the start of 1869 and find:

  Stormy day. Commenced to occupy office on the lower floor of old Post Office building Pt Townsend, as the office for Commissioner of Pilots. US Commissioner. Notary Public rent $5 per month.

  I check the final night of 1874 and learn:

  One Arm Smith & I worked this PM sodding Bulkeley’s grave & planting shrubbery around it.

  Even for Swan these seem broad enough brackets of endeavor.

  Days Fifty, Fifty-One, Fifty-Two

  Pleasant day, nothing of interest occurred except a fight...between Ginger Reese and Sam Alexander in Reeses saloon....

  Dave Sires, Lieut Paige and several officers of the Cutter gave me a serenade about 12 oclock PM....

  Col Larrabee & Col Pardee passed the evening with me discussing Swedenborgianism....

  Swan’s frontier Americans as they clumped themselves together into the barely-in-out-of-the-weather settlement they called Port Townsend. To the local Clallams and visiting Makahs they must have seemed exotic as albino bears, this white tribe.

  Their customs and rites of leadership are sporadic but frenzied. (Most memorable, at least by Swan’s report, would have been the election of 1860: The Republicans burned a tar barrel in honor of the supposed victory of Abe Lincoln.)

  They have a fixation on honorific titles: officers from the army post near town always addressed as “Colonel” and “Major,” those from ships on station in the harbor as “Captain” and “Lieutenant”; at the courthouse, it is “Judge” and “Sheriff.” (Swan himself in these years served for a time in charge of a municipal court and became thereafter on the streets of Port Townsend “Judge Swan.” Such distinction was not without drawbacks: Tom Butler and I had a talk in Jerseys saloon this evening in which he made threats that he would hold me responsible for my decision in case of Butler vs Butler.) This they extend with guffawing generosity to the Indians, renaming the local Clallam chief Chetzemoka as “the Duke of York” and one of his wives “Queen Victoria.”

  This white tribe’s sacred notions focus not on the earth and its forest and its roof of sky, but on obscure ancient quibbles among humans. (White humans, at that. Swan early makes note of an Oregon tribe who shook their heads firmly when told the story of Christ’s crucifixion. The Indians had enough trouble getting along with each other without borrowing conflict, they declared to the missionary; this Jesus matter was a quarrel the whites would have to settle among themselves.) They hold as well a strange sense of territoriality, strong as that of wolves, basing it on invisible boundaries: not the borders of common sense where you know yourself liable to ambush from another tribe, but seams on the earth somehow seen through a spyglass mounted on a tripod.

  Their weaponry is potent and mysterious, and growing more so all the time. (Lieut Hanbury US Topographical Engineer called on me today he is engaged On steamer Celilo taking account of force of current at various points on the Sound for the purpose of ascertaining if it is practicable to make use of torpedoes as a means of harbor defence.)

  Their boats are even more prodigious. Long schooners—the admiring Makahs have told Swan their word for them is bar-bethl’d: house on the water— which moor at the sawmill settlements and take aboard what had been sky-touching groves of trees. Steamboats which with their thrashing sidewheels can travel without the wind.

  Their food ranges from disgusting—hard salted beef which the sailors call “mahogany horse”—to marvelous: molasses, rice, coffee.

  Their views on whiskey are inconstant: some Port Townsend whites irate about the Indians sharing in it at all, others making a commerce of the liquid fire. (Thomas Stratton brought a bottle of whiskey to me which he took from a Clallam Indian this noon under the wharf of the hotel. The Indian said he got it at Sires saloon and it was lowered through the floor to him.)

  So too their notions on sex: the white men are ostentatious about preferring women of their own skin, yet Port Townsend has a growing population of half-breed children. (This matter and the previous one meet once in Swan’s pages, when he reports that an elderly couple of the Dungeness area have complained of their neighbors that Squaws and Whiskey were legal tender among them.)

  These whites are showy as well about their dead, keeping the corpses about for a day or more for the sake of ceremony instead of putting them instantly to rest in the earth.

  A good many whiteskins, particularly those along Port Townsend’s waterfront, are several baths per annum less clean than the Indians. (Especially less so than the Makahs, of whom Swan at Neah recorded that whenever a grimy task such as flensing a whale carcass was completed, they at once scoured themselves in sand and surf and came out clean and bright as so many new copper tea kettles.)

  Above all, this: they are a moody people, hard to predict, their community sometimes boisterous, sometimes dead silent. The afternoon, make it, that Swan and the other townspeople learned that the iron wagons of the railroad would not be coming: watch them from the eyes of Chetzemoka the Duke of York, how the bearded men cluster and mutter and slump awa
y to their houses, how the street stands emptier than empty after them, how even the whiskey voices in the saloons cannot be heard.

  You might imagine, the myth already finding words inside your lips, that this odd white tribe had abruptly got aboard one of its wheeled boats and gone away.

  Day Fifty-Three

  And then Port Townsend would jerk awake again and scarcely blink between excitements. In one span of a dozen weeks Swan inscribes these doings:

  ...Edwin Jones died during the night of heart compliant. He had been playing in the band at a dance in Masonic Hall and was on his way with the rest to Aliens to get supper. He stopped in at Urquharts Saloon where he had a room, laid down and died immediately.

  ...About Midnight Wednesday night Bill Leonards cow came into my entry and I drove her out. Then Ike Hall brought a drunk man into his office and I got up to see who it was and took cold by so doing....

  ...A Clallam Indian was cut in the head by another Indian and the squaws came and complained. The Sheriff took the guilty Indian and locked him up.

  ...John Martin stabbed Poker Jack his morning about 2 oclock in Hunts Saloon....

  ...Joseph Nuano the half breed Kanaka—Hawaiian—who murdered Dwyer on San Juan—was hanged today at the Point near the Brewery....

  ...The 6 canoes of Haida Indians who have been camped on Point Hudson for several days left this morning—They first went to Point Wilson where they burnt up the body of a Hydah man who died in Port Discovery 3 days ago—then they gathered up the bones and carried them off all leaving for Victoria and thence to their homes on Queen Charlottes Islands—

  Day Fifty-Four

  Lot of Hydah Indians with me this day in office, the tenth of May of 1873. I copied the tattoo marks on the back and breast of Kitkune....

  He did indeed, and the creatures from Kitkune’s epidermis writhe up at me now, from the pages of Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge No. 267. The breast tattoo is a head-on image of a dogfish, twin tails looping beneath its gills to both sides: it is a broadline cartoon of some tropical mouthbreather which might gape at you from an aquarium tank. The creatures of the back—a pair of them, sitting up and facing to opposite directions like book ends—are crossbreeds of killer whales and wolves. They have snouted heads with teeth like sawpoints, claws long and pointed as fork tines, broad curved scimitar-like tails, and an extra eye just beneath the neck.

  The skin art of the visiting Haidas plainly captivated Swan. He sketched a dozen of the patterns—the most decorative visitor seems to have been a canoeman named Kit-ka-gens, who displayed a thunderbird across his back, squids on each thigh, and frogs on each ankle—and lamented that they were but a portion of the whole which were tattooed on the persons of this party.... Soon another of his letters was away to Baird at the Smithsonian proposing the article for Contributions. (Proposing a bit nervously, given all these whalewolves and ankling frogs: the Haidas, Swan assured Baird, are no more grotesque in their attempts to imitate nature than are our designs of griffins, dragons, unicorns and other fabulous animals.)

  His fascination with the Haidas is more than understandable. They surge in the history of this coast as a Pacific Northwest version of Vikings. Writers are habitual about the analogy of raids down from northern waters, canoes like small dragonships, fur-shirted warriors bursting up from the thwarts to do battle. Swan never blazons that comparison, and I think he was right. The Haidas of his time amply deserve attention entirely as Haidas. Undo the past and disperse a few hundred thousand Haidas along this coast from their home islands of northern British Columbia, the Queen Charlottes, south as far as the mouth of the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, prime them with firepower equal to ours, and white civilization still might be waiting to set its first foot ashore here. The Haidas from all I can judge would have warred implacably as long as we could have stood it, then negotiated us to a frazzle.

  The actual arithmetic is that as late as 1835 perhaps as many as six thousand Haidas dwelled in the Queen Charlotte Islands and by 1885 there were eight hundred. Alcohol and other allurements of white frontier society had made their usual toll of a traditional way of life, but more terrible harvest yet, civilization’s diseases killed these warrior people like kittens. A smallpox epidemic in 1862 spread north out of Victoria and devastated what was left of the natives of the British Columbia coastline. No one knew the total of corpses—a ship’s captain counted a casual hundred scattered along the shores like flotsam on his voyage from the Stikene River to Victoria—but the estimate has been that of a coastal Indian population of perhaps sixty thousand, one-third perished. Among the Haidas that smallpox outbreak obliterated several particularly strong villages along the remote lengthy western margin of the Queen Charlottes archipelago. That west shore population, reported a visiting geographer in 1866, “has become wholly extinct”; every Haida had left in terror or stayed and died.

  If the Haidas were a diminished tribe, in unaccustomed baffled retreat to the safest of their shores, they remained a profound academy of artists. Besides the tattoo pages in Swan’s Contributions article he drew a few of the stone carvings the visiting Haidas had brought with them, miniatures of the carved cedar columns which soared in their villages, and I can barely pull my gaze from the one that proffers four fantastic figures lined one atop the other. Just what the merry hell is going on here, it is not clear at first. Count on Swan to explain the foursome into two sets of two creatures:...the lower one is Hoorts the bear holding in his paws the Stoo or crayfish. The upper figure is the Tsching or Tsing, the beaver, holding the Tl-kam-kostan or frog....The Indian, however rude or grotesque his carvings or paintings may be, is always true to nature. He knows that the bears eat crabs, crayfish and other littoral marine crusta-cea, and that the frog is the fresh-water companion of the beaver....If the carver had reversed the grouping, he would have been laughed at by his friends.... The linework is as fluid as the logic; no inch of the carving is without some thrust of action, something amazing about to begin. The beaver could be some creature of Mayan art gone mad; the frog he holds looks like some semi-human doing a handstand while wearing a gas mask; the bear could be a South Seas version of a jolly grizzly; the crayfish being plucked up backwards into his jaws is clearly from some far star. Restless skilled minds move behind this deftly stacked menagerie; minds which took magic from the forest, had the power to draw the coastal fir wilderness and its beings into the brain like fog into a cave and joyously make them art.

  Swan caught an idea from the Haidas during that day of tattoo tracing in his Port Townsend office, and it became the underpattern of his Contributions article: the Haidas were a most intriguing tribe—of larger stature, better proportion, and lighter complexion than the natives of the Strait—whose home villages in the Queen Charlotte Islands—a healthy picturesque territory—ought to be visited—if the Government would empower some person here, and appropriate sufficient funds to be expended—by someone probably named Swan.

  That notion persisted, I find, as if one of the Haida tattooists had engraved it on the inside of Swan’s forehead. Entrancement with the Haidas’ vivacious art surely has gripped Swan here, but I wonder whether something more is not urging him as well: a longing to step away, if only temporarily, to a new horizon. To the next West he can find (a healthy picturesque territory). Catching his third wind, so to speak, after having moved his life to California and then to the Washington coastline, Swan looks to me ready—yearnful—to venture again, and he would be typical enough of his era (and mine, now that I count up my own veers) to do so.

  Whatever ran in his mind here in 1873, over the next years Swan’s letters to Baird say steadily this: I am more desirous of making explorations in the Queen Charlotte Island Croup than of doing anything else.

  And Baird’s to him say as steadily only: I hope that one of these days...

  Later: something remembered as I stare at Swan’s sketch of Beaver fondling Frog, Bear sampling Crayfish. When we returned from our time in Britain six
years ago Carol brought with her a recording of African Sanctus, the fusion of African songs and dances with Western choir music, and began to use it in her semantics course to show the queer capturing power of rhythm, the vast sophistication of “primitive” folk art. The Haida work is something like that awesome Sanctus: anthems of existence, modulation upon modulation of the creaturedom which we too belong to. Carved music.

  Day Fifty-Five

  Storm. Fencefloater. Goosedrowner. None of which is fractionally enough word for such weather. Nightlong, rain swatted walls and windows, the wind pounded and ripped among the valley trees. Carol and I yanked awake at the gale’s first try at peeling the roof from the house, never fully slept from then on. I was certain that the birch trees outside the bedroom would be bending, eluding, as they always do in southwest blows. I was equally certain I would be greeting one or more of them in through the rafters any moment.

  After breakfast—the birches still stood, although branches thicketed the lawn as if someone had spent the night up in the limbs with a pruning saw—I slumped away to try for sleep, Carol drove up the hill to meet her classes. The wind roared on. In minutes I admitted myself more or less awake for good, managed to decide that I would head for Shilshole to see this weather at full run on the Sound.