Winter Brothers Read online

  But what speaks the weather even clearer is today’s renewed presence of birds. This morning kindled into warmer sun than we have had and already, Carol minutes gone up the hill to teach her first class of the day, just to be out in the fresh mildness I have walked to the top of the valley. Clouds were lined low across the southern reach of the Olympics while clear weather held the northern end, the Strait country. The view west from me was bannered in five blues: the water of Puget Sound in two shades, azure nearest me, a more delicately inked hue farther out; the foreshore of the Olympic Peninsula in its heavy forested tint; the mountains behind their blue dust of distance; the clear cornflower sky. Such mornings shrug away time. Vessels on the Sound—freighter, tug harnessed to barge, second freighter, the ivory arrow that is the Edmonds-to-Kingston ferry—seemed pinned in place, and I had to watch intently before my eyes could begin to catch the simultaneous motion of them all, inching on the water. Then as I turned home, the flurry. Robins in fluster at the mouth of the valley, abruptly dotting suburban fir trees and frost-stiff lawns. Motion doublequick, headlong. Airful of flying bodies, a vigor in orbit around fixed beauty of Sound and mountains.

  Soon after, a jay cry, like rods of some terrible substance being briskly rasped against each other. Then framed in the desk-end window, popping from place to place along the bank beneath the valley slope’s evergreens, a tiny brown flying mouse which proved to be a wren.

  These past iced days I have tried to picture this valley’s birds, up somewhere in innermost branches, fluffed with dismay and wondering why the hell they didn’t wing south with their saner cousins. I live in this suburb for its privacy, the way it empties itself during the workday—people evaporated off to office, school, supermarket—and delivers the valley to me and the birds and any backyard cats. I suppose I could get by without the cats, or trade them for other interesting wanderers, maybe coyotes or foxes, but a birdless world, the air permanently fallow, is unthinkable. To be without birds would be to suffer a kind of color blindness, a glaucoma gauzing over one of the planet’s special brightnesses. Bushtits must bounce again out there on the thin ends of birch branches like monks riding bell ropes. A fretful nest-building robin—we always have one or two nattering in the trees at either end of the house—must gather and gather dry spears of grass until the beakful bristles out like tomcat whiskers. Towhees, chickadees, flickers, juncoes. (All the creatures of this planet that do not know they have splendid names.) Occasional flashing hummingbirds; seasonal grosbeaks who arrive in the driveway and, masked like society burglars, munch on seeds amid the gravel. Besides Carol and the pulse of words across paper there exist few everyday necessaries in my life, but birds are among them.

  And Swan, with his name which the Indian woman at Shoal-water had said is like our word Cocumb, a big bird: depend on it, birds perpetually aviate across his horizons. Time upon time I marker incidents of birds in his pages. This forenoon, the tenth of July of 1865 at Neah Bay, I saw a kingfisher fluttering in the brook, and supposed he had a trout which he could not swallow. On going to him I found he had driven his bill into an old rotten stick with such force as to bury it clear up to his eyes...hard and fast. I took him with the stick to the house and called Jones & Phillips to see the curiosity. It was with difficulty that his bill was pulled out again. Two years previous, in the same week of July: I discovered a dead Albatross on the beach yesterday which had a large dogfish which it had swallowed partially but it was too large, and while the fish’s head rested in the bird’s stomach, its tail was out of its mouth. Consequently the bird was soon suffocated....I never met with a similar instance of voracity. And the twelfth of February of 1863: Quite a number of crows have been washed ashore dead. They have a rookery at Waadah Island and probably the stormy wind that has prevailed for several days with the thick, snow blinded them and they fell into the water.... Catastrophe of that sort marauds here as well, although fortunately not in bunches. This house I live in sits as a glass crag in the birds’ midst. Swan once tells of a canoe crew of Makahs stopping for the night at the cabin of an Olympic Peninsula settler; of how they swung the canoe mast wrong while stowing it and crashed an end through the hard-bought one window of the homestead cabin; of the settler’s highest fury, as if they had shattered a diamond. This suburban house of mine glints with fourteen windows; wobbly mastbearers could pass none of my walls without creating crystal. Badgerlike, I hunch in here at the typing desk and watch helplessly as this building with windows to every direction and inclination imposes itself athwart the birds’ paths and every so often will kill one of them. Grosbeaks have been the most frequent victims of headlong smash against a window. During one of their migrations, twice in two days I found corpses, flat on their backs and feet curled in a final surprised clutch, below the north window.

  One bird outside these transparent walls is invincible: the Stellar’s jay. Jays attack their way through life like cynical con-nivers in a royal court. A Stellar’s will alight on the garden dirt, cock his head in disdain, scream twice, burst off into the hemlock and set the lower branches dancing, almost before its blue sheen has blazed on my retina. What a vacancy a jay leaves in the air. The Makahs explained to Swan that the blue jay was the mother of a rascally Indian named Kwahtie. She had asked him to fetch some water, saying that she wished he would hurry, because she felt as if she were turning into a bird. Kwahtie ignored her and went on making the arrow he was at work on. While she was talking she turned into a blue jay and flew into a bush. Kwahtie tried to shoot her, but his arrow passed behind her neck, glancing over the top of her head, ruffling up the feathers, as they have always remained in the head of the blue jay. It sounds to me as good an explanation as any for this sharp-hooded brigand.

  And then the most arresting of Swan’s notations, the one that halts me in dismay: During the spring, when the flowers are in bloom and the humming birds are plenty, the boys take a stick smeared with the slime from snails, and place it among a cluster of flowers...if a humming bird applies his tongue to it he is glued fast. They will then tie a piece of thread to its feet and holding the other end let the birds fly, their humming being considered quite an amusement.

  That scene is doubly unsettling to me. The doom of the hummingbirds, and the knowledge that had I been one of the Makah boys I would have had my own captive bird whirring like a toy on the end of a tether.

  Day Sixteen

  Swan as disclosed by the few, damnably few, photos of him. In a portrait studio at age sixty-Eve, he sits wearing a small round-crowned hat, brim serenely without crimp, and has trimmed his snug white beard, toyed a chain and fob into precise place above the middle button of his vest, and primped a little show of handkerchief at the breast pocket of his jacket. His right hand, holding wire-rim reading glasses, rests amid books and sheafed paper atop a tablecloth so Victorianly brocaded that it looks as if it would stand in place without the table beneath it. Just slightly he faces to the left of the camera, the photographer’s experience evidently having been that dignity is an oblique matter. Angled as Swan is, a white wedge of collar stands out sharply between his high-cut vest and his left jawline. This stiff bright fence of fabric at his neck and the dark orb of hat exactly flat across his head make the portrayed figure startlingly like a priest of the era, probably shyly sidled in to pose while home on leave from some far missionary billet or another.

  Five years later in a crowd scene at Port Townsend, his beard is fuller and he sports a derby with the brim making a dapper little swoop to his brow. Here he looks somehow...elfin; somehow not quite of the same world as the foursquare town-folk all around him.

  Another shot, when I judge him to be perhaps fifty. Hatless this time, and his hairline arcing fairly far back. A comb has done careful work and scissors have tidied around ears and back of neck. White, or more likely gray, is wisping into the beard only at either side of his chin. According to what one writer of regional history has remarked the dark cheek portions of beard and Swan’s hair were brown, but I have no
word yet from any contemporary of his on that. One surprise: the corners of his eyes are touched with only a few brief lines. I conclude that dry Montana of this century, which early engraved a web of lines on the upper face of my father and grandmother and made a noticeable start on me, is more erosive than Swan’s maritime frontier of a hundred years ago.

  Next, Swan older again, and in high regalia. He wears a fez and a broad sash, evidently trigged up for a convention of the Order of Red Man, one of the several Port Townsend lodges he belonged to. As a frontier pasha Swan looks spendidly silly, and there may be a hint held in around his lips that he more than suspects it. The new feature here, fez and sash aside, is the clear profile of Swan’s nose. For most of us the nose looms as an open hinge in the center of the face, shaped to no discernible purpose except revenge on us by forgotten ancestors. But Swan came off rather well, a straight unfleshy version proportioned comfortably between the wide set of his eyes and the emphasis of his barbered heard. A restrained Boston nose.

  A smatter of other scenes exists—one I particularly grin over, Swan at ease in his Port Townsend office with a deluge of Indian regalia covering every wall and shelf around him; the place looked as this writing room of mine is beginning to with the copied heaps of Swan’s paperwork stacked around—but they do not offer further detail. Except one final pose, unquestionably snapped the same day in the studio as the priestly portrait. This time Swan perches on a queer chair-sized square of small notched logs, evidently the photographer’s notion of a rural setting, and with casual care is holding a large canoe paddle slantwise across his body. If a flash flood should sweep through the studio he will be ready atop his small square floe. He has company in this photo, a blocky and strong-faced young Haida Indian named Johnny Kit Elswa. Wearing a suit jacket which his chest and shoulders threaten to explode, Johnny Kit Elswa stolidly stands just apart from Swan, also grips a paddle, and a fistful of arrows and a small bow as well.

  Both men, one of Massachusetts and the other of the wild native coast of the North Pacific, are stiffly tethered by their stares to the camera’s lens. But precisely between them breaks out a vertical riot of animated faces: a ceremonial Indian carving roughly the length and shape of the canoe paddles, agog every six inches with some fantastic woodfaced creature or another popping its eyes in the direction of the camera. Giddy, droll, mischievous, outright heehawing, the carvings are an acrobatic ladder of forest imps. In this company the humans seem dry solemn stuff indeed.

  Swan, then, in the entirety of his gallery of likeness. Slightly narrow-shouldered, with a tendency to build a bit at the waistline. Surprisingly long-armed: a 32½-inch sleeve when he orders a coat from Boston. An average chest: 37 inches, on that same garment. He is perhaps five feet eight inches in height and not heavily built: Batsie took me across the Waatch Creek on his shoulders, the diary discloses. Say, at his best-fed, perhaps 160 pounds. All in all a shape which could be pared and stretched a bit into my own, I notice. But his beard, with its regular, combed smoothness, is nothing like my copper-wire version. My bet is that he grew it aboard the Rob Roy, coming west to California in 1850: new life, new face. In the ceremonial pictures in his later years he seems to have begun shaving his cheeks along the top of his beard, declaring a definite border such as where a department-store Santa’s whiskers begin. Which leads to the thought that, like me, he may have been a touch overproud of a firm face of beard. A sack of hair from ear to ear may be less enhancing than we imagine.

  Not an elaborate man, but with a small dressy touch now and again. A ring with a stone there on the ring finger of the left hand; that chain and fob. A favorite white meerschaum pipe. A pocket watch which he tries, with no great success, to keep accurate with the precision clock of the Port Townsend jeweler.

  Average vanities aside, Swan impresses as tidy; deft enough within his radius of interests; indeed, even painstaking about any matter he thinks sufficient to warrant it, such as presenting his face for the world to see. And yet in every pose more distance to him than merely the span from the camera’s lens. An inward man, a winterer within himself as well as his far-frontier surroundings.

  As I have fingered through the photographs Swan has seemed more than half familiar to me, the kind of visage seen from the tail of the eye and not quite willing to register. The tiny jungled planet that is the human head can be mysterious this way. Forest of hair and that sometime cultivation of beard, plain of brow, the twin seas of eyes, wrinkled country of memory and cunning and wonder and who knows what all: you can look on constellations of heads all day long without fully seeing any single orb. (Unless you sense reason for comparison. I am interested that Swan seems never to have gone bald at the north polar region where I have, but his forehead began to extend into the farthest tundra country.) At last the exact resemblance clicks. Swan looks more than a little like the history book portraits of the steel king of the nineteenth century, Andrew Carnegie. Similar wide clear brow, same trim half-face of beard more white than gray, with downward arc of mouth in it.

  Between brow and beard, however, exactly there across the eyes and cheekbones, entire difference arrives. Even at his most carefully benign, Carnegie’s scrutiny lances off the page at you as that of a man gauging just how far you can be tantalized with the gift of a public library. Swan blinks the middle-distance gaze of a fellow who would be in that Carnegie library thumbing through the collected works of John Greenleaf Whittier all the afternoon.

  Day Seventeen

  Neah Bay, mid-January 1864: a week of Swan’s winter.

  Sunday. Russian Jim came in this evening and requested me to intercede with his squaw who has recently left him and try and induce her to return. Jim told me that when any one came to my door at night I should always ask “Who is there” for the Skookums sometimes came to peoples doors and did mischief. I told him I was not afraid of the powers of the air at all. He said I had a skookum tumtum—a strong heart.

  Monday. This is my birth day 46 years old. Cleaned up the school house today, piled the lumber, and placed things in order. I shall be glad when the building is completed for the constant interruption I have and the various duties I am called on to perform prevent my giving that attention to the children I wish to. I have no time that I can call my own or in which I am not liable to interruptions except evenings and then I am generally alone but I can find but little time to write for my sight is getting too poor to attempt writing much except by daylight.

  The Indians think I have a’skookum tumtum to live alone in this great house. I do not suppose one of them would dare sleep here alone for anything they are so afraid of spirits. I think the spirits of the earth are more to be feared, both spirituous liquors and evil prowling Indians but I don’t apprehend any dangers or alarms from any source and thus far never have been more peacefully situated.

  Tuesday. Today took an inventory of Government property for Mr Webster. Billy Balch came in this evening and gave me a very lucid explanation why the spirits of the dead did not molest me. He says that it is because we have a cellar to the house and a floor over it, but in Indian houses there is nothing but the bare ground or sand. That when any of the Indians are alone in a great house and make a fire and cook, that the memelose or dead come up through the earth and eat food and kill the Indian, but he things they can’t come up through our floor altho as he says he would be afraid to try to sleep alone here for there might be some knot hole or crack in the floor through which they could come.

  Billy also related an interesting tradition. He says that...at not a very remote period the water flowed from Neeah Bay through the Waatch prairie, and Cape Flattery was an island. That the water receded and left Neeah Bay dry for four days and became very warm. It then rose again without any swell or waves and submerged the whole of the cape and in fact the whole country except the mountains....As the water rose those who had canoes put their effects into them and floated off with the current which set strong to the north. Some drifted one way and some another and when the wat
ers again resumed their accustomed level a portion of the tribe found themselves beyond Nootka where their descendants now reside and are known by the same name as the Makahs....

  There is no doubt in my mind of the truth of this tradition. The Waatch prairie shows conclusively that the waters of the ocean once flowed through it, and as this whole country shows marked evidences of volcanic influences there is every reason to believe that there was a crust which made the waters to rise and recede as the Indian stated.

  Wednesday. Very heavy surf during the night and this morning, showing there must have been strong winds outside the cape recently....At 8 PM Jackson & Bob came to the door and informed me that a vessel had run on the rocks on the north end of Waadda Island. I went out on the beach and saw a light in that direction, but after watching it some time I concluded it was as lively to be a vessel at anchor in the harbor as one on the rocks. The Indians refused to go off to ascertain, as the wind was blowing too strong, so I came back to the house and after going up to my room in the upper part of the turret, where I had a better chance to judge I concluded from the appearance of the light that it was the US Rev Cutter Joe Lane...expected here with Mr Smith the keeper of Tatooche Light.