again.
THE DAWN CAME TRICKLING through the doorway to the greathouse. Harry was sitting beside the embers of the fire, poking at them with a half-burned stick and wondering what was to follow. Funerals happened quickly among the Indians, usually the day after death. There had been several in the months he had been among them in Rupert. They died so easily, victim to ailments a white man would snuffle with and, like as not, shrug off in time.
The real question was what kind of burial George had in mind: Christian or heathen? The old man was huddled before the coffin, his blanket wrapped about him, his head down on his chest. Abayah and Francine dozed on a platform to one side. Harryâs wife had slipped off somewhere before dawn as he slept.
âMr. Hunt,â Harry spoke, at last, to the old manâs back. âShould we not be making plans for the day?â
His father-in-lawâs head drew up and turned a little, showing the outline of his sharp nose, his thick, grey moustache. âWeâll have the gravebox,â he said. âTell the people. Heâll go to the island.â
Harry fought down the ire he felt at the manâs curt manner. He had just lost his son. It wasnât the time for such thinking. It was a time to help. He pushed himself to his feet and walked out into the morning.
Outside, he raised both arms and stretched, then took stock of the day. Mist floated low on the ocean. There was no wind. The sun was still behind the mountains of the mainland to the east. It was cold. The tide was in, and the jetty stretched out into the faintly lapping waters, the pebble beach a narrow line at the bottom of the steep bank. The Hesperus bobbed at its mooring out at the jettyâs end. To left and right, the wooden roofs of the village arced away around the shore. The world smelled of seaweed, salt, and rotting fish.
His eyes followed the great ancestral pole by the doorway up along its length. The Bakwasâthe wild man of the forestâthen wolf, frog, human,thunderbird, killer whale, and, forty feet above, the great beak of Raven. If he knew by now to name them, still he could not have described their meaning. He placed his hand against the poleâs wood. Rough grain and cold dew. Then he pulled his greatcoat about himself more closely and turned along the beach toward the trading store, at the far end of the village.
Here and there, men and women were already out, a few wrapped in the thick grey or filthy white blankets of the Hudsonâs Bay Company. Others wore faded shirts or shabby sweaters and pants. Men were folding the nets, left out the night before like always in the faint expectation they might ever dry. Women sat outside the houses, speaking to each other in low tones as they prepared food.
âYoh,â he greeted them as he passed, feeling the idiot using the Kwagiulth word, but knowing they liked him for it. They nodded, but without their usual humour, sombre to the relative of a dead chieftain, even if Harry was no more than a white man.
He stepped off the plankway at its end and onto the path that ran along above the beach. Two dogs, mange and insect ravaged, nipped and snarled around the rotten head of a halibut. Harry aimed a stone with a well-practised foot. A yelp brought him some faint satisfaction after the hardships of the night.
âYoh,â a voice called from a shadowed doorway. âFat Harry.â He stopped. A face appeared, a foot lower than Harryâs own, black close-set eyes in weather-beaten skin, a smile, long on humour, short on teeth.
âCharley,â Harry said.
âWhat news today?â
âHe goes to the island.â
âWalas gigamé!â said Charley, lifting both his hands into the air, the deformity of his back becoming visible as he stepped through the doorway. âDavid was man of people. Good for George remember.â
âWill you help me pass the word?â
âEm,â Charley nodded.