Winter Brothers Read Online Free PDF Page B

him spending his time on the Boston waterfront, or any other waterfront, in preference to twiddling under the family roof. To transfer the roof with him, Swan and Matilda and the children all staunchly mutual new citizens of the Pacific shore, is to find the family settling to the grooved routines of a city neighborhood again; likely in Portland, with its New England affiliations. But could the Swan youngsters have grown up at their father’s inquisitive side here along this new coast in the life he led, absorbing the Indian languages and lore as he did, poking along the shore with him into the bays he appraised like a portraitist, stooping as he did to the frontier’s odd bouquets of salal and kinnickinnick and yarrow and skunk cabbage, what western venturers that daughter and that son might have been.
    Come they did not, of course; could not except as I would reinvent their lives; and but for Swan’s scanty visits back to Boston heard their father’s voice only from across the continent, by the paper echo of mail, for the next half-century.
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    Evening, last inches of the leaden day. Ellen and Charles missed sprigs of knowledge indeed when their father left them to Boston. From Swell’s tribe, the Makahs, Swan noted down that their version of the sun arrived robustly each morning by thrusting away the stars with his head and trampling night underfoot. Rainbows, they considered, had claws at either end to seize the unwary. Comets and meteors were the luminous souls of dead chiefs. As for the mysterious northern lights that sometimes webbed the sky beyond the Strait, Swell explained them astutely to Swan:
    Under that star, many snow’s sail from here in a canoe, live a
race of little men, very strong, who are dressed in’skins. They look like Indians, but they are not taller than half the length of my paddle. They can dive down into the sea and catch a seal or a fish with their hands. Their country is very cold, and they live on the ice where they build great fires, and that light is the fires of those little people....
    Swell as tutor about Eskimo life puts light on something else as well. Along the wilderness that was the North Pacific coastland, more than five hundred miles of broken shore from Neah Bay even to southernmost Alaska and greater distances beyond that to the people of the ice, ideas of that sort must have traveled like thistledown on puffs of breeze: canoeing tribe in wary touch with canoeing tribe, a seed of story deposited, to be borne along by the next barter-trip southward. By the time the Makahs received the story of the miniature ice-men of the north, lore had been nurtured into legend. I recognize such wafts of alchemy, for I live with them as well. A morning in the nineteen-twenties a dozen riders are returning to their home ranches after a weekend rodeo. Whenever the horses’ hoofs strike the dryness of a Montana country road, dust drifts up until from a distance the group looks like men of smoke. Most of the journey, however, cuts across open sageland, and the slap of the gray tassels of brush against leather chaps competes with their talk of the rodeo broncs. Unexpectedly the loose troop reins to a halt. Across a stretch of pasture they have always ridden through, a fresh barbed-wire fence glints. The owner of the land emerges from a nearby cabin to explain that he intends to plow the ground, that they can no longer go across the field-to-be. A rider with a notch-scar in the center of his chin—he was my father—grins down at the man and says in his style of half-joke, half-declaration: “We never saw any place yet we couldn’t go.” Turning his horse to the fence, he touches spur to flank, and mount and man pass through the air above the blades of wire. One after another the others soar after him, like boys on great birds of sorrel, roan, dapple gray.
    The story and its impromptu anthem of the West’s last horseback generation have come down