Kweetchel was a young man when it happened and that was before the days
when the red canoe and the Sitka Spruce had brought numbers of white men
to his part of the world. Kweetchel had seen very few white men; and he
had never seen a compass until he took one from the body of a dead
sailor he found in a drifting boat.
He was out in the summer fog, fishing for halibut with bits of
octopus-arm for bait, and the boat came sideways out of the fog, and
rubbed gently against his dug-out, and he looked in and saw the dead
sailor.
There was nothing on the white man but a twist of tobacco and the
compass. While Kweetchel was wondering what he should do next, a sooty
albatross screamed at him. His snam was an albatross, so Kweetchel took
this to mean that he’d better have nothing to do with the boat or the
dead man; he sent the boat off with a push and the fog shut down on it
forever. But there seemed no harm in keeping the compass, which was in a
bright brass case.
Kweetchel went ashore. He intended to give the compass to the girl he
liked best—either Kolite or Oala. The trouble was he could not decide
which he preferred. Oala’s silver labret was nearly twice the size of
Kolite’s, but Kolite’s eyes were soft and bright as deep river-water and
looked kindly on Kweetchel.
He sat down to think it out, the compass in his hands, and his heart
beat—Kolite? Oalo? Kolite? Oalo?
Then glancing at the compass in his hand Kweetchel saw that the needle
pointed straight at Kolite’s house.
This was not strange considering that Kolite’s house was north of
Kweetchel as he sat on the beach among the draw-up dug-outs and the
barbed cod’s heads and the fighting dogs. But of course he did not know
this, and it came as a shock. “My holy snam!” said Kweetchel, or
gutterals to that effect, “but there is a strong spirit in this little
box!” He decided that he would keep the compass himself. But he went
immediately and made arrangements to marry Kolite as soon as possible.
Kweetchel took Kolite to wife, and very soon forgot all about Oala. He
was very happy. Kolite was an excellent housewife as far as oalachan oil
and preserved seaweed went. Kweetchel attributed his comfort to the
spirit in the brass compass. He made a beautiful hutch for it to live
in, of well-grained male wood greased black, inlaid with studs of shell,
and incised with albatross wings.
The days went over Kweetchel and Kolite, the silvery North Pacific sun,
the nights, and the great burning moons. The west winds which had last
touched the eyes of lovers in the peony gardens of Japan, now touched as
softly the eyes of Kweetchel and Kolite.
A sub-chief gave a great potlatch. Kweetchel was a dandy, and he had
himself tattooed for the occasion in a design of conventionalized
compasses. But the wounds inflamed. And when the day of the feast came,
Kweetchel was a sick man. He lay on his bed with a fever, talking wild
spirit-words, and Kolite fanned him with a cedar-bark fan.
The second day of the feast, Kweetchel’s mind came back to him suddenly,
and with it a great sense of fear and disaster. He heard from without
the howls of the drinkers, the groans of the eaters, the weeping of the
neglected children, the worrying of the dogs. He trembled with fear and
weakness. He said to Kolite, “Bring me the hutch with the Thing inside.
I must talk to that spirit.”
Kolite brought the carved hutch, and covered her eyes with her mantle of
green-and-black goat’s hair while Kweetchel took out the compass.
Kweetchel held the compass and turned it in his quivering hand; and the
needle balanced, hesitated, and then hung true to the north.
Kweetchel crawled out of his house and stood and looked north.
A great white fog-belt hung low across the sea. Kweetchel saw three
black specks break one after the other from this fog. They were a long
way off, but he knew them for what they were,—canoes under twin-sails.
He watched a moment more. Then, with a great cry, he ran staggering to
the potlatch house. He burst through the totem poles and flung himself,
naked and shouting, on the revellers within. As men of Kent or Essex
might have burst into an English hall, crying, “The Norsemen, the
Norsemen!” so Kweetchel came, crying, “The Haidas, the Haidas!”
The crapulous rabble huddled to the defence. They tried to launch the
war-canoes to meet the sea-hawks on the sea. Only one got off, and
Kweetchel, for all his weakness, in her. Women fled to the fir-forest,
all except Kolite. She climbed to a high rock above the beach, and
wrapped her fine woven mantle about her, and sat as still as a stone,
her chin upon her knees, watching the hopeless fight.
The Haida war-canoes came down under full sail, swift and beautiful
among the beautiful boats that men have ever made in the world.
The canoe from shore, with drunken courage and a scattering fire of old
muskets, put out to intercept the leading Haida. The Haida swept on,
silent, until scarcely twenty feet divided the two. Then her sails came
down, shots were fired, spears and stone-headed axes flew. In a moment
from the other boat rose a great cry of pain, fear and death. The
Haida’s way carried her on. Her terrible sharp prow, with the great eyes
glaring on either side, ground into the side of her adversary, which
heeled over. The Haida was sixty feet long; she rode right over the
smaller boat and beached on the sand leaving the living and the dying
struggling in the water. The second canoe picked up a few of the former
for slaves.
Then the slaughter commenced, of men too gorged to stand up, of men too
drunk to steady a harpoon. Kolite did not stir while the sound of it,
and then the smell of burning, went past her in a smoke.
Later, she heard feet running on the rock, the high rock whereon she
sat. She covered her face with her mantle. A man came and stood by her,
panting. He tore the mantle away. He said, “Who are you?”
As if she were dead, Kolite replied, “I was the wife of Kweetchel.”
He took her in his arms and carried her down to the boats. He was gentle
with her. Love for her had entered his heart when he uncovered her face.
And Kolite looked among the other prisoners to see if her husband was
there. But he was not. Then she lay down and it was as if her life went
from her. Kweetchel was dead, and she was the slave to the Haida chief,
Annoish-Haung.
But Kweetchel was not dead.
In the brief fight with the Haida, he was wounded and pitched into the
sea. Swimming as instinctively as a wounded seal, he travelled under
water while his breath held. He came up, gasping and half-dead, in the
lee of a reef that sheltered him from sight.
He clung here a long while, too much hurt to have any clear thought of
what was happening. Later, he recovered enough to swim back to shore.
This took all his strength. He crawled dripping above tide-mark, and
dropped, lying all night with other men, more still and silent than he,
under the light of the vast Pacific moon.
The moon set. The sun climbed. Kweetchel woke and stood up.
He looked at the dead. He looked at the ruins of the burning houses. He
saw the crows gathering from the woods, and the fierce herring-gulls
swooping inshore. He knew then what had happened.
He ran up and down the beach, calling, “Kolite, Kolite!” But none
answered him.
He ran into the forest, calling “Kolite!” There was no reply.
He walked two and fro among the burning boards of cedar, crying on
“Kolite!” A huge totem-pole, charred through at the base, fell with a
crash, scattering him with flakes of painted wood. That was the only
response. He made his way to the smouldering ruin of his own house and
lay down in the hot black ash, waiting to die.
His hands, beating about as his sorrow hurt him, touched wood that was
not burned, and closed on it. He drew from the ashes the hutch that the
compass lived in. “Spirit of the bright box,” groaned Kweetchel, “where
is Kolite?”
He took out the compass and held it in his hands. The needle shook,
quivered, and hung true on the north. . .
Kweetchel, with something hardening in his breast like stone, bowed
himself and wept in the ashes of his home.
Then he hung the compass round his neck on a leather string, provisioned
his own dug-out with a keg of fresh water, some nice fresh sea-urchins,
a little smoked salmon, fishlines, spears, and all things necessary to a
long journey, and went off after Kolite.
Kweetchel’s account of what happened to him during the next two months
is confused. He seems to have made his way right round Vancouver Island,
however, and crossed to the mainland, where he hung about some inlet
more-or-less opposite Clew Cumshewa, waiting for a chance to cross to
the Queen Charlottes. He knew Kolite was here, because the compass had
pointed the way. It troubled him that the compass no longer pointed to
the Queen Charlottes, but he decided that it had been bewitched by the
powerful Haida spirits.
In a week of calm weather he provisioned his little canoe again, and set
out for the Islands. He landed on the southern shore of a tiny bay,
notched into a bigger bay, which was notched into a fjord. Enormous
cedar-forest grew to the water’s edge. Kweetchel hid his dug-out and lay
down in the bushes, watching the unbroken forest on the opposite shore
of the little bay, to which the compass needle now pointed. Rain dripped
on him, made sweet with the layers of cedar through which it fell. He
dared not light a fire. He waited for the event.
At the very edge of the night, something stirred in the cedar forest
across the bay. He thought it was a deer; but there are no deer on the
Haida’s Islands. Lifting his head, he looked. At the very point the
needle had indicated, a woman parted the branches and stood by the
water, carrying in her hand a torch like a timid star.
Kweetchel’s heart seemed to leap from his body. For it was Kolite.
Hunter as he was, he made no sound nor stir. He watched her as she bent
and extinguished her little torch. Then, a shadow among the shadows of
the forest, she slipped out of the bright robes she wore, the robes of a
Haida chieftainess. She stood bare and softly dark as the young night
sweet with rain; on arms and anklets broad bands of beaten silver
gleamed like bars of the moon. She entered the water, holding a knife in
her hand, and began to make prayer to the Spirit of the Sea.
“O Scanawa, Un-Una,” said Kolite, in very good Haida, “I entreat you to
punish the men who killed my husband. I entreat you to rise, O Scanawa,
Un-Una, Soul of Storms, and upset their canoes, and fill their nets with
the dog-fish and the mother of the dog-fish, and drive the otter from
their coasts, and bite holes in their baskets, and spoil their copper
shields, and break their abalone shells. O Scanawa, Un-Una, hear me. I
am a poor woman. I have nothing. I am nothing. I am the slave of
Annoish-Haung. O Spirit of Storms, I give you all that I have. Hear me,
Scanawa, Un-Una, and make Kweetchel alive again so that I no longer fear
the emptiness of the night and the arms of Annoish-Haung.” And lifting
the knife, Kolite shore from her head the long locks of black hair, and
let them fall in the salt water. She wept as she cut them, and there was
a faint phosphorescence in the water, so that she stood with a silver
ring about her waist, and her hair floated like silver snakes, and each
tear as it mingled with the brine was like a spark of pale fire.
Then Kweetchel could no longer be still. He leapt into the water and
swam across the little bay. When Kolite saw him coming she ran ashore
and crouched on the edge of the forest. Kweetchel rose out of the sea
and came to her, and said, “I am come, Kolite.”
They had no words to fit what they felt. They sat near each other, they
touched each other softly here and there, and smiled. Then Kweetchel
said, “Come with me.” Kolite swam with him across the bay, they found
his dug-out. In the dim night, in the sweet rain, they put out to sea.
Kolite said, “Let us go home.” But Kweetchel shook his head and paddled
north, for that was the way the compass pointed.
An old woman had followed Kolite through the woods from the Haida town,
had heard her prayer to Un-Una, had seen her meeting with Kweetchel.
This old woman went back and told all that she had seen and heard to
Annoish-Haung. And when in the morning light Kweetchel looked about the
great silver disk of the sea, he saw, between him and the misty
mountains of the Islands, four black specks beneath the rising cloud of
dawn.
“He follows soon,” grunted Kweetchel between his teeth, and bent to the
paddle. He had been paddling all night. He must paddle longer. The
glittering silver swell lifted the dug-out, she climbed, sank, climbed
again. The four canoes pursuing altered course, converging like black
ducks upon a stricken fish. Kweetchel’s canoe had been seen.
“If we had a sail. . .” said Kweetchel stolidly.
Kolite stripped off her mantle of a Haida chieftainess, her fine-woven
mantle of red and blue. She spread it upon spears. The wind filled it,
she steadied it with her arms. The wind stung her body, she leaned back
and laughed fiercely at Kweetchel, and he loved her as never before.
The canoe sped more swiftly, but the four big canoes of Annoish-Haung
were swifter yet. Kweetchel looked back. Before they had been like low
black ducks. Now they were like eagles, and the foam about their high
prows was like the white feathers of an eagle’s neck. Kweetchel groaned,
bending over the paddle.
“Shall we leap in the sea together?” asked Kolite, child of the seas,
laughing fiercely.
“I am a well-born man and my ears are pierced,” panted Kweetchel. “I
will die fighting Annoish-Haung.”
There were islands in the sea. “If we hid among the small channels in
the fog,” whispered Kolite. But Kweetchel glanced at the compass and
stolidly shook his head. The Thing still pointed north. North he went
and Annoish Haung followed.
But now Kweetchel was spent with paddling. He glanced despairingly at
the dim mountains of the Lak-Haida, at the canoes that hunted him down.
His dark chest heaved, water ran down his face. Kolite left the sail and
knelt beside him, and wiped the water from his face with her hands. They
looked into each other’s eyes. Kolite tore from her arms the bracelets
of beaten silver, stamped with the crest of Annoish-Haung, and threw
them into the sea.
“O Scanawa, Un-Una,” she cried, “hear us.”
Then she shrieked like a gull and pointed.
Scanawa, Un-Una, Spirit of Storm, Soul of the Sea, had heard. Down from
the tall mountains of Lak-Haida swept the squall. Between the small boat
and the others two miles astern it drove a sudden wedge of hail and
wind. The waves lifted. The air and the sea mingled together. Un-Una
reached up and shook the canoes of Annoish-Haung and the souls of the
men in them, Kolite seized the paddle, and Kweetchel reeled forward and
stayed the sail. He looked up and saw an albatross riding the gale like
a ship. Behind the Soul of the Sea fought for them. Kweetchel bowed his
head. It is not given to all men to walk with the gods of the sea.
The squall broke away south. The sea about them was driving green and
blue, flashing with foam. One staggering shape, water-logged and with
torn sails reeled from the rim of the storm and came battling after
them. Annoish-Haung still followed.
Under the bright sail, with Kolite bending at the paddle, the little
canoe climbed the waves like a duck. Grimly behind her laboured the big
canoe of the Haida. Annoish-Haung set his slaves to bail. She lightened
each moment. Kweetchel took the paddle once more.
North through the bright ridged sea they struggled, following the
compass needle. Islands of refuge, channels of escape, showed here and
there among the low clouds. Kweetchel would not turn aside. North he
headed. And Annoish-Haung followed fast.
Ahead of them, a great crag reared from the running surf about its base.
It roared into an islet of honey-gold rock, grown with vivid green moss
and all hollowed by the sea. An hour passed and they could see the
sea-lions thick along the reefs as grubs along a leaf; they could hear
the roaring of the honey-brown sea-gulls mingle with the roar of the
foam.
Towards the crag Kweetchel headed. And Kolite thought, “It is ended.”
For she thought he meant to dash upon the crag and die.
But Kweetchel, following where the needle pointed, saw due ahead a great
cave in the rock, and in the surf before it a break.
He glanced back. The Haida was near, but she hesitated. He could see
Annoish-Haung beating his slaves, who had no stomach for the surf.
Kweetchel smiled at Kolite and headed for the break in the reefs.
Inevitable as life or death, the jaws of the reef opened before them.
They were enclosed in streaming rocks, from which hung curtains of
bronze kelp. From the ledges the sea-bulls reared to look, and right and
left the cows dived in the flow.
Kweetchel yelled. The lions bellowed. The surf thundered about the
narrow channel of green water. . .
They were through. A great sheet of foam shouldered them quietly into
the cave.
Kweetchel looked about him. Rocks buttressed the entrance, and the reefs
kept the waves from it. The pool in the cave was foam-red and shallow.
He stepped out and drew the canoe behind one of the rock-buttresses. He
lifted out Kolite. Clinging together, they looked about them with large
scared eyes.
It was a very still place they had entered, though it hummed and shook
to the thunder along the reefs. The air of the cave was calm, it seemed
to be hung with strange green water-shadows and reflections of the deep.
The pool that floored it was calm. The rock beneath the calm pool was
covered with a rose-red encrustation, blotched with scarlet, hung with
mauve and bronze weeds, and starred with living flowers as green as
emerald. Huge crabs, noduled with purple and crimson, moved with the
undulations of the sea. In one wall was a rose-pink recess, like a
throne for a sea-spirit. Kweetchel lifted Kolite and set her in this
shrine. Then he caught up a spear, loosed the knife in his belt, and
turned to the entrance.
As he turned, he heard a cry of death. He looked out. The hands of the
weary slaves had not been as true as his hand. He saw the Haida swing
for the opening of the reef, and miss it. He saw, in a moment of time,
her high prow crashed upon the rocks; she split from end to end, slid
away, and sank. The slaves went down in the rush and smother of the
foam. Only one man, gripping a spear in his mouth, leapt clear; hung to
the kelp, heaved himself upward among the herd of sea-lions, and
staggered towards the cave. It was Annoish-Haung.
Huge, dark and dripping from the sea, he splashed into the cave, and
Kweetchel met him there.
They closed at once, stabbing with shortened spears. The water of the
pool rocked, green and silver reflections flowed over the walls. The
surf thundered outside, and the bulls of the sea-herd bellowed angrily
after the man who had run among them.
Kweetchel kept his knife hidden in his left hand.
Great and fierce was Annoish-Haung among the great fierce Haidas; fair
in colour, and delighting in war. Kweetchel was a head shorter, and
swarthy, and had no more stomach for war than another man. But he had
not followed Annoish-Haung nine weeks for nothing. Waiting his chance,
he took many wounds. The froth on the churned pool was stained as pink
as the walls. The crabs, pausing in their unceasing run, winnowed the
water with horrid feathered jaws.
Annoish-Haung shouted his war-cry and drove again with his spear.
Kweetchel avoided it, and the impetus of the stroke carried
Annoish-Haung past him. Kweetchel wheeled. The Haida wheeled almost
instantly and recovered. But Kweetchel had seized his chance. He leaned
forward and slashed his knife across the forehead under the studded
head-band.
It was only a shallow cut. But the blood blinded Annoish-Haung. He
faltered. Before he could clear his eyes, Kweetchel had run in and
slashed his knee. He dropped to the other. He flung his spear, but he
could not see clearly. It flew wide. Kweetchel speared him through the
heart. He fell forward on his face in the pool, and died. Kolite came
from her rosy niche and took him by the hair, and together they carried
him to the opening of the cave and heaved him into the surf.
They spent three fireless days on the rock, eating sea-urchins and
dulse, while Kweetchel, like another before him frapped his ship; for
the dugout had been scraped on the reef; and Kweetchel bound her
together with strips of sea-lion hide, and braced her with splinters of
Annoish-Haung’s canoe which the tide washed up. Then, suffering badly
from thirst, they put off again.
“Now we can go home,” said Kolite, shivering in her mantle.
Kweetchel thought it about time. He looked at the Thing, but it still
pointed implacably north. He dared not disobey a spirit that had done so
much for him.
So he paddled stolidly north once more.
He paddled forty-eight hours in a rough sea against a north-wester. The
dug-out made water badly. They were nearly dead when they fell in with a
trading-schooner, and the captain took them on board. He could speak
some Haida, and Kolite was able to tell him some of their story. At the
end of it,—“Where do you want to go now?” he asked them.
“We want to go home,” said Kolite.
“But we have to go north,” said Kweetchel sadly, “because the Thing
inside this shining box points us there.” And he showed the sacred
compass to the captain.
The captain began to laugh. He laughed and laughed. Then, looking at
their faces, he grew grave. He looked at the compass. He said gently,
“but it points south.”
“North, Yetzhabada,” answered Kolite, resignedly.
“But south too,” insisted the white man.
Of course when one end of the needle pointed north, the other pointed
south. Kweetchel had never happened to notice this before. It made him
very happy. He could go off home with Kolite without fear of angering
the masterful Thing in the bright box.
The captain took them south with him and eventually landed them near
their old place, at a village of their own tribe. He tried on the voyage
to explain the real nature of the compass to Kweetchel, but he never
succeeded.
Kweetchel stayed with his own people. In time missionaries found him,
and he stopped keeping slaves and eating dog, and became a Christian,
and wore a second-hand Stetson. He himself told me this story years ago.
He was a very old man then. I thought he was dead since. But the other
day I saw a little totem-pole in a store in Victoria. It was carved of
yellow cedar, about two feet high, gaily painted; such as old Indians
make to sell to the summer tourists on the Coast. As soon as I saw it, I
knew Kweetchel had made it, for he had carved it with all the characters
of his saga. He was there, and Kolite, and a sea-lion, and the big canoe
and the little canoe, and an albatross, and a terrible representation of
Un-Una, in a cave, swallowing up Annoish-Haung. On the very top was
something. . . .
I went into the store. They wanted ten dollars for the pole, which was
dear. “But, as you can see,” said the man, “it has a heap on it. But no
one knows what that thing on the top is.”
I bought the pole, because I knew all about it and what the thing on the
top was.
It was a mariner’s compass in a yellow box.
Snam—Guardian spirit, “medicine.”
Mother of the dog-fish—shark.