'The third time, did you make the jump?'
'No. And the raven failed too. When I was bigger I jumped, and my name remained.'
Because of his unusual persistence, he had been valuable to his tribe when unusual tasks confronted them, and he succeeded so often that he acquired a daring approach to everything, whether in battling other clans in actual warfare, or in building a house, or decorating it with the proper totems when it was completed. It was this daring which had led to his capture, for when the Great Toion's army moved against Raven-heart's clan, the latter led the defensive sorties and raced so far ahead of his supporters that he was easily surrounded.
Now, as the toion gasped away his final moments, making death for Raven-heart inevitable, the captive made his boldest move. Slipping away from the wood-and-wattle big house in which the toion had lived since gaining ascendancy, Raven-heart moved carefully among the six tall totem poles that marked the place and edged toward the heavily forested area to the south. Cautiously he endeavored to slip into the deeper part of the forest, but was prevented by the noisy arrival of sixteen mourners coming from that direction. Jumping nimbly behind a large spruce, he heard them pass, lamenting the approaching death of their leader, but when they were gone, he leaped onto the path they had been following and dashed headlong into the saving comfort of the tall trees and the shady glens they protected. Once safe among the spruce, he began to run with an almost demonic fury, for his strategy required that he be removed as far as possible when the old man died.
He reasoned: If they can't find me at that moment, they can't kill me then. Of course, if they catch me later, they will kill me for having run away. But I have one good chance. If I can find an American ship and get aboard, I can tell them I was busy bartering, and they'll have to believe that. This strategy was not irresponsible or ill-founded, because he was one of the Tlingits who had learned enough rudimentary English to conduct trade negotiations with the Americans, whose ships stopped in Sitka Sound with considerable frequency.
So as he ran, he began calling silently upon those ships he remembered servicing with deer meat and fresh water when the Americans had come for peltries: White-Dove, come flying.
J.B. Kenton, help me. Evening Star, shine to guide me.
But now the bad weather for which Sitka was famous descended like a feathery blanket, gray, thick and hanging but a few feet above the earth and the surface of the bay.
It quickly became impenetrable, and any chance Raven-heart might have had of saving his life by attaching himself to some trader vanished, and for three agonizing days he hid among the spruce trees along the edge of the bay, waiting for the fog to lift.
On the evening of the third day, when he was hurting from hunger, he heard a muffled sound which electrified him. It seemed to be the firing of a cannon such as mariners used to create echoes from which they could deduce their approximate distance from the looming peril of rocky shores, but it was not repeated as would have been the case had this been such a probing shot. On the other hand, the cannon fire might have been so effective that only one shot was required, and with this hope to feed on he fell asleep in the lee of a fallen spruce.
In the early dawn he was awakened by the raucous voice of a raven, and no better signal from the other world could have been devised, because all Tlingits, from the beginning, had been divided into two moieties, the Eagle Clan and the Raven, and every human being on earth belonged to one or the other. Raven-heart was of course a Raven, which meant that he must defend that moiety in games between the two clans and in contests of a more serious kind, such as the providing of totem poles for the village commons or the bringing in offish. As a Raven, he must marry only an Eagle, a provision established thousands of years earlier to protect the cleanliness of the race, but the child of a Raven man and a woman Eagle was an Eagle, and as such, was dedicated to the furtherance of that clan.
There was a belief among the Tlingits, and he subscribed to it, that although Eagles were apt to be more powerful, Ravens were by far the wisest, the wittiest and the cleverest in utilizing nature or in winning advantages over adversaries without recourse to fighting. It was known that mankind received water, fire and animals to feed upon through the cleverness of the First Raven, who outsmarted the primordial protectors of those boons to mankind. 'All the good things were kept apart,' his mother's brother had told him, 'and we lived in darkness, cold and hunger until the First Raven, seeing our sorrow, tricked the others into letting us share these good things.'
Now, when the raven cawed in the early dawn, he knew it was a signal that some rescue ship lay in the bay, and he ran to the water's edge expecting to see the vessel which might have fired the cannon the night before, if that was indeed the sound he had heard. But when he stared into the fog he saw nothing, and in his disappointment he could feel the crushing log upon his throat. Disconsolate and starving, he leaned against a spruce and glared at the invisible bay, still shrouded in gray, and in his extremity, very close to death, he again pleaded silently with the American ships to show themselves:
Nathanael Parker, help me. Jared Harper, come close to save my life.
Silence, then the sound of iron against wood, and the arrival of a vagrant breeze which moved the fog a little; then, mysteriously, as if some powerful hand were drawing aside a curtain, the revelation of a shiplike form, followed by its quick submersion in the shifting mist. But the ship was there! And in desperation, ignoring the danger he placed himself in by revealing his position to searchers who might be trailing him, he ran to the shore and knee-deep into the water, crying in English: 'Ship! Ship! Skins!'
If anything could lure the Americans, assuming they were Americans, to shore, it would be the promise of otter skins, but there was no response. Edging deeper into the water, in which he could not swim, he cried again: 'Good Americans! Otter skins!'
Again there was no response, but now a stronger gust of wind swept aside the fog, and there, not two hundred yards away, miraculously safe amid the dozen tree-studded islands that protected Sitka Sound, lay the Boston trader Evening Star, with which he had traded in the past.
'Captain Corey!' he shouted, dashing into the waves and flailing his arms, and making such a commotion that someone on the brig had to see him. An officer put a glass upon him and called to the bridge: 'Native signaling, sir!' and a boat was lowered and four sailors rowed it hesitantly shoreward. When Raven-heart, overjoyed at being saved, waded forward to meet it, he found himself facing two rifles pointed right at his chest and heard the stern command: 'Stand, or we fire!' Captain Miles Corey of the trader Evening Star, fifty-three years old and Pacific-hardened, having known too many commanders who had lost their ships, did not take any risks, anywhere, at any time. Before leaving the Evening Star in the skiff, the sailors had been warned: 'It's one Indian. But there could be fifty lurking in those trees.'
'Stand, or we fire!' the men repeated, and as Raven-heart froze, waist-deep in water, one of the four shouted: 'My God, it's Raven-heart,' and he reached out his paddle so that the Tlingit with whom he had traded before could make his way into the boat.
It was a gala reception that Captain Corey and First Mate Kane arranged for their old friend, and they listened attentively as he explained the predicament which had sent him alone into the forest. 'You mean,' Captain Corey asked, 'that you'd have been killed? Just because the old man died?'
In his broken English, Raven-heart pleaded with them: 'You say me on ship four days, eh? You say fog too much, eh? Four days.'
'Why is four days so important?' Kane asked, and Ravenheart turned to explain. The two men were of about the same size, each a muscular, fearless brawler, and for that reason Kane, the former harpooner, was attracted to the Tlingit, who explained: 'I suppose to be killed three days ago. Suppose run away, catched, killed now. But if I on ship, trading with you ..."By lifting his hands as if relieving them of bonds, he indicated that with such an excuse he might be spared.
The omnipresent Sitka fog had
once more descended upon the Evening Star, this time so heavily that even the tips of the two masts were invisible from the deck, so Corey and Kane assured the endangered slave: 'We'll probably be in this soup two more days. You're safe.' And to celebrate they broke out a bottle of good Jamaican rum, and there, in Sitka Sound, protected by the volcano and the circle of unseen mountains, they reveled. When Raven-heart felt the fine dark liquid exciting his throat, he relaxed and told the Americans of the many pelts he had helped assemble for them, and they were so pleased by this intelligence that they in turn showed him the goods that they had brought from Boston to enrich his Tlingits.
'These are the casks of rum,' Captain Corey said, indicating the eighteen barrels stowed in safety below decks, 'and what do you suppose these are?' Raven-heart, with a copper ring through the septum of his nose, studied the dozen squared-off rectangular wooden cases, and said: 'Me not know,' whereupon Corey ordered a sailor to draw the nails 'And save them from one of the lids, and there, nestled in oil-soaked rags, lay nine beautiful rifles, and below them, in similar ranks of nine, twenty-seven others. These twelve boxes, packed in orderly manner by the gunsmiths of Boston, contained four hundred and thirty-two first-class long-barreled rifles, and the kegs stowed behind had enough powder to last two years, along with supplies of lead for bullets and molds in which to make them.
Raven-heart, satisfied that no one could order him killed if he brought such power to his captors, smiled, grasped Captain Corey's hands, and thanked him profusely for the tremendous boon the Bostonians were bringing the Tlingits: rum and guns.
A MINOR OFFSHOOT FROM THE POWERFUL ATHAPASCANS who populated interior Alaska, northern Canada and much of the western United States, the Tlingits were a collection of about twelve thousand unique Indians who had moved far south into what would later be Canada and then fish hooked back north into Alaska, with their own language and customs. Divided into various clans, they occupied the southern littoral of Alaska and especially the big offshore islands, their principal location being the excellent land surrounding Sitka Sound on the island of that name.
The people of the dead toion had chosen for their center a conspicuous promontory in the sound, one which rose to a small hill that dominated everything. It was an excellent site, surrounded by at least a dozen rude mountains that formed a protective semicircle to the east, with the majestic cone of the volcano standing as beacon to the west.
But as the Russian Baranov had learned when he first saw the sound some years before, one of its most attractive features was the horde of islands, some no bigger than a tea table, others of considerable size, which speckled the surface of the water, breaking up surging storm waves that would otherwise have roared in from the Pacific.
When the fog finally lifted, Captain Corey gingerly threaded his Evening Star through the islands, bringing her some hundred yards from the foot of the hill, and fired a cannon to inform the Indians that he was prepared to trade with them for pelts, but when the time came for such trade, the Americans found themselves in a predicament. Ever since the ambushing of Captain Cook in the Hawaiian Islands, captains and crews had remained on their trading ships and invited natives to come aboard with their goods, while sailors armed with rifles maintained watch. However, at Sitka the Tlingits were preoccupied with burying their Great Toion, so the Americans launched a longboat, and with Raven-heart perched in the prow, they ignored custom and rowed ashore.
At first, the grieving Tlingits waved them away, but when those in charge of the ceremony saw the slave Raven-heart standing amongst the visitors, they announced that they had spent the last five days seeking him as one of the three slaves to be slain so as to provide the toion with servants in the next world. When Captain Corey and First Mate Kane realized that the Tlingits were determined to take Raven-heart from them and put him to death, they indicated that they would not allow this, but since they had only four sailors in the boat, and they without arms, they knew that the Tlingits could overpower them if they tried to make a serious protest. So with a sense of sinking shame at abandoning a good man who had placed his life in their care, they made no further objection when some of the elders seized Raven-heart and started hauling him to the ceremonial log.
But now an important man in Tlingit history stepped forward, the bold young chieftain Kot-le-an, a tall, sinewy fellow in his early thirties, dressed in shirt and trousers made from choice pelts and draped in a decorated white tunic of deerskin. About his neck he wore a chain made of shells and on his head the distinctive hat of the Tlingits, a kind of inverted funnel from the top of which streamed six ornate feathers. Like Raven-heart, he had a slim copper ring in his nose, but his brown-red features were made distinctive because of his drooping black mustache and neatly trimmed goatee. In height, slimness and mien he was visibly differentiated from the other Indians, and in voice, determination and willingness to act he displayed a moral force which made him the acknowledged military leader and principal aide to the toion.
The six Americans had not encountered Kot-le-an on previous trips to Sitka, for he had been absent on punitive forays against troublesome neighbors, but even had he been present they would probably not have met with him, because he felt that trade was beneath him. He was a warrior, and it was in this capacity that he now stepped forward to prevent the execution of Raven-heart. In words that the Americans did not understand and which were not interpreted for them, since Raven-heart had previously provided that service, the young chieftain voiced a decision that would soon prove to have been prophetic: 'One of these days we shall have to protect our land from either the Americans like these here today or Baranov's Russians gathering strength in Kodiak. As your leader in battle, I shall need men like Raven-heart, so I cannot let you take him.'
'But the Great Toion also needs him,' several of the old men cried. 'It would be indecent to send ...'
Kot-le-an, a man who loathed oratory or extended debate, responded by nodding to the elders, then ignoring them and grasping Raven-heart by the hand, pulling him free of both the Americans and the funeral managers: 'This one I must have for when the battles begin,' and in this abrupt manner the life of the big Tlingit was saved.
The Americans then watched with horror as two male slaves, young men in their teens, were dragged down the hill to the seashore, where their heads were held under water until they strangled. Unmarred, their corpses were then hauled back up the hill and placed ceremoniously beside the dead body of the Great Toion, whereupon four of the stoutest Tlingits grabbed the slave who had been selected to replace Raven-heart, stretched him across the sacrificial block of wood, and placed across his neck a slim driftwood log, pressing it down until all twitching in the body ceased. Sadly, as if mourning the loss of a friend, they placed this third body across the toion's feet, and signaled to the watching Indians that the burial of their chief could proceed.
After the funeral ceremony was concluded, trading for the pelts collected by the Tlingits proceeded, and ten of the eighteen barrels of rum were exchanged, under the mediation of Raven-heart, for seal pelts. No sea otters, the fur that China, Russia and California wanted, were in evidence, and it looked as if the Evening Star would have to sail without trading the guns, which the Tlingits really sought. However, just as Captain Corey was about to give the signal 'Haul anchor!' Raven-heart and Kot-le-an drew up to the ship in a small wooden rowboat recently built in imitation of those used by American ships, and when the two men were aboard the Evening Star, Raven-heart showed the young chief who had saved his life the dozen boxes containing the guns, telling him in Tlingit: 'There they are. The guns you need.'
Kot-le-an, spotting immediately the box whose top had been removed earlier to show Raven-heart the guns, pulled the loose boards aside and saw the handsome dark-blue barrels and the polished brown stocks. Even had the guns had no practical purpose, they would have been beautiful, but as rifles capable of protecting the Tlingits from would-be invaders, they became objects of immense importance.
'I wan
t them all,' Kot-le-an said, but when this was interpreted, Captain Corey demurred:
'We trade only for sea otter.'
When this was translated, Kot-le-an found it impossible to control his rage. Stamping the deck with his moccasined feet, he shouted: 'Tell him that we have enough men to take the guns!' but before Raven-heart could speak, Corey grabbed Kot-le-an by the arm, swung him about to indicate the four cannon on the port side pointing directly at the houses atop the hill, and then to the four on the starboard, which could be pivoted around. 'And tell him,' he snarled, 'that we have one aft and one forward, ten in all.'
Translation was not necessary, for Kot-le-an knew what cannon were. One year ago an English ship, having fallen into dispute with Tlingits on the mainland, had lost a sailor in a brawl, and in retaliation had bombarded the offending village until only one house remained standing, and Kot-le-an knew that American whalers were even quicker to exact vengeance. Capitulating to Captain Corey's superior strength, he instructed Raven-heart: 'Tell him in five days, many otter pelts.'
When Corey saluted this information, as if Kot-le-an were the ambassador of a sovereign power, the Tlingits withdrew, and as they departed First Mate Kane assured them:
'We'll wait five days.' Within the hour the Americans saw numerous small boats set forth from Sitka Sound to visit outlying settlements, and during the next days they watched them returning much deeper in the water than they had been when departing.
'We'll be getting some otter pelts,' Corey assured his men, but even as he prepared to leave ship he ordered Kane: 'While Kot-le-an can see, train half our cannon on the hill, half on the shore where he'll be, and have the men stand ready.' Kot-le-an, watching these preparations, was satisfied that no surprise attack from his side was going to succeed, but he also knew that the Americans, having come so far from Boston, could not return with an empty hold. They needed furs as badly as he needed guns, and from this pragmatic base the barter proceeded.