Hannah & the Spindle Whorl (3 page)

MY STOMACH STARTS
to rumble partway home, and I remember that I have a half-eaten granola bar in the pocket of my hoodie. I finish it quickly, and as I’m fumbling to get the wrapper into the pocket of my jeans, I’m thinking of dinner, and not really paying attention to where I’m putting my feet. I stumble over a twisted root and fly off the footpath, landing face down in the shrubs.

“Well, Hannah, that’s what you get for thinking about spaghetti and garlic bread,” I chuckle out loud to myself. Sprawled on the ground and feeling stupid, I squint my eyes and see that there’s a big flat rock hidden beyond the bushes where I landed. I get up, brush off my knees and wriggle through the bushes, only to find a steep, ivy-covered embankment about fifteen feet high — definitely not visible from the trail. You can barely see the rock, it’s so smothered by ivy; except, when I look a little more closely and walk to one end, I see a partially hidden opening close to the ground. It looks like the entrance to a cave. I can’t believe it! The whole cave and the entire rock face are completely hidden from the trail. Unless you were to fall exactly where I did and shimmy under that same tangle of salal bushes, you’d totally miss it. I wish Max were here in case I get stuck or something, because I can’t resist checking it out. I take a deep breath, get down on my hands and knees, and look up toward the sky as I suck in my belly. And there, up on the top of the rock face, staring back at me, is the biggest blackest raven I’ve ever seen! He’s just standing there, checking me out with his beady black eyes.

“Uh … hi!” I say to him, because it almost looks like he’s expecting me to start some kind of conversation. He actually answers me back. Well, sort of. He lets out a croaky squawk and then ruffles his wings, craning his head forward to watch me as I belly crawl through the opening. All I can feel is dirt and rocks and moss. I know right away that I’m going to have to come back with a flashlight, and Max. I’m not a fan of the dark, but I keep going anyway. There’s a sliver of dim light coming from the opening I just squeezed through, and it smells like moss and mushrooms, or somebody’s mouldy basement. I belly crawl another ten feet or so into the darkness, but then it gets so inky and still that I think better about going any further. This is freaking me out. I really hate the dark. I’m such a chicken that I won’t even go on the deck of our houseboat after the sun disappears. For some dumb reason, I always think I’ll either fall overboard or something, or someone might snatch me into the air. But this time, I will myself to suck it up because, despite my fear, this is wickedly cool!

And then my hand touches something behind a rock. Something smooth and sort of flat except there are ridges on it too. At first I think it’s some kind of a shell, but then I realize that it’s too big, not to mention too round! I spend a couple of minutes running my hand over the surface of the object. This is something I have to see clearly! I grab hold of it with both hands and begin to ease my body backwards and out through the cave opening. It’s hard to crawl when you can’t use your hands. A rock digs into the side of my hip and I wince, but I keep going. Once I’m all the way out, and my eyes adjust to the daylight, I pick up the strange round object and turn it over in my hands.

What is this? It’s some sort of wooden disc. Again, I trace my fingers across the surface. It’s pretty big — about the size of a dinner plate, and it has a perfect hole the size of a nickel right in the centre. But it’s the designs on the surface of the disc that really amaze me. Fish. Two big fish, their arched bodies carved around the hole. It almost looks like the one fish is following the other one. The whole disc is heavy and smooth and I can tell that it’s old. I study it closely. The wood grain is still noticeable, and the whole thing is a dark brown, kind of shiny in places, like the legs on our old antique coffee table at home. Something tells me this is really special. I feel stoked to have found it even though I don’t know what it is. I think of all the times I’ve walked up and down this trail completely unaware that a cave lay hidden just ten feet off the path …

How long has it been here? How many other people have walked by without noticing it? I have my granola bar to thank for this. If I hadn’t been thinking about food and supper, I would never have tripped and seen the opening myself. What is this thing I found? I wrap the object carefully in my gym T-shirt and put it in my backpack between my math workbook and my beat-up running shoes.

I can’t wait to show it to Dad and Aunt Maddie. But I’m kind of creeped out too. Max and I had just been talking about artifacts and arrowheads and stuff, and then I go and find this! And strangely, the big raven is still hanging around. Only now he isn’t looking down at me from his perch. Now he’s on the ground looking up at me. He hops energetically from one foot to the other, and then struts closer. Right in front of me! When he hops onto my backpack, I step back quickly. What kind of a birdbrain is this?

“Hey!” I say, “Get off of that! What’s with you anyway?”

Again, he squawks at me, ruffles his wings, and then flaps up to settle in the big cedar just off the trail.

I shake my head. Could this day get any more bizarre? It starts to drizzle a bit as I near the end of the forest trail. I can see a few people on their boats, and there are even a couple of
BBQ
s on the go — a sure sign that summer is here. All the windows of our houseboat are wide open, which can only mean that Aunt Maddie is already here and cooking up a storm.

I step out from the trees and onto the road. Nell has put the closed sign on the bakery door and gone home for a while. I can see all the day-old stuff bagged up, ready and waiting on the table by the door. I hope that Dad remembered to get carrot muffins. Aunt Maddie loves carrot muffins.

When I get home, Chuck is lying in the flower box under the kitchen window. There’s nothing in it except a few clumps of hardened old dirt, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He looks sleepy and bored and opens his mouth in a “hello” meow when he sees me, only nothing comes out. I can see Aunt Maddie by the stove. The counter is a complete mess, but we’re used to kitchen chaos when she cooks supper. There are always vegetable peelings everywhere, and she uses every single pot and pan we own. We have to do dishes for about three days after she goes home, but it’s totally worth it because she’s such an awesome cook.

“Hey Aunt Maddie!” I call as I come through the door and chuck my backpack on the stairs.

“Hey Han,” she calls back, brandishing a wooden spoon covered with tomato sauce. “Where ya been?”

“Wait till you see what I found!” And then I go cold all over, remembering how I had tossed my backpack on the stairs. What if the thing broke? I rush over to check and, luckily, it’s still safe and snug between my books and my shoes. I slide it out slowly, like it’s made of glass, and then flash it in front of Dad and Aunt Maddie.

“Holy cow! Where’d you get that?” Dad asks.

“I found it in this cave. In the bottom of this cliff, hidden just off the trail! I tripped and fell in the woods and I saw this rock face with a hole in the bottom covered by a bunch of salal and thick trees and ivy and stuff. So I crawled inside, and then I found this! Isn’t it great! What do you think it is?”

“What do you mean, you tripped and fell?” Aunt Maddie starts picking twigs out of my hair and then notices the dirt on my clothes. “You crawled inside?”

Dad takes the thing carefully from my hands and examines it slowly, turning it over again and again. “Well, it’s definitely a Native artifact … I don’t think it’s cedar though. It looks more like maple to me.” Dad knows a lot about wood because of his carving hobby.

“Whoa … I bet it’s carved from big leaf maple,” Aunt Maddie says decisively. “This is way cool, Hannah. I think you’ve found a Cowichan spindle whorl. Coast Salish. And look here! Check out this pattern of salmon!”

When she was younger, Aunt Maddie studied anthropology in university and once even worked on an archeological dig in northern British Columbia. But now she works at home editing people’s books. She does a lot of work for my father, because even though he’s a very good writer, he’s also a very bad speller.

“A Salish what?” I ask.

“Spindle whorl,” she replies.

“A spindle whirl?”

“Not whirl; whorl … w-h-o-r-l. It was used for spinning wool and other fibre. It’s what people used before spinning wheels came into use. I once saw a woman use one at a heritage fair. It was amazing. She really made the thing sing! She went into a sort of deep meditation. It was sure something to watch.”

Now Aunt Maddie holds it, inspecting it from all angles, feeling the smooth lines of the carved images on its surface.

“Can I keep it, Dad?” I ask, then remember Max telling me about the arrowhead that he had to give to the archaeologist in Williams Lake.

“I doubt it, Hannah. It looks like something pretty important. We should let someone at the museum in Victoria know about this. It may be a big deal. They will want to examine this for sure and find out how old it is. Things like that.”

“How do they do that?”

“Well, if it’s really old, then they use radiocarbon dating. Dating the dirt, basically,” Aunt Maddie explains.

“How old could it be?” I can feel myself getting more and more excited about the strange object.

“Well, hard to say. They say that people came across the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age and reached Vancouver Island close to ten thousand years ago,” Aunt Maddie tells us.

“No way. Canada is only 142 years old!” I correct her. “We learned that in school last week. We learned that Confederation took place on, um … oh, just a sec! I can remember … we just had the test. Oh, yeah … July the first in 1867!”

“It’s officially been a country for almost 143 years — and European settlers have been in eastern Canada for close to 400 years, but there’s been human beings living here for much, much longer than that.”

“Do you think it could really be ten thousand years old?” I ask her. I actually have butterflies in my stomach, and I’m already imagining the headlines in the
Cowichan Bay Gazette:

“Ten thousand years old? Hmmmmmm. That’s doubtful. Wood couldn’t withstand that test of time. But it could be a couple hundred years old,” Dad answers, resting his head on the back of our ratty green couch. “If it’s been in a cave all this time, it would be somewhat protected from the elements. I think we should find out for sure, don’t you?”

“Will they carbon copy it? I mean, radio — what’s it called again?” I ask, looking at Aunt Maddie.

“Radiocarbon dating. Not if it’s only a couple of hundred years old,” she explains.

Then she starts going on about something called comparative analysis and other ways to tell the age of stuff that isn’t super old, and I glaze over a bit because it doesn’t really make any sense to me, and to tell the truth, it sounds kinda boring.

“Dad,” I say, “when can we find out about this thing?”

“Well, I have to drive in to Victoria to see my publisher tomorrow. If you like, we can call ahead and try to get in touch with the museum. I’m sure someone there will want to have a look at this.”

“Can Max come with us?” I ask. I
KNOW
that Max would be really excited to be a part of this whole thing.

“No problem for me. Give him a call, but I want to make an early start. If I can get in to see Ian before noon,” Dad kids, “I have a good chance of being done before dinnertime.” Ian Barker is the senior editor at Kingfisher Press. He’s very gruff and tells my dad all the time how disorganized he is, how difficult it is to work with a writer like him, and how he should cut him loose — even though my dad has published four books with him. They’re always arguing it seems, but they’re good friends anyhow.

The smell of garlic wakes me from my daydream. I was right; Aunt Maddie has made her famous spaghetti and garlic bread. It’s very spicy and she and Dad have dark beer with it, but I have to have milk. We eat on the couches with plates on our laps, and listen to Aunt Maddie tell us about her latest plans to go hiking in Nepal with two of her friends and a real Sherpa named Tashi. Apparently she met him when she was editing a book on the Himalayas. She’s already running five times a week, and lifting weights to get fit before she leaves in September. Her biceps are pretty ripped, and after dinner she challenges my dad to an arm wrestle, and Dad loses almost right away. I feel kind of embarrassed for him, but Aunt Maddie just says, “Oh forget about it, David. It’s probably just your writer’s cramp acting up again!” which is actually a pretty cool thing for her to say.

Dad makes a face at her, but soon after, they both get serious and start talking about more boring stuff like income tax and accountant’s fees, so I decide to call Max about tomorrow, and then just go to bed.