Joko (25 page)

Part VII

JOKO lern to spek

joko lErn to SPEll

SWAN give man ways

to JOKO

Swan called them his winter family, self-imposed exiles in the foothills of the mighty Olympic Mountains.

Johnny saw Swan as a reprieve; a chance at returning to his former life, and proof that his prayers had been answered, but when he said as much to Swan, the man laughed. “Me?” he roared, “an answer to a prayer? That
will
be the day, young Tilbury.”

The wintergreen berries had lost their pungency long ago, and Jocko’s senses were dulling to the awful stench of the cabin. Watching Swan tend the fire was a new and fascinating treat, and as night approached and the fire grew, the smoke veiled the other more sinister odors that had soaked into the never-dry woodwork.

Here was fire, under control, tended by a person who used its heat as a focal point of their life inside a dwelling.

Above their heads was a dome of wood, not unlike a canopy of trees or the roof of an overhanging stone. Here were some of the answers he’d been seeking for years. He was eyeing, first hand, the hidden ways of humans
.

Where a week before he had expected to find only doom, Johnny thrived in an oasis of cordiality. Days became weeks in which Jocko began to understand human ways by watching them prepare for winter.

First came the sleeping arrangements. Swan fashioned a cot for Johnny out of spare timbers, a few wooden crates and the bearskin. The latter had been Johnny’s project. Swan showed him how to treat the skin by working it with seal grease and plenty of scraping. It was difficult to work with a broken leg but, when it was finished and applied to the makeshift cot, Johnny felt there was no finer place to sleep.

Near Johnny’s cot Jocko built a nest of his own design. At first Swan protested Jocko’s sudden appearance at the door with an armload of branches, dried grasses, and ferns, nearly as large as himself. But Swan held his tongue, knowing Jocko needed as much encouragement as possible as he made the transition from sasquatch to human.

Swan soon became fond of the strange
au natural
zone in his cabin. “It gives the place rustic charm,” he remarked to Johnny one day. “I’m surprised, though, that we haven’t seen insects among the plant material.”

“That’s most likely because Jocko ate ’em,” said Johnny.

“He likes spi ders especially.”

Swan smiled politely. “That would explain it, I suppose.”

The onset of winter presented more serious problems for the three of them than sleeping arrangements. Swan had come to the mountains with provisions for one. If they were to last the winter they needed more food.

In that regard, living with the sasquatch presented a real problem: Jocko’s fear of Swan’s weapon. He avoided getting near it and shuddered whenever Swan took it from its place next to his cot and went hunting.

There was no evidence that Jocko had ever been shot.

Despite his link, Johnny didn’t know how Jocko knew enough about guns to fear them, but Jocko did know. Swan said they couldn’t exclude the possibility that Jocko and his family had run afoul of some mountain men, or, more likely, some frightened Indians, but Johnny sensed Jocko’s fear of guns was more instinctive. To side-step the gun issue, when Swan hunted for game he made sure to do it as far from the cabin as possible.

It took the sasquatch about a week to get over his aversion to the physical trappings of mankind that, to him, stunk up the cabin. His choice in bedding included aromatic plants that he hoped would help.

Daily, as Johnny’s leg improved, Jocko would travel afield, sometimes quite far from the cabin. The area was pristine and wild and overrun with many plants and animals that were new to him, but he knew enough to eat only the plants he knew.

Sometimes, he found tubers and berries in such abundance that he wished he had a means to take them back to his new human friends. His two bare hands, for the first time in his life, were proving inadequate.

Jocko’s strong musky odor began to annoy Swan. Some days, when Jocko was particularly active around the cabin, Swan found himself dreading the dark wet days of winter that would keep them inside the cabin for long periods of time. He openly wondered if he might acquire some unique malady brought on by distressed olfactory senses. It helped that Jocko had used many aromatic plants in the making of his

‘nest’, as Swan called it. While the experience of living with Jocko was a source of amazement and amusement to Swan, he was still uneasy around Jocko. Once he said to Johnny that it was like living with a unicorn. “Except unicorns don’t stink up a home, I’m led to understand.”

Johnny had stopped noticing Jocko’s odor a long time ago. His only real problem involved the long painful walks to the latrine behind the cabin. He’d developed many bruises and scrapes associated with the task, and because the pathway to the latrine led fairly far from the cabin and through a small but treacherous field of boulders, Johnny’s cane often proved to be more of a hindrance than help. Once he slipped and it struck his already injured eye, reopening the wound.

On another occasion the cane stuck between two boulders and snapped him in the groin. But with necessity guiding his practice each day, his footing improved.

Johnny didn’t complain, however. There was too much good fortune worth noting. Swan was a treasure trove of knowledge and stories, and Johnny had become fond of them.

War and conflict, according to Swan, seemed to be a permanent condition between the tribes. The case of the murder of his friend Chief Swell had been resolved not by Indian agents, or white man’s law, but by a sudden raid nearly a year after the murder. After months of threats and plans to wipe out the guilty Nootkahs, a war party of eighty braves simply rowed across the San Juan Strait and killed the first two members of the tribe they encountered. Then they came back and bragged about it.

As Indian Agent, Swan was rarely able to control the way the Indians handled their affairs. “It would be foolhardy to try, as they might as easily kill me like any other enemy. But there was an innocence about their scheming that was refreshing, almost preferable to that practiced by many white men I’ve known.”

As he listened to Swan’s stories, Johnny saw that Swan the journalist had the heart of a missionary. Even though Swan spoke with contempt against missionaries who preached to the Indians but never listened to them.

Swan had built a schoolhouse at Neah Bay to ingratiate himself among the Makah. He had hoped that as a trusted friend and teacher the Makahs would seek his counsel before going to war. “The only salvation and redemption I seek for the red man is in the view of the U.S. government, who might then hold at bay those conniving opportunists that would soon overrun the Indian territories and doom their culture.”

Fond as he was of them, Swan acknowledged that his diaries often chronicled his frustration with the Indians. He described the children he tried to teach as, “unable or unwilling to maintain a regular schedule. Each day brought a different group of children who’d ramble in at odd times seeking food for their stomachs and not for their minds. The classrooms at Neah Bay were often disorganized rabbles, more cafeteria and clinic than a place of learning. Some days I barely taught at all.”

Swan said that after a year of struggle he decided his efforts as a teacher were fruitless, and he went back to his principal concerns, exploration and discovery.

By the 1870’s he was regularly sending illustrated articles and boxes of Indian artifacts and natural curios to the Smithsonian. His career as a teacher, in his opinion, was over, and though he wrote to his family with religious regularity, he said no effort on his part ever made him feel like a proper father and husband. Despite a few mildewed photos his wife had sent, Swan didn’t really know what his children looked like. Many’s the night that he would sit alone after a long game of ‘Old Sledge’ with Captain John Pennington and Billy Barlow and drain both lantern and bottle staring at the photos and wondering if he’d ever see his children again.

But now, at least for the moment, Swan’s frustration and disappointment were swept aside by the arrival of his winter family.

Despite fumbling around the cabin and frequent headers in the stony gauntlet between cabin and latrine, Johnny’s leg strengthened. With Swan’s help he had fashioned a strong leg brace and soon abandoned the cane entirely. This freed his hands for work and for balance, and since he hadn’t fallen for some time Johnny was gaining confidence every day.

Meanwhile, Jocko’s preliminary education had begun.

While expressing grave doubts as to whether a sasquatch could learn any ‘human cognitive skills ’, still Swan fashioned cedar chip tiles with painted letters to teach the alphabet. He also encouraged Jocko to observe as he made notations in his diaries.

The sasquatch found Swan’s writing a joy to watch.

Noting this, Swan took up the habit of reciting each word as he wrote it and soon found Jocko parroting the sounds and sometimes repeating words he recognized. He took care to study those words in particular and soon became what Swan described as a ‘right eager student’.

Johnny thought the process of teaching Jocko could be accelerated by his ability to ‘link’ with Swan, but that proved not to be the case. After many tries Swan said that he, not Jocko, seemed to be the recipient, and the experience made him light-headed. It worked no better when Johnny tried it, so they both concluded the link had its limitations. Swan theorized that Jocko received practical, not abstract thoughts and ideas. Symbols, like letters, involved another way of thinking.

To his own disappointment and frustration, Jocko’s link with the humans allowed him to understand Johnny or Swan’s feelings, but not the words they spoke. And certainly not the strange markings they made on bits of wo od and white sheets of the material called “paper”.

Chips of wood littered the area near his nest, and every so often Swan would arrange them and say a word. The process should have been easy. After all, Jocko had been marveling at the symbols humans used for a long time. As he gazed at the letter combinations and listened to Swan’s instructions, Jocko found the connection difficult, if not impossible. He took it on faith that there was any meaning to the exercise at all. But, despite his difficulties, Jock o resolved to be an eager and willing student.

Soon a routine formed around Jocko’s studies.

In the mornings, long before Johnny or Swan awakened, Jocko would travel far afield to gather vegetables to augment their meals. Swan would decide the previous evening what the next day’s dinner menu would be, and Johnny would tell Jocko what types of plants to find; roots or leafage. Swan provided Jocko a green canvas satchel or carryall, with instructions to use it to carry vegetables.

Their instructions didn’t always produce satisfactory results, and Jocko often brought back a vegetable more suited to his own tastes than those of the humans.

The ever resourceful Swan, however, took such serendipities in stride and generally found a way to incorporate Jocko’s contributions into their meals, not always with the most satisfactory results. Swan’s exotic vegetable curries might have brought raves at a specialty restaurant, but as a routine they had Johnny yearning for simple meat and potato fare.

Swan was nonetheless grateful when winter’s cold prevented new growth of fiddlehead ferns, one of Jocko’s personal favorites. Swan had long ago exhausted his culinary skills in dealing with those fuzzy offerings. Finally, one day he politely gave Jocko back a heap of fresh fern heads saying,

“Here, my friend, put these near your nest for a midnight snack but don’t bring me more for our pot.”

Johnny agreed wholeheartedly. “Yeah, they make my tongue itch.” Most afternoons saw Johnny fetching water from a spring, chopping kindling, or daubing pitch on broken roof shingles while Swan and the sasquatch continued their schooling.

Sometimes Johnny joined in the lessons or just observed, but generally he left Swan and his friend alone and involved himself in chores. A nearby creek provided a fishing hole for Johnny, who would hike there when the weather allowed and usually return with enough trout to feed them all.

Winter moved in slowly, and the weather allowed many days when the three of them felt compelled to take day trips and explore the area; sometimes to fish but usually just to get out of the cabin.

One day, as the three left the cabin on an explorational foray, Jocko, who always took the lead, looked back at Johnny and said: “Joo-neee, close door.” Johnny and Swan both registered surprise.

“Well, my friend, you
are
learning, aren’t you?” said Johnny with delight.

Jocko wasn’t paying attention, though. He trotted silently down the path, eager to be on with their excursion.

Swan smiled. “I gave him a pencil today, and a book.

When I gave it to him, I put a hand on his shoulder and told him that this was his learning book.”

Johnny shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr Swan. Talkin’s one thing, but do you really think Jocko could learn to read and write?”

“That I do,” said Swan with conviction.

“No. I mean like us,” said Johnny. “Enough that Jocko could read a book or get a job.”

Swan laughed. “Whoooaaa there, John. That’s a mighty big step from where he is now. But I think Jocko is smart enough and careful enough to cut the muster. Yes.”

“I want to think that,” Johnny said. “But Jocko is a sasquatch.”

Swan didn’t argue. He just nodded, indicating he understood.

They were quiet for some time as they moved deeper into the wilderness, picking their paths through the unrelenting tangle of spruce, cedar, fir, and elder. The path was occasionally lost in a wet bramble of blackberries, or a bog of cattail and reeds, but these they crossed with little difficulty as long as they followed the path the sasquatch had chosen.

Sections of the forest with large, older trees provided more walkable terrain, because their shade prevented thick undergrowth from developing. One such expanse lay a mile from the cabin and ran along a stream that had carved a chasm into broken glacial rock. Downstream a few more miles, the chasm joined with another torrent and became a grand white water gorge.