The Devil's Making (54 page)

In the morning Lukswaas slept, waking at noon in a sort of daze. She then became so distraught that I sent Mr Jones into town with an apologetic request that Pemberton telegraph to Port Townsend to ask if there was any news of the Tsalaks' arrival in Puget Sound. Lukswaas and I waited for the rest of the day and went to bed with a feeling, which I now shared through infection, of oppression and terror.

Pemberton's reply did not come until the following afternoon, when it was brought by messenger.

‘Dear Chad: I cannot express in words how sad I am to have to enclose this copy of the reply by electric telegraph to my enquiries to Washington Territory. Warmest regards to you both – Augustus P.'

The telegraph read:

IN RESPONSE TO YOUR QUERY PARTY OF TSIMSHIAN TEN MEN TWENTY FIVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN MASSACRED AT DUNGENESS SPIT NIGHT BEFORE LAST STOP NO SURVIVORS STOP TWENTY FOUR CLALLAM INDIANS NOW AT SNOHOMISH RESERVATION UNDER ARREST STOP SIGNED WILLIAM KING US AGENT PORT ANGELES

EPILOGUE

‘Dear Mr Hobbes:

I thank you for your most interesting letter. I am indeed preparing a work on Expression, a subject which has preoccupied me, on and off, for thirty years but will have to wait a little longer before I can treat of it in a book, since I am much occupied with my
Descent of Man
which I hope will see the light within a year or two. I did indeed, in 1867, prepare a set of printed Queries, of which I enclose a copy with some manuscript emendations. I have so far received some twenty five replies from missionaries and other observers, and I should be pleased to receive one from you with regard to the Indians of the British Columbia coast. I must urge you, however, under no circumstances to rely on
memory,
in compiling your notes, for it is notoriously fallible. Trust only
observations.
Indeed, the observations in your letter, of the Expression of sadness and horror by the Tsimshian, had all the vividness of having been penned, as I suppose, very shortly after you had made them.

My aim is, in comparing the Expression of Emotion in man and in animals, to provide a rational explanation of how various Expressions, now rendered innate, might have originally been acquired as habits. Expressions may be in fact subject to the laws of Evolution. But before I can formulate the principles which suggest themselves to me after thirty years of observations of Expressions in man, in animals at the zoo, and even in my own children (whose emotional Expressions I have endeavoured to record through photographs), I wish to collect as many trustworthy observations from other sources as possible. In this I should be glad of your help.

Thank you for your kind remarks. I am sorry to have missed British Columbia on the Voyage of the Beagle, which did not proceed farther North than the Galapagos. In those days your coast was nothing more than a wilderness inhabited by the cannibals whom Cook had described.

I envy you the opportunity to make the most interesting observations of all, namely of the differences between civilised and savage man which are, as I put it in the
Voyage,
no less than those between the tame and the wild animal. Yet, as your observations so clearly show, in states of deep emotion, the differences are less than we might suppose.

Yours truly, Charles Darwin.'

Mr Justice Begbie and I picked our way carefully along the rocky shore of the Goldstream, every now and then stopping for a long while, observing, and saying nothing. The rain had stopped earlier in the day, but drops still fell in showers from the drooping branches of the tall fir trees every time a gust of the raw November wind shook them, and big yellow leaves would float down through the air from the cottonwoods interspersed with the firs along the riverbank, to become strewn on the surface of the water, some of them sticking to the backs of the salmon as they broke the surface. The river was about fifty feet wide and only two or three feet deep, gravel bottomed, and scattered with rocks and boulders on which some of the dying salmon became stranded, flapping weakly as the shrieking seagulls tore with their beaks into the flesh, starting always by pecking out the eyes. The corpses of salmon were littered along the rocks and along the banks, skin gashed and ripped to expose half eaten flesh, the eye hollows mere rings of bone. Cawing crows feasted alongside the gulls. Every so often along the river were rapids where the water ran shallowly and where the salmon cut their bellies wriggling upstream, so that the water behind them carried dissipating streaks of blood. In the deeper pools the females circled over their ‘redds' – scooped out hollows in the gravel on which they laid spawn clusters of eggs, while the males circled around them, quivering and ejaculating clouds of white milt.

From further down the stream, behind us, came the heavy splashing sound of some Songhees, in dungarees and floppy hats, standing in the water at the edge and gaffing the largest salmon, the Chum, some of them up to four feet long. Most of the salmon were smaller Chinook, two to three feet long. All were emaciated from their long struggle back from the sea, into the Saanich Inlet and up the Goldstream to spawn and die. Here and there in a deep pool under a cottonwood or fir, a pair of Coho, smaller and darker than the others, circled around each other. Chum, Chinook, and Coho had different life spans, but all ended here.

The dark green gigantic firs dripped, the yellow cottonwood leaves drifted down and strewed themselves on the living and the dead, and the thousands of salmon struggled first and later circled in their slow dance, shuddering first in ecstasy and later in death. All silently. Only the gulls and crows cried raucously as they plunged their beaks into dying or dead eyes and flesh. The river flowing over the stones and boulders made a low, constant, gurgling.

Rather than pick our way back along the shore, Begbie and I pushed through bushes to a path which led parallel to the river. As we walked down it we could have been in any part of the forest, and the gurgling of the river faded, although we could still hear the gulls and the crows. ‘I've seen a hundred people out here from town on a Sunday afternoon,' Begbie remarked, ‘and none of them ever makes a sound when they are by the river. All keep silence, as if visiting a holy place – which in a way it is.'

I could think of nothing to reply. We both fell silent again. Begbie was still a dandy, even in his wet-weather riding gear. His boots were elegant, and he wore a sort of highwayman's cloak with toggles of silver braid, and a top hat.

After a while he said: ‘I find the whole story sad. Then that final blow for you in the hour of your triumph. I'm sorry I was in the Interior. But I dare say I could have done nothing Pemberton didn't do. And if I'd tried to help I should have been accused of being an interfering Indian-lover. But, as you've found out for yourself, there are Indians and Indians, just as there are English and English. In fact English were all Indians once – so I often think. The Britons whom Caesar discovered even covered themselves with war paint! And the Druids who were their medicine-men would burn human sacrifices alive in wicker cages hanging from oak trees – which is worse than many things the Indians have done. Civilisation is, as they say, skin deep.'

‘Yes. I had a letter from Charles Darwin the other day in which he reminded me of that.'

‘Really? You're in correspondence with him?'

‘I wrote to him six months ago with some observations about the expression of various emotions among the Tsimshian. He replied very generously. I can show you his letter, if you have time to pass by my house for tea. Or might I ask you to supper?'

‘Why not? That's very kind of you. I want very much to meet your wife. But since it gets dark so early and the roads are muddy, you may have to put me up for the night. Excuse my pioneer ways, inviting myself.'

‘Of course. I had thought of it but was shy of asking. We don't live in grand style, though I can provide a couple of bottles of claret with supper.'

‘My boy, I've spent many a night with no roof over my head at all, and at times the accommodation they provide for me in the Interior is a shack such as a man would be ashamed to erect even on the Upper Harbour in Victoria. I'd like you to show me that letter, the terrible one, from King, the Indian agent.'

‘I liked the man – Mr King – behind that dreadful letter,' I said. ‘I also liked Epstein, the American Lieutenant, and I preferred his band of freeborn soldiers, ambling behind him, to our mechanical Beaumont. I had feared all Americans, except the obvious rogues, were Perfectionists – like McCrory – trying to create the best of all possible worlds and not seeing how they are doomed to fail. Epstein, and Mr King, are realists.'

‘I'm not afraid of the Americans,' Begbie said. ‘Whether Europeans or Jews or even Negroes, they
are
our cousins. But I think only a
British
Columbia could include us and our friends the Indians in the same society. Not a Utopia! But there's land enough for all of us here: we don't need to despise God's children for the colour of their skins. I wish for your sake and your wife's that the impossible could come to pass. But I'm getting too old to leave here, and if we must be Americans or Canadians I know myself well enough to predict that I shall make the best of it.'

We reached the clearing where we had left our horses in the care of a Songhees to whom Begbie gave a dollar. Before mounting his horse, Begbie stood as if looking back towards the river, but he was obviously thinking of something else.

‘One thing, Hobbes, I'd like to ask you. But I'd like you to forget about it once you have answered it. This whole sordid affair of the alienist McCrory is very disturbing. I've heard rumours that so-and-so or so-and-so were patients of his. Do you know who was, in fact?

‘He kept no records. I'm sure of that. But yes, I know who most of his patients were.'

‘Could you tell me, was Mrs Blum among them?'

Begbie was looking at me almost haughtily, but the question rendered him totally vulnerable. He was said to have recently fallen in love with this Mrs Blum, a married woman. The nature of their relationship was shadowy, although as I saw Begbie now, I could guess what it was.

‘I can tell you truthfully that her name was never mentioned to me in connection with the alienist.'

‘Thank you.'

We mounted and rode off along a muddy track, parallel to the river and hemmed in by mountainous walls of moss-covered rock, on which the sun's rays never fell, presenting a scene which might fashionably have been called a ‘romantic prospect', but which in reality was one of utter gloom.

*   *   *

I had resigned from the police after the seven day leave Pemberton had given me. I was too heart-sick to continue, and Lukswaas and I needed each other. I had been able to rent Orchard Farm, at a pittance, from Mrs Quattrini. The Joneses had left to settle on Saltspring Island. Lukswaas was pregnant – probably from one of our first encounters in the forest. But I had managed to bring in and sell the fruit harvest which I regarded as Aemilia's. We would be all right for the winter. I had bought a few pigs. This was far from romantic, but practical. Mrs Pemberton had told me that in Ireland a pig was known as ‘the gentleman that pays the rent.' And this horse I was riding, as well as another, had come with the farm.

By the time we had arrived, the wind had become more blustery, and behind us in the West the sky was blackening. It was good to enter the house in which Lukswaas and I, in spite of all that had happened, had been so happy that light seemed to leap out of the walls. There was a roaring fire in the sitting room grate, and Begbie and I sat ourselves in front of it, Begbie wearing a pair of my slippers, while Lukswaas prepared hot toddies of spiced cider and brandy. Begbie had learned enough Tsimshian from the Interior branches of the tribe to pay her some gallant compliment which had made her smile.

She brought the hot toddies and sat down close to me, but I got up for a moment to fetch the two letters for Begbie to read: Darwin's, and the other.

Lukswaas and I sat looking into the fire, holding hands. We were at peace with each other. This did not change even when I went on to think about the salmon dying on the rocks of the stream. Lukswaas and I had circled each other many times like the salmon in their dance, but it had been granted to us to live a while longer before the beaks of the gulls pecked out our eyes … Like the eyes of Wiladzap, Aemilia, and their little boy, of sturdy Waaks, gloomy Tsamti, and gentle Wan.

Begbie had read Darwin's letter, and was now reading the other one which I knew by heart:

‘Dear Mr Hobbes:

It has taken time for me to get back to you with this, but the life of a U.S. Indian agent is very busy, and I wanted to make this a long enough letter to explain to you fully these barbarous events which, as you write, deprived you at one blow of your dearest friends.

‘First, the Clallam. The name means “the strong people”, and they are indeed big and warlike. They are a Salishan tribe, unfriendly cousins to your Sooke and Saanich and Cowichan. I say unfriendly because even now a Clallam canoe will occasionally head North and return with a cargo of their cousins' heads. These expeditions are carried out with the utmost stealth, and I dare say they creep up on their victims unawares. To my knowledge, the Salish in general avoid pitched battles (although they used to fight them at sea, from canoes) preferring sudden assassinations and ambushes. Their villages, set back from the long sandy beaches we have here, were often fronted with rows of sun-bleached skulls set on stakes, and these can occasionally still be seen. The Clallam are now in a precarious state of half-civilisation. Some of the older ones when young, prior to 1849, became great favourites of your British sailors, who gave them names which they still keep, such as: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, the Earl of Clarence, and the Duke of York. They are amiable old rogues for the most part. The younger ones find themselves caught between the old ways and the new, unable to prove themselves in feats of hunting and blood feuds, since the Territory is filling up very fast with settlers and, unlike in British Columbia, they are heavily outnumbered.