From the look of it, he was marching straight over to tell them so.
The men stood waiting. A hundred yards behind them, desperate eels wriggled from their sand pits like the rays of a sun.
I had a vision of roasting eels with the Yuroks, learning their legends as the waves crashed beside us. What a child Pat was.’ Just because we’d fought a bit in the car.
“I know why he thinks I’m crazy,” the woman said.
I sat with a sigh, pulling another paper cup out of the old backpack and filling it. I handed it to her, feeling like shit. So what if the men wanted to join us for a while? Patrick and I had the rest of the afternoon to fight. Maybe the rest of our lives.
“We came out here to decide if we should get married,” I told her.
I could feel tears sting my eyes. “But the trouble is, he’s still so young.
He’s only seven years older than my oldest daughter. He doesn’t have his career together — he just got laid off. He’s been moping around all month getting in my way. He’s an engineer — I met him when I was researching a science-fiction story. All he knows about politics and literature is what I’ve made him learn.” I wiped the tears. “He’s grown a lot in the last year, since we’ve been together, but it’s not like being with an equal. I mean, we have a great time unless we start talking about something in particular, and then I have to put up with all these half- baked, college-student kind of ideas. I have to give him articles to read and tell him how to look at things — I mean, yes, he’s smart, obviously, and a quick learner. But fifteen years, you know.”
She nibbled a bit more salmon. “Probably he saw the van on the road coming down.”
“What van?”
“Our group.”
“The’Yurok?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. They’re up in Hoopa on the reservation, what’s left of them. They’re practically extinct.”
“We assumed you were Yurok. You’re all so dark. You know how to do that whip-spear thing.”
“Yeah, we’re all dark-haired.” She rolled her eyes. “But jeez, there’s only five of us. You’re dark-haired. You’re not Yurok.” Her expression brightened. “But the whipstick, that’s Yurok, you’re right. Our leader”—she pointed to the not-Yuroks on the beach, I wasn’t sure which one—“made them. We’re having an out-of-culture experience, you could say.”
Patrick had reached the group now, was standing with his shoulders up around his ears and his hands still buried in his pockets.
“How did you all get so good at it?”
“Good at it?” She laughed. “The surf’s absolutely crawling with eels. If we were good at it, we’d have hundreds of them.”
“What’s the group?”
Patrick’s hands were out of his pockets now. He held them out in front of him as he began backing away from the four men.
“You didn’t see the van, really?”
“Maybe Pat did. I was reading the map.” I rose to my knees, watching him. Patrick was still backing away, picking up speed. Up here, showing fear of a ranting woman, he’d seemed ridiculous.
Down on the beach, with four long-haired men advancing toward him, his fear arguably had some basis. What had they said to him?
“The van scares people.” She nodded. “The slogans we painted on it.”
“Who are you?” I asked her, eyes still locked on Patrick.
“I was going to say before your fiance huffed out: what about the sea lions? They get fat with no effort, just feasting on the self-en-slaved, black-souled little eels. Do they get away with it?”
The sky was beginning to darken. The sea was pencil-lead gray now, with a bright silver band along the horizon. Patrick was running toward us across the beach.
Two of the men started after him.
I tried to rise to my feet, but the woman clamped her hand around my ankle.
“No,” she said. “The sea lions aren’t happy very long. They’re just one more fat morsel in the food chain. Offshore there are sharks, plenty of them, the mightiest food processors of all. This is their favorite spot for sea lion sushi.”
“What are they doing? What do your friends want?” My voice was as shrill as the wind whistling between the rocks.
“The Yurok were the eels, kings of the river, stealthy and quick and hungry. But the obsessions of history washed them into the jaws of white men, who played and gorged in the surf.” She nodded.
“The ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger, the thing the eel can’t bear to understand because the knowledge is too bitter.”
She’d said that more than once, almost the same way. Maybe that’s what scared Pat: her words were like a litany, an incantation, some kind of cultish chant. And the men below had mirrored her gestures.
I knocked her hand off my ankle and started backward off the rock. All she’d done was talk about predation. She’d learned we were alone and not expecting company, and she’d signaled to the men on the beach. Now they were chasing Patrick.
Afraid to realize what it meant, too rattled to put my shoes back on, I stepped into a slick crevice. I slid, losing my balance. I fell, racketing over the brutal jags and edges of the smaller rocks we’d used as a stairway. I could hear Patrick scream my name. I felt a lightning burn of pain in my ribs, hip, knee. I could feel the hot spread of blood under my shirt.
I tried to catch my breath, to stand up. The woman was picking her way carefully down to where I lay.
“There’s another kind of hunter, Maggie.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “Not the eel who waits and strikes. Not the seal who finds plenty and feeds. But the shark.” She stopped, silhouette poised on the rock stair. “Who thinks of nothing but finding food, who doesn’t just hide like the eel or wait like the sea lion but who quests and searches voraciously, looking for another—”
Patrick screamed, but not my name this time.
“Looking for a straggler.” Again she raised her arms and her chin to the heavens, letting her dark hair fly around her. Patrick was right: she did look crazy.
She jumped down. Patrick screamed again. We screamed together, finally in agreement.
I heard a sudden blast and knew it must be gunfire. I watched the woman land in a straddling crouch, her hair in wild tendrils like eels wriggling from their pits.
Oh, Patrick. Let me turn back the clock and say I’m sorry.
I looked up at the woman, thinking: too late, too late. I rode the river right into your jaws.
Another shot. Did it hit Pat?
A voice from the sand cliff boomed, “Get away!”
The woman looked up and laughed. She raised her arms again, throwing back her head.
A third blast sent her scrambling off the small rocks, kicking up footprints in the sand as she ran away. She waved her arms as if to say goodbye.
I sat painfully forward — I’d cracked a rib, broken some skin, I could feel it. Nevertheless, I twisted to look up the face of the cliff.
In the blowing grass above me, a stocky man with long black hair fired a rifle into the air.
A real Yurok, Pat and I learned later.
GILLIAN LINSCOTT
Gillian Linscott (b. 1944) was born in Windsor, England, the daughter of a shoe shop manager and a shop assistant. Holding an Oxford degree in English language and literature, she worked as a newspaper journalist in
