Where were his mother and father? Where was he being taken? He looked at the markings on the inside of the canoe. They matched the tattoos he had seen covering the body of the old woman, now faded and sagging into an ugly indistinct story, that of beasts fighting and devouring each other, crows crowing, whales with big eyes and rounded teeth, animals with angry blank stares in the middle of a fierce battle.
The old woman, wrapped in several skins and a wool blanket, sat next to him. She stared forward, singing to herself in a simple and repetitive chant. It was the same hoary voice he had heard when he was sleeping in the tent next to the boy who was coughing.
Jacob dozed off again but awoke with a start as he heard hollering.
The men were excited and talking loudly, pointing off to his left. He tried to sit up and saw several killer whale fins crest out of the water ten yards away. Dozens more crested on the other side of the boat. Some of the whales were small, while others were big enough to capsize the large canoes. But they just moved on.
After a while, the men calmed down, and the silent paddling continued. It rained for what seemed like a terribly long time, and then it stopped.
In another hour, the sun came out, and the clouds seemed to spread apart showing off the land to his right, and after another few hours, the boats moved into a small cove and beached.
He slept in the boat.
The next morning, he awoke to shouting as utensils and camp supplies were being thrown into the long boat. The early sunlight had just spread over the cove, and he saw the warriors looking past him out at the harbor.
Jacob turned and saw a small ship flying a British flag resting at the south end of the bay.
They shoved off and moved to the right of the harbor, heading north. He saw puffs of smoke from the ship, heard deep popping sounds, and then saw large splashes approximately one hundred yards short of the lead boat.
The men in the canoes started jeering. He saw a warrior in the lead boat climb to the front and hold up a long pole. On top of the pole was a head.
“Boston Tyee. Boston Tyee. Boston Tyee!” they all started hollering.
The ship spread its sails and made way, and for a short while, it seemed to be gaining on the rowers. But the wind failed, and the ship fell back and began to recede from view. Soon it disappeared around the bend of the coast.
Jacob watched for signs of the ship but did not see it again.
Two days later, the long boats reached a rendezvous point where Jacob saw nine other long boats beached along the shore. As they came closer, the men in the boat began to chant loudly, and the camp on the beach came alive.
He heard them shout, “Tyee!”
The old woman nudged Jacob, looking to the front of the long canoe, and he saw the warrior in the lead boat mount the trophy on the pole again. Jacob, groggy from the cold, the drugs, and hunger, thought it looked like his father’s head.
Breathing fast, a dull, nauseating pain deep in his gut, Jacob looked down the pole from the waxen head and saw the man who held it up, staring at him intently.
Anah.
Chapter Twenty-Three
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Sarah
She looked in the mirror and, for the first time, saw a face that was older. In the past, she hadn’t spent much time grooming or preening, so a mirror was simply a place to look for tidiness. But over the past four weeks, with the burial of her stepfather, Isaac, and helping her aunt and Missy care for her mother, it seemed that her self-awareness had diminished so much that when she saw her face again for a moment, it was really a stranger looking back at her.
Something else was different, too: she had two white hairs, one on each side of her head! How could that be? She was only eleven.
She fingered them along their entire length, feeling if they were different in other ways.
She pulled them out.
Sarah was relieved when her mother regained her strength and was able to move about. Emmy had recovered quickly. As much as her Aunt Cora and Missy Crockett fretted, Sarah knew her mother would recover because she had never let anyone or anything best her. Sarah could never imagine her mother dying. Emmy had too much living to do.
In many ways, Sarah had always sensed that her stepfather was vulnerable and would die long before Emmy. When he had been away in eastern Washington, Sarah had prepared herself for hearing that he had died in some massacre or by drowning or from snakebite.
He always put himself out a little too far and didn’t look out for himself as much as she thought someone should. Long before he died, she had imagined herself at the graveside with the mourners, all saying sad praises for his departed soul. And she would cry and have to wait to see him again in heaven.
She had practiced crying for that event, and it felt sad the first time and less so the second time she did it.
She knew about death, of course. She had seen animals slaughtered, remembered when that farmhand was trampled, and had seen Jimmy Falcon’s washed-out body pulled from the sound when he and his brother had capsized their boat two years ago while fishing too early in the season.
She understood the grief that relatives showed, and that was why she had practiced doing the same for the time when her father would die—so she could do it right and with some dignity. And when it happened, when Cora told her that Isaac was dead and Jacob had been stolen and her mother might die too, she had taken
