Klixuatan glanced at Anah.
Anah smirked.
The mate didn’t wait for an answer but pointed to six of the young women, the prettiest ones, two of whom were white, two black, and two natives, then nodded for his mate to hand a small bag of gold coins over to Klixuatan. He then motioned for the skiff holding off shore to land and unload its goods - a small cannon, several leather bags of grape shot, and a dozen barrels of powder.
Referring the seven women and the four men not chosen, he laughed, “He can keep these ones and try to pedal them at the Tsimshian potlatch at Three Spirits.”
Then he noticed Jacob.
Jacob, a collar around his neck, was tethered next to the Haida long boat by a chain.
Walking over to long boat, the mate leered, looking Jacob up and down.
“And what about this little one?” he asked the translator.
Jacob withdrew a step as the mate attempted to touch him on the thigh. When the mate persisted, this time attempting to fondle him, Jacob gasped.
Then suddenly Jacob recovered and rushed the surprised mate.
“Leave me alone!” Jacob screamed, biting the man on the hand, then doubling him over with a kick in the groin.
Klixuatan, laughing as the embarrassed mate picked himself up, pointed to two of the Haida warriors who had bandages on their hands.
“This little wolverine is the son of a powerful white tyee,” he said to the translator. “Worth much more than your Portuguese can pay.”
“They call him Little Wolverine,” the translator told the mate, who was still recovering from the blow. The mate had started to reach for his knife, but withdrew it when he saw Anah’s warning expression.
“A fresh one, eh?” the mate said to the translator, when he finally righted himself from the blow. “I’d take the little son of a bitch off their hands. I’d break him good.”
“My father will come and kill you!” Jacob yelled.
Anah and Klixuatan exchanged a look, smiling.
“Not for sale,” Klixuatan said.
While watching the Portuguese slavers rowing back to the ship with their new possessions, the shaman said to Anah, “You must harness the little wolverine’s rage, Anah. It is powerful.”
Anah did not disagree. From the time he had defeated Isaac, the big tyee, and looked into his dying eyes, Anah knew he had killed one with a special magic who had bestowed a curse onto him. Fascinated in a way he did not understand, he now knew he needed to watch Jacob to see if he had the same power as had the tyee, his father.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
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Anah and Jacob
On the fourth night in safe harbor, Anah brought Isaac’s decaying head into the tent where Klixuatan’s wife kept Jacob drugged and bound. He compared the blackening face of the trophy to Jacob’s sleeping visage. He returned the next night as well, again bringing the head right next to the boy’s face. And it was there—the same sweep of the brow and deep-set eyes, the determined jutting jaw, strangely similar between the grimacing movements of a child in his drugged dreams and the now exaggerated, stretched features on the trophy.
The smell from the head was becoming putrid, and he would have to skin the face and scalp off soon, then tan it quickly if he were to keep it from rotting. There would be some value to that skin, he thought. Perhaps he could seize some of the tyee’s power with it.
In the cold three weeks from the time they landed by the Campbell and then moved farther north to the inland side of the channel, as Klixuatan had advised, Anah observed Jacob as often as he could. There was something about the boy.
Anah could not comprehend what it was, but it was related to the curse, he was certain. And thus while watching, sedentary during the healing of the deep chest wound from the death struggle with the boy’s father, Anah began to think of his own early childhood, a period of his life that remained confusing to him.
He had always been ashamed that he had been unable to grow up fast enough to protect his family, and yet, he missed the happier times when he was a child, when the colors were softer. The pervasive, seething anger he felt from the time he lost his sisters had evaporated his childhood, like the way the bitter fog of a sudden cold Southerly immediately smothered a spring’s early morning sun.
Early on, before most men, Anah had become an adult, with all his adult appetites at once accelerated and intensified, but with none of the wisdom or temperance necessary that would allow him to live safely with other men.
Despite adherence to a strict warrior’s discipline, taught over the years by the harsh lessons of Little Raven, Anah had never learned civil restraint because Little Raven and Klixuatan encouraged him to indulge all his passions, believing that would promote the reinvigoration of their clan.
As Anah watched Jacob, he wondered whether this boy might grow up quickly as he had, driven by a desperate need for survival and vengeance. Was this boy a replica of himself? Was this somehow part of the curse?
On the fifteenth day of Jacob’s captivity, he ordered Klixuatan gradually to begin reducing the drugs. He told the shaman to untether Jacob two days later and, with Klixuatan, watched to see if the boy would flee.
He did not.
Still, Anah and Klixuatan continued watching the boy, unsettled, for Anah had observed what Klixuatan had seen. He understood that Jacob had a smoldering fire in him, which the shaman told him was likely ready to burst forth if left uncontained.
In the hours after his capture, the boy had fought so vigorously that Klixuatan had had to strike him repeatedly and then bind him tightly to try to stop him from provoking retribution from others. All of the men now referred to him as “Little Wolverine” because of
