One warrior’s deep bite marks from Jacob had festered, despite the poultices the shaman had applied. Drugging Jacob was the only thing that had worked to keep the boy down.
Klixuatan, for his part, would have killed any other child with such venom. But he knew about the curse the five year old’s father had made on Anah. Killing the boy would only make it worse.
They had to contain his spirit.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Jacob was watching them, also.
As his delirium dispersed and his exhaustion diminished, he began to understand his dilemma. And then, after looking without success for the other boy he had seen in the tent on the journey up the sound, he realized he now was the lone white in the encampment.
He became aware of the difference between those who were enslaved and those who had the freedom to move about freely. But the difference was more than the tethers; it was the depressed countenances and fearful actions that distinguished the captives when they were spoken to by others. And they never fought back when pushed or shoved.
On one of the few times he saw any resistance from one of the slaves—a heavily tattooed young native woman who looked the same age as his Aunt Corrie—he saw her receive a severe beating that left her in a bloodied mess. After the beating, the old crone, Klixuatan’s woman, who had been in the boat with him, went to her and helped her up, berating the woman while she administered water and covered her with a blanket.
When the slave pushed Klixuatan’s woman away and angrily spit out several bloody teeth at her, he saw the shaman stand and quietly walk over, pull the hapless captive’s head back by the hair, and cut her nose off right down to the flat of her face.
After witnessing that, Jacob kept quiet.
And he watched.
In the night, shivering in the tent under a lean-to that looked like it had been present for many seasons, he thought back over the events that had brought him here, a dark passage, and he was alone. With each breath, his ribs hurt from the kicks he had received from one of the men he had bitten. He held himself from coughing to avoid the stabbing pains beneath a deep black bruise on his right side. For two days after that beating, his pee was dark brown.
Despite all that he had seen, Jacob told himself he was not afraid.
At first, he tried not to look at the line of rotting heads impaled on tall poles surrounding the encampment, placed there, he realized, to protect the tribe from enemies and keep its slaves trapped inside. But after a few days, he was able to look up at the totems. And on the fourth day, he forced himself to consider the features of the spiked head closest to his tent.
It was covered with flies and maggots, and much of the skin and deeper flesh had been eaten away, exposing all the teeth on the left side of the face. The hair was a silky black and straight, short enough that it must have been a man’s head.
From his tent, he stared at it for a long time.
The next day, he walked up to each of the other heads, ten in all, and studied each of them, each one in a different state of decomposition. All were males, but he could not tell their ages or their races, except for the three that had beards, the heads of white settlers most likely.
The head he thought he had seen when they had first landed—the one that looked like his father’s—was not among them. It had to have been a dream. His father was too strong and great a fighter to have succumbed, he tried to reassure himself.
Jacob watched and knew he was being watched by everyone in the camp.
He saw that the big warrior who had the chest bandage had to be their tyee, for when that man spoke or gestured, everyone turned to him, some stooped, and a few cowered.
Jacob felt contempt for them. He wasn’t going to be afraid of that man.
And every night he reached into his pocket and felt for the reassurance of the small collection of treasures that had been there the day he was captured. He pulled them out when he was sure he was alone, reexamining them one by one: a piece of sand-polished blue glass from the beach near his home, the beak of a downed eagle he had found one day while walking with Sarah, a lead musket ball his father had given him while molding bullets, and a small ball of multicolored twine with a hundred knots tying the bits and pieces together.
That reoriented him, and with that nightly exercise, he found the courage to resist.
He was not going to be afraid of that man.
He was not going to be afraid of the old woman or the old man either. Or any of them.
He knew he could escape when the right moment came. And if any of them had hurt his father or any of his family—the flush and anger built up and made him breathe so fast that he got dizzy—he would kill them.
“I will kill them,” he told himself repeatedly.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Four days later, a southern Kwakiutl trading party canoed into the encampment. Little Raven had always been careful to keep raids away from these particular Kwakiutl villages—a prudent decision because more than once the Kwakiutl had given him important information as well as valuable outlets for trade.
After exchanging lead, powder, and sugar, the traders told Anah details about the upcoming off-season Tsimshian potlatch up the Skeena River. Ksi Amawaal, a wealthy and powerful tyee, had extended a generous and broad invitation, sending message sticks to surrounding tribes, the Kwakiutil told him. They also told him that the family of a white tyee from the south was seeking a kidnapped child and
