That realization, at least was a fair compensation.
And such self-appraisal was not an overestimation of her abilities, she hoped. She knew that many who dealt with her during Isaac’s long absences had learned to respect her. She heard one person had even commented that “the steel in her tiny frame had a spring-like memory.” That gave her hope for better days to come.
Despite all of that, on this day, as the fog moved back in over the strait, she again found herself looking out the kitchen window, towards the sea, watching for whatever might come. Friends or strangers. It was a habit now, an important one, she realized.
Friends or strangers.
Chapter Four
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Anah
CONTINUED ASSAULTS!!!
Fourteen savagely murdered; Six missing
Officials at the Hudson’s Bay Company reported the tragic loss of another contingent of coal-miners on its Campbell River Coal Mining operation.
The Vancouver Colonist - August 15th, 1857
To know him was to fear him, whoever he was, the one they called “Black Wind.” Few outside of his small clan, however, really could identify him beyond a vague description as that of a tall, well-muscled, heavily tattooed warrior with an aggressive bearing and disturbingly dark presence. No one, neither non-native settlers nor the peaceful peoples along the coast, was safe from his predation. He and his clan seldom left tellers behind.
Hlgahlas Tatsu (“Black Wind”) in Haida, Anah-nawitka-halo-shem, (“Has No Shame,”) as he was called in Chinook trading jargon by tribes up and down the British Columbia coast, had been raised by his father’s aging aunt. She took him on only at the insistence of a father grieving for his young wife.
Anah’s mother had been lost to measles in the first wave of disease that hit the Haida after Protestant missionaries passed through the Charlottes, attempting conversion and, when that failed, bartering for specimens of tribal artifacts for sale to collectors in New York and London.
The Haida and the Bella Bella called the malady “Tom Dyer,” after one of the sailors on the missionaries’ vessels. Thousands perished along the coastal areas over a two-year period before the epidemic burned out.
Anah’s only siblings, two older sisters, had been taken away by “the Boston Men” when his father was away one spring hunting in the far north. The American fur traders had come to the village talking about buying small black shale totems that some women and older men carved during the winter months when they had to stay in the long houses. But instead, the traders took the pieces that had been displayed and then grabbed the two girls.
Anah watched the entire event from the beach, the Bostons pulling his screaming younger sister by the hair into their boat and paddling to their big boat with sails anchored offshore. They didn’t take him, as sturdy a child as he believed he was, just the girls.
When his father, Little Raven, returned, he was angry. Howling like a wolf, he beat Anah every day for a week. No one ever saw the girls again, although Anah saw them in his dreams, on the beach, running away from him.
As he grew older, Anah became sullen and quick to hurt others for perceived wrongs, prone to long rages and howling violent demonstrations.
By the age of twelve, he had killed two grown men in retribution raids against the Bella Coola along the inland straits off the big Island of Vancouver.
Because he was tireless and accurate in his hunting and trapping skills, Anah was allowed to accompany his father and the elders of their small clan on a slaving run down into south Puget Sound, a coming-of-age honor that was not accorded other young men in that region. That caused some enmity between Anah and the young men who were not given the same privilege, but everyone already understood he was unique in a strange way that needed to be respected and, as well, given distance.
To move as a man in the long boat, one had to push the oars fast in concert with warriors seasoned to successfully chase wounded prey and outrun the lumbering ships of the Brits and Russians.
Taunting the Brits by paddling ahead just out of range of their cannons, in particular, was a great coup, and the Royal Navy had never caught a long boat with any of its sailing vessels stationed in British Columbia. The Haida, masters of the tides and currents all along the inland coast, loved to tell how they outwitted the King George Men and the Bostons, just as all neighboring and distant tribes had lore about how they had outwitted the Haida.
The Brits, however, simply brooded over this frustration and requisitioned for improvements in their Northwest fleet, bigger cannons and faster ships, to finally catch the insolent marauders.
When Anah was thirteen years old, in 1842, off Maury Island, on an early summer run deep into south Puget Sound, his clan’s long boats set upon The Pigeon, a small two-mast schooner caught in the morning’s windless drift five-hundred yards offshore.
Anah was the first to board the hapless vessel, whose crew had been alerted to the Haida’s approach by their syncopated, grunting war song. The prows of the long boats had ornate, frightening clan carvings, and, standing behind the big-eyed figure-head on the lead boat was the shaman of the clan, Klixuatan, dressed in bear skin and capped with a huge, monstrous, long-beaked raven mask. Klixuatan stomped his spear onto the deck, blowing a whistle and singing in a high-pitched whine.
The oarsmen pulled the boat forward, paddles dipping the water in synch with
