No shots were fired because the schooner crew carelessly had left their powder to molder outside over night in a wooden bin.
Because the sound carried well across the still of the morning, the terrified men had had at least five minutes to prepare themselves for the onslaught, and a ferocious knife fight ensued on deck, seven desperate men against two large converging long boats, each carrying twenty-five warriors.
Anah killed two more men that morning and took a head, his first ever, as a prize, that of his biggest opponent, an orange-bearded, long-haired man with a knot braided in the Chinese style. For the first time, Anah saw the difference between the angry, terror-filled eyes immediately before an opponent’s death and the flat colorlessness caught in those same eyes when all life had drained away.
The dead eyes on his prize were different than those of one who had simply given up living, as he had seen on his hobbled aunt the year before. He thought about how her eyes had become bottomless black holes — tired, taking in no more. The eyes of this sailor, however, were without color, as if the spirit released with the beheading had carried their hue away with it.
After the killings, one of the long boats stayed behind to ransack, then set the sloop on fire while the second boat proceeded southward.
Anah crowed his pride for an hour after the killings.
Maury Island, a triangular land mass roughly three miles across, was separated from adjacent Vashon Island by a small waterway, passable during a medium tide, which led into a natural harbor bordered by each island.
Vashon, the larger of the two, had recently been swept by a seasonal forest fire, so the local Suquamish natives who remained had moved their encampments onto the higher northeast bluffs of Maury, to positions that presented easy access to the beaches below, as well as a 280-degree view of the entire sound. From their huts they could see all the way from the big mountain “Tacomat,” later called “Rainier” by the explorer Vancouver, up along the Cascades and the white-haired woman mountain called “Kulshan” by the Lummi, over to Whidbey Island, and then westward to the sacred peaks of the Olympic Mountains.
The Suquamish watched the brief, bloody battle below between the Northerners and the schooner’s crew. They knew about the Northerners and, for generations, had heard verbal renditions from elders who, like many tribes along the Puget Sound, also had contended with them.
The Suquamish women, fearing a landing by the marauders, spread out into the dense forests of Maury, looking for hiding places for their children and for their settlement’s few valuable possessions. However the men of the clan, encouraged that this was a small war party moving in only two long boats, plotted an ambush.
The leader of the Suquamish clan, Na ma t’shata, argued that they outnumbered the raiders and had many more craft, and because their own boats were smaller than the raider’s boats, they were much more maneuverable.
He noted that the smaller of the raiders’ two long boats had passed through the narrow channel on an outgoing tide, while the larger one lingered, its warriors busy dismembering the stricken ketch. All the Suquamish knew that the tidal flats between the two islands extended for almost a mile, and when the tide moved out, it did so swiftly, leaving all but the smallest of craft attempting to pass through stranded and immobile for hours.
Na ma t’shata argued that an attack against the small lead Northerners’ boat in the deep harbor by several of the Suquamish craft would easily overwhelm it, especially if they could hurl the large boulders they had collected for a purpose like this into the Northerners’ canoe.
Over the previous four years, since the last time Northerner raiders had passed through, the Suquamish elders had carefully selected the stones. Anticipating a return by the Northerners in the future, they had conferred on each huge stone a name for incantation during the dangerous approach to the marauders. Heaved by two men from a smaller canoe, they reasoned that the stones would punch holes into the bottom of the war canoe, then the Suquamish, from their smaller craft would be able to surround and spear or drown the Haida warriors in the water. Then, Na ma t’ shata predicted, they could go back and finish off the remaining warriors in the larger boat immobilized by the outgoing tide in the shallow channel.
Observed by Suquamish who remained on the shore, the fierce battle in the harbor lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Anah was in the first Northerner boat through the channel, carrying his war trophy still dripping the blood of the beheaded sailor. In the same long boat, his father, Little Raven, had directed the warriors to head toward the south shore of the harbor, where several years before they had found a rich Suquamish village with racks of drying salmon, some metal utensils and axes, and stores of fresh water. They reached the shoals but saw that the village was gone, so they started moving into deeper water out of sight of their second boat that was dismembering the schooner. As the Haida moved around a small peninsula, the Suquamish attacked, fifteen small four-man canoes moving in on the longboat from three sides.
Anah, seeing two warriors in one of the approaching canoes struggling to stand up with a massive stone, immediately understood the tactics being advanced. Ducking arrows and spears, he barked to the warriors in his boat to stop paddling and instead commanded them to use their long oars to stave off the smaller canoes.
As they did so, Anah impaled his severed trophy head onto a pike and pushed it into the faces of the oncoming attackers in the closest boat.
Anah knew the Haida were great swimmers. He ordered several of the warriors to leap into the water and pull on the gunnels of the lead Suquamish boats, which already were rocking unsteadily as their occupants struggled
