THUNDERBIRD AND HIS CUMULONIMBUS

Part I: The Gathering Storm (1809-1810)

Chapter 2: The Captive

The fire in the longhouse dwindled to glowing coals. It cast out just enough light for Rolling-Thunder's strong eyes to see through the darkness to the other side of the longhouse. His long-haired dog slept on the floor beside his bed, soft yips accompanying whatever dream filled his canine mind.

He couldn't sleep, though it would soon be dawn. He sighed and pulled his woven dog-hair blanket up further around his bare shoulders. His gaze fell back across the room to where the nest of firelit curls tumbled over a bear skin blanket. The thick fur nearly buried the tiny figure beneath. A soft rise and fall of the fur showed that she finally succumbed to sleep, while the tracks of dried moisture on her cheeks showed what had kept her awake so long.

He knew when her veneer of stoicism finally crumbled into tears in the refuge of darkness, the only privacy that could hide her lapse into long-suppressed emotion. Her face, since first appearing in the longhouse during the potlatch, maintained one expression. It was as if she, too, were wearing a mask carved of wood, just as the masks of the dancers around her showed only one face of Whale and Raven and Deer and Thunderbird. Hidden within her bed, she took off her unaffected, colorless mask and he wished he could see who dwelt within. But all he could see was a glint of her hair.

Since his eyes first fell upon the ho-kwat slave, he could not pull them away any more than he could reverse the current of the Quillayute river to flow away from the sea. It wasn't that he found her beautiful. (Strangeness can be both a root of and repulsion of beauty.) It was more that something about her held him captive - as if with a hide strap bound around his wrists.

When their family departed the land of the Hoh, he watched her, his curiosity as strong as the first day he joined a hunt for whales or went into the forest to seek the spirits for himself. In the grey, misty daylight of the mouth of the Hoh River, she was a splash of exotic color. She was not made of cedar nor obsidian but snow and flame and in her eyes, she held the ocean. But it was only her eyes which spoke, not her face.

She tugged at her cedar skirt as if she felt ill-at-ease in the brown cloth and she fingered the waterproof rain hat and jacket given to her as if she had never seen anything like them before. His mother laughed when she struggled to put the garments on properly.

Their canoes were heavy laden with the many gifts they received from the Hoh. Rolling-Thunder's father grumbled under his breath over the bounty. It would take many seasons to gather enough gifts to repay the Hoh clan properly and until he could repay them, the Hoh chief would fluff up his feathers like a proud puffin and parade around his greatness.

The Hoh were only too proud to boast of their exploits in capturing their slaves and their foreign bounty.

"They were few in number," the son of the Hoh chief boasted to Rolling-Thunder in their shared Quileute tongue. "Yet they were very foolish. They did not ask our permission to gather food or hunt on our lands. They did not share with their hosts the customary portion of the foods they gathered. They behaved like wild bears - charging into homes and stealing away bundles of fish and bags of roe (fish eggs) at the point of a musket and throwing strands of beads and buttons behind them."

The Hoh were furious. It was custom for the People of the River to calculate the number of bundles of ten fish required per person per household each year. When the time came to harvest the bounty of fish, each house only gathered what was required to feed their family and a few guests. When the ho-kwat burst into their longhouses, they ran off with the winter store of fish and roe for the family, even after the Hoh told them they could not spare it. The Hoh quickly determined it would be better to take some of their "guests" as slaves to compensate themselves for the loss of honor and insult.

The Hoh boasted freely of their cleverness in deceiving the outsiders. "They wished to cross the river to our longhouses. We agreed and brought our canoes. Once we split their parties between the shore and two canoes, we removed the cedar plugs from the floor of our canoes and the canoes began to sink. Then we easily captured two of their women and two of their men. They fought back, of course, but we proved our valor. Two of our warriors were left on the battlefield, but none of their warriors left without a wound somewhere."

"They are very strange," the chief's son continued. "Some of the men grow long hair on their faces and bodies like animals and they have very poor manners. We trailed the ho-kwat for days upon days, but they never bathed. Not once. They must not mind if they offend the spirits with their human smell."

Rolling-Thunder grimaced. For a man not to bathe everyday was considered a great breach of propriety. These must be very uncivilized people indeed.

"They only had one ho-kwat woman with them. We think she is the wife of one of their chiefs because he cried as an animal slain when she was captured. We thought, perhaps they would be willing to part with four of their guns in exchange for the woman and so we brought her back in a canoe to negotiate for her. Their chief was willing, but his men were not and so we kept her as our slave."

Whoever this "husband" of the woman was, he gave up his rights as husband when he failed to protect her from the spears of the Hoh. Wives, like the upkeep of territorial rights to land and the guardianship of spirits, only remained with men as long as the men maintained them properly. If a man failed to be strong enough, brave enough, generous enough, and honorable enough, then he lost all that was his to others greater than he. How could he keep a wife if he failed to protect her and their progeny from enemies? How could a man keep the blessing of the spirits if he failed to fulfill his duties? By allowing his "wife" to be captured as a slave, the ho-kwat man proved he was unworthy to keep her and she could be married to another who would keep her properly, as a man ought. Now, as the property of Rolling-Thunder's father, their family could do with their slave as they wished.

It took time to load the dozens of family members into their canoes and the rain grew heavier when they finally dipped their many paddles into the choppy waves of the green-grey sea. Rolling-Thunder's hands were calloused from where his hands held onto his wooden paddle. The motion of pulling against the water was as familiar as walking and their canoe fairly sprinted across their ocean road northwards towards their home. It would not be long before the horizon was punctured by the rocky teeth of A-Ka-Lat Island and then the mouth of the Quillayute welcomed them back.

It was here at La Push where the greatest congregations of Quileute gathered. The families and clans came from as far away as the prairies along the Calawah and Sol Duc Rivers to this stretch of beach for whale hunts and feasts and rituals and to spend the long winter nights. It was a sacred space where the fresh waters of the land met the salty waters of the river and so it was also where the space between what could be seen and what could not be seen became as translucent as sea mist.

The men unloaded the canoes into the longhouses while their long-haired dogs yipped and licked their feet in excitement. The huge, ancient structures faced the river mouth, their triangular roofs sloping into the sky to keep off the constant dripping of moisture. The faces of the cedar houses were painted with the familiar faces of animals. The same faces were carved into their ceremonial masks, painted on their canoes, and carved onto towering cedar poles erected upright in front of the house. The figures told their stories and reminded them of their songs.

The tide was low on the grey-sands of the beach, exposing the many little holes and burrows of the clams and muscles within. It was their own little feasting ground and the women set to work immediately digging through the soft sand for the treasures within. The ho-kwat woman took to her task as a small child would, slow and clumsy and unsure. She would not be a particularly useful slave if she did not know how to perform such simple tasks as finding a clam. She proved slightly more useful at finding firewood, though her delicate, bare feet were not used to the forest floor and bled from many cuts by the end of her first bundle.

It was long after the family ate their boiled clams and smoked fish and finished their songs and stories that Rolling-Thunder failed to sleep. The fishing gear and hunting tools had been cleaned and stacked along the front and back ends of the longhouse, the babies were untied from their cradleboards and fitted with fresh cedar bark undergarments, the daily prayers had been spoken and all were content and well. As the pitter patter of rain on the cedar roof lulled the other members of the longhouse into deep slumber, he stayed awake, fighting to keep his eyes off of the woman sleeping between the beds of his grey-haired mother and third-born sister.

Like the first snow over the forest, a quiet assurance blanketed his mind and he decided, then and there, that he would take the strange woman as his wife.

Oooooo

Anna Petrovna Bulygin paused to rub the sea spray from her forehead before resuming her work. Her calloused hands clung to her digging stick as she forced it into the wet sand, clumsily imitating the actions of the women around her. She dug a deep hole where they motioned for her to dig. There she found another clam with seaweed protruding from its mouth. She bent to pick up her find and placed it in the basket on her back. Then she followed the women to the next clam hole and began again. It took her twice as long as the others and despite the lack of shared language, she could understand enough to know when she was being chided for her ignorance. She placed another clam into her basket, but not before a cold, salty splash soaked her bare feet and made her jump in surprise.

Her Russian dress and Aleut boots did not survive the treacherous journey through the forest. Their tatters had been replaced with the garb of the people who now owned her. She stayed warm enough, though she could hardly say she felt comfortable in so strange of clothes. Her bare feet sank into the moss-laden, muddy earth as she worked alongside the other women of the village and grew cold in the frigid ocean shallows.

She missed her seal skin shoes. In the days of wandering and hunger between when their ship ran aground and her capture, she had been forced to boil her shoes to eat them to stave off the hunger. Without fishing tools or a boat or knowledge of the land, their days of wandering in the cold, constantly damp forest had been terrifying and she had doubted if they would survive it.

While being taken captive by such fierce, savage people had also been terrifying, at least she was now warm and well-fed. She wondered how her companions fared and if they even still lived. It had been a month since she last saw them from where she was kept prisoner on a canoe while her captors attempted to trade her for guns. Did her husband still seek for her or had he given up on her completely? Would her new captors treat her kindly or speak to her harshly, as the Hoh had?

Since her capture, Anna had been forced to work, but she was no stranger to hard work. Her birth as a serf in the largest country on the face of the earth prepared her well to not fear challenges. Throughout her childhood, the hands of her family never sat idle. The crops her father planted; her mother harvested. When her mother was not processing food, she was sewing clothes. Anna always knew if she married a fellow serf, her hands, too, would gain thick callouses from years of making sure her family would survive the next winter.

The "black earth" (chornozem) steppes of southern Russia produced the majority of food for the constantly expanding empire. Their fields grew high with oats and wheat and barley during the short growing season. The fields were tended by serfs, those born "attached" to the land. They did not own the land, the land owned them. They were as much a part of the endowment of the landowners as the timber and harvest and barns and livestock produced by the land itself.

Both the land and the labor of those born to the land could be dispensed with according to the whims and wishes of their masters. Many remained tethered to their natal land, their hands deep in the oft-frozen earth of the Russian prairies until the day the land swallowed their empty bones. Some serfs were sold away from their agrarian farms to companies in need of what their hands could do elsewhere. Other serfs were sent to the dangerous, outermost fringes of the empire to claim colonies and trade goods on behalf of their distant masters.

Anna's life as a serf had not been so very different from her life as a slave. Her fate, for good or ill, rested heavily in the whims of her master and the luck of the harvest and the caprice of the yearly growing season. She was no more free to go where she pleased or live as she wished than she was now, captive in a strange land to a strange people. She knew, as she had always known, that if she wished to survive, she needed to gain and maintain the favor of her masters.

When Anna entered the door of the richly painted house, the smell of smoke and furs and dried cedar filled the large room. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she pulled off her rain hat and cape, letting the rain water splash onto the compact earth floor. A Quileute woman met her there. She gave Anna a disdainful perusal, catching her face in her rough hands and turning it from side-to-side. Then she chattered out something Anna could not understand and when Anna failed to heed her, she spoke a second time, but louder and with greater exaggeration in her hand movements. Anna shook her head, still failing to understand.

The woman was young. Her face was painted brown, her forehead flattened to an elongated slope, and her ears were pierced with shell earrings within. She was wearing nothing but a woven bark cloth skirt around her waist, which revealed a number of designs tattooed into her brown skin. Two black braids fell down her bare back nearly to her waist and her feet left footprints in the floor as she walked.

The woman held out a basket of clams for her and motioned for her to follow. Anna took the basket and sat on the floor of the longhouse. The woman demonstrated how to open the clams and clean them properly with a series of tools and baskets. Anna attempted to follow as she was instructed, but growing up far from any ocean shore, Anna was much better acquainted with preparing wild fowl than sea creatures.

The woman picked up a long, wooden cradleboard in which an infant, perhaps half a year old, was secured. The babe's head was being shaped like her mother's into the tall, elongated head and spent most of the day tied to her mother's back. Cradleboard on her back, the woman left Anna to her tasks. When she returned, it was to give her a new one.

When the grey sky finally dimmed into distant charcoal and the bustle within the longhouse dimmed along with the coals of the fire, Anna was finally left to herself. No one bothered to speak to her with more words she did not understand or order her to do tasks she had never done before. She sank into her narrow, wooden plank bed and hid herself under the thick bear fur. She buried her head under the blanket and wept.

Ooooooo

Author's Notes:

Rolling-Thunder: is this a Quileute traditional name? I have no idea. I found what traditional names I could and tried to follow form, but they are a very small tribe and most data collection came from the era of "salvage ethnography," long after dramatic culture change and loss of traditional names had already occurred. The amount of historical data from this early of a time period is pretty limited and mostly comes from outsider's perspectives and "capture" narratives like this one.

Is this version of Jacob based on a "real" person? No. But Anna Petrovna Bulygin (this era's version of Rosalie) is based on a real person. Did she actually spend time among the Quileute? There's no way to tell. She was captured by the Hoh and a few months later was living among the Makah and then was sold around a bit after that (maybe to Makah? Maybe another group?).

Was she a serf? We don't know. We don't know how she met her husband or where he was from. Most of what we do know comes from the account of Timofei Osipovich Tarakanov, one of the fur-trappers who took over leadership of the group when Bulygin stepped down. He gives us a fantastic first-hand account…but his information on Anna is limited.…but all those empty spaces are the spaces for creative license.

Note on terms like "civilized" and "uncivilized" and "barbaric" and "savage"-it's pretty common for people groups around the world to consider themselves the center of the world and the definition of "civilized" by which all other people groups are measured (technical term is "ethnocentrism"). In many languages, the self-given name a group of people calls themselves is their word for "people" or "humans" and all other outside groups are something "other". It's usually only when there's some kind of conquest and a dynamic of one group ruling over another that the marginalized group internalizes ideas of them being something other than the best people group in the world and the center of "civilization".

Note on place names: "La Push" came from the French "La Bouche" for "The Mouth" and was the Chinook jargon version of the name for the place. I use A-Ka-Lat Island ("Top-of-the-Rock" Island) instead of James Island though because it's a sacred place and so it seems more fitting to use. As I mentioned the previous chapter, I am using (mostly) modern place names for geographical continuity between chapters and because the meaning of most indigenous place names are more descriptive than symbolic...though I still debate this decision since I really do love etymology (I mean, what's not to love? The original name for the Quillayute River was "lawodokwat" which meant "behind the buttocks". What's not to love about that?) If you are curious about the place names in the region that the Quileute originally had, the Seattle Art Museum has a great map. Google Quileute map and key, Seattle Art Museum.

I'm learning as I go here so please feel free to let me know of any errors!