THE SHE-WOLF AND THE RAVEN
Chapter 9: Ocean
"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
"Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night
"You were only waiting for this moment to arise."
The Beatles
ooooooo
Fenris followed Leah behind the trees. She could feel his curiosity like an itch under his skin and she hadn't even stopped walking before he accosted her with his questions.
"Who's he?" Fenris whispered to her. He nodded over his shoulder to where Sam feigned nonchalance and leaned against a tree, waiting for them.
"I told you. That's Sam," Leah whispered.
"I clearly heard. You know very well that is not what I am asking," he said with a pointed stare.
"Umm, well, Sam is the alpha of the first pack I belonged to back in our people's homeland. He's also family," Leah answered.
She could feel his impatience and doubt…and a slight hint of something else that tasted so close to jealousy she almost laughed. He was her imprint…and a reluctant one at that. What did he need to be jealous of? Of course, she couldn't quite say Fenris owned her heart in the same way Sam had. She barely knew him, but the imprint bond was deceptive in its forced intimacy.
"What?" she asked, feeling suddenly vulnerable as if his eyes could uproot the secrets of her heart she wished could remain hidden. Of course he knew there was more to Sam than what she'd said. He could read her as well as she could him. After so many years away from Sam, it still nearly took her breath away to see him.
"You must have a different meaning of the word 'family' than I have," he responded dryly. "Tell me, why should a brother or cousin or uncle elicit such a strong emotional response?"
She hadn't heard of any of the other wolves sharing all emotions with their imprints. She didn't know why she would be different. She knew they had an uncanny sense of the well-being of their imprints and a keener-than-usual perception of their emotions and feelings-but the ability to share emotions as if sharing a plate of French fries? That was unique. Was it due to their wolf connection? Or something else? She didn't know, but at the moment, she found it highly inconvenient.
She could only shrug. How could she explain Sam-even to herself?
...
In his dark eyes, she heard Beatles songs finger picked on a guitar by firelight. She felt rain-dampened flannel shirts and thick hair slipping through her finger tips. She smelled cinnamon and driftwood fires and cedar and ocean salt and all that was Sam.
The old Sam. Her Sam.
She still remembered the first time she saw him. It was the year of the first Paddle to LaPush, the celebration of their shared maritime traditions. Hundreds of people came from Canada to California, from over forty tribes, flocked to the shores of LaPush. Their lands exploded in drum and dance, hand-carved canoes and feasts. Quileute from both on and off the reservation came home to join in the festivities. That was the year the Uleys came back.
Joshua and Allison Uley, faces long missed from Quileute social functions, journeyed all the way from Portland to join in the fun. Their twelve year old son was introduced to everyone as the "grandson of old Chuck Uley." Sammy (as he was called then), was a thin, gangly kid with his hair in a bowl cut. He wore a faded black Volcom hoodie and a dinosaur Tamagotchi attached to his belt loop. He met Leah and the other kids on the beach with a shy smile. It disappeared when he saw the kids chasing crabs through the rocks and digging for clams in the sand. His hesitation melted away the deeper he waded into the cold, grey Pacific waves and by the time night fell, his loud laughter bounced off the shores with abandon.
They stayed the week with Chuck Uley and Sammy followed the kids on the Res everywhere they went. He hadn't been around much before then. The adults said (in hushed voices when they thought the kids weren't listening) that Joshua Uley was "shamed of his blood" and "wanted to forget." More than once, bitter arguments broke out between Chuck Uley and the other elders over how he raised his son.
"You failed to teach him our songs," they said. Chuck Uley, ever a quiet man, responded with little other than a shrug and the click of a bottle opener.
Chuck left the Res in the 50's. It was back during the days when the Bureau of Indian Affairs made their big efforts to "assimilate" and "urbanize" their Indian charges. After decades of forcing their charges into a state of dependency on government programs, the BIA decided it was time for them to "grow up" and "become American" (i.e. disintegrate what remained of their former ties to their culture). The BIA encouraged families to relocate to the big cities and leave the reservations and their "primitive" wayward Indian ways behind them. They told grand stories of the job opportunities, material advantages, and an easy highway into the American Dream.
A young Chuck Uley, his wife, and their three kids tried it out, much to the displeasure of their elders and their families. They found poor lodgings and even poorer opportunities in San Francisco. With government assistance of $80 a week for one month, it was hardly enough to set them up to survive life in the big city. As the American Dream remained as intangible as the stars in the sky, Chuck barely lasted a decade in the concrete slums of the big city. He returned home with less money and even less dignity than he had started out with. He buried himself in a bottle long before he buried himself in their ancestral lands. They all whispered it was a "heartsickness" that finally sent him to the Land of the Dead two years after the Paddle to LaPush. He never did teach Joshua their songs.
Joshua Uley, the middle child, grew up in the urban slums of the big city and knew little of the Quileute ways. His parents only spoke of life on the reservation in hushed whispers, as if their heritage were a dirty secret to be hidden in closets and underneath worn mattresses.
After completing a semester of a full ride scholarship to the University of San Francisco, Joshua Uley decided he wanted to know more of who he was. He rebelled against the mold he was forced into and felt he didn't fit. When he heard about the Occupation of Alcatraz movement in '69, he dove in head first. Along with hundreds of other American Indians from tribes across the country, they gathered at the abandoned old prison site and claimed it as their own for just over a year. They colonized the space, protested their treatment by the U.S. government, and dreamed wild dreams of developing a new cultural identity and homeland for themselves.
With grants and funding not forthcoming and little to unify the disparate band of colonizers other than a shared history of oppression, they quickly fractured and were sent off the island. Joshua spoke little of his time there in the years that followed. He said a Lakota introduced him to the guitar and a Sioux taught him how to play the Beatles' music. His mother whispered about how many of his "bad habits" were picked up from that island. Disillusioned by "the cause," Joshua left Alcatraz for Seattle without his college degree.
He found ready work at the shipyards and changed jobs nearly as often as he changed women. He did well enough at his odd jobs, but he didn't bother coming to connect with the family back on the Res very often. Joshua Uley said the past would hold him back and his family and people were part of that past. He needed to let go of it and move on. He was good at that-moving on.
He met Sam's mom through a family connection in Portland. He kept her around long enough to give her Sam and then disappeared for years. He returned when Sam was in middle school and stayed just long enough to give Sam a love for the guitar and introduce Sam and Allison to his family on the Res for three summers.
The Uley family stayed another week during the next summer's Paddle to Puyallup. Sammy came to his grandparent's house a bit taller, a bit more confident, and without the Tamagotchi. Leah hid at first when she saw him arrive, but she also couldn't take her eyes off of him. They still ran along the beach with the other kids and hunted for crabs, but Leah decided she would love him forever. She wrote his name all over her school notebooks for a full year and made sure he was her match in every game of M.A.S.H. played with her classmates. She mailed him the occasional note written during Algebra class and breathlessly called his house (and hung up) repeatedly in hopes of hearing his voice.
The following summer, a fourteen year old Sam came back to his grandparents' house and never left.
"Don't call me Sammy," the boy said in the cracking voice of a boy trying to pull himself taller and become a man too early. "Call me Sam."
This was a new version of Sam, one with a heaviness and forced maturity that robbed the spark from his eyes and the smile from the corner of his mouth. He was so thin then. He'd just hit puberty and he sprouted up before he sprouted out and was as awkward as he was angry.
There were no hunts for clams or swims in the ocean that summer. That was the year Chuck Uley got sick and never got better. Joshua and Allison came just in time to say good-bye. That summer, Joshua left Sam's mother at his parents' house with a mountain of empty bottles, a black eye, a broken arm, and a pile of debt she could never hope to repay.
As the summer ended and Joshua's old Toyota never came back, as they buried Chuck Uley only to have Grandma Clara fall sick after him, Sam only grew angrier. Allison spent all her time split between housecleaning at the Oceanside Resort and nursing Grandma Clara. She came home exhausted and at a loss on how to rein in her teenage son.
"It's your fault he's gone," Sam shouted as he fought back his tears. "You told him to go. It's because of you he doesn't want me."
Allison could only cry and hold out her arms for the embrace he refused to succumb to.
As fall turned into winter, Sam only raged more. He ditched school again and again. He ran away from home saying he was going to "find his father." Instead, he turned up drunk as a sailor and on the "wrong side" of Forks and Port Angeles so many times that Allison gave up going to find him. Her tears and threats did little to tame him or keep him home.
That was until old Quil got ahold of him. Old Papa Quil, grandfather of one of Sam's childhood playmates, was a force to be reckoned with. When he came across the scraggly, bleary-eyed teenager nearly passed out on the rocks behind the marina, he swore loudly at the prostrate frame. Papa Quil tore the half empty bottle from Sam's hand, smashed it on a nearby rock, and gave Sam such a kick in the shins that he had a bruise for a week. Sam squawked and stumbled to his feet in surprise.
"Enough, Samuel Joshua Uley," Papa Quil said so fiercely that his dark eyes burned like fiery coals.
He gave the old man a confused, foggy look and grumbled under his breath. Papa Quil picked up the teenager, despite his protests, and threw him down the considerable distance into the ocean with a splash. A spluttering, angry Sam emerged with fists swinging into the air and his own chorus of curses. Old Quill, unfazed, only crossed his arms and stared at the boy.
"What's your problem?" Sam shouted. He nearly fell as he tried to stumble through the rocks and back to the shore. Papa Quil blocked his path with his considerable girth and frowned more.
"Drink more," Quil said. "Get back into that ocean and drink it."
Sam shook his head and Quil pushed him till he fell back into the water with an unceremonious splash.
"Drink it, boy!" Quil said firmly. "Those waters will heal you or kill you and it's your choice which it will be."
"I don't understand," Sam answered. He gave up struggling to his feet and let the cold, shallow waves ripple around where he sat.
"The ocean gives us food and takes our land. It is both our freedom and our captivity. Once it can be paddled, it becomes a highway, but until then, it locks us on this shore. It is our past and our future, as much as the land we live on or the blood in our veins. You can run from it, but it always calls you back until you learn to deal with it," Papa Quill said. His grey hair fell against his wrinkled forehead wet with sea spray. He pulled a bit of something stringy and knotted from his pocket and dropped it onto Sam's palm. "Do you know what that is?"
Sam grimaced and held it up. "Rope…uh…some kinda net?" he answered.
"A fishing net. Once it was used to catch fish to help us live-but it was only helpful when we knew it was there and used it. This particular net was lost and forgotten in the ocean for a long time. Nobody missed it or thought anything of it until a few years ago. One day, there was a storm. It came so fast that a fisherman got caught in it. His boat capsized near the shore in the waves. He should have been fine. He should have been able to swim to shore. He couldn't. The man's foot got tangled in that net and he drowned."
"That's terrible," Sam answered cautiously.
"I found that net and I cut it into pieces after they found my son's body. It was too late by then. I spent years here, like you, with a bottle in my hand and cursing at the ocean. I couldn't help but wonder if I'd found that net earlier and dealt with it if that story coulda ended different. Then one day, I realized it was better to drown in the ocean than to drown in a bottle. Now, I come back to this ocean, again and again, and I remember the lives it has sustained and the lives it has taken and I try to find all the forgotten fishing nets I can find.
"You see, Sammy, the past can be a bit like that net. Just because you don't know it's there doesn't mean it can't tangle in your legs and pull you under the waves. Your father worked so hard to get away from the past and pretend he wasn't all jumbled up in it that he never bothered to stop and remove the nets. It makes him fall again and again, no matter how hard he fights against it. He tries to forget his past and so he can never move into his future. He fights tooth and nail for a present that does no good to nobody and he refuses to drink this salty water for fear it will drown him instead of heal him.
"You have a choice to make. You can continue on as you are and grow up to be your father, or you can dig up the old fishing nets, drink deep of the ocean, and learn to paddle. It's time you learn our songs and it's time you sing your own."
Papa Quil extended a large, calloused hand and helped up the now shivering Sam. Instead of taking him back to the old Uley house, he took him straight to the back house on the Clearwater property and deposited him into Harry's keeping.
"Teach this boy to canoe," Papa Quil told Harry. "I want him here every day until he can build and paddle it all the way to Hoh."
Then the old man turned and left.
True to his word, Harry Clearwater taught Sam everything he knew until Sam helped paddle the tribal school canoe in the summer journeys. But Papa Quil still wasn't satisfied. He turned up at the Uley house one day with a beat up old guitar case in his hands. He thrust it at Sam with a wide grin.
"You need this. I want to hear your songs," Papa Quil said and he came by every Thursday afternoon to hear Sam play. From then on, Sam's hands were too full of Gibson frets to have space for vodka bottles and his guitar song haunted every campfire and clam bake and after school hang out from then on. His rage, forced upon old cedar logs with axes and canoe paddles in the ocean, simmered down into a scarred, healed old wound that only throbbed when the weather changed.
Somewhere in the midst of that, as Leah grew from sapling girl to budding woman, their innocent searches for crabs and hunts for clams and moonlit swims in the cold Pacific turned into heat and butterflies and first kisses and late nights under the stars. His voice deepened as her curves formed and she sang harmony to all his fire lit melodies.
When he left for college, his mama cried.
"He'll be the first in our line to finish college," she said with her heart bursting with pride. They were all proud. The Res boasted eight bachelor's degrees in residence. They hoped it would soon be nine. The fact that he graduated high school was in itself a small miracle (and one that Allison blamed on Papa Quil again and again).
But it was not to be. That was the old Sam.
The new Sam exploded into fur and teeth and legends better left for fireside stories and long house secret societies than college dorm rooms. Try as they might to forge a new way to be Quileute, a new identity as someone separate from their "pack," the past always came back to bite them and tangled around their ankles like a forgotten fishing net.
Old Quil tried to help Sam through the change as best he could. There were a lot of dreams to sort through and throw away before Sam could move forward.
"Why me?" Sam said through his fingers as he huddled in a shed in the Ateara yard. "Why not my father or my grandfather?"
Quil sat next to him and stared at the rough planks of wood making up the shed. He shook his head.
"You are not your father. You are not your grandfather. You are not your son or grandson. You are the bridge, the one to build the long house to hold you all. It's your job to heal from the past, to learn the songs you want remembered and leave the ones behind that should be forgotten in order to make new ones. You must lash your past and future together and choose what you will give your children.
"Some people say that to move forward, we gotta let go of the past. Some say the past is all we have left and there is no future. I think it's a little bit of both. The past is more like the ocean than the rocks on its shores. The rocks are solid, steady, and change slowly. The ocean is always changing, never the same. The ocean may remain forever, but the water changes. The past is like that. It was never static or something you could fully grip in your fingers. You can only feel it slip over, just beyond your grip, taking part of you with it.
"Now when we visit that ocean again, where we stand gives us a different picture, a different perspective than the last time we stood on its shores. It still pushes us and moves us, but it is constant in its change. The ocean teaches us our songs, but it is our job to sing them to our children or they will be lost. It is also our job to learn new songs.
"You have become a warrior in a time when warriors are not valued. You are a wolf born in a cage, an eagle with clipped wings. You know you are made to run and fly but you can't and it makes you burn like a driftwood flame. The danger is to take out that anger on those in your home, longing for victory so much you declare war in your own house. Your strength is found in protecting the weak, not defeating them. You have been given a gift. It is not an easy gift, but it is still a gift. You must learn to wield it well and sing the songs only known by a Quileute wolf."
Old Quil left Sam to wriggle and writhe and struggle to lash together his past and his future in such a way he would not become entangled and drown in his impossible present.
Sam would not be finishing college. He'd take on the unpaid and time-consuming roles of "guardian" and "warrior" for their small community-a position high in prestige and low on economic benefits. The new Sam barely had time for his old guitar and never bothered with a shirt, much less a flannel one. He still hummed Beatles songs under his breath when he was happy…or sad, but he was not the same as he had been.
He left most of the old Sam behind-and Leah was part of the old Sam.
...
She'd always heard that imprinting solved old heartache. In a way, it was true. She no longer felt like her heart had been cut out of her body and wept blood internally. Instead, it felt more like the ache of an old, long-healed wound-like how her father used to complain about an old football injury in his knee from his high school days. She felt an echo of a past injury, but not the debilitating daily reminder of a current wound. Just enough to give a calling card of the past, enough to hint at old tears and the way they watered the earth for the next spring's wildflowers.
Perhaps, Sam was part of the old Leah instead of Leah being part of the old Sam. Leah's dark eyes focused on where Fenris stood, in her present. He cleared his throat slightly and continued giving her a concentrated gaze. This was all part of the new Leah.
"Sam is married to my cousin…who is basically more like a sister than a cousin to me," she answered without meeting his face. She attempted to control her emotional response to that statement as much as she could.
"And before he married your cousin?"
Leah didn't answer at first. "That was before we all phased. It was a different time and place. You said once you prefer not to speak of your past. I'd rather not speak of mine right now."
He paused before granting her a stony nod. "I gather we must return with your companion to your home?"
"My baby brother is getting married. I need to be there," she said, finally meeting his eyes and trying to express how important this was to her. She could do this, she told herself. She had to. The knowledge that her baby brother was getting married-and she'd missed so much-meant she would force herself to deal with it all. She'd face fire and flood for Seth if she had to. What did facing her old pack mean in light of that?
"We will take turns carrying the small pups," he said. "I assume it will be a long journey."
"Yeah. A couple days at least," she answered- knowing full well in her heart that she meant more than the physical distance.
"Let us gather the children."
oooooo
Sam stared in fascination as Fenris shifted in a shimmer of green and without a single breach of cloth or flash of bare skin. The white wolf gave what could only be described as a haughty glance as Sam and corralled the five pups around him.
"What is he?" Sam asked quietly to where Leah was about to walk into the forest to change unobserved.
"I'm not quite sure."
"Haven't you asked?"
"Yes. Repeatedly. He's very good at dodging questions he doesn't want to answer," she answered.
"Like that's ever stopped you. You are as stubborn as a mule."
"Well, I only figured out we could, you know, communicate a couple of weeks ago."
"What? How did you not know?"
"I thought he was a wolf, ok," she answered a bit too defensively. Sam only grew more awed.
"You imprinted in wolf form?" he asked, his face unashamedly curious.
"Yeah," she said with a shrug.
"And that didn't make you wonder?"
"Of course I wondered. I'm not an idiot. How exactly was I supposed to figure it out? Draw pictures on a cave wall?"
"Phase and talk to him."
"Phase and talk to a wolf?"
"He doesn't look like a wolf now. He looks like a, I don't know, a Robin Hood type."
"Well, I didn't know that. Not until he phased first. Since then, he's been pretty close-mouthed about who he is or where he comes from or what he is."
"And that doesn't make you nervous?"
"Would you be nervous if that was your imprint?"
"Fine, fine. And your kids?"
"Sarah phased to human form yesterday for the first time. Isaac is still working on it. The other three are too small."
"You gave birth to wolves?" he asked, his mouth falling open in surprise.
She sighed and ran her hand through her long hair. "Yes."
"Huh," he answered. "That's…different."
"You know me. I like to do things a little different than everyone else."
"Yeah, you kinda take it to the extreme," he answered with too much familiarity and warmth in the tone to leave her unaffected.
"Why do you think I didn't want to come back to the Res?"
"Oh, come on, Leah. Why would that stop you? What do you think we'd do-refuse you?"
"Sam, I've put up with the nasty thoughts of the pack long enough. They've made fun of every aspect of me for as long as I've been around to hear them. Do you think I really wanted to hear what they thought of my new family? It's bad enough that Quil imprinted on a two year old or that Jacob imprinted on a vamp's kid."
"At least Jacob's is half human," Sam answered and when Leah groaned, he backtracked slightly. "You've been happy?"
"Yes."
"Good. That's all that matters, then. We haven't been able to hear you…for a long time….," he began.
She rolled her eyes and pulled a strand of long, dark hair behind her ear. "Yeah, I've been living here for awhile."
"We've been trying to find you for years…any trace of you. Leah, we've sent wolves out every month since everything happened to try to find any trace of you. We hoped, Seth especially, we hoped to find you."
She considered him more carefully as he spoke. He'd aged, though not physically. There was a heaviness to his shoulders, a weight in his eyes, and a tiredness in his limbs that had never been there before. Though his hair fell as unmarred and dark as before and his skin shone in perfect golden warmth, something was moved and aged within him.
"Let's go home," he said.
At the word "home," her heart did a flip within her chest and she felt the call of the moss-covered cedars, the grey waves of the ocean, and the familiar stretch of beach that was "hers" as deeply as she felt the pulse of life in her veins. It was as if the land itself called her name and she could hear the echo of it no matter how far she wandered away from it.
"Yes. I'm ready to go home."
Let me give some "macro" history notes: Originally Native Americans were seen as "sovereign nations" which were outside of the U.S. and not part of the U.S. Thus, as the U.S. grew and extended, the national policy was to keep pushing Native Americans to outside the borders of wherever the U.S. stopped. Thus, they were relocated again and again until the U.S. borders hit the Pacific Ocean in the 1840's and then there was no place left to push them outside. Then, the national policy shifted to either kill them off or place them in designated territories inside the U.S. (i.e. reservations).
After sticking them firmly into designated spaces, they weren't permitted free movement to leave or go other places. Then the focus shifted from geographic conquest to more of a "cultural conquest" that involved forcing them to assimilate to the dominant culture and leave their old culture behind. This policy remained until about the 1940's and 1950's when the policy changed to wanting to relocate Native Americans into urban city centers, leave their status as sovereign nations and "become American". (it is important to note, they did not receive U.S. citizenship until 1924 and were not guaranteed the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)
The 1960's to 1970's saw another shift (aided significantly by the Occupation of Alcatraz and other "Red Power" movements) which changed the policy away from that of "termination" or the disintegration of cultural identity and autonomy of Native Americans and more protections over that identity. Conversations around ideas of reparations for failed treaties and empty promises began. In the 1980's to present day, there has been more revival of indigenous languages and practices and more discussions around fixing past injustices.
The Quileute are a fascinating case because they were able to maintain their land. Despite pressures to force them off their land and onto the Quinault reservation (because in U.S. ideas, one Indian is the same as all the others so completely disparate linguistic and cultural groups should be "the same"), they resisted and maintained their land, albeit a vastly reduced piece of it (i.e. over 900 square miles reduced to one single square mile, but it was their most sacred piece of land and it was theirs).
In 2012, 785 acres of land were granted back to the Quileute from the national park around them. In recognition of the rising sea levels (due to climate change) and the danger their land faced due to potential for tsunamis, the Quileute were given back more of their indigenous lands.
For more specific history on the Quileute, I found a great timeline of Quileute history at the Seattle Art Museum's website. They have a very simple, but thorough overview of Quileute history.