Snow Raven let go of the earth and danced. She leapt, whirled, dove and darted in and around the startled faces of her people, her wing beating stronger and stronger, until they felt the irresistible urge of the buoyant air and then…
For days Harry looked for a second mural to ‘get into’, but none opened up to him. He wanted to prove his first adventure in Mural #1 The Steam Donkey had been real, not just an old fart’s quirk-of-mind, a synaptic short circuit into Lulu Land. He knew he could probably will himself into the murals, but that would be make-believe; unless he was drawn in by the psychic equivalent of gravity, his experiences would be bogus.
On the point of giving it up for the day, he ducked into the Owl’s Nest for a consoling coffee and scone, parking his walker at the entrance, then waddling up to the counter, leaning heavily on his cane. Recognizing him, the server smiled, then busied herself pouring his coffee and putting his scone into the microwave. “Don’t tell the Missus,” he joked, when she rang in his total. Her smile was polite. Kindly, Harry decided.
“You go sit down, Mr. Sanderson. I’ll bring the scone out to you when it’s ready,” she said.
How long before he ended up in an old-folks home, where everyone would talk to him that way? He plonked his coffee down on a vacant table, then eased himself into a chair. Can’t blame the girl, he chided. Her kindness was genuine, even if she was in a hurry. Be grateful, you old grouch! What he dreaded most was the day Bernice started talking to him like that, then the day he’d be too far-gone to mind. Please God! he shivered. Don’t let that happen!
Funny, how we call out to God, even when we aren’t really believers anymore. Harry tried not to think about it. He slurped his coffee, thanked the girl when she delivered his scone, and asked if he needed anything to go with it. God won’t go away, Harry figured. No matter how hard you try to ignore Him, the fact that you were trying reminded you He was still up there, lurking in his heaven, an omnipotent and omniscient possibility.
Harry broke his scone up into edible chunks, tore the lid off a plastic-encased butter pat, buttered up a morsel, then popped it into his mouth. If there is a god, there’s no point in my being here, he thought, angrily. Everything’s decided, and we’ve got no say in the matter.
He chewed hard and swallowed his lump of scone, felt it working its way down his esophagus down to his belly; visualized its liquefaction in his his stomach; its slow progress through the coils of his intestines… “It’s all shit in the end, isn’t it?” he grumbled. But even as he muttered this epithet, he knew he would never be able to wholly disbelieve. There would always be a part of him yearning for the infinite and eternal… wishing he could gain immortality without having to give up his puny, insignificant, individual soul. His meedom.
At that precise instant what he would later describe as ‘a homing instinct’ overwhelmed Harry. He didn’t actually see the yellow footprints leading to a lane halfway down Mill Street, between Willow and Chemainus Road – not as a distinct vision – but he sensed them with some faculty he never knew he possessed, sniffing out the direction he must go with the eagerness and tenacity of a bloodhound. He needed no corroborating imagery to feel the gravity of Mural #6, Arrival of the ‘Reindeer’ in Horseshoe Bay, pulling him toward it.
That’s the next one, a voice only partly his own announced. Coffee and scone unfinished, he clattered up from his table, hurrying as best he could toward the exit… So what if people stared.
His destination less than a block away, Harry hustled down the lane entrance where Mural #6 was located. He maneuvered his walker a ways up the pavement, turned its seat-toward the wall, set the brakes, and squared off, facing Mural #6. It depicts a young Penelakut woman, watching a British warship entering Horseshoe Bay after rounding Bare Point. The thing that struck Harry first, examining the painting closely, was the young woman’s complexion. Her skin was ghostly white, more like a Japanese Geisha’s than a Hul’quimi’num woman’s. Why did the artists choose that skin tone? Harry asked.
Then he was drawn to the design of her cloak. It wasn’t rendered in realistic detail, the artists – Sandy Clark and Lea Goward – opting instead for an impressionistic style. But suggestions of colour in the seemingly magical garment, draped shoulder-to-ankle on the woman’s back, struck Harry as out of keeping with what could be achieved in woven cedar.
And the ship! It looked so out-of-place, as if it had been clipped out of another painting – hanging on the wall of some British baron’s manor, no doubt – and pasted onto the scenery of pre-contact Chemainus.
The surest way into a mural is through the eyes of one of its depicted characters. That’s something Harry learned by trial and error, later. As much as you-seeing-them, they must see you, then – like a ping-pong ball sucked into a vacuum tube – whoosh! Bingo! You’re in! Harry would learn this technique eventually and, as a Mural Gazer, perfect it. But he was a beginner. Incited by Bernice, he’d stumbled into Mural #1, now he was eager to repeat the experience, and learn to make it habit, an event that simply happened.
At first he might have been thinking you could sneak into a mural the same way a spider disappears through a crack in a wall. Dr. Qwak would later analyze Harry’s investigative notions concerning each wall’s colour, style and composition as futile searches for breaches in ‘physical reality’. He would go on at length about ‘avoidance mechanisms’, built into Europeans’ chronic escapism, contrast the ‘solitary confinement of rationalism’ to the intimate connections to dreamworlds experienced by ‘so-called primitive peoples’. “Imagine a door opening in front of you, a clear blue sky outside, and what you’re really preparing yourself for will become obvious,” he would advise.
Ignorant of all this, Harry’s second venture into a mural loomed as something hoped for, but unexpected – a sort of miracle in the making. It started with a persistent pressure building behind his eyes, “as if someone was inflating my head with a bicycle pump,” he would later describe it. Then he felt himself “swelling toward the painting,” more precisely toward the vanishing point, which lay somewhere between the ‘Penelakut Princess’, as some people call her, and the intruding Reindeer.
Psychically, Harry was groping toward resolution of a difficulty he didn’t consciously perceive. Problem was the young siem was fixated on the ship. She looked into the painting, not out, toward him. They couldn’t make eye-contact. So, like a cedar’s roots, seeking water, Harry’s psyche expanded and stretched blindly toward the space between the woman and the warship, stretched until he felt sure body and soul were going to split. Only then did he look sideways, into her eyes…
For a second, nothing, then a flicker of recognition, and in that instant his ‘real world’ gave way, the world-inside-the-mural closing in behind…
A fire flickered, it’s sparks mingling with the stars; Harry’s feet shifted unsteadily in the loose rocks of the pebbled beach, so he sat down; beyond the wavering light of the fire, trees huddled in gloomy masses; then, through the smoke and distorted firelight a face appeared – an ancient face, sketched in a million wrinkles around its coal-black, obsidian eyes. “Grangran!” Harry yelped, impulsively. The old woman chuckled. His great-grandmother had been Hul’quimi’num, and lived on the Sanderson farm until she died, when Harry was nine years old.
“I can be her, if you wish.” The old woman poked at the fire with a stick.
“Why am I here?”
“You asked to be here,” she reminded. But ‘here’ wasn’t what he’d expected, looking into the bright, blue sky of Mural #6. ‘Here’ was dark, cold, foreboding. “Look up,” the ancient instructed. “Look up and tell me what you see.”
The Milky Way spanned the heavens, as if flung by the hand of a pioneer farmer, casting seeds of light into the unfathomable dark out past the glow of the constellations. “I see stars, and blackness beyond,” Harry said.
“Look harder!”
What am I supposed to see up there? Harry wondered. Squinting, he stared into the night sky, searching for seams in its fabric, folds in his ideas of space and time that might reveal secrets. For a second, he thought he detected something like the edge of a wing or invisible cloud, a faint shimmer between him and the stars, but the phenomenon was less distinct than a mirage, and he took it to be a trick-of-mind.
“When we do not know our way, we think ourselves lost,” the crone taunted. “When we don’t even know what we’re looking for, we truly are.” She laughed at her own words of wisdom, a feeble wheeze that escaped like it might have been her last. “You came here in search of a story; I am here to tell it. So sit, listen, and believe, if you can.”
A good story has no ‘here’, no ‘now’. The old crone didn’t say that, and may not even have thought it, but never in her long-long life had she ever uttered the phrase, ‘Once upon a time…’
Snow Raven
Snow Raven was a strange young woman. Had been ever since she was a girl. She liked to be on her own, especially liked to see what she could find on the rocky beaches of the island where her village totems had stood for longer than anyone could remember or even imagine. Every day, in every kind of weather, she would hike across the island by her favourite path, to her favourite beach, looking for special stones, pieces of driftwood, shells, feathers, bones, the colourful husks of starfish… anything to add to her collection.
And every day she would end these trips atop a knoll that looked out over the Salish Sea, toward the bulge of the horizon, and places she had never been. “What’s out there?” She wondered. But the only answer she ever got was a shiver that ran up her spine, as if an Arctic wind had somehow lost its way, and was coming at her out of the south. A part of her dreaded that wind; but she opened her arms to it every day, and invited it to whisper its secrets.
“She’s special,” her great-aunt said, when people complained of the girl’s habits. “Give her time,” when they demanded she learn the things she would need to know to be useful: cooking, gathering herbs, picking berries, bearing children and loving them. “Give her time,” her great-aunt insisted, but she knew Snow Raven would have to choose a path soon to quell the grumbling, and she talked to the girl, asking her what she wanted to do.
“I want to be a weaver, like you,” Snow Raven answered, without hesitation. “I thought you knew.”
The old woman laughed at the girl’s impudence, and shook her head at her own gullibility. Her great-niece had put off as long as she could the end of her wandering-ways, and now she would learn the skills of a weaver. The girl’s choice made the great-aunt proud. “But,” Snow Raven asked, “I hope I can still take time every day to visit my favourite beach and discover what there is to find.” This they agreed on. “You’re special,” her great-aunt said. “You must continue along the paths that make you so.”
In the coming years, her great-aunt taught Snow Raven all there was to know about being a cedar weaver; how to ask the trees and thank them for allowing her to harvest their bark; how to cut with an axe across the trunk of a chosen tree, then up each side, to peel a tongue away, then strip off great lengths of bark, which fluttered down like banners; how to detach the rough outer bark, and bundle the pliable inner bark to carry home and store for use; then how to prepare and weave the supple cedar strips and strands into beautiful mats, baskets, hats and capes.
Everyone marvelled at Snow Raven’s work, and agreed her great-aunt had been right to claim the girl was ‘special’. But Snow Raven, once she had mastered her art, became impatient. She wanted to create something new, something that told a story of the land she and her people lived on, and the sea that sustained them. So she began weaving items from her beach collections into her mats, baskets, hats and capes. Some thought it was wrong, to change the patterns that had been in use for longer than anyone knew; others marvelled, and it wasn’t long before Snow Raven’s works became valued articles of trade, people coming from miles around to admire and acquire her compositions.
She was busier than ever, but Snow Raven still took time every day, most often near sunset, to hike to her favourite beach, find new things for her collection, and look out over the Salish Sea from her familiar knoll. One day, scanning the horizon, she saw what she took to be some kind of boat, coasting north, toward her. She only caught a glimpse, before the vessel slipped out of sight behind the point of land that blocked her view to the southwest, but there was something strange about it, so she waited, knowing the boat would have to reappear, if it continued on its way.
What was it about this canoe that aroused suspicion and fear? The fierce Haida warriors always swooped down from the north – unless they were returning from a raid. But there had only been one canoe, and even from a great distance she could tell it wasn’t Haida: she hadn’t seen Eagle, or Killer Whale or Bear painted onto the boat’s prow. And she could tell that this boat wasn’t driven forward by strong paddlers, digging their blades into the waves… It had glided mysteriously into and out of view, as if it were a cloud upon the water.
Troubled by these thoughts, Snow Raven waited for the vessel to reappear. An inner voice urged her to run as fast as she could, back to her village to warn her people, but she took courage: “Wait and see!” Snow Raven commanded her desperate limbs. “What can you tell the people now, if they ask what the thing is shaped like? Who is on it? What the invaders’ intentions might be?”
So she waited, and waited, barely able to breath her muscles were so tensed, until suddenly a pennant fluttered into view above the trees on the opposite shore, then the topsails of three gigantic masts, a bowsprit, a hull that went on and on and on before the stern of this massive boat – a vessel that could have fit 100 canoes inside its belly – cleared the point of land and the ship steered northwest to continue up coast.
“Run!” Snow Raven’s panicked spirit commanded. “Fly to your people!”
Still, she watched and wondered. Men clambered up and down mesh ladders; they pulled ropes or let them out, obeying the shouts of others, who must have been their leaders; a man at the stern turned a big wheel, which seemed to tell the ship which way to go; and next to him another man, whom Snow Raven took to be their chief, studied the land. Was he looking for her? For her village? What would he do if he found them?
Suddenly he raised a shiny tube to his eye and looked through it toward what was her village’s hunting ground on the opposite shore. Snow Raven gasped! Wherever he looked the trees toppled, as if they had been blown over by a mighty wind. Then log cabins and barns popped up, as if they’d been created at this man’s command. The land was graded and plowed, and crops sprang out of the groomed earth. “Where will my people hunt,” Snow Raven protested. But before the echo of her words had fled, he pointed his tube at the marshy estuary of her people’s river, and hundreds of wooden dwellings sprang up, with trails between them, along which wagons rolled, pulled by horses. “Where will my people fish,” Snow Raven cried. “Where will they gather herbs and medicines?” He swept the coast with his transforming vision, and tracks barged through the wilderness, along which metal monsters chuffed, pulling carloads of people and goods that filled up the land. “Where will my people live!” Snow Raven raged.
As if he’d heard her challenge, the captain suddenly swung his glass round, looking straight at her. “Run!” her spirit shrank. But she refused. Summoning her courage, Snow Raven stared back at this rapacious being, this hwanitum, and challenged him. “You have no right to do what you are doing, and my people will not give up their right and the right of their descendants to be in this land,” she said fiercely. Only then did Snow Raven fly to warn her people.
When she rushed into her village, disheveled and out of breath, everyone was amazed. “What’s wrong, Snow Raven? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Giant canoe,” she gasped. “Other side of island.”
“Raiders?” her listeners cried.
Snow Raven shook her head. “Come!” she urged, turning back to the trail. “Come quickly!”
The chief, the elders and all her people followed Snow Raven to the other side of their island, and looked out into the bay and up and down the channel for the gigantic canoe she had described: nothing. They surveyed the opposite shore for the signs of devastation, and the teaming town she said had arisen: nothing. They looked at Snow Raven, shook their heads and laughed. “Crazy,” they said, and shunned her after that. Except for her great aunt. “The vision you have looked for all these years has come to you, girl. Now what are you going to do?” she asked. Her brother, too, when he heard about all the commotion, supported her: “I don’t know what it is you saw, sister, but I know you are not crazy, like they say,” he consoled.
There was only one thing Snow Raven could do: weave. So she went back to her loom, to a cape she had just begun. Her fingers worked the cedar strands like a pair of spiders, shuttling back and forth, guiding the supple strands in, out and around each other, link after link, row by row. But, watching her hands, Snow Raven realized they were not doing what she had intended, that this cape would turn out to be like nothing she had ever imagined. “I am weaving a vision,” she told herself – and later, her great aunt and brother too – a vision that will remind me and my people who I am when the time comes.”
After that, Snow Raven laboured over her cape for months and years. Her great aunt and brother helped. When she asked, her aunt acquired the white wool of the mountain goat, which Snow Raven needed. And her brother fetched a vial of glowing water from the shores of the big ocean on the far side of the big island to the west of theirs. A carver, he also made a cedar box to hold the cape, and a raven’s mask to go with it – for Snow Raven knew that’s what her cape would embody: the spirit of the raven, her raven.
Although they hadn’t forgotten she was crazy, her people marvelled at the cape, taking shape on Snow Raven’s loom. “Magnificent!” they said. “Beautiful!” Even those who had criticized her for breaking traditional patterns couldn’t help complimenting her creativity and workmanship. They were awed, but wondered who the cape was for, because she hadn’t told them.
When the work was finished, she held it up for her great aunt and brother to see. “Amazing!” they gasped, for the cape shimmered and danced in her hands, as if it might fly away with no-one in it. “You must dance this cape for me Brother,” she said hopefully. When he looked doubtful, and made no answer, she coaxed, “You are a powerful dancer, but I stumble and stagger about as if my feet were blocks of stone.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “You must dance this cape yourself, and its wings will help you soar. But I will be with you. I will sing and play the drum.” At that, her great aunt took her hands, and looked into her soul. “I will be with you too, Snow Raven. But your brother is right: no-one but you can dance this cape.”
The full-moon rose over the Salish Sea, it’s glittering path beckoning southeast. The faintest glow of the setting sun outlined the towering cedars behind Snow Raven’s village. Above: a night sky, spangled with stars and the almost imperceptible glow of the Milky Way. Snow Raven held all this in her memory. Imagined it, for she crouched beneath the folds of her cape, its wings forming a sort of tent over her bowed head. She could only ‘see’ within. When the time was right, she would emerge, and dance; for now, she held herself ready, tensed, but relaxed at the same instant; fearful, yet brave. She wondered what her brother was waiting for; had to let the impatience, building in her breast, dissipate in a sigh. When he was ready, he would sound his drum, and her flight-song would begin.
“Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum… At last the beat of her brother’s drum summoned her people, and he raised his voice like a loon, warbling at the moon. “Come see!” he called to them. “Come see White Raven fly.” Curious, people gathered on the walkways in front of their houses, then – one or two at a time – they came down to the beach, their footsteps guided by moonlight. “Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum-tum-TUM!” The summons ended, and the gathered people waited for what would happen next.
“Tum. Tum. Tum. Tum…” Snow Raven’s brother sang again! beginning slowly, but at a quickening pace. Now he sang for her, only, his deep, powerful voice vibrating, tingling from the very centre of her soul to the outer reaches of nerves and skin, then beyond. “Fly, Snow Raven!” he sang. “Stretch your wings and row the night air. Join the moon and the stars in the night sky. Show us the way.” Snow Raven unfurled her wings. She cocked her head, and looked into every eye, the eyes of her people. She sensed a glow surrounding her, as if she were looking out from inside flashes of lightening, illuminating the crowd surrounding her. Then Snow Raven let go of the earth and danced. She leapt, whirled, dove and darted in and around the startled faces of her people, her wing beating stronger and stronger, until they felt the irresistible urge of the buoyant air and then…
She took flight.
Some claim her brother’s drumming and singing put them into a trance, and that’s why they saw Snow Raven fly off, and were unable to follow. Others, that they watched her dance out of the circle, then up to the trail that led to the far side of their island, and her favourite beach, but they hadn’t followed because they thought it was part of her dance and she would return. Only when her brother’s drumming and chanting ended did they begin to ask where Snow Raven had gone? Her brother and great-aunt were as surprised as everyone else, and he ran after her, guided by moonlight over the trail to the other side of their island, and finally to the knoll overlooking the Salish sea. All that was ever found was her magnificent cape and the mask her brother had carved. She was gone.
Many tales have been told about where Snow Raven might have flown, but everyone agrees she will return to her people someday. In the meantime, her cape and mask were securely deposited in the cedar box her brother carved, and were given to his great-aunt for safekeeping. That was long, long ago, however, and much has happened since. Many things have been lost, except to memory.
Undoubtably, the opening of that box and dancing of the cape will happen in due course, and be accompanied by the telling of many more stories… that is, if the cape can ever be found…
So immersed was Harry in her tale, he hadn’t noticed the old woman’s disappearance. When he opened his eyes, she was gone. All that remained of her were the fading echoes of her ancient voice. Her place on the other side of the fire had been taken-up by a middle-aged gentleman, dressed like someone out of the late 19th or early 20th Century, sitting in a straight-backed chair, observing him with pale, blue eyes.
“So?” the man asked. “What do you make of this dream of yours?”
“Who are you?” Harry demanded.
“I am your psychoanalyst, Dr. Qwak, Carl Gustave,” the man said, somewhat annoyed. “Please, don’t even think of forming any amusing, but utterly unwarranted, associations between the phonetics of my name and any thing or being other than what or who I truly am. The earnestness of my professional calling and humanistic intention forbids such facile humour.”
“Where did the old woman go?”
“I imagine she flowed back into your unconscious…”
“And is that where you come from?”
“I think our time, and my expertise, will better be focused on resolving questions about you, not sorting through the incidentals of my life, don’t you agree?” Harry wasn’t certain he did, but thought it best to play along and see where things went. “So? About your dream?”
“He’s a crackpot. Don’t listen to him. Wake up!” Harry recognized the old woman’s voice, but it seemed to emerge from a younger body, the vocal cords taught, and melodious.
“Go away!” Dr. Qwak shooed.
“Get lost yourself,” she countered. Then, “Oh. I forgot. You already are lost in all your crackpot theories, aren’t you?”
“You must get back inside the patient’s head,” Dr. Qwak almost shouted in an anguished voice. “This manifestation is unprofessional and not real, so please, let me help Mr. Sanderson without your interference!”
“But I haven’t finished my story. You cut me off, butting in with your psycho-analytical stuff…”
“You hadn’t finished? What more could be left to say?”
“If you’ll shut up and listen, you’ll find out.”
Dr. Qwak, with a resigned look, began to fade, morphing in the wavering firelight, back into the old woman – or, rather, a younger edition of the Snow Raven’s storyteller. “Grangran?” Harry called out to her.
“If you want to call me that, it’s okay,” she said.
“But it is you! Isn’t it?”
Gone were the wrinkles. The mysterious kindness of the old woman’s eyes had resolved into a fierce, uncompromising glare – not hatred, but something close to it… ‘distrust’ the only word Harry could think of. “The thing about love is, it tries to blanket even those you hate,” the girl said. “If that was part of your Grangran’s spirit, then she is part of me. That’s all I can say about it.”
“And the old woman?”
“She is one of my ancestors.”
“And the story she told.”
“The story she didn’t finish, you mean? It includes you, and me, and anyone else who wants to believe it…”
The Tale End
For a long time, many generations, Snow Raven’s cape and her brother’s mask sat in their cedar box in her ancestors’ place in the longhouse, and her story was often told. Eventually her vision of a ‘gigantic canoe’ that moved through the water without the strong arms of paddlers digging into the waves came to pass, and she became known as a prophet.
As she had foretold, the trees in our ancestral hunting grounds were cut down by settlers; farmers tilled the land and grew their crops; their cattle grazed where deer once browsed, and their pigs rooted in my people’s potato patches; a town sprang up at the creek’s mouth, where berries and herbs had abounded. There was nowhere left for my people to live the life they had known for uncounted generations.
We were called ‘savages’ and worse by the hwanitum, who had stolen, plundered and pillaged our land, and it would be decided that any measures needed to subdue our savage natures should be. But the spirit of my people lived – sometimes like the embers of a fire, buried in ashes, but always sending up its smoke, always reminding us who we are, and who our ancestors were. Snow Raven’s spirit was revered, and her cape, along with her brother’s mask, was often taken out of its cedar box and danced, always at night, outside the longhouse.
But as our way of life changed – as we adapted to the new realities imposed on us – the longhouses were eventually abandoned. With their people gone, their beams rotted and roofs collapsed. Foreseeing this, one of Snow Raven’s descendants, the rightful owner of her cape, took the cedar box containing it to a new home, when she left the longhouse. Some accused her of theft, claiming Snow Raven’s things belonged to everyone, but she vowed to keep it safe, and to allow the cape to be danced at potlatches and ceremonies whenever it was needed.
Promises sometimes lose their way, though. Especially in troubled times. No-one knows where Snow Raven’s cape and mask are now, but it is said to have been taken into the house of a hwanitum farmer by his Hul’quimi’num bride. Although it’s exact whereabouts cannot be determined, my people know the box is intact, her cape and mask still longing to be danced.
Someday it will be found and restored to us. Then Snow Raven’s spirit will whirl and soar around our campfires once more.