Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online

the’skin inflated like a bladder. When further harpoons were hurled into the body of the whale, it is not unusual for from thirty to forty of these buoys to be made fast to the whale, which, of course, cannot sink, and is easily despatched by their spears and lances.
    Dispatched and towed ashore, the whale begins to become bill of fare.
All hands swarm around the carcass with their knives, and in a very short time the blubber is stripped off in blocks about two feet square. The portion of blubber forming a saddle, taken from between the head and dorsal fin, is esteemed the most choice, and is always the property of the person who first strides the whale. The saddle is termed
u-butsk.
It is placed across a pole supported by two stout posts. At each end of the pole are hung the harpoons and lines with which the whale was killed. Next to the blubber at each end are the whale’s eyes; eagle’s feathers are stuck in a row along the top, a bunch of feathers at each end, and the whole covered with spots and patches of down...The
u-butsk
remains in a conspicuous part of the lodge until it is considered ripe enough to eat, when a feast is held, and the whole devoured or carried away by the guests....
    Swan would, and did, journey almost anywhere with the coastal Indians in their canoes, but I do not discover in his diary pages or other writings that he ever went whaling with the Makahs. My guess is that he lost any such appetite early on, the time he was idling along in a canoe full of Makahs paddling for Port Townsend when a whale innocently broached beside them in the Strait. Swan emerged from the resulting commotion enormously grateful that no harpooning equipment happened to be aboard and the Indians had to forfeit their excited plan of pursuing the whale to the water-end of the earth or to his death, whichever arrived first.
    Swan’s eyewitness knowledge of the Makahs’ soldiery of the sea, their whale hunts, then stops at the shoreline, and my questions go unmet. Whether the seabirds shadowed the canoes in white and gray gliding flocks as the whale-men stroked out from Cape Flattery into the Pacific. Whether there hung—I cannot see how else it could have been—an audible silence of held breaths before the first paddler behind the harpooner judged the distance to the whale and cried:
Now throw!
Whether the crew shouted a united great cry when the harpoon blade snagged home, a chorus of conquest. And whether some tincture of apprehension mixed with whatever exaltation they clamored, (or success meant this: their canoe lashed behind the harpooned whale: a seagoing cart harnessed to a creature several times the size of a bull elephant and dying angry.
    Â 
    Yet if he did not go see whales stabbed, not a lot else of Makah life escaped Swan’s attention. What a listener he must have been, the rarest kind who aims his ears as if being paid by the word. Whatever the majority of the Makahs thought of their white newcomer—and just as surely as his constant mention of some of them is testimony that they were attracted to him in friendship or something very close to it, there would have been those who suspected Swan, supposed him silly or perhaps even vaguely dangerous—a great number of the tribal members did talk with him, allowed him to rove along on the rim of their Neah Bay life. Even yet in his words their personalities breathe hotly to me. Swell, of course, with his knack for fact and his easy competence. His brother Peter, a brawler and restless under the cleft of the white men’s growing power over the natives. The obliging Captain John, something of a tribal bard, who
drew on the first page of this book one of the’skookums who cause the lightning by running out its tongue.
(Swan in turn later sketched Captain John into the front of a diary—an oval ocher face, low broad-lipped mouth, dark quarter circle eyebrows of surprising delicacy, amused eyes. Swan estimated him