Strange Possession at Viner Sound

By Robin Percival Smith

I have written about seven stories that I put away and have occasionally revised. One story started when I was anchored alone in Viner Sound in 1996. I felt a presence on board that set off my imagination. The book contains the stories of six lives. Two half breeds, Matti Wilson (part Finish and part Indian) and Bessie David (part Kwakuutl Indian and part Chinese). Chief Joseph of the Koeksotenok in the village of Gwayasdums. Shaman Caring-well in the village (cousin of Matti) and shaman to Chief Bell of the Tsawatenok. Lad and Jojo (sons of Chief Bell) held captive at a secret Japanese radio base in Viner Sound during WWII and died there. Jojo had not been given the rites at burial that would send him to Transformer for reincarnation and his spirit is trapped in Viner Sound. Jojo's spirit possesses Matti and shows him how the boys died at the radio base. He asks Matti for assistance in releasing his spirit for passage to Transformer so that he can be reincarnated. The lives of these main characters are interwoven in the novel's narrative.

The idea of spiritual possession was reinforced in 2002, when a Haida woman told me about her possession by the bad spirit of Hot Spring Island in the Gwai Hanas Park on the Queen Charlotte Islands. In 2012 I decided to self-publish, Strange Possesion at Viner Sound, to raise funds for my charities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456619602

Book preview

Pacifist

Prologue

I saw Windsong the first time that I sailed alone to Queen Charlotte Strait in 1988. I had intended to sail up to Port Allison from Blunden Harbor but the afternoon Northwest wind forced me to take refuge in the Kent Island anchorage. As I entered from the east, Windsong swept into the bay from the west. She chose to anchor under the lee of the islet and a wizened man hailed me to raft alongside. He sent me on shore with a stern line to attach the two vessels to the Islet. As I rowed back through a patch of calm water he winched the boats out of the wind.

Once our sailing vessels settled on his anchor, we both went below to enjoy the sea-solitude of our cabins. At happy hour he invited me aboard Windsong and I gathered together my red wine, cheese and crackers. I sat in his warm cabin opposite his bookcase.

You get the gist of a person from the books he reads and Matti surprised me as I stared at three prominent volumes, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Plato's Republic and a slim volume 'How Free Are We?' by Honderich. He was a kindred spirit in his choice of music, a rack of cassette tapes, all Baroque, Classical and Romantic.

How wrong you can be about people, Robin, his eyes smiled from a masked face and the doctor in me diagnosed Parkinson's disease, By your accent I took you for a G&T man, he proclaimed as he sipped his Martini.

As I left Windsong to cook and eat my dinner I extended an invitation to him to come on board Tremethick for a nightcap. His bland appearance did not prepare me for his question, Do you think that reincarnation is possible? asked with such ingenuous excitement as soon as he sat.

Possible but not probable, I replied.

What about the supernatural, do you think there are spirits?

Watching someone die, I hesitated to phrase my reply, A dead organism and a live one look the same, yet different. Perhaps a spirit leaving is as good an explanation as any.

You're a doctor, Robin; do you think that shamans have the power to heal?

How do you know I'm a doctor?

Tch, with a Celtic boat name that means doctor's house, he laughed at me. It was the first time the mask left his face and showed me that he did not have Parkinson's disease.

You use the word 'think', not 'believe,' I commented.

Believe is not a philosopher's word, he scorned, And what about shamans?

They are healers, as a western doctor my tradition is from war, our priests and apothecaries have been abandoned.

At Hot Spring Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands the Haida say that there is a bad spirit that possesses people staying there.

A visible spirit, a ghost? I asked a little anxiously.

They say that an unseen hand ties them to the bed in the night and it is terrifying so they say.

I shivered and his eyes smiled at me. I needed a diversion and asked, Were you born around here?

That was all the bait he needed to start his fascinating history. Matti was part aboriginal from his mother, Mary Wilson and his father, Matti Kurrika, the man who founded Sointula on Malcolm Island in 1900. At sunrise he finished his story, a story that started with his strange possession by the spirit of Jojo and ended with a personal tragedy at Viner Sound.

In 1991, Windsong was found beached on the Indian reserve at Viner Sound. The cabin, in immaculate order, his books still on the shelf and the logs for 1990-91 showed that he had arrived three days before Windsong was found. A safety deposit box key for a bank in Port McNeill was placed on the chart table. When opened, the box contained the logbooks for 1960 to 1970. Matti's body was never recovered.

Anyone who visits Viner Sound on Gilford Island and enters the narrow channel to the Indian reserve will find a snug harbor; hear the echoes as the kingfisher crosses from one side of the cove to the other. Alone in the quiet dark of evening you will know you are not alone although our concept of madness will prevent a sane man from divulging this secret. In 1996 I was anchored in the cove at Viner Sound. I turned into my bunk at dark to read. I seemed unable to concentrate, then Matti's voice instructed, 'Robin, tell my story.'

Finnish Settlement at Malcolm Island Suffers a Terrible Calamity.

Fire Breaks Out in a House Containing Over a Hundred People.

Eleven Unfortunates Lose Their Lives and Seventeen Are Injured.

From our correspondant, Vancouver, B.C., Feb 2nd - Thursday evening witnessed a grim tragedy with dire results to the Finnish settlers on Malcolm Island. The news was brought down by Matti Kurrika. In a terrible fire, which broke out while men were at a meeting in a large dwelling, in which 24 families were living, 11 persons were burned to death and 17 injured.

President Kurrika jumped from the building and was stunned. After he came to, a bundle struck his feet, he stooped and picked it up, and Found it was a baby rubbing its eyes and unhurt. It had been thrown from the second story. The mother was saved by jumping.

Chapter 1

Possession by the spirit of Jojo

Windsong sailed into Viner Sound from Hornet Passage in late afternoon. A narrow gut at the end of the sound separates Mount Dunsterville from the Carrington Hills. Mount Dunsterville rose up 2,000 feet off Windsong's port bow and the Carrington Hills less steeply off her starboard beam. Both sides built of purple-gray granite walls with evergreen trees growing precariously from the cracks on their stony shelves; between them an aisle of a great cathedral unobstructed by choir or altar, yet decorated for Christmas.

Matti remembered standing beside Michael, his Captain, mentor and friend from the war, at the East End of Ely cathedral as he had stared with awe at its unobstructed magnificence. In the Lady Chapel he viewed the ceiling through a mirror reflecting the intricate filigree that splayed out from the columns like a roof of a forest; an image that made him long to be back on the northwest coast of his youth where the fronds of the huge cedar trees roof the forest glade.

The river at the head of the sound wound its way through the clam bed mud at low tide. A green midden just above the beach marked the site of an abandoned Indian village. Before reaching the clam bed shelf, Matti hauled his sloop to port into the snug cove and went forward to drop his anchor into 24 feet of water. He felt the anchor touch the soft sandy bottom and grab. Windsong swung into the wind and Matti dropped the fluttering mainsail.

Matti furled the mainsail onto the boom and shouted, Hoy, hoy, hoy, to bring the cove alive with echoes from the granite walls. Matti froze at the rasping cry of a kingfisher as it crossed the cove. He stood motionless believing in his invisibility just as the hunter uncles of his youth taught the boys. A sound that rang in the ears of his dog whose black Labrador face looked at Matti through the hatch, Come, boy, Matti said as he drew the dinghy alongside. The dog moved his Great Dane body gracefully up the steps and leapt down into the bow. Three years had passed since Matti first held the small bundle in his arms with no expectation of the size to come. He tied the dinghy painter to a log as the dog bounded along the beach, barked and the sound echoed back. The dog pricked up his ears in expectation of company. When a puppy he was all black save his pink stomach and that prompted his uninspired name.

Come, heel, Blackie, Matti called to control his dog.

Matti sat in his cockpit with contentment savoring the mixed aromas of his stew bubbling on his stove and the tobacco smoke from his pipe. He had not been back here to the village since the 1930s. The village was abandoned during the war when Shaman Fool proclaimed that bad spirits haunted the area. The shaman advised the people to stay away and Matti now saw that the forest had already reclaimed the area with few of the old long houses still standing.

Shamans, Matti mumbled his scorn of those witch doctors of his youth.

Blackie put his head on Matti's knees and whimpered, You feel the bad spirits? Matti asked his companion with a ruffle of his black head.

If Matti had been asked that question before the war he would have scoffed and not deigned to answer. He had been brought up to fear the shamans, fear their power. At school in Alert Bay he had been taught the Christian belief in an all-powerful God, a god who would punish him for his earthly sins. He had come to think that both beliefs were crazy. Michael, his Captain and friend in the war, had told him to swap the word 'belief ' for the word 'think' because there was good reason for thinking about any phenomenon, religion or other people's beliefs, as long as you kept an open mind. In his post war sojourns at the Indian villages of the northwest coast tracing his origins from where his grandparents hailed, he had listened to the myths and legends of his relatives at Wrangell close to the mouth of the Stikine River and at Masset at the north end of the Queen Charlotte Islands with a renewed interest. His grandmother was born at Wrangell, into the house of a Tlingit chief and his grandfather was from the abandoned Haida village at Kiusta.

Matti put Blackie's food down before he sat to eat his evening meal in Windsong's tidy cabin. His war service in the SAS had made him organize the little space available to him with four men in or under one armored jeep. His cabin was a luxury of space in comparison. With Michael and two Kwakiutl boys, they had roamed behind enemy lines from North Africa to Sicily, Italy and France.

As Matti washed the dishes, he turned to look out of the hatch with a sense of company, voices in the air; no one visible outside; echoes perhaps? Reception too poor from his radio, he settled to read his book. Blackie left his basket and put his head on Matti's knees. The dog whimpered.

Matti tried to move his hand to stroke the dog's head but his body was rooted to the spot. As he tried to struggle against unseen tethers, a voice inside his head spoke to him as if the voice was his own. A scene revealed to him and a story told as if he, Matti, was a movie camera: the put-put of an Easthope engine heard as his eyes looked back at his brother, Lad, in the small wooden clinker boat.

Big Lad, my brother, at the tiller of our small boat, an engine putters us along the sound towards shore. I look over my shoulder and see that we are headed for a small beach. He smiles at me as he cuts the engine, takes a paddle to guide us into the beach. He nods at me to go over the bow. I take the painter and jump into the shallow water to pull the bow up the beach grasping the short bowsprit carved in the stylized shape of a sculpin. The name on the bow, 'Alunem', Lad instructs me with familiar ease as he hands me the tarpaulin. I set it up as a temporary shelter while he brings up the supplies from the boat to camp the night. He lights the fire; I glean for firewood along the small beach. Once the billycan is boiling he takes two live crabs and drops them into the boiling water, each giving out a little screech of objection.

After supper Lad smokes his pipe propped against a large cedar tree within nature's cathedral walls and we watch the moon rise up over the distant land. The moon's reflection sparkles on the stained glass water ruffled by a land breeze, a breeze that brightens the glow from the dying embers of our fire. A blissful peace meditates between us suspended like the moon, but motionless in time. A strange whooshing sound comes from the sea to make him hide his pipe and throw a cover over the fire. We stare out at the apparition; a huge whale has broken the surface of the sea and wallows; a clanking sound before people start to move on the whale's back.

Lad's shrill of a kingfisher warns me of danger; freeze, be absolutely still. A canoe glides towards us, a single man paddles the craft and he passes less than a hundred yards from us before heading out to the men launching a boat from the submarine. I count five men get in and row with the canoe alongside towards the narrow gut, then pass out of our sight. A single man rows the boat back to the submarine. The boat makes three trips into the gut taking seven men to shore with supplies before the boat is taken back onto the submarine, a clanking sound again before the men disappear from sight. The submarine turns silently and slowly heads out into the deep water of the sound and disappears under the surface of the sea.

Blackie sat on his haunches, his head cocked to one side and his ears pricked up as Matti opened his eyes.

What was all that about? Matti asked his companion.

Matti reached for a towel to wipe the cold sweat from his brow. He felt a dark chill in the cabin in spite of the heat from his Dickenson diesel stove. Lethargy made him turn in early to sleep in his forward bunk.

In the morning Matti pondered his strange vision as he washed in seawater much as he had done since a child, although soap replaced urine as a cleansing agent. He responded to Blackie's gruff woof and rowed ashore. He sat on a driftwood log while Blackie took his morning run. His vision had been unlike a dream and it remained clear in his memory with the colors, dark green of the trees, gray sand on the beach and the red trim on the boat.

Matti steered the dinghy out of the gut into Viner Sound as Blackie kept watch at the prow. He turned to starboard and took a course close to the small beach. As he turned to go back to Windsong he caught sight of another small beach on the opposite side and as he beached the dinghy he experienced a strong sense of Deja vu. He saw Blackie run along the beach and disappear into the forest. He sat with his back to a large cedar tree feeling an unusual familiarity with the place and imagined a submarine surface in the sound ahead of him. A smile of self-scorn opened his lips.

When Blackie started to bark in the forest behind him, Matti joined the dog, standing in the thick underbrush, his tail wagging and his face a picture of alertness.

What you found, fella? Matti asked as he waded through the salal. He stood beside a lap strake bow just visible beneath the moss and rotting wood. Matti followed the gunwale forward and uncovered a small bowsprit, the carving of a sculpin still identifiable in spite of the rotten state of the wood. He followed the keel back removing the moss and unearthed a rusty propeller shaft, no engine or propeller but the shaft was in line with the keel. He returned to inspect the bow and under the moss found the name still visible, Alunem; Wolf, his own family emblem.

Chapter 2

Stephen

Windsong nudged against the dock at Echo Bay as the current swept them beam on against it. Blackie bounded ashore before Matti had fixed the mooring lines and rushed up the ramp to greet Martha coming out of the store. Matti was expecting the morning flight to deliver his friend, Stephen Donner, for his yearly charter of Windsong.

Martha and Matti walked up to the store with arms around each other's waists and as she looked up into his eyes, her face still shone at him with the mischief of her youth in spite of her older, courser skin and crow's feet.

Flight's grounded until tomorrow, she told him with a squeeze.

Why? Matti asked, Fog or weather?

Mechanical, she said, a word spoken without any effort to hide her pleasure.

Blackie, he shouted and the dog came to heel, Back to Viner Sound, eh Blackie? he teased Martha and was rewarded with a playful dig in the ribs.

In the store after lunch, Matti was attracted to the display of books for sale. He picked up a folio of Indian stories printed on a Gestetner copying machine.

Martha, what's this book? Matti asked as he opened the copy, The conversion of Fool?

Those guys at the school did it for the children.

What guys?

Teachers from the Seattle Museum where they took our totem poles, Martha's voice did not hide her contempt for those who had stolen her heritage, They teach in the village school.

Isn't it good that they teach the children?

Okay, but our people should not have sold our heritage to a museum, Martha said bitterly.

Matti took the book to a chair and opened the cover, an old sepia photograph at the top of the page; Shaman Fool dressed in the cedar bark tasseled garb of his shamanic calling; and Matti remembered those eyes that seemed to search into his soul.

Do they mean Shaman Fool in the village? he called out to Martha.

Yes, Caring-well's teacher.

Caring-well, he said under his breath.

One of those poignant moments when the brain brings a memory out of the blue to haunt him with a picture of his cousin walking ahead of him. Her long black hair held in a neat braid above her trim waist and hips, her strong legs powered her up the hill to Shaman Fool's house to continue her instruction. When he called to her she stopped, turned and looked at him, her head shaking in response to his plea to abandon her quest and join him. She was the passion of his life; a passion that did not die until the brutality of war wiped out the youthful memories from his brain. Shaman Fool took her under his wing and instructed her. With a ceremony in the shaman's cave at Viner Sound, he starved and purged her until she was close to death. Then he revived her to be reborn as Shaman Caring-well. His friend, Stephen, had gone with Shaman Fool and his two novices to observe their conversion. Their fast of many days was aided by their consumption of an extract of Devil's Club bark that purged them. Stephen told Matti how they had writhed on the ground as if struck by an epileptic convulsion. Their mouths foamed with frothy saliva before they both lay still on the ground. Stephen had been convinced that both were dead. Stephen described how Shaman Fool had lifted young Caring-well's head to wet her dry tongue with an aliquot of water that started her slow revival.

Within the matrix of the story of Shaman Fool's conversion, Matti recognized the story of the Ghost people that his mother had told him as a child about the Chief who found a wolf with a deer bone in its mouth that was stuck so that his mouth was held open. The Chief made some rope out of twisted cedar roots, placed it around the bone and pulled out the deer bone. The wolf rewarded the Chief by showing him where he could catch seals for his people. Matti's mother was related to the Tlingit of Wrangell Island and he had inherited the Wolf dance from her.

A weird feeling hit Matti in the stomach, his vision from Jojo so clear in his memory nauseated him. He closed his eyes to think, but the story of Shaman Fool drew him back to read again until he finished the narrative.

Shaman Fool had returned both novices to the village. He presented Matti's cousin to Chief Bell as Shaman Caring-well to be a healer for the Tsawatenok people. The elders accepted Shaman Caring-well as their healer and sorcerer. Some weeks later Shaman Fool presented the boy to Chief Joseph as Shaman Life-giver, healer for the Koeksotenok people.

Matti knit his brow in distress as he read of Shaman Fool's power conferred by his teaching of his novice cousin, still upset by the memory of beauty spoilt by religious tradition. Oh yes, Matti thought, the villagers of Gwyasdums are afraid of Caring-well, her power over them real in their imaginations. He shook his head and his eyes went back to the page.

Matti closed the book and remembered the submarine appear out of the sea in his vision. He smiled and stood to take Blackie down to Windsong and prepare for Stephen's arrival next morning.

Matti moved Martha's clammy head from digging into his shoulder. He puffed her pillow, let her head sink into its soft goose down and then pushed the bedclothes down his chest. He placed his hands behind his head, 'I can never sleep after exercise,' a self-confession to bring a smile of contentment.

Matti remembered Martha, his young stepsister, sitting on the rocks at Mamalilaculla on Village Island; she was the fourteen-year-old daughter of his latest 'uncle', another uncle lover for his mother. Matti had promised to tryst with Martha, a promise extracted as a bribe for her silence. The memory always made him guffaw, one of those sexual encounters of his younger days when visiting a wife whose husband was away fishing or hunting.

On this occasion the treachery of Martha's plot unfolded in the early hours of the morning when he searched the top of the bedding for his clothes. In the half-light of dawn he could see the young wife convulsed with mirth as he vainly searched. A low whistle to attract his attention, another urgent whisper from the young wife's sister, Matti, he's on the beach!

Matti sprang out of bed, muffled laughter all around the house as he darted about hoping to find his clothes, and then lunging at every blanket securely held in the owner's hands.

Hurry Matti, for God's sake, hurry, another anxious appeal to make him fly out of the back door of the house in a state of nature, running as fast as he could for his own back door.

Martha sat at the kitchen table with a broad grin on her face as she admired his body. Matti's clothes neatly folded and stacked before her. She made him come close to claim his clothes and pushed them to one side as he grabbed for them and ran her fingers down his chest, her eyes intent on his pecker.

Not here, he gasped as she caressed.

Meet me then, her eyes danced with mischief, At the rocks.

When?

Sunrise? she suggested and he nodded.

Martha's cunning determination to earn this tryst with him came as a surprise. She had been such a shy young girl four years before when they had first met. He could hardly credit her with the mind behind the intricate plan to get her way with him; the blatancy of her bribe.

If I refuse? he had asked with amusement.

Her husband will know.

Martha shifted her position, turned in her sleep, coughed before she settled back into a deep sleep. As tonight, they always enjoyed their brief encounters and over the years there had never been a suggestion of permanence on her side. Marriage? Matti would have run a mile if she, or any other woman, had raised that topic.

Who's for Echo Bay? the pilot called out to the group of four passengers standing on the Government dock at Campbell River.

Stephen Donner handed his tote bag to the pilot to stow at the rear of the Otter aircraft. The baggage stowed first in, last out and Stephen turned to his companion, Thanks for your help, Jack, he said to the Curator of the Campbell River Museum, See you on my way back.

Stephen boarded the aircraft and took the rear seat as the pilot turned from his seat, Quite the milk run today, folks, he said and looked at Stephen, Port Neville, Port Harvey and Minstrel Island before we get to Echo Bay.

Stephen raised his hand in response as the roar of the engine expunged all chance of further conversation. He closed his eyes and imagined Matti's bland face. They had been friends since the thirties when he went to the aboriginal village of Gwyasdums on Gilford Island as a graduate student. Chief Bell singled Matti out to guide him through those first weeks of his research; strange for a Chief to choose a half-breed for the task; those men and women despised by natives and whites alike. He smiled at his recollection of those long arguments about Matti's beautiful cousin, a novice shaman studying with Shaman Fool. His graduate studies Supervisor sent a letter of introduction to the great shaman that started him on course for a thesis entitled, 'Shamanism among the Northwest Coast American Aboriginal People.' He remembered Matti's scorn that labeled all shamans as suffering from Dementia Praecox, as Schizophrenia was named at that time; the creepy feeling they emanated described by early Psychiatrists as diagnostic. Matti's scorn generated as much by her refusal to give way to his amorous advances as to her dedication to her religion. His friendship with Matti had cemented over the next three years whenever Matti returned to the village from those harsh work camps of the dirty thirties. He had been saddened by Matti's uneducated intelligence, his training as a shipwright wasted by lack of employment; ground down by uncaring governance. The Second World War changed all that.

Stephen approached the power of the supernatural as an academic, a collector of facts. Shaman Fool and his teaching of the two novices who became Caring-well and Life-giver after their rebirth had impressed him. His work with the shamans continued after his thesis and each year he chartered Matti and Windsong to visit various aboriginal villages where shamanism was still practiced.

At Port Neville, the Otter aircraft drew alongside the Government dock at the Hansen's place. Two of the passengers disembarked and Stephen smiled at Dolly, Matti's sister, as she boarded.

Stephen, she greeted, Matti meeting you?

At Echo Bay.

Dolly was the lynch pin of Matti's extended family. A stout jolly woman who had held the family together at Gilford Island during her mother's many liaisons with stepfathers. Children, like Martha, joined her family and Dolly nurtured them, still nurtured all the off spring at her house in the village. She loved them and welcomed them all to her ample bosom although no push over with youngsters whose disrespect was rewarded with hard swats across their backsides.

Is that Jason's boat? Stephen asked.

Been on another binge, Dolly said calmly, Put him about.

Is he coming back to the village?

Going fishing again, more money, Dolly sighed as she shook her head, Vicious circle!

Young men signed onto fishing boats as crew to earn their share of the rich harvest of salmon or halibut; in port they headed for the tavern to drink away their share and carouse with the women. There was no change to their behavior after marriage for the many that became caught up in the power of their addiction to alcohol, both natives and whites the same.

Blackie lay at Matti's feet in Martha's kitchen, his head rose and ears pricked forward. He gave a gruff woof and trotted to the door.

Must be Stephen's plane, Matti said rising from his chair.

Don't hear it, Martha said.

The sound reached them as the aircraft rounded the rock and headed into the small bay skimming the sea and settled down like a cormorant just short of the dock. Matti helped Stephen down with his tote bag before he saw his sister.

Dolly, he said surprised at her arrival.

Matti, she replied hugging him, Jason!

Scorn at her son transmitted with just one word.

Matti had lost count of the number of times he had tried to reason with Jason.

Welcome, Stephen, he said taking his old friend's hand, I'll stow these, you go up, Martha has lunch for you, heel Blackie.

Martha saw Dolly get down from the plane and added extra stock to the soup. She turned to greet them, Nice surprise, she said to Dolly, Stephen, how are you?

Fine, Martha, he leant forward to peck her cheek.

How is he, Martha? Dolly asked.

Not himself, she replied.

Not been since the war.

Never talks about it.

Never.

Martha stirred the soup as she pondered her quiet, secretive occasional lover. All the raucous fun of those days at Gwyasdums in the thirties had been buried by his war. She had hardly seen him when he was employed at a boat works in Steveston. Then his long sojourn up the coast parted them for even longer periods; a stranger since his return, preoccupied with himself and uncommunicative. But he had never been one to talk things over or share his introvert deliberations.

Might tell Stephen, Dolly said.

Possibly, Stephen replied, You know Matti as well as I do; only find out when he's ready. Sometimes.

Blackie trotted into the kitchen and all discussion of Matti ceased.

Ho, Matti, just reminiscing those days at Gwayasdums when we were young, Stephen joked to make Martha chortle.

Matti acknowledged his levity with, Huh, and inquired, Where do you wish to visit? he raised his eyebrows at Stephen, Only six days now, I guess.

Gwayasdums is the only place I must visit, to talk to Caring-well again, Stephen winced a little as he said it acknowledging Matti's aversion to his cousin's sorcery and shamanism.

The village of Gwayasdums on the Western aspect of Gilford Island has a long history going back before the white men arrived on the coast. The Koeksotenok people were the first to inhabit this shore at their winter village. Later five other nations built their houses at the village. In 1835 the Hudsons Bay Company survey estimated that some fourteen hundred people occupied this winter village, with the Mamalilakala and Koeksotenok tribes having the largest populations.

In 1857, a war party of Bella Coola ravaged the village and killed all but seven of the Koeksotenok living at the village. The Kwakiutl nations retaliated in a raid on Bella Coola and brought heads back to the Fort Rupert village. The chiefs displayed the scalped heads of their captives on poles in front of their houses. The much-prized scalps were cured and kept in special cedar bent boxes as trophies of war and the bones of the dead used by their shamans for sorcery against their Bella Coola enemies. One of those Bella Coola 'sugarloaf' skulls has survived and resides in the British Museum in the J. K. Lord collection.

The Koeksotenok population never recovered from this slaughter. The ravages of small pox and venereal diseases brought to the West Coast by the European men had already reduced their surviving population. Measles and tuberculosis claimed many victims that led to a further reduction in the aboriginal population. In 1881, the newly appointed Kwawkewlth Agency of the British Columbia Government called for a census of the various tribes. By 1886, the Tsawatenok nation contributed the largest population to the village. In 1916, the Agency reorganized the Indian Reserves and gave the village of Gwayasdums to Tsawatenok people.

As other aboriginal villages were abandoned due to dwindling populations and the ravages of the great influenza epidemic, the village of Gwayasdums became the home for surviving Koeksotenok, Tsawatenok, Hahuamis and Guauaenok nations. When Matti's mother, Mary Wilson, joined her daughter in 1933, the population of all the Kwakiutl was at a low point and only 123 people were living at the village.

The population recovered slowly over the next generation and houses from the Port Hardy Canadian Air Force base were brought to the village in 1950 to replace the old rat infested buildings. Outhouses were built, a school started, a clean water supply piped to outdoor faucets and a new float built just the previous year allowed Matti to dock Windsong at the village for Stephen and Dolly to disembark.

Caring-well sat cross-legged on her mat rocking to the beat of the drums of her assistants. Her eyes were closed as if in a trance. She sensed Stephen's presence in the room and her hands rose from her lap, her eyes still shut, Enough, she said to silence the drums, Welcome, Stephen, she said. One of her assistants rolled out a mat and Stephen sat opposite Caring-well.

Thank you, Caring-well, he said.

Caring-well waved her thin arms to dismiss her assistants and they left her side. She waited until they were out of her house, I do not want them to hear.

Stephen knew that her assistants acted as informants for Chief Joseph, and his shaman, Life-giver. But then Life-giver's assistants gave her news of Koeksotenok activities for her to report to Chief Bell. Political leaks were alive and well in the village.

Stephen settled on his mat and waited for her usual friendly chatter. Anecdotes of her sorcery for people who wanted to punish a neighbor, an adulterer, a liar or a cheat. Many villagers brought small effigies for her to stick with needles and bring pain onto their victims. Indeed if justified Caring-well had ways and means of making life uncomfortable for an individual. Then she regaled Stephen with stories of her use of psychosurgery to heal the frightened of their hypochondriasis; magic learned from Shaman Fool. But there were phenomena that Stephen could not explain when she claimed to have knowledge from transportation.

They're back again at Blunden village, she said, her eyes on Stephen flashed her anger.

The looters you mean?

Caring-well nodded, And at Karlukwees.

For years curiosity seekers had been to village burial sights to steal the burial paraphernalia from the cedar boxes. Cedar burial boxes placed high up on the branches of trees at Blunden Harbor or layered on the treeless burial islands at Karlukwees that allowed the wind to transport the spirit of the dead to Transformer. The value of artifacts fetched attractive prices for natives or whites alike. For some time Caring-well gave vent to her anger.

You left this village?

I visited there, yes, she replied and her anger cleared, You doubt my ability, Stephen, she said teasingly.

Not doubt, Caring-well, he said seriously, It is beyond my ken.

Matti walked with Dolly along the street and could not hide his irritation at the