A NORTH PACIFIC ISLE.
THE smoke of the forest fires lay in heavy folds along the mountain sides, and a faint haze was steaming up in misty patches from the sea. The ship was shouldering her way between long oily rollers ; the great stern-wheel had churned up a broad white wake like a road of snow ; on either side of her were ropes of gleaming kelp and floating masses of glistering seaweed. The snowy summit of the distant Olympians stood out against the blue sky like rough-hewn silver; long-beaked canoes with tarnished sails were threading in and out through a, maze of spruce-green islands ; the Siwash ducks were skimming over the ripples in flocks of five and six, and a heron stood erect under a yellow promontory that ran out from the mainland. The tide was running from seven to ten knots as we entered the mouth of the pass, boiling into hollow whirlpools that would suck down a canoe stern foremost ; there was a big red rock-cod floating along- side, with his air-bladder blown up like a child's toy balloon, smothered by the turmoil in his own element; and amid the gurgle and wash of seething water you could hear a strange dry drizzle, like fine sand wind-blown against glass. Here and there were bare cliffs of naked sandstone, but wherever there was a thin skin of earth the firs and shrubs seemed to spring up from a yellow carpet of scanty herbage, and, deeper in, the mountain ridges were a blaze of vivid foliage, with cool green vistas between the trees at their base.
The landing-stage was close to an Indian rancherie, a wooden shed a hundred feet long, with a sloping roof and a passage-way some eight feet broad down the middle, on either side of which the different families have their separate fire- places, but no division-walls. The " town " consisted of a country store, a small hotel, and a post-office half-hidden in an orchard of pears and apples and plum-trees laden down with bursting fruit. Between the trees were strange grassy mounds, the burial-ground of a prehistoric race, which the postmaster means to excavate one of these days. He stands six foot three, as straight as a pine, and has lived in this country for some forty years on and off ; wherefore he is full of Indian lore, and can tell you queer tales of nights spent on the mountains, when the medicine men would go into trances by the camp fire and see visions ; and of sea fights in the old days, when the islanders would hurl from sealskin slings "stones as big as your two fists," that crashed into a man's head, or drove through the bottom of a canoe. He owned a collection of arrow-points, and stone chisels, and gouges, and pipes carved out of horn, and an axe-head made of green jade that was polished to the smoothness of steel; the edge of it was transparent,_ but keen and hard enough to cut glass. Several archaeologists, he said, had wished to open up the old cemetery, but he would not allow it to be touched until such time as he could attend to the work himself. Meanwhile he pointed out in two of the mounds a curious cradle-like arrangement of head-stones, undoubtedly artificial, that seemed to testify to the truth of his conjecture. Forty years ago a party of white men had been massacred on the sand-strip below the orchard, and his predecessor, with ghastly cynicism, had built himself a garden fence of skulls and crossbones.
The road to the fruit ranche wound through a regular park, under a long avenue of down-dropping cedars, and gigantic firs, and glossy-leaved madronos, with dense thickets of thimble-berry, and flowering currant, and bracken, and sword- fern. For acres the ground was carpeted with salal (Gatd- theria Shallon), and from the boughs of the trees hung long tresses of green and grey moss ; great woodpeckers flew fear- lessly close to our heads, and the blue grouse rose with a startling rattle of wings, like pheasants in an English covert. Faint breaths of warm air seemed to brush past one's face with the softness of floss silk ; the men were slow and hesi- tating of speech; they seemed to think it toil enough to lie and listen to the murmuring surge of the waves and to watch the fruit ripening in the orchards. Meals were served in the hotel at any time by a Chinaman with a yellow, old-ivory smile, who bad once, in a sudden fit of revulsion, thrown up his job and cooked for three months for the sealers " away up north " in Alaskan seas. He saved up three hundred dollars, lost it all in one wild night at " black-jack " in a Victorian gambling-hell, and then returned to this land of drowsyhed. From the edge of the landing-stage you could look down through ten or fifteen feet of crystal-clear water, and see five-rayed purple star-fish crawling very slowly along the bottom, and sea- urchins, and darting minnows ; and the kelp sprang up in a tapering, serpentine stalk to a floating bulb of brown india- rubber, and then dropped again in a tangle of long streaming fronds like a mermaid's hair. The foot of the cliff was hollowed out by the waves, and at low tide there was a bare floor of ribbed rocks, with little shining pools drying up in the sun.
One afternoon a black, venomous, four-funnelled torpedo- boat destroyer rushed down the pass, with a white flurry of foam amidships, the half-human moan from her siren echoing away from cliff to cliff; and then she seemed to vanish in a sort of dark smoky mist against the background of sombre pines on the further shore. It was like the passing of an Afrite, fraught with presage of doom, the more impressive because of her swift invisibility. While the yellow hull of a Nanaimo steamer was clear and conspicuous in the straits beyond, the Sparrowhawk ' had managed to efface herself in a smudgy blur, just as a cuttle-fish will fade away in a cloud of ink ; she was practically out of sight while the ripple of her wake was washing up the beach at our feet. At sunset on a calm night the water in the inlet turned to deep dark-blue, in which the shadows of the mountains lay like purple clouds, broken here and there by widening pools of gold where some leaping salmon had ruffled the surface so as to catch the sun's rays ; and after dark the seals would leave a wake of white fire in the phosphorescent ripples between the islands. It was on one of these that we noticed a striking instance of protective colouring one August afternoon. We were sailing slowly, almost drifting, under the lee of a tall rocky crag, when some one remarked that a curious opening in one of the jagged peaks, through which you could see daylight, was shaped like the legs of a sheep ; and then he picked out by degrees the outline of two sheep, standing side by side, but matching their surroundings so perfectly that it was minutes before the rest of the crew could see them at all, although we were within easy gunshot. Four American girls, overworked school-teachers, were camping in a tent together on the western shore, where they lived in the open air all day, and bathed, and rowed, and cooked clams on red-hot stones under piles of seaweed, and sang camping songs by the light of Japanese lanterns among the trees at night. They were a strange mixture of fearless- ness and prudery, for though they lived this life for two months, and proudly showed off the interior arrangements of their tent, yet the whole four together thought it daringly improper to enter a bachelor household to borrow a book without the protection of a chaperon.
But it was a very Castle of Indolence. It is possible that people worked there occasionally—the roads and rustic bridges would prove that—but we never saw them doing it. They had not the energy even to amuse themselves ; nobody read any- thing ; and the men only smoked at rare intervals on account of the exertion involved in filling and lighting a pipe. They began to organise a concert in honour of some visitors from Victoria a fortnight before their arrival; the visitors re- mained a month, and the concert came off two weeks after they had left. And even then nobody turned up from the neigh- bouring island, because the invited guests could not make up their minds which of three,particular boats they would choose for making the passage of less than a mile. It is only fair to say that this is not quite so unreasonable as it looks, because the tide-rip raves and races between the rocky islets like a waterfall under certain conditions, and the yearly tide-table is the only work which the inhabitants conscientiously study. When a tree has to be felled they bore a two-and-a-half-inch auger-hole straight into the trunk some four feet from the ground, and then another hole of an inch and a half slanting down to meet the first. Into these they insert live charcoal, and blow it up with bellows, till the hapless trunk catches fire inside and smoulders, perhaps for twelve hours, perhaps for four or five days, bleeding pitch meanwhile on to the ground below, till at last the whole core is consumed, and the hollow
shell breaks off and falls from its own weight. It saves trouble perhaps, but it seems a cruel thing to do.
The returning steamer was four hours late on the day we left. Nobody complained; we simply sat on the beach and waited; it seemed the natural and proper thing to do. We were sorry to go, for a more restful Eden it would be hard to find ; but I think that we stepped on board with a certain sense of relief, for we had a depressing foreboding that if we missed that steamer we could never muster up the energy to catch another.
C. H. W.
Previous page
