Landfalls (19 page)

She was so young, after all—young enough to have bony shoulders and hips, to shriek when cannons went off, to flirt with a ship captain at dinner. The realization felt like a return to sanity, and in a moment he could divine the hours and days just ahead: the spectacle, hopefully successful, followed by a makeshift ball on the beach with such musicians as they had at their disposal. He would dance with her. Afterward, he would meaningfully press her hand and look into her eyes before delivering her to her husband. The evening would end with fireworks. Then the colonists would mount their horses and climb into their carriages and, like so many Cinderellas, return to their homes. Tears would be shed. Goodbyes and good nights would be shouted until they could no longer see or hear each other. And then his attention would return, finally and completely, to the expedition. To the dinner with his men tomorrow. To their promised day off. To seeing them all back on board, and then the departure. He felt enormous—what was that word Langle had used?—
optimism
, that was it. He could not wait to resume the voyage. The best parts of the expedition were yet to come. He returned the hat to Eleonora with a nod, then drew himself up as best he could in the press of people and addressed the crowd once more.

“We promised a French spectacle to follow the French dinner,” he cried. “This evening, our chief engineer, Monsieur de Monneron, and his worthy assistants”—he motioned down the hill toward Monneron and his men—“will attempt to re-create for you a demonstration made in 1783 before the king and queen of France. Some of you may be aware of the experiments conducted by the Montgolfier brothers.” There was a gasp of recognition from some in the assembly. “From the courtyards of Versailles to the shores of Chile, we offer you—flight.”

Lap
é
rouse nodded to Monneron and felt the crowd lean into him as Monneron bent down and lit a grate set on the ground between the barrels. At first there was nothing to see except for the backsides of Monneron and another crewman as they tended to an invisible fire. Then white smoke appeared, curling out from under the pile. Lap
é
rouse held his breath, forgetting even Eleonora's beguiling nearness, so anxious was he for the spectacle not to fail. After what seemed an interminable time, but must only have been a minute or two, there was a slight movement in the pile, as if something were inside and trying to come free, and then more movement, the pile growing larger over the fire, lifting itself. Now the uninitiated were gasping also, as the object took shape before them: a hot-air balloon. Made of tissue paper affixed to a double, inner layer of cloth, it was painted to resemble the Montgolfiers' famous balloon, sky blue and ringed with gold scrolling, fleurs-de-lis, eagles, and sun faces. Duch
é
de Vancy and his team of painters had done a marvelous job.

The balloon filled with the heated air, rising until it was as high as a house, then higher, as high as five grown men one on top of the other, and still it expanded, until it was nearly as wide as it was tall. Then it lifted clear of the barrels, and the four men assigned to control it took hold of the ropes, grunting and shouting—“More rope there!” “Steady!” “Watch the fire!”—and holding it in place so it could fill completely. Then at a signal from Monneron, they let go of their ropes in concert, and the paper and cloth dome soared into the sky. Great roars of approval came, not just from their amazed guests, but from the commoners on the beach, and then, like an echo, from the men waiting to discharge the fireworks in the longboats and those watching from the decks of the
Boussole
and the
Astrolabe
. The balloon traveled straight up at first, then caught a breeze from the ocean and began to drift inland, still climbing, climbing, till it was a bright blue dot against the darkening eastern sky.

“What will happen to it?” Eleonora asked.

Lap
é
rouse turned to look at her. Her eyes were very bright. “What do you mean, Do
ñ
a Eleonora?”

“Will it keep climbing into the sky? Forever?”

“No,” Lap
é
rouse said, turning back to look at the disappearing spectacle. It took him a moment to find it—shocking, how much smaller it had grown in just a few seconds. “No,” he repeated. “The air inside will gradually cool, or escape, and it will float back to earth. Sometimes they come down in one piece; but as often as not they are torn apart by winds, or snagged in high trees, or crash into mountainsides and are wrecked.”

She nodded gravely. “So it will not come back.”

“No,” he said. “It will never come back.”

Then, heeding the reedy call of strings and woodwinds played in the open, he offered her his arm and led the assembly down to the beach, where an area had been swept clear for their dancing pleasure.

 

FOUR

SNOW MEN

Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 1786

There is a big disagreement in my family about what happens if you drown and your body is never found. My aunts say that you are turned into a Land Otter. Land Otters come up out of the water, in the dark, and steal away the living. You cannot see them, but you can hear them—they whistle. We lie in our huts at night and listen for whistling, because we lost a canoe when we arrived for the salmon season, and afterward we found only four of the bodies.

My father and his brothers say it is true about the Land Otters everywhere else, but not here. Here, they say, if you drown you are turned into a bear and become a lookout for Kah Lituya. Kah Lituya is the jealous spirit of this place. He sleeps at the mouth of the bay and tries to capsize canoes when they pass. He turns the people who drown into bears and makes the bears watch for more canoes coming into the bay. The aunts say they know about Kah Lituya, they respect his jealousy, they just do not agree about him turning people into bears. Why, in this one place, they ask, would the power of the Land Otters mean nothing? My aunts want the bears to be just bears. They want the men to hunt the bears—there are so many of them—but Grandfather says no hunting bears this season because you do not know who you might be killing.

The argument was very noisy for a while, every night around the fire, the aunts and my father and his brothers, back and forth, back and forth, till one day Grandfather got so angry he made his slave smash up his best canoe to shame us. Then everyone was quiet, but they still disagreed. I never said anything, but I hope my father's people are right. I am less afraid of bears than I am of Land Otters. One of the bodies we never found was my cousin. I was supposed to marry him after the salmon season. If he is a bear he will be busy watching for canoes. But if he is a Land Otter he might come for me.

Then the Snow Men appeared, and new fighting began. The day they came with their two winged war canoes, we were still singing for our lost people, and that is a song you must never interrupt, but one person stopped singing, then another and another, and one of the children shouted, Look! Look! so of course we all stopped singing, and there in the bay were the largest canoes we had ever seen. Grandfather, who is almost blind, saw instead a giant raven, and shouted that it was Yehlh, the creator. We all ran into the woods, because you will turn to stone if you look at Yehlh with your eyes, and although we knew Grandfather could not see and that the canoes were canoes and not a raven, no one can say, Grandfather, you are blind, you are wrong.

I hid behind a rock and felt a tug at my back. It was my little cousin, pulling on my dress. I call him my little cousin even though we are almost the same age. He is always coughing, he is shorter than I am and much too skinny, and he has followed me around ever since his brother drowned, the one I was supposed to marry. He was holding a bit of my dress between his bony fingers and wheezing. I shook him off and punched him hard, in the arm. What was
that
for? he said, and his eyes got watery. I said, If you hang on to me or start crying, I will hit you again. So he stopped saying anything, and I was a little disappointed. I wanted to hit him some more. The aunts say I will have to marry this cousin now that his older brother is dead. But not till he is older.
If
he grows older. I am glad that now I will not have to marry till later. My other cousin was handsome and I felt proud to be promised to him. I just wished we could wait a little—maybe till next salmon season. My aunts laughed at me when I said so. Hush, they said, you are lucky to get a man like him, you do not make a man like that wait.

Now my little cousin stood trembling next to me, and I said, You need to think. My aunts are always saying this to me. You never think, they say, You need to think. But really, I am always thinking. What they mean is, Do what we tell you to, do it more, do it sooner—which has nothing to do with thinking. But when I told my cousin to think, I meant it. I said, What did you think you saw, before Grandfather said it was Yehlh? Two giant canoes? You saw them with your eyes, yes? And have you turned to stone? Look at your hands and feet—see, they are fine. Come, we will have another look. And he shrank back, shaking his head, but I rolled up some skunk cabbage leaves and gave them to him. What are you doing? he asked. I showed him how to look through the rolled-up leaves. I had heard Grandmother say once that it is safe to look at spirits if you look through a cabbage leaf.

We crept forward, and when my older brothers saw me they did the same, staying just behind us. When I looked through my rolled-up leaf, I said, They are giant canoes with wings, white wings, and little ants crawling all over, and my brothers ran to Grandfather to tell him what I said, and he nodded and told them they were brave. My little cousin frowned and said, But
you
are the one who is brave, you are the one who looked, not them, and I threatened to punch him again if he was not quiet.

Then we heard Grandfather tell my brothers that the ants were not ants, but tiny ravens, Yehlh's helpers, who would fly here to peck out their eyes, and my brothers who were so brave ran shouting into the trees, and my cousin laughed and looked through his skunk cabbage leaf and said, They are not ants, they are strange people. So I looked again, and he was right—they were men, climbing over the wings of the canoes. My cousin dropped his leaf and ran to Grandfather, who stood looking out with cloudy eyes, scaring everyone with his words and never feeling afraid himself. Grandfather, my cousin said, they are canoes filled with men, we will not die from looking, and it is she who knew it. He pointed to me and tried to say my name, but he started coughing, and for a while he could not stop. When he finally caught his breath, he spoke the rest of my name, but I pretended not to hear.

The canoes were so large they were like floating villages. The women and children watched from the hill while the men went out to meet them, and they came back with black metal and colorful beads and white food that looked like maggots that no one dared to eat, and told us that it was Snow Men. We had all heard of Snow Men, but none of us had seen them before except for one of our slaves. He said Snow Men had visited his people, and these men in the giant canoes looked like them, and he warned us about a powerful Snow Man weapon that made a noise like thunder and could kill a man a long way off. Grandfather was pleased by the slave's knowledge and told him he would be freed at the next potlatch. Then the aunts were unhappy because the man was their best worker, and the other slaves were jealous, so there was new unhappiness right after the Snow Men arrived.

But the real fighting did not start till a few days later. At first we were all excited. The Snow Men moved their canoes to the far side of an island in the bay and camped there. Our men and the older boys followed them during the day, and every night around the fire they would tell us what they saw: Snow Men climbing the ice rivers or scratching pictures on funny boards, cleaning their canoes or looking up at the sky through hard, hollow sticks, and my brother made us laugh by making
shwa la la la
sounds to imitate their talk. My other brother asked, What do Snow
Women
look like? and my uncle said, They do not have women, that is why they are here, to take our women. The aunts laughed and said, No, they are on a great hunt and they do not take women on their hunts, just like you. Then Father said some of the Snow Men go off into the woods with the Eagle women on the other side of the bay, and my uncle said, They are all ugly anyway, the Eagle women, and everyone laughed except for his wife, because she is an Eagle, and she refused that night to sleep by him, and then he was not laughing.

After a couple of days, though, the women became angry with the men for not catching salmon like they should and for trading what they did catch with the Snow Men for more beads and metal. The men started gambling with one another for the metal, and fighting when they lost, and spying on the Eagles across the bay, and getting angry when the Eagles got something from the Snow Men that they did not, and then there was fighting between our people and theirs. But when we were not fighting with one another or with the Eagles, everyone complained that the Snow Men were taking all of our fish and our otters without asking, and the men bragged each night about what they took from the Snow Men in return. Then there was fighting over
that
—Give that back, I saw that before you did, you stole it from under my mat, you liar, you son of bear-dung—all for strange-looking things you could not eat or wear, things no one knew how to use or what they were for. They even stole one of the Snow Men weapons—the slave was right, we saw them knock birds out of the sky, with a great noise—but no one could make it work.

One day, my brothers and some of the Eagle men snuck onto the island and came back with a large wooden container filled with juice that looked like blood and smelled like spoiled berries. The Snow Men drink this every day, they said, It may be the secret of their skill in canoe building. Your skin will turn white like theirs if you drink it, the aunts said, your hair will become wild and yellow. But my brothers and the Eagles tried it anyway. They spat it out right away—it burned their throats—but they kept sipping it little by little even when we told them to stop, and it must be poison, because it turned them all into noisy fools and then into retching fools.