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Authors: Rosanne Parry

Written in Stone

BOOK: Written in Stone
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ALSO BY ROSANNE PARRY

Heart of a Shepherd
Second Fiddle

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2013 by Rosanne Parry
Jacket art copyright © 2013 by Richard Tuschman
Map art copyright © 2013 by Luiz Vilela

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parry, Rosanne.
Written in stone / Rosanne Parry. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “A young girl in a Pacific Northwest Native American tribe in the 1920s must deal with the death of her father and the loss of her tribe’s traditional ways.”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-375-98534-8
1. Makah Indians—Juvenile fiction. [1. Makah Indians—Fiction.
2. Indians of North America—Northwest, Pacific—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction.
4. Northwest, Pacific—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P248Wr 2013 [Fic]— dc23 2012012491

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

For my fifth-grade class at Taholah Elementary—

Ancy Grover, Ilene Terry, Phyllis Comenout, Corinne Snell, Rosie Dan, Jeremy Mail, Chris Baller, Jeffrey Capoeman, Anthony Seymour, Shiva Capoeman, Greg Martinez,

Johnny Eselin, and David McCrory—

who asked for a book of their own. I never forgot, and after all these years, this story is for you and all of your children and even someday your grandchildren.

I don’t need my eyes to tell me what’s coming, and I don’t need my great-granddaughter’s hand on my elbow to keep me from stumbling. I know my way to the beach. For eighty-nine years, these feet have known the land of my tribe. I won’t fall now. Not today. Not after waiting so long.

I let Ruby guide me, my grandson’s girl, proud to have the honor of bringing old Pearl to the whale, our whale. She takes me at an easy pace, one hand under my arm and the other holding her drumsticks. She taps some hip-hop tune from the radio on the leg of her jeans. She doesn’t hear the sound of death in that beat: the death cough of white disease, the gasp of a drowning man. She only knows it makes her father crazy when she taps it on the walls of their house.

On the beach, the shouting of reporters from Seattle,
Vancouver, and Victoria drowns out the sound I’ve been waiting for, praying for. But the wind brings something I have forgotten, the smell—sharp like smoke, but clean—of a whale. My hands tremble because I feel it rise up in me, one of the old songs, the one that welcomes the whale home. I lift my head and let it out. Ruby chants in, but the Makah words halt in her mouth as if she were a baby.

There was a time when we all knew this song. There was a time when we were kings of the ocean, and travelers told grand stories about our wealth of furs, copper, and whale oil. I remember the last time we sang this song. It was after the Great War, before the vote, before roads and radio and power lines took us places we did not imagine we would go. I was thirteen years old, as stubborn as any nose-pierced, black-leather-wearing, drum-playing great-granddaughter of mine.

I remember that girl.

1
Waiting for the Whale

I should have been praying that spring day. I should have been fasting for a successful whale hunt, but I was running. I ran along the wet sand with a harpoon in hand. The gray whale raised up his barnacle-speckled head, and raised it again to offer his life for the life of the tribe. I planted my feet and hurled the harpoon.

Thunk! My stick hit the log dead center and splashed into the sea.

I shouted in triumph and stamped my bare feet at the edge of the waves. A dozen steps into the whale dance, I froze. Dancing was forbidden during a whale hunt, and singing too. My father depended on it. I imagined him standing at the bow of the whaling canoe while my uncle and cousins paddled. He would hold his harpoon ready.
The round cedar bark hat would shade his weather-lined eyes: my papa, Victor Carver, the best whaler of the Makah, probably the best Indian whaler on the whole Pacific coast.

He would find us a whale, find one when no one else could. I pictured him leaping and striking and pulling the cedar rope. No depth or speed or strength would outlast him. He would bring home thousands of pounds of meat and hundreds of barrels of oil to feed our village and light our lamps. Sea captains knew his name and anchored off our shore to buy oil for cash money.

BOOK: Written in Stone
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