Free Klee Wyck by Emily Carr

cultivate a few patches of garden. When they went away again the stare in the empty hollows of the totem eyes followed them across the sea, as the mournful eyes of chained dogs follow their retreating masters.
    Just one carved face smiled in the village of Yan. It was on a low mortuary pole and was that of a man wearing a very, very high hat of honour. The grin showed his every tooth. On the pole which stood next sat a great wooden eagle . He looked down his nose with a dour expression as a big sister looks when a little sister laughs in church.
    The first point at the end of Yan beach was low and covered with coarse rushes. Over it you could see other headlands—point after point … jutting out, on and on … beyond the wide sweep of Yan beach to the edge of the world.
    There was lots of work for me to do in Yan. I went down the beach far away from the Indians. At first it was hot, but by and by haze came creeping over the farther points, blotting them out one after the other as if it were suddenly aware that you had been allowed to see too much. The mist came nearer and nearer till it caught Yan too in its woolly whiteness. It stole my totem poles; only the closest ones were left and they were just grey streaks in the mist. I saw myself as a wet rag sticking up in a tub of suds. When the woolly mist began to thread and fall down in rain I went to find the woman.
    She had opened one of the houses and was sitting on the floor close to a low fire. The baby was asleep in her lap. Under her shawl she and the child were one big heap in the half-dark of the house. The young girl hugged her knees and looked into the fire. I sat in to warm myself and my clothes steamed. The fire hissed and crackled at us.
    I said to the woman, “How old is your baby?”
    “Ten month. He not my baby. That,” pointing to the girl, “not my chile too.”
    “Whom do they belong to?”
    “Me. One woman give to me. All my chiles die—I got lots, lots dead baby. My fliend solly me ’cause I got no more chile so she give this an’ this for mine.”
    “Gave her children away? Didn’t she love them?”
    “She love plenty lots. She cly, cly—no eat—no sleep—cly, cly—all time cly.”
    “Then why did she give her children away?”
    “I big fliend for that woman—she solly me—she got lots more baby, so she give this and this for me.”
    She folded the sleeping child in her shawl and laid him down. Then she lifted up some loose boards lying on the earth floor and there was a pit. She knelt, dipped her hand in and pulled out an axe. Then she brought wood from the beach and chopped as many sticks as we had used for our fire. She laid them near the fire stones, and put the axe in the pit and covered it again. That done, she put the fire out carefully and padlocked the door.
    The girl child guiding the little canoe with the flour-sack sail slipped us back through the quiet mist to Masset .

C HA-ATL
    While I was staying at the missionary’s house, waiting to find someone to take me to Cha-atl, the missionary got a farm girl, with no ankles and no sense of humour, to stay there with me. She was to keep me company, and to avoid scandal, because the missionary’s wife and family were away. The girl had a good enough heart stowed away in an ox-like body. Her name was Maria.
    Jimmie, a Haida Indian, had a good boat, and he agreed to take me to Cha-atl, so he and his wife Louisa, Maria and I all started off in the boat. I took my sheep-dog and Louisa took her cat.
    We made a short stop at a little island where there were a few totem poles and a great smell because of all the dogfish thrown up on the beach and putrefying in the sun. Then we went on till we got to the long narrow Skidegate Inlet.
    The tips of the fresh young pines made circles of pale green from the wide base of each tree to the top. They looked like multitudes of little ladies in crinolines trooping down the bank.
    The day was hot and still. Eagles circled in the sky and porpoises