Free Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Page B

Government (no matter what the party) in saving this country and ourselves from ruin.
    That out of his system, Swan goes on to record that the Indians’ dogs killed two skunks in the lumber pile.
    He next has to take three days out to supervise the digging of the schoolhouse cellar, introducing the Makah laborers to the wheelbarrow, which they think a hilarious machine. Then a drain to carry the runoff from the schoolhouse roof needs to be finished. Jimmy Claplanhoo comes down with a cough so severe that Swan worries the ailment may be consumption. The Makahs put on a raucous tamanoas ceremony to boost Jimmy’s health, just as a gale rips across Neah Bay. Crows tip over Swan’s rain gauge. He sets to work on them with shotgun and strychnine. Makahs from the village of Waatch arrive for Swan to dispense potatoes to. One of the Makah men brings his two-year-old son to school to learn the alphabet and creates uproar by spanking the tot for not mastering it. A number of the Indians embark on a drinking spree which gets rougher as it progresses day by day. There are knife wounds and one combatant smashes three canoes with a stone before other partyers knock him out with a brick.
    At risk here was more than a few cedar hulls.
This drunken frolic shows how easily these people can be excited to deeds of violence,
Swan’s pen scolds.
We are powerless under the present circumstances either to prevent these drunken scraps or protect ourselves in case of an attack. But I have not the least apprehension of any difficulty if liquor is kept from them.
    Now Swan catches cold;
I have not felt so sick for a year certainly.
Jimmy Claplanhoo’s health mends and he arrives back at school. The agency’s winter larder begins to be questionable:
Sometimes we are very short of provisions and have to depend on our beef barrel, then again the Indians will bring in such quantities of fish and game that there is a surfeit.
The agency cattle start dying. Cold, damp weather holds and holds. On December 16
the most remarkable fall of rain I have ever known
, gurgling to the top of his rain gauges twice,’ a total of nearly seven inches. A number of the Indians begin another knockabout drinking party. One participant this time is blasted in the arm with a dragoon pistol and another asks to borrow a shovel from Swan.
He went to where old Flattery Jack, Sixey’s father had been buried and dug up one of his arm bones which was taken and bound on as splints to the arm of Sixey. The Indians believing that the bone from the father’s arm would cure.
    A weakened bull from the staggering agency herd has to be put in the basement of the schoolhouse for shelter. He takes out a window on his way in. Another party of Makahs from Waatch troops in to purchase a bride:
They came in the house and rigged themselves up with masks and feathers and all went to Whattie’s house to make their trade.
    Five weeks since Jimmy Claplanhoo inaugurated the schoolhouse, Webster at last sails into the bay with some supplies, and an audible sigh lifts from the ledger pages as Swan turns his pen toward the coming of Christmas and the making of a plum pudding.

Day Fifteen
    The strop of this weather on the days, each one brought identically keen, tingling. Rainless hours after rainless hours glimmering past, it has dawned on me how extraordinary is this dry cold time, as if I were living in the Montana Rockies again but without the clouting mountain-hurled wind. There is a bright becalmed feel, a kind of disbelief the winter has about itself. Other years, by now I might have shrugged almost without noticing into our regional cloak of rain and cloud, the season’s garment of interesting texture and of patterned pleasant sound as well. “Rain again,” a friend growls. “Right,” I say and smile absently, listening for the
boommm
and
whoommm
of foghorns out in the murk of Puget Sound. But through yesterday morning the temperature hung