Bone River Read Free Page B

me, cluttering every surface and corner, each holding a story I never forgot: those Bela Coola masks hanging high up on the wall from Papa’s last trip north; those stone sinkers found on a day when Papa agreed with me how graceful the pelicans were as they flew low along the water. Wooden Chinook salmon hooks and spindle whorls, and strings of the narrow, cone-shaped dentalium shells the Indians had used as money, called
hiaqua
, piled in coils of clean white and smoky gray and hanging from nearly every knob. Suddenly I missed him so much, and all the hours we’d spent together, digging for relics in the mud, all the ways he’d been both mentor and parent, that twinkle in his eyes when he smiled at some lesson I’d learned particularly well...
    How melancholy I was today. Birthdays always brought that out in me, but this year seemed especially bad. It was just the storm, I told myself, trying to shake it off, shoving my feet into a pair of boots and grabbing my old wool coat, along with a pair of thick gloves and my wide-brimmed oystering hat, and going out into the day.
    The air was crisp and expectant. The storm had swept away the clouds, and the sun was shining, a brisk, chill breeze blowing off the water, summer’s warmth gone for good. Sodden leaves from the alders and maples scattered over the grass, gold and orange and brown. Fallen branches lay cracked and splintered all about. Edna grazed contentedly in the yard, already milked. I stepped through the clutter on the narrow porch, beaten old chairs and piles of nets and an old pair of long oystering tongs, and went down the stairs to the yard.
    I was at the river before I realized I was heading toward it. I stared down into the churning water, the long grass of the bank trailing in its eddies, the currents at the shore lapping more roughly with the stirring up of the storm and the added rain. Usually I could see to the bottom here at the shore, but not this morning; it was murky and mysterious today.
    It was then I heard the noise that had me glancing toward the mouth of the river where it plunged into Shoalwater Bay. There, only a few yards away, stood a great blue heron, ruffling its feathers—the sound I’d heard. I’d never been so close to one before, and I froze, catching my breath in surprise. The two of us stared at each other, his dark eye and long yellow beak, the shaggy feathered tuft of his chest. For long moments I didn’t move, but then, suddenly, he lifted his dark wings. I was so close the air they stirred pulsed against my skin. I watched him fly off toward the bay, and it was a moment before I dropped my gaze again, before I noticed the strangeness of where he’d been standing.
    The bank had fallen away. This was not uncommon; the river was constantly eroding the banks. But this cut was large—at leastthree feet of the shore had fallen into the river, and it looked odd, cleanly shored, as if the chunk had been cut away in one swipe of a knife, not bits and pieces falling and crumbling the way it usually did. I picked up the hem of my skirt—already sodden from the wet grass, as were my boots—and stepped down to see. The sheared clay bank did not look like clay, but something...strange. Beneath a thin layer of clay was something mottled, discolored, with light and dark striations. Hesitantly, I scraped it with my gloved finger. It didn’t give at all when I pressed it.
    It was narrowly ridged, nothing natural. Something was buried here, and I was on my knees in the mud before I knew it, heedless of my skirts or the river, scraping at it gingerly at first, and then, as my excitement grew, scrabbling like an animal. I could not get at it quickly enough. I bent to dig around it, but there was no
around
. When I scraped away, there was more, and more, a wall of ridges and coils that stretched a foot and a half wide before I decided I couldn’t get at it with my hands alone.
    I ran back to the house for a shovel and pick, half-fearful that