Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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many dorsal fins! For weeks I had hoped to get a glimpse of an orca, a minke, a fin, humpback or grey whale, but what was this? Scannah, the legendary five-finned killer whale, was a monster of myth, or so I’d been told.
Still unnerved and a bit spooked by the encounter we’d had offshore, Axel and I arrived on the deserted island. The haunting eyes of a dozen mortuary poles lining the beach stared at us unblinking as we hauled the double kayak up an ancient canoe launch cleared of large rocks. Those eyes continued to follow us in an eerie gaze as we moved reverently about the site.
Ninstints in 1973 was awe-inspiring. It was like coming upon Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Tikal in Guatemala before the archaeologists arrived to cut back the jungles. Unlike museum display poles with their chemically treated wood in climate-controlled confines, nature made it beautifully clear these poles belonged here. The trees that embraced them, the roots that split them and the stunning arrangements of ferns, flowers, salal and moss that adorned them—all made it apparent that the forest was reclaiming a part of itself.
Ninstints boasts the world’s largest display of totem poles in their original setting, and although the site hadn’t yet been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Site, it seemed just a matter of time before it would become known to the world. What makes this fortress island such a world-class attraction is not the poles but the wilderness in which they are set. A visitor can look out in any direction and see the same unspoiled scenes the inhabitants of the island saw for thousands of years—a setting hauntingly alive and still echoing with the spirits and drum songs of those who lived here more than a century ago. The legendary Haida transformations from human to animal form and back again seemed not only plausible here, they appeared to occur before our eyes.
If there is any sense of conventional reality on Haida Gwaii, it is blurred at the best of times. The merciless moisture and relentless fog of the west coast creeps in so often from the surrounding seas to obscure the headlands and highlands that the landscape itself becomes a phantom, an ever-changing figment of the imagination. If we in our cynical, scientific age can find power and spirit afoot here, one can only imagine the effects it had on the Haida, a people who did not deny or cast aspersions on the supernatural. To them, the great supernatural beasts and transformed forces that rule these isles are real, like Kostan, the giant crab that can crush a fifty-foot Haida freight canoe with a single claw, or Goghits, humans that revert to a state of primal wild being and hide in haunting forests of towering trees.
One evening while Axel was slowly cooking supper over an open fire, I hiked across the island to view the sunset on the wild west side. It was a savage scene. Wind-tortured trees gripped bare rock headlands where waves, built up over the world’s largest ocean, exploded like bombs and roared their defiance at an island that had the audacity to interrupt their passage. Eagles cried in the dying light of day as they circled cliffs covered in eerie lichen that glowed blood red as if the setting sun had suddenly dissolved and been cast like wet watercolours across the granite faces. Racing against darkness to return to camp, I was surprised to see Axel approaching me on the trail. He must have been worried, I thought, and I called out to him, “Hi Axel, I’m fine. I was just …” He was no longer there; a raven cried and flew off into the forest canopy. I raced back to camp to find Axel asleep beside the fire.
It was in this weirdly affected state that Axel and I left Red Cod Island and began the long journey back to Burnaby Narrows. There we parted ways. I was kayaking on my own now and would be for months to come. I crossed Juan Perez Sound to Hotspring Island, a paradise on earth if there ever was one. I lingered a few extra days to soak in the soothing geothermal springs set in natural rock grottos overlooking the spectacular islands and distant mountains that rimmed the sound. I was totally alone, but there was life everywhere: soaring eagles, barking seals, a gaggle of squawking gulls. Clever ravens cracked and opened clams by repeatedly dropping them from great heights onto the rocky shore and hyper little hummingbirds buzz-bombed the pool I soaked in as they darted from flower to flower, sipping the sweet nectars of red columbine and multi-hued foxglove flourishing early in the season thanks to the geothermal warmth. Every so often one needs moments of pure bliss.
Rather than return north through the protected waters of Darwin Sound, as Glenn and I had done on our southbound journey, I decided to paddle the more exposed east coast around Lyell Island. When the tide turned against me at midday I pulled into shore to wait out the ebb at a place marked on my chart as Windy Bay. Nothing was particularly outstanding about this bay compared to countless others I had stopped to explore along the way—at least, not until I set foot in the forest.
Standing beside a massive western red cedar at Windy Bay in 1973, I was awed by the majesty and antiquity of South Moresby’s temperate rainforests. Richard Krieger photo
Here was the temperate rainforest of fairy tales, an enchanting garden of massive moss-draped trees: western red cedars, yellow cypress, Sitka spruce and western hemlock with bases three to six metres in diameter. Fifty metres overhead, the crowns of these conifers formed a cathedral dome where shafts of sunlight penetrated the mist and the sea breeze sent a perpetual rain of needles shimmering to the ground. There was little, if any, understorey here; instead, a deep, luxurious mantle of moss in subtle shades of green carpeted the ground and a few fallen forest giants. Windy Creek flowed through this valley like a living artery; its crystal-clear waters babbled and flowed over clean spawning gravels and formed back eddies behind fallen trees where several species of salmon fry found shelter. Eagles perched in trees overhead eagerly awaited the return of the salmon migration, and black bear trails, already centuries old before I walked them, meandered along the stream bank.
Windy Creek flows through the moss-smothered forests of Lyell Island like a living artery.
I found myself mesmerized, listening in reverence to the calls of the varied thrush and Pacific wren as if they were a Gregorian chant in a great cathedral. It was hours before I returned to the beach and began gathering firewood to cook some bannock for dinner. I still had another hour or two before the tide would flood again and I could resume my journey north.
I had combed the entire length of the beach for firewood and was in the process of flipping the last of the bannock in the pan when an eagle landed in a tree behind me and started calling relentlessly for its mate. I scanned the skies for some time in vain, but soon discovered that lying on the beach less than ten metres from my fire site was a dead eagle. I was overwhelmed. The eagle’s body still felt warm so it couldn’t have been dead for long. I wondered how I could have missed this transpiring in the time I was on the beach.
I took the eagle carcass in my hands and was astonished at the size of the wingspan. Knowing that the Queen Charlotte Islands’ museum was nearing completion in Skidegate and realizing that I was just a few days’ paddle from returning there, I decided to try saving the carcass so it could be used as a stuffed museum specimen. It would be a shame, I reasoned, to kill an eagle for this purpose when this one was so perfectly intact.
I made a small offering to the eagle’s spirit, then carefully cut open and disembowelled the body cavity and restuffed it with damp moss. I had learned to keep fish fresh for some time with this same procedure in Alaska, so I felt confident the carcass would not spoil before I reached Skidegate.
The eagle’s mate was still crying from the treetop when I loaded up the carcass in the stern of my kayak and paddled out of the bay. The sea was flat calm without a breath of wind that evening, and I offered up a prayer to the eagle’s spirit to give my kayak the wings of an eagle. A fresh, steady breeze came up out of the southeast and I figured I could make Vertical Point before dark if I made use of my sail. A white bedsheet I had used for bedding throughout my Central American sojourn was now doubling as a square-rigged sail whenever the winds were favourable. I had drawn a stylized Haida eagle head on the sheet with a waterproof felt pen some weeks earlier, so it seemed fitting that moment to hoist sail.
Ten nautical miles away and out of sight to me, Percy Williams, the chief councillor of Skidegate, had set anchor for the night on the north side of Vertical Point. Wanting to stretch his legs