Author’s note: To get the most out of this story, I recommend you first read the previous blog about the place. Thanks!
1785.
Sarah pulled the stiff water-proofed coat tighter around her body. It was her father’s and fit her like a tent. The cold rain came down in diagonal sheets. She huddled next to a log under a wooden door at the edge of a long strip of sandy beach littered with pebbles and driftwood. The ocean nipped at the shore in angry bursts and erupted in frenzied whitecaps across the strait. On the far side she could barely make out the dark outline of the Olympic Mountains. Beyond them, far to the south, was Fort Vancouver. Her home.
Why hadn’t I stayed there?
A twig snapped behind her. She twisted her body, causing a rivulet of water to pour from the coat onto her shirt and pants. The forest, thick with tall evergreens and beds of ferns, appeared dark as night even though it was mid-afternoon. She could see no movement within the gloom but nevertheless scrunched closer to the ground.
Her father, a hunter of animal pelts, worked both in forests and along the coasts. Several times a year he and several other men from the fort set sail to catch seals, sea lions, and, most coveted, sea otters, with their thick, silver-tipped fur. They would trade the pelts to merchants heading across the ocean to China. The trips would take weeks, even months. Sarah preferred her father over her mother, just as she preferred men’s work over that of women, and when he was gone, she missed him terribly. Three months earlier, she had turned fifteen. When he readied for another boating trip, she begged to go along, so much so that, against what he called his better judgment, he finally relented.
“Don’t let me regret this,” he warned when they boarded the boat.
And now he was dead, their boat sunk, and she, the only survivor, alone in a vast wilderness. Sarah brushed at the tears but could do nothing about the slash in her heart.
The hunt had gone well for the first couple of weeks. They circled Olympic Peninsula and crossed a strait to reach a forested coastline that some said was part of a large island. Hundreds of otters sunned on the beaches or cavorted in the shallow waters. Rejoicing in their good fortune, the men used harpoons and clubs to kill the animals, then skinned them on shore.
Sarah helped with the skinning, and even killed a few with a harpoon. “You’re as good as any of my boys,” one of the hunters told her. Her father smiled and patted her on the head. Though her hands were raw from the wet cold and crisscrossed with knife cuts, she nearly burst with pride.
“Pride cometh before a fall,” her mother had often admonished her. She must have been clairvoyant. On what was to be their final kill before returning to Fort Vancouver, the wind whipped up and fog became so thick she could scarcely make out the tips of her fingers. Suddenly, there was a thunderlike crack. The boat lurched, and the prow of another boat came to rest on its deck. Shouts of fury flared up around her, half in English, half in a foreign language, Spanish perhaps. The men began to fight each other, using fists, harpoons, and clubs.
One man clubbed her father, and he collapsed onto the deck in a heap. She started toward him, but her uncle held her back. “Wait.” He crept over to her father, examined him, pulled off his coat, and crept back. “He’s gone, nothing you can do.” With a strength forged by grief, he ripped the door from the room where they stored the pelts, then tossed it in the water. Wrapping the coat around her, he pushed her off the boat. “Go. Save yourself,” were his last words.
What good is being saved if everyone else is dead?
Once on the beach, she dragged the door to a log and, in her makeshift lean-to, fell in and out of sleep for the rest of the day and through the night. Several times, unknown forest sounds caused her to awake trembling.
When morning came, shining shafts of light streaked the forest. The rain had stopped. Moving the door, she got up and straightened her body. I wish I had died, too. She did her best to tamp down the panic in her stomach.
Something moved in the forest. Someone, she realized and stopped breathing. A girl around her age, with dark skin, wore a rough-hewn skirt and shawl. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and braided. The girl, moving closer, said something Sarah didn’t understand, though the words sounded kind. She seemed to be alone. When they were face-to-face, the girl stretched out a hand.
Sarah clutched it.
