earthquakes the Haida, like the Japanese, designed their homes to have no inflexible parts. Every piece of the structure had free movement within the grooves and notches that held it all together. A house could also be easily dismantled and moved to another location, yet another way of coping with changing food supply or security needs. To better cope with enemy raids and warfare, the houses were often so close together that one could not easily walk between them. This fortress effect required defence only on the farthest flanks to prevent war parties arriving by canoes from sneaking behind.
We left the ruins of Tanu to slowly work their way back into the earth and paddled into the most spectacular coastal wilderness I had ever seen. All the way down Darwin Sound and into Juan Perez Sound I couldn’t help but marvel at the astonishing density of eagle nests, the profusion of seabirds, falcons and marine mammals, and the stunning biodiversity of the tidal zone. The forest itself was the greatest feature, a wonderfully untouched ecosystem with age classes of trees ranging from a few months to several thousand years old. The ancient cedars, with their multiple dead tops bleached a lustrous silver grey, spoke of the antiquity of these post-ice age forests. Like the greying hairs of an old wise one, they spoke to the need for reverence and respect, something noticeably lacking in Northwest Coast forestry practices.
It took nearly a week to reach Burnaby Narrows and the small community of back-to-the-landers who resided there. Glenn’s dovetail-notched log cabin stood boldly on a high gravel bench just above all but the highest of tides. Only a few times a year did he have to move all of his belongings and himself to the upper loft while the tide inundated the house, he told me.
It is the rush of tides between Juan Perez Sound in the north and Skincuttle Inlet in the south that has always made Burnaby Narrows a choice place to live. As the tide ebbs, the Narrows present one of the richest and most spectacular life zones on the Pacific coast when thousands of miniature geysers squirt skyward as butter clams, little necks, geoducks, horse clams and cockles expel water from their siphons. At low tide the seabed becomes a kaleidoscope of colour with bat stars in every hue of the rainbow, sun stars in lavender and red, bright-red blood stars, and ochre, orange and purple pisaster starfish. Along the shoreline of the Narrows one can see evidence of thousands of years of Haida occupation represented by deep shell middens. The only trace of the village that once occupied this important site are these shell disposal sites and a small grove of crabapple trees growing in a clearing not far from Glenn’s cabin.
A great party was thrown at the cabin for our arrival and it was there I met Axel Waldhouse, an Eastern European immigrant to Canada who wanted to join me on my kayak journey south to Ninstints, a village on remote S’Gang Gwaay Llanagaay (Red Cod Island). It is the most intact ancient village on the entire Northwest Coast and I very much wanted to go there.
It was a wild and somewhat harrowing experience to paddle around the southern end of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago several days later and out to the exposed west coast with the highest recorded winds and wave action in all of Canada. Every feature of the landscape here reflected the fury of this coast: the wild, wind-sculptured trees, the flotsam and jetsam hurled deep into the forest and the splash zone of the rocky shore, void of vegetation ten to twenty metres above the tidal level. What people would have chosen this small, storm-lashed fortress for their home, we wondered as we paddled the huge Pacific swells toward the isolated island.
Axel and I were less than a kilometre from the island and lost in our own thoughts when something huge surfaced behind us as we paddled. A great black island of flesh rose from the depths, exhaled with a blast of air that showered us in a fine mist, and then rolled forward with one, two, three … far too 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
