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 after a long day of salmon trolling, he rowed ashore in his skiff and hiked across the narrow neck of land to hunt for deer. Scanning the beach unsuccessfully, he found himself gazing out to sea. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular; it was just a built-in Haida instinct that had helped his ancestors survive more than twelve thousand years on a coast where war parties arrived by sea.
What Percy had seen that evening completely baffled him, as he later recounted to me. It was not a war party, but a great eagle flying low over the water, its wings wet and glistening in the sun, and it was coming straight toward him. Although he had been a seaman all his life, Percy had never before seen a kayak, and the wing-like movement of the paddle blades catching the last rays of the setting sun and the large white, sheet sail depicting the head of an eagle had totally mystified him.
The sun had already set before I made my landing on the beach and began hauling my gear up above the high-tide line to make camp for the night. There in the twilight, amid the silver-grey beach logs, I was surprised to see a Haida man with a sweater as weathered and hair as grey as the old cedar log upon which he sat. People behave oddly when they’ve been out of the social loop for a while, so instead of the customary courteous hello, I said nothing. But I immediately thought, I want to show this man my eagle. I took the carcass from the kayak stern and carried it up the beach, holding it out with both arms proudly.
The old man stood, startled, and took a few steps back, all the while watching me intently. “Why do you bring me this eagle?” he said cautiously.
“Because there aren’t many left,” I responded without thinking.
For me, growing up in Michigan where DDT poisoning and habitat loss had decimated the North American bald eagle population, the statement was true. For Percy Williams, growing up in Skidegate where eagles on the beach are as common as pigeons in a city park, my statement was bewildering. Neither of us said anything further for some time, until finally we sat on a beach log and casually started talking about my journey and how extraordinary I found the Haida Islands. I expressed deep concern about the clear-cut logging I saw working its way progressively south and I lamented what was happening at Skedans. Skedans, it turned out, was the ancestral village of Percy’s mother, and as Haida trace their clan lineage matrilineally, it was his village as well. The logging concession had been sold, he told me, because Skidegate needed funds to build a new basketball court and community recreation facility for their youth. “We’ll never do that to a village site again,” Percy said, though he never let on that he was both a hereditary and elected chief of Skidegate. For me, our impromptu encounter was a moment in time soon forgotten; for Percy it proved profound, and would influence the course of Haida history.
ReDiscovery: The Eagle’s Gift film promotion featured Gerald Amos wearing Rediscovery regalia made from the same eagle carcass I had found at Windy Bay in 1973. Richard Krieger photo
The eagle carcass never did make it to the Queen Charlotte Islands’ museum. The museum society didn’t want it: Ottawa was supplying all their bird specimens fully stuffed and mounted. The Windy Bay eagle found its way to a storage freezer in Victoria’s Royal BC Museum, only to be returned to Haida Gwaii seven years later as part of the regalia donated to the Haida Gwaii Rediscovery Camp. I had never shared the eagle story with anyone so I was dumbfounded when Peter Prince, an independent filmmaker from Victoria (who now lives on Salt Spring Island), produced an award-winning documentary on Rediscovery that he titled ReDiscovery: The Eagle’s Gift. The promotional poster featured Gerald Amos, a Haida participant on Rediscovery, wearing the wings and body feathers of that same Windy Bay eagle.
It was then that I came to the realization that I was merely a player on the Haida Gwaii stage; the best I could do was bear witness to my own unaccountable involvement.
Chapter III
Drawing
