Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley

      The Eagle’s Gift

      I wanted to leave Haida Gwaii from the moment I arrived. The Northland Navigation freighter pulled into the Masset dock near midnight and disembarked its half-dozen passengers amid a crowd of curious onlookers. The twice-weekly arrival appeared to be the biggest event in town, but the mood was surprisingly sombre given how few of those gathered at the dockside were actually sober.

      I strolled up the pier past a series of faceless aluminum-sided buildings that lined the length of Main Street, an absurdly wide boulevard void of any shade trees, shrubs or flowers. The town, from this vantage point, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fabled Misty Isles I’d been envisioning during my passage. The road ended abruptly—as if ordered to “halt!”—at a Canadian Forces military base, CFS Masset. I stopped under a lamppost to dig through my wallet in hopes of finding enough money to book passage back to the mainland on the return sailing. I was short; I would have to paddle.

      Resigned to my misfortune, I returned down Main Street and tried to view the village from a more positive angle. The military makeover was sadly apparent, but a few turn-of-the-century wood-frame houses and some well-kept gardens were nestled in here and there among the hideous to hint of the charms of an earlier era.

      I didn’t know it at the time, but Masset was once destined to be a hub of the Pacific Northwest. In the heady days before World War I, British railroad magnate Charles Hays conceived of a plan to make Prince Rupert Canada’s principal Pacific port and the terminus of his Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Vancouver would have been little more than a backwater, while Masset was expected to become an agricultural breadbasket to feed Prince Rupert’s great metropolis, envisioned at fifty thousand. The vast lowland bog from Masset to Tlell was parcelled out for settlement and some hardy pioneers dug drainage ditches by hand to try farming the muskeg. It never worked, and Hays’s dream died a sudden death too when the visionary went down on the Titanic in 1912. My own spirits, this June night sixty years later, had sunk almost as low.

      I was dog-tired after disembarking the ship, but I still had the kayak bags to deal with. I stashed them beside a road embankment near the BC Hydro office and made a hasty bed of cedar boughs under a grove of trees beside Masset Inlet. It was not a good sleep, with Saturday-night revellers racing by along the road above me and the tide rising up to my feet, so I awoke at first light to end the ordeal. Camouflaging the two kayak bags as best I could under logs and rocks, I shouldered my backpack and set off north along the road. I wanted to find a beach where I could camp for a few days while I sorted out my next move. Several kilometres later I walked into Haida Village, a long series of Indian Affairs dwellings fronting the road along Masset Inlet. A Haida man in his thirties was the only sign of life on the road this early Sunday morning. He staggered up to me, pulled out a folding knife and with glazed eyes and an unsteady bearing, introduced himself with the words: “I should slit your throat, you stinkin’ white man.” He was the first Islander to speak to me since I’d arrived, and I took this to be my official welcome.

      I remained calm and left my acquaintance staring drunkenly into the void where I encountered him, working my way presumably out of harm’s way to the beach just beyond the cemetery of the village. Here, finally, was food for the spirit. A majestic sweep of sand and gravel beach stretched more than 160 kilometres along the shores of Dixon Entrance and Hecate Strait. Breakers rolled endlessly down the long reach of shoreline, roaring like bowling balls down some infinite corridor. The air was heady with oxygen and the rich aromas of salt, seaweed, seabird droppings and the occasionally fishy burp from some offshore sea lion. Across the deep cobalt blue of Dixon Entrance, the southernmost islands of Southeast Alaska shimmered in the sun. This was the Queen Charlotte Islands (QCI) I had been hoping for, and I felt a great weight lifting from me, as if someone had come along to shoulder the bags of my kayak and gear. For six months and almost 10,000 kilometres of hitching, that kayak had hung around my neck like an albatross; now I would finally get it on the water where it belonged.

      I was feeling much more positive about the Islands now, and as if to bolster my spirits even more, the following afternoon the man who had threatened me was all smiles as I walked back through the village. It was as if he had been awaiting my return, though he seemed to recall nothing of our first encounter. He pointed to a doorway where an old Haida woman was looking at me. “She’s been expecting you to join her for lunch,” the man said pleasantly.

      “What?” I asked in utter astonishment. “Yesterday morning you wanted to slit my throat and now …” He acted as if he hadn’t heard me and went on his way. The old woman beckoned me inside.

      A traditional Haida feast had been set out by the woman’s grandchildren. There was barbecued salmon, fried halibut, razor clam fritters, steamed Dungeness crab, herring spawn on kelp, dried oolichan and oolichan grease, octopus, abalone, seal meat, wild berries, boiled potatoes and bannock. I’d never seen a spread like this in my life. You couldn’t order this in any restaurant in the world, and even if you could, few could afford it.

      The woman’s name was Eliza Abrahams. She was the oldest living Haida, and according to accounts I heard later, she was the most traditional. Eliza spoke little English but was bright and fluent in her own tongue. The two of us dined together and laughed and enjoyed each other’s company even though there was little common language between us. After we ate, far too much, she had her family go into her dresser drawers to bring out all of her button blankets and family heirloom regalia to set on my lap. “What’s happening here?” I finally felt compelled to ask one of Eliza’s attendants, even though I ran the risk of appearing rude.