I Heard The Owl Call My Name

There is flooding in August, and on his patrols of nearby villages, Mark learns of villagers who spent thousands of dollars on alcohol and gambling. When he is returning to Kingcome, he encounters an American yachting party who ask for a tour of the village. One of the women in the party says of the Cedar-man on the totem pole: “Look—look at the funny man at the bottom of the totem pole” (101), and later one asks him how he can tell the Indians apart. Mark replies that it is by the same way she can tell her own friends apart. The Kingcome villagers get drunk over the weekend, and Mrs. Hudson is disapproving. Towards the end of the month, an English anthropologist visits. She is imperious and insists on mispronouncing the name of the tribe, even when Mark tries to correct her. She laments that Mark has changed the church by insulating it, and she spends 10 days asking the villagers questions. She says she has completed her research with the exception of learning about the myth of the raven. T.P. offers to tell it to her on the way to her seaplane, but she becomes seasick and does not absorb it. At the end of the month, the Bishop writes Mark to say that the tribe had spent $6,000 on liquor and that when men came to his door saying they had no money to live on, to tell them to hunt and fish.

In late summer, Mark and Jim transport Gordon and the other boys who are going off to school, and though the boys appear eager to leave, “[t]he old knew this was another bit of the slow dying of all they held dear in their own race” (106). After they take the boys in Mark’s boat, he completes his exams qualifying him to handle the boat alone and meets his sister for lunch. Her eyes are sad, and after when Mark meets up with college friends, he can’t relate to them. One of his friends asks Mark how he handles an increasingly materialist society that believes it has no need of faith, and Mark replies that in an Indian society everyone is interdependent, and even the atheists and agnostics value the community of the church. One of Mark’s old professors observes that he’s beginning to become like Caleb. Caleb meets up with Mark and Jim to pick up the boys and place them with their host families. When Mark is returning to Kingcome, he feels as if he is returning home. When he arrives, Chief Eddy informs him that everyone is financially broke because of the liquor, but no one is dead. He tells Mark that the town drunk, Sam, had excellent luck in fishing and spent most of the money on liquor, but the remainder on a washing machine, which he promptly lost in the river because he was drunk. His wife hit him with a skillet and locked him out of the house until he agreed to let their daughter Ellie go to school. When Mark returns to the vicarage, it has been cleaned and there is warm food waiting for him.

Marta asks Mark to dinner, and afterward, they are joined by the elders, T.P. and Peter among them. They ask Mark for help cleaning up the old burying ground because many of the coffins have fallen from the trees and the bodies are littered on the ground. Mark helps the men of the tribe bury the bodies. Peter says that now the dead are safe from the hamatsa, the cannibal spirit, and relates the myth to Mark. In the myth, a young man is bewitched by the cannibal man and terrorizes the people of his village. He falls in love with a girl but is still not cured, so the villagers killed him with magic, and he returns to the woods. Peter says that during the ceremonial dance during his father’s time, the young man performing it would leave the village for four days and then come out of the woods at night, carrying a real body from the burying grounds on the second night. He says that in his father’s day, anyone who laughed or made a mistake during the dance would be killed, and Peter implies that the dancer actually bit people. Mark reflects that he will never know what it was like in the time of the hamatsa but believes that the collective forgetting of the village means that the hamatsa was finally free of his “holy madness” (118).

In the fall, Caleb writes to report that Gordon is having a difficult time adjusting to life outside the village but soon writes again to say that he is doing well. The village believes Gordon will return at the end of his year of study. Gordon returns around Christmas, now a handsome young man in city clothes, to the consternation of the village. T.P., Gordon’s grandfather, and his uncle tell Mark that they plan to throw a wedding for Gordon and Keetah and to give him a lucrative position during the fishing season. They ask Mark to convince Gordon to agree to return, but Mark refuses. Gordon decides that he wants to remain outside the village and go to university, saying that he has changed too much to return. Mark assures him that someday he will be able to live in both worlds. Keetah decides to go with Gordon and try to live in the outside world, but Jim tells Mark he is certain she will return. Mark replies that Keetah must return by choice, and not because she has failed; otherwise, she will never be able to live in either world.

After Christmas Caleb arrives on a hospital ship. He reflects on the way all the coastal Indians in the region began to form their identities through myth and explains that the Cedar-man is common to them all because of the importance of the cedar tree as a material. Clothing, shelter, canoes, tools, and ceremonial masks were all made from cedar. He describes visiting an abandoned Indian village and finding moss-covered, decaying totems in the woods. He tells Mark that this is also the fate of Kingcome, and the young people will follow in Gordon’s path. Mark agrees but tells Caleb that Caleb has been like the Cedar-man to the tribe. Caleb says he hopes it is true, and if it is, it is also true of Mark.