Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig

the Armada-surplus anchor chain hung fat with seaweed), the surprising long clean amidship straightness of the 49th parallel across upper Midwest and West. This patchwork ship of states is, by chance, prowing eastward. Or as I prefer to think of it, forecastle and bow are awallow in the Atlantic while great lifting tides gather beneath our Pacific portion of the craft.
    Trace to the last of this land vessel at the westernmost reach of the state of Washington, to the final briefest tacked-on deck-line of peninsula. There is Cape Flattery, where the Makahs of James G. Swan’s years lived and where I am traveling today.
    Towns thin down abruptly along this farthest-west promontory. In the sixty-five-mile stretch beyond Port Angeles only three—Clallam Bay; within sight of there, Sekiu; then after fifteen final miles of dodgy road, Neah Bay—and each one tightly hugs some cove in the northern shoreline of the Olympic Peninsula, as if grateful to have been rolled ashore out of the cold wallowing waters of the Strait.
    The tiny communities exist on logging and seasonal salmon fishing and, as such places do, produce ample vacant time for their citizens to eye one another. The man beside me this morning at the Sekiu café counter was working his way through hash browns, sunnyside eggs, toast, sausage, coffee, and vehemence.
    â€œThat kid,” he grumped across the room to the waitress, “that kid never did make much of a showing for himself around here. Glad to see him gone.” An instant later, of someone else: “Never liked that lamebrained SOB anyway.” As fork and tongue flashed, a close contest whether his meal or the local population would be chomped fine first.
    At Neah Bay, now at midmorning, I am the one looked at, for my red beard and black watch cap. The Makahs of Neah Bay have been studying odd white faces in their streets for the past two hundred years. One story suggests that an early Russian sailing vessel smashed ashore at Cape Flattery and Swan believed that those survivors and probably other voyagers had left their genetic calling cards. (Some Makahs, he noted,
have black hair; very dark brown eyes, almost black; high cheek-bones, and dark copper-colored skin; others have reddish hair, and a few, particularly among the children, light flaxen locks.
...) It is definite that Spanish mariners arrived in the late eighteenth century to build a small clay-brick fort, which seems to have lasted about as long as it took them to stack it together. Every so often Swan and a few interested Indians would poke around in the Spanish shards, and the midden would stir up righteousness in him:
How different our position from theirs. They came to conquer. We are here to render benefit.
    After a hundred and twenty years as a reservation people under United States governance the Makahs might care to argue that point of benefit. Neah Bay meets the visitor as a splatter of weather-whipped houses, despite its age a tentative town seemingly pinned into place by the heavy government buildings at its corners: Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, Coast Guard enclave, Air Force base on the opposite neck of the peninsula. One building stands out alone in grace, a high-roofed museum built by the tribal council to display the finds from an archaeological dig southward along the coast at Cape Alava. Despite the museum’s brave thrust and the bulky federal presence, the forested hills which crowd the bay seem simply to be waiting until the right moonless night to take back the townsite.
    I have brought with me the copied portions of Swan’s diaries where he writes of Cape Flattery’s place in the tribal geography of the North Pacific. Remoteness and the empty expanses of Strait and ocean ought to insulate such a site, but that was not the case at all when Swan lived among the Neah Bay villagers in the early 1860s. He discovered them carrying on a complicated war of nerves, and occasionally biceps, which