Before his final daughter was born, a child he would never see, Yeikoo.shk’ lived like a fish. During the last months of his wife’s pregnancy, a steady, daily rain raised the waters over the banks of the creeks and streams. The trails flooded up to the village homes, and he laughed when the coho slapped their tails in the muddy pools at his doorway. Some mornings while his wife slept, Yeikoo.shk’ stepped out of bed and grabbed the nearest salmon swimming on the floor, took out his knife, and slit it throat to belly, the long strand of roe glistening like berries at dawn. He would slurp the viscous mess in one long gulp, the eggs rolling off his fingers and dripping down his chin, and then throw the rest of the fish through the doorway into the street, the gravest sin. Raven and bear and the poorest of the clan fed on the corpses that floated away.
When the waters had receded, but still weeks before his final daughter’s birth, the father-to-be traversed the forests to the village of Hoonah in search of spawning fish. The salty memory of roe on his lips enticed him like the smell of a woman. A few men had built a stone fish trap in the sea, and late that night, Yeikoo.shk’ stole out under no moon, to borrow a few eggs. Even in the darkness, he could feel the slippery bodies wriggling in the rocks, and with delicate fingertips, he sensed the telltale bulge of a gravid female. He teethed his knife to free the huge fish. As he grabbed it by the belly, the fish snapped like a whip and with one quick blow from its tail, it knocked the blade deep into his tongue. Swearing through the blood and pain, he slipped and dashed his head against the stones as the salmon swam off. The men of Hoonah found him next morning, his blood and life drained through the mouth, running off with the tide.
“A sad story,” the old man said. “Bad luck to the man who never meets his offspring, and sadder still for the daughter who never claps eyes on her old man.”
I placed my index finger against my lips and indicated with a nod for the woman to continue uninterrupted.
After her father left it, the world welcomed his final daughter. Dropped to the earth from between her mother’s legs, she was wet and slick as any fish. When wrapped and swaddled, she was perfect. Her parents had thought they were through with having babies and, in fact, had named the child that had been born before this baby Youngest of the Daughters. This child, when it came time to give her a name, was called Shax’saani S’ee—or Youngest Daughter’s Doll, for she looked just like a doll, bound in her cradleboard, eyes wide and searching the cloudy cold sky as if waiting for someone to return. The four older sisters and five older brothers always thought of her as simply S’ee, and they spoiled and babied her all of her life, becoming little parents themselves, so that poor S’ee had to contend not only with five mothers and five fathers, but with her mother’s people in the Frog clan, who treated her as a communal doll, perhaps out of sympathy for the widow with ten children. More than the others, she was a child of the village, but that does not belie the possibility that even villages can be as dysfunctional as a family isolated and on its own. She may have been better off with a little less attention.
When she came to know the true story of her father, S’ee laughed at the punch line of the man caught by the salmon. She had no fond memories—not even the sound of his voice or the smell of his skin—so he was no more than an illustrative figure in a moral tale, and thus of no consequence to her. Days and nights were spent at her mother’s side, with her sisters hovering nearby and all the Frog clan at potlatch or beading blankets for their doll, a life in idleness, tempered only by the bitter rains of winter and the blackflies of short summers. As one by one the girls were married off, S’ee grew closest to Shax’saani Keek’, the next youngest daughter. They went everywhere together from the beginning, and through the years Shax’saani led her doll over the hurdles of childhood, beckoned her into adolescence.
So it goes that these two sisters, young women of sixteen and thirteen, ventured forth one late summer morning to gather berries and talk of boys. A pair of dogs, Chewing Ribs and Curly Tail, accompanied them through the wilderness, trotting ahead to chase hares flushed from the brambles. The sun rose and brightened the sky to yellow, and the sisters soon wearied of their task and escaped to the shade, popping sweet berries into their mouths while they dreamt of their futures.
“They say you are destined for Man-in-the-Moon, who everyone calls just plain D’is, for his face is round as the very moon,” S’ee teased her sister.
“Like an owl with a man’s nose,” Shax’saani replied. “Like a plate with two eyes and a bump in the middle.”
“The moon in the man. He’s not for you, sister. For you, someone handsome, but for me, someone strong.”