The Shadow Catcher

The word seemed to toll a knell between the two of them. They seemed to have stopped breathing and drawn themselves up even taller where they stood, already straight and dignified as regimental sergeants. They were dressed today, as they always were whenever she had seen them, in white men’s clothes, rough woven shirts with buttons, workmen’s pants dyed indigo, cheap leather boots, and one would not have guessed their Skokomish or Twana affiliation save for their hair which was black and thick and straight and long, and for the skin of their faces which looked like expensive glove leather, and for the fact that one of them wore a feather behind his ear and the other wore a feather in his rolled-up shirt cuff and both of them wore leather thongs around their necks braided around shells and ocean-polished sea glass. But now something hung between them in the air, between them and her, an intimation of who they were when they weren’t hiding behind cultural masks, or fear or mockery or stoicism, who they were when they spoke their minds and hearts, who they were when not seen through a white woman’s prism. One of them unshouldered his rifle and the other took the piece of paper she had drawn on from her and then held out his hand for the piece of charcoal. Clara gave it to him. The two Indians exchanged a glance between them and then the one with the charcoal drew a swift thick violent line through the figure of the buffalo then threw the drawing and the charcoal on the ground. Both of them looked at her with what she thought might have been dark understanding, but then, again, might have been cold pity, then they turned away from her and disappeared, as if in a silent march, into the woods.

She retrieved the sheet of paper from the ground and crumpled it inside her fist, walking toward the house. She had never seen a buffalo, except in taxidermy. Did they still exist? Maybe they, like unicorns, were animals less missed for what they might have been, alive, than what they are as myths. She stopped and smoothed the sheet of paper out and looked at it — pretty close, she thought, a credible rendition. She could draw, her father had taught her, and who were they to throw her drawing on the ground? Had she insulted them? Why should she care? They and their ilk had still been drawing stick figures and unenlightened geometrics five hundred years after Cimabue and Giotto; four hundred years after the Italian Renaissance in painting. How could anyone ever try to build a bridge across a chasm of perception between two kinds of people, two tribes, as wide as that? She crumpled the paper again, suspecting that, within hours, the two Indians would, once again, deliver squirrels.

On the porch she paused in admiration of the gleaming tub, perfect in its artistry and execution, and Now or never, she determined. There was the matter of the kitchen, of the cleaning up from breakfast, which she dispatched not only with efficiency but with a sort of womanly insouciance: she was going to do something that she’d secretly desired for some time: she was going to spoil herself, indulge in pleasure: she was going to have a bath.