Trying to make it right.

While hiking up above the Eel River I came upon a ruined farmstead amongst the redwood trees. There I found the notebook that contains this handwritten account…

‘I wonder if anyone will ever read this. Probably not, but I have a wish to write some things down anyway. To explain my life to any that come after I have passed on.

I have been shunned by the folks around here and it is likely my own fault. I can’t blame them as I have kept to myself for over fifty years now and always do what I have to do to keep this place empty of people. At times I have had to protect my woods with knife, gun or fist.

They call me ‘The Owl Man’ down in Fortuna. I don’t mind it, for I have always loved the barn owls that live in my crumbling barns and suppose I do have something in common with them. They look strong, but are really mostly feathers. They look clever, but are only good at one thing. Hoovering over the dark ground and silently killing. I hunt for most of my food and am a pale ghostly white too nowadays. I don’t screech though.

The first time I heard those screams as a boy, on a camping trip with a friend and his mother, the sound ran a cold shiver through my bones. It was like tearing something, tearing a hole in the world itself. Cold and terribly lonely it sounded, though I knew it was a call. A call in the night to say, ‘I am here. I have killed. This is my wood.’

I was reading by candlelight in a small tent on my own. It wasn’t maybe the best idea to have chosen a book from the horror section in the library, but I wanted something exciting to read in case it rained. The story was about a small town where gruesome murders kept happening that no one could explain. It turned out that the whole town had been built on an Indian graveyard and so was cursed. I was so terrified that I crept out into the night to find two sticks and, with a bootlace, I made a crucifix to ward off any ghosts that might be nearby. I kept it under my pillow and was comforted enough to eventually find sleep. As I drifted off my mind wandered, as it does when we float between sleeping and waking, and it occurred to me that this whole county must be just one giant graveyard. I certainly had never seen any Indians, except in movies.

When I awoke the next morning I found that I was still pondering on my thoughts of the night before. All around here is good land and I figured it must have been full of generations and generations of native people once upon a time. So where were they? It was back to the library for me, where I learned that they were chased out, bought out, killed in wars, killed by new diseases, lynched or enslaved. Not one around here remains.

Only the name of the language they spoke survives. Yukian. They left nothing else behind and were all swept away by the Gold Rush, the redwood rush or the salmon rush, like in the great floods of the mighty Eel River that they lived by.

After learning the truth about our place I was never really the same again. It was almost like a curse for me. I was cursed with curiosity and a strong feeling for the families- mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, who had been at home here only a generation or two before. Why, the dust had hardly settled before they were making films about shooting Indians down in Hollywood!

I tried to share what I had found out in school and chose the subject for my history class project. My schoolmates listened politely to my mumbling and shifted uneasily in their chairs until I had finished. But not one asked me a question and Mrs Foster passed quickly on to less uncomfortable territory. Essays about the Civil War, or Washington, or something. I soon learned to keep quiet on the subject of ‘injuns’.

When I wrote that the Yuki people had left nothing behind, that wasn’t quite the truth. In the redwood stand up behind our place is an outcrop of rock in the north side of the valley. One summer’s day long ago, while exploring, I crawled under an overhang and was amazed to discover carvings in the rock. Zigzags, wavy lines, diamonds, tally marks and circles all chipped into the stone. They overlapped one another and many were worn down as if this place had been used for hundreds of years for some forgotten purpose. I was strangely excited by my discovery and I felt a bond with these people of the past. The redwoods were still here, and the Eel River and the barn owls. Just the same as when the Yuki lived here- in balance with the natural world. Taking no more than they needed to live.

I am old now and will soon be gone like my parents before me. I never married and slowly the place has fallen back into the forest. I have tried to help the redwoods back down into the pasture and the salmon in the river. My hope is that when I die the place will be back to how it was before my people came here. Before our terrible crimes.

If anyone finds and reads this account of my life, I beg of them to leave this place. Leave it in peace and go.’