Island of the Blue Dolphins

29

After two more springs had gone, on a morning of white clouds and calm seas, the ship came back. At dawn I saw it from the headland far out on the horizon. When the sun was overhead it lay anchored in Coral Cove.

Until the sun went down I watched from the headland while the men made a camp on the shore and built a fire. Then I went to my house. All night I did not sleep, thinking of the man who once had called to me.

I had thought of his voice calling for a long time, since the night of the storm when the ship had sailed away. Every day during those two springs and two summers I had gone to the headland and watched, always at dawn and again at dusk.

In the morning I smelled smoke from their fire. I went down to the ravine and bathed in the spring and put on my otter cape and my cormorant skirt. I put on the necklace of black stones and the black ear-rings. With blue clay I made the mark of our tribe across my nose.

Then I did something that made me smile at myself. I did what my older sister Ulape had done when she left the Island of the Blue Dolphins. Below the mark of our tribe I carefully made the sign which meant that I was still unmarried. I was no longer a girl, yet I made it anyway, using the blue clay and some white clay for the dots.

I went back to the house then and built a fire and cooked food for Rontu-Aru and me. I was not hungry and he ate my food and his too.

‘We are going away,’ I said to him, ‘away from our island.’

But he only put his head to one side, as his father often had done, and when I said no more, he trotted out to a sunny place and lay down and fell asleep.

Now that the white men had come back, I could not think of what I would do when I went across the sea, or make a picture in my mind of the white men and what they did there, or see my people who had been gone so long. Nor, thinking of the past, of the many summers and winters and springs that had gone, could I see each of them. They were all one, a tight feeling in my breast and nothing more.

The morning was full of sun. The wind smelled of the sea and the things that lived in it. I saw the men long before they saw the house on the headland, far off on the dunes to the south. There were three of them, two tall men and one who was short and wore a long grey robe. They left the dunes and came along the cliff, and then seeing the smoke from the fire which I kept burning, they followed it, and at last reached my house.

I crawled under the fence and stood facing them. The man in the grey robe had a string of beads around his neck and at the end of it was an ornament of polished wood. He raised his hand and made a motion towards me which was the shape of the ornament he wore. Then one of the two men who stood behind him spoke to me. His words made the strangest sounds I have ever heard. At first I wanted to laugh, but I bit my tongue.

I shook my head and smiled at him. He spoke again, slowly this time, and though his words sounded the same as before and meant nothing to me, they now seemed sweet. They were the sound of a human voice. There is no sound like this in all the world.

The man lifted his hand and pointed towards the cove and made a picture in the air of what could have been a ship.

To this I nodded and myself pointed to the three baskets I had placed by the fire, making a gesture of taking them with me to the ship. Also the cage in which I had put two young birds.

There were many gestures before we left, though the two men spoke among themselves. They liked my necklace, the cape, and the cormorant skirt that shone in the sun. But when we got to the beach, where their camp was, the first thing the man who spoke the most did was to tell the other men to make me a dress.

I knew this was what he said because one of them stood in front of me and held up a string from my neck to my feet and across my shoulders.

The dress was blue. It was made of two trousers, just like those the white men were wearing. The trousers were cut up into pieces and then one of the men sat down on a rock and put them together again with white string. He had a long nose, which looked like the needle he used. He sat all afternoon on the rock and the needle went back and forth, in and out, flashing in the sun.

From time to time he would hold up the dress and nod his head as if he were pleased. I nodded as if I were pleased, too, but I was not. I wanted to wear my cormorant skirt and my otter cape, which were much more beautiful than the thing he was making.

The dress reached from my throat to my feet and I did not like it, either the colour of it or the way it scratched. It was also hot. But I smiled and put my cormorant skirt away in one of the baskets to wear when I got across the sea, sometime when the men were not around.

The ship stayed in Coral Cove nine days. It had come for otter, but the otter had gone. Some must have been left, after all, who remembered the Aleuts, for on that morning there were none to be seen.

I knew where they had gone. They had gone to Tall Rock, but when the men showed me the weapons they had brought to kill the otter, I shook my head and acted as though I did not understand. They pointed to my otter cape, but I still shook my head.

I asked them then about the ship that had taken my people away many years before, making the signs of the ship and pointing to the east, but they did not understand. Not until I came to Mission Santa Barbara and met Father Gonzales did I learn from him that this ship had sunk in a great storm soon after it reached his country and that on the whole ocean thereabouts there was no other. For this reason the white men had not come back for me.

On the tenth day we sailed. It was a morning of blue skies and no wind. We went straight towards the sun.

For a long time I stood and looked back at the Island of the Blue Dolphins. The last thing I saw of it was the high headland. I thought of Rontu lying there beneath the stones of many colours, and of Won-a-nee, wherever she was, and the little red fox that would scratch in vain at my fence, and my canoe hidden in the cave, and of all the happy days.

Dolphins rose out of the sea and swam before the ship. They swam for many leagues in the morning through the bright water, weaving their foamy patterns. The little birds were chirping in their cage and Rontu-Aru sat beside me.