My almost-daily walks with Runa by the ocean here in California have reminded me of another early story of mine from my unpublished 2011 collection Tomales Point: Creation Stories, set 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco on the jagged, ragged, wild, haunted Farallon Islands. I wrote about the geology of these islands and their history of murre-egg hunting in a previous glimpse from this collection here. (You'll also meet Ada in it, granddaughter of young Zakahar who is the hero of today's piece.) What follows this week is a 19th century story of seal hunting and animal ghosts and a young Russian man who can hear them speak. This story was written about twelve years ago now, but revisiting it (and giving it a few gentle line edits) brings me right back into the deep current of myself, of what I have always loved and sought to illuminate, and how this rugged tidal land has shaped me. It's not a perfect story by any means (I was only 22 after all!), there are some holes to be sure, but I've always loved young Zakahar, his miraculous sea lion journey, his visions, and how he helped me see the history of these haunting islands in sharper relief. At the end, there's a link to one of my early published books about the old histories of the San Francisco Bay Area, a collection of nonfiction essays beautifully done by Heyday in Berkeley. NOTE: line drawings are all mine, circa 2014. Photographs of the Southeast Farallon Island are in the public domain and can be found here. ZAKAHAR & THE SEALS OF SOUTHEAST FARALLON
1. The year was 1817. Zakahar Shekalef was only eighteen and had seen as many islands as he had years. And far more animal carcasses flayed of their skins. Salt from the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Strait, the Gulf of Alaska, and the great cold Pacific was stained into his pale skin. But with his eyes closed, dreaming fevered nightmares under an elephant seal fur on the rocky shore of the Southeast Farallon island and sweating out his own salt, Zakahar looked small and homesick. His light brown hair was greasy and stuck to his face. He dreamt of the bull elephant seal he had clubbed a few days earlier just as it woke up from its own slumber. He dreamt of the way the bull had bellowed out through the fleshy proboscis of his nose, that short trunk rumpled into a mound over most of his face. Then he dreamed that the seal was skinning him with the two protruding bottom teeth Zakahar had seen when the animal bellowed. With his bottom teeth he was slowly inching off Zakahar’s own flesh. Scraping the skin clean, salting the underside, storing up the meat for dinner.