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were probably from the Tolowa tribe, I thought. Once,the Tolowa had dominated the land around Smith River, controlling a territory that stretched from Crescent City, just to the south, all the way to the Rogue River in Oregon. They were efficient hunter-gatherers and had feasted on the rich resources of the North Coast—the game, the berries, the fruit, and the waterfowl.
    In 1872, Stephen Powers, a reporter with a gift for ethnography, had set down his impressions of the tribe for the
Overland Monthly
, then the premiere journal in the state. The Tolowa, Powers wrote, were tall, haughty, aggressive, bold, and altogether forceful. They were in the habit of marching down to Requa, a Yurok village, rounding up a few captives, and holding them for ransom. They liked gambling and card games and had a superstitious reverence for the dead, never speaking their names, even by category, as in “father” or “mother,” so as not to insult them.
    For the Tolowa, Powers said, heaven was somewhere behind the sun. This belief was a natural outgrowth of their coastal climate, he maintained, since they had to suffer through “chilling, dank, leaden fogs” all summer and dreamed of bathing in “warm, soft rays” through eternity.
    That afternoon, I took a back road out of Smith River, and it led me by chance to a neatly kept Indian cemetery enclosed by a white picket fence. Little ovals of rust had bled into the wood from aging nails, and the gates were held fast with twine.
    For some minutes, I stood at a gate deciding whether or not to go in, but then I did and walked carefully among the headstones and the gravestones and read the chiseled inscriptions. I looked out at the ocean, so near, and at Prince Island, an uninhabited rock where seabirds were flocking.
    Most of the Indians buried in the cemetery had not lived very long, but I came across some exceptions, such as Joe Seymour, who’d lived to be a hundred. A vase of plastic flowers on Seymour’s grave had toppled over, so I set it right. The only sound I could hear was the crying of the seabirds.

    A LIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING when I got to Crescent City the next day, and everything in sight was gray. The sky, the streets, the dogs, the cats—all gray, as gray as flophouse linens. The grayness had an inordinate strength and seemed to suck the brilliance out of other colors, leaching them of their substance. Here was a primal gray that could not be appeased with coffee, tea, brandy, or flames, a gray so clammy and relentless that prolonged exposure to it threatened to sever your ties to the universal oversoul.
    The doldrums, then. April twentieth, noon, and the thermometer was bottlenecked at forty-six degrees. I took a room at American Best Motel, a confident establishment if ever there was one, and discussed the weather with the manager, Bob Young, who advised me that there would be no change until early evening, when the mercury would drop a few more notches to add another dollop of misery to the prevailing chill.
    For with the grayness, the abiding gray, came a weird sort of cold that couldn’t be measured reliably on any gauge. No matter how you tried to resist it, it got to you sooner or later, seeping through your clothing to reside in the marrow of your bones. It felt as if a steady clatter of miniature ice cubes were being released into your bloodstream. You shivered, stiffened, and stamped your feet, but your metabolism refused all entreaties.
    Crescent City was a famous fishing town. Touring the harbor, I could see some boats out on the ocean and pitied the poor crewmen aboard them. Say, for example, that they were into the twelfth day of a two-week voyage, at a point in nautical time when the cramped quarters of an old trawler became almost unbearable—the decks slick with slime, the heater broken, the head a holy nightmare, and the stink of bait, entrails, and dead fish permeating every inch of enclosed space.
    At sea, in frigid weather, every metal surface seemed