BONE RIVER

This is the story of a very stoic group of people living in the Washington Territory of the Pacific Northwest during the mid 1800s. Megan Chance spins a tale of mystery and intrigue that grips the reader and will not let go until you have read all 386 pages. Only a person who lives in the Northwest could describe the weather like Megan does. I have not felt this cold and wet reading a book since I read Dan Simmon’s The Terror. Megan’s descriptions of the foul weather actually made the book feel cold in my hands! The constant rain, flooding, and harvesting of the oyster beds accords the proper atmosphere for this arcane novel. Before I tell you about the story, I have to give Megan Chance kudos for the critique in descriptive writing. It’s ironic that this story is set in the 1850s, because that’s the time period for some of the greatest descriptive writers, such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickens. I’m not saying this book is a classic, but I think her writing style draws the reader into the story’s time period and location better than most modern authors.

In the prologue, a famed ethnologist is dying and makes his seventeen year old daughter Leonie promise to marry his protege, Junius, even though he is at least 25 years her senior. In the first chapter, we flash forward 20 years. Leonie, a housewife and drawer of relics, lives in her deceased father’s cabin with her now husband Junius, a oysterman and ethnologist. Also living there is her father’s long time associate, Lord Tom, a Chinook Indian. The day after a storm (and there are many!) Leonie finds a mummy in a basket partly uncovered on the bank of the river. Lord Tom and Junius help her dig it out. Who is this female mummy? Is she a precursor to the Indians, as her father had imagined? How did she get there, and how did she die? On page 20, Leonie thought, “I looked back down at the mummy. Junius, like my father, believed there had been an advanced culture here before the primitive indians had supplanted it...” Leonie then takes charge of the find and immediately starts having nightmares about an Indian woman running in the grass trying to tell Leonie something. What was the mummy trying to tell Leonie in her dreams? At this point, Daniel Russell, Junius’s son from a previous undissolved marriage shows up presumably as a reporter for a San Francisco newspaper doing a story about the mummy. Hostilities ensue between Daniel and Junius with Leonie caught in between.

At this juncture, an Indian medicine woman named Bibi (Lord Tom says she's a fake) shows up, tells Leonie of impending danger, and gives her a charmed bracelet to wear. Junius pressures Leonie to dissect the mummy so he can send the information to Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian Museum. Leonie delays the cutting, because she is still having undeciphered dreams. Leonie consults her dad’s journals and finds out that he was working on a unknown experiment. How did this relate to her and the mummy? The dreams get worse. She starts having feelings for Daniel. Where will all this lead to? On page 148, Leonie is still unsure that the mummy is ancient, even as she remembered her father saying, “Promise me you’ll fight such sensibilities. Logic, my dear. Logic is your only friend." She still can’t decide to cut open the mummy. Something's wrong! What is it? Why does she have this lust for her husband’s son? Then she finds her father’s cave bear tooth necklace in the mummy’s dress! What’s going on! Papa has been dead for twenty years! If you want to find out what happens next, I suggest that you grab a copy of this wonderful story and start turning pages.

Some of the sidebars that I enjoyed were the Indian legends and tales told by Lord Tom, the protector of Leonie. The sprinkling in of Chinook words and sayings were particularly entertaining, such as wake kloshe (bad luck), kani (it lives), mesachie tomawanos (bad spirit), and okustee (daughter). The 16th century’s plastica theory was another incidental link to this tale that was highly instructive. On page 308, her father wrote in his journal, “I wonder if perhaps God, like an artist sketching the same thing over and over again until he reaches perfection, must have created the various human groups in experiment, trying out his vision of man in lesser forms before he settled on the last and best”. Is this the unknown experiment her father was working on before he died? If so, how is the mummy involved?

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: The Chinook Indians, who play a supportive role in this novel, lived by a strict caste system during the time period of this novel. Upper class were the warriors and shaman, who were known to have slaves. The highest class was the Flathead Indians. Some children would have their heads squeezed under the pressure of two boards thus creating the flatness. They were considered to be superior over round heads. I don’t know if this system is still in vogue. Lord Tom touched on how the Chinooks came into being with Leonie, but here is a version of that legend: “Talapas (Creator) made the earth a nice place with animals and trees. Talapas asked Tsoona (Thunderbird) to carry special eggs to a mountain called Kaheese. He did as he was told, but Old Giantess didn't want the eggs to hatch so she began to break the eggs. The Spirit Bird came down from the sky and consumed her with fire. The remaining eggs hatched and became Chinook Indian”. The Chinook Indians are known to be, as most tribal indians, great storytellers. A quick informative book about the Chinook would be Chinook Indians by Suzanne Morgan Williams.