A Small Memory Recovered

The West Seattle House (Google Earth Screenshot)

I have been poking around in the dim corners of my memory, trying to retrieve some fragments related to any awareness of the previous indigenous residents of the neighborhood I lived in as a child in West Seattle. 

Aside from some references to Chief Seattle heard in school, the only actual contact I could recall with a living Native American was from around the age eight or nine when I had an Inuit friend of about the same age as I.  Originally from Alaska, he lived just down the street in a house even more modest than the one I lived in with my mother and grandparents after the war. His name was Marco.

I remember Marco as a handsome little guy with dark hair and dark eyes.  We often played together at war games as boys of that time did, fighting valiantly and dying dramatically.  A favorite locale for such dramas was about a mile to the southwest of our street -- a bluff overlooking the beach with steep, sandy slopes that were mostly covered with trees, including a few madrones with papery red bark. People in those days seemed unconcerned that children our age might be wandering about by themselves for much of the day.  I remember going often to the bluff, or in later years even down to the beach to spear flounders in the shallows.

The Bluff (Google Earth Screenshot)

Once, when we were scrambling around on the bluff's steep slopes, we came across a covey of valley quail which scooted noisily ahead of us through the brush.  One of the birds flew up into a tree close by. Marco picked up a fist-sized stone and threw it with perfect aim, hitting the quail which fell dead to the ground. I could not have been more surprised and amazed if Marco had suddenly flapped his arms and rose into the air.