The Cannibal Spirit (17 page)

A boy's imaginings, and darker than pitch. Yet more vivid even than such fantasies were the true dyings of the people what I did witness. The plagues swept through us during the sixties. Rasp and wrack, black phlegm and bloody, flowing shit, sores and sunken eyes, the hair in clumps from women's heads, bones showing clear through skin. Always some new sweet stench at which to nauseate and shiver—gist for a child in the night, staring up at the shadows of the masks creeping on the walls and high among the timbers of the roof.

I walked on down the beach until I came to that place what was my destination: the greathouse where I had first healed the boy.

All that was left now was ruins, the ground thick with grass, the timbers heaped about, rotten, bled dry of memory.

I stood in the centre of that ruin. I watched seals roll in the water offshore. Now the clouds split apart and the late-afternoon sun flooded over the ocean onto me. I shut my eyes. The light was pink against my eyelids. The whole day had drifted away without me noticing. I opened my eyes again and walked back along the beach to my camp.

I went through my pack. At the bottom lay a wooden box with killer whale carvings on it. But I did not take it out, as I had meant to. I did not walk back along the shore to the greathouse, to perform the ritual for which I was come.

I thought on those shamans bathing me in the water. I remembered the excitement of that time. The emptiness of the world as now it was. I knew that there was something else I must do instead.

The box went back into the pack and some few of my necessaries for the wilderness went with it. I made my way along the beach, as far as the
clear-water stream what was the reason surely for the village first being settled there, whatever the old myths might tell of thunderbirds and other fierce creatures of the sky coming down and transforming into human beings to settle on that lonely stretch of sand.

A storm was rearing its ugliness away to the south and west. I squatted down and splashed water on my face. Then I followed the stream's path into the forest.

 

 

I feel like I have been standing here, before this museum mannequin and its suit of armour, for ten thousand years. I must move my eyes off it and go among the other exhibits. The light washes in through the high windows across the floor and the glass cases. The very few people in here, what wander between the masks and poles, the great carven boxes, the old high-prow canoes, like they is half somewhere else, they give the dust to swirl like convoluting whirlpool eddies in a low tide. I am awash with ghosts, with shadows, with the fermenting juices of my own history.

I had gone to Teguxste to atone. That's a Christian word, but there it is. I had broken my canoe, and so made my decision not to go back to the world. Was it death then I was seeking for? Maybe it was. I wonder on it still.

Yet when I stood in the ruined greathouse of the old chief whose grandson had been sick and I had healed, all those years before, it did not seem that I had come to the origin of my sorrow after all. I don't know if that ain't just the sentiment of hindsight. Who can know in the retelling of events?
Now
and
then
are but random pointers in this creation. They mould theirselves together into that which we may recount to others, and so dream that we do comprehend this elsewise senseless, pitiless place of our being.

As I was moving forward, so was I travelling backwards. Back to where? Some origin, I imagine it to be. The heartland. The first place from which all else did follow. I see it in the researches of those scientists what come along the coast. They seek for a world from which they dream their own
grand civilization, what hums and whirs and broods, sprung up. A world out of the past. As if the Indian ain't lived the same number of years of the world's history as have they. Years of unrelenting change. Years of history, as they use the word. Yet have we all lived the same number of years on this Earth. Where do they think the Indians had gone off to for all that time between? Have they been frozen, like as to statues in the wilderness, just waiting for the white man to arrive—to pour electricity through them, perhaps, and so draw them once more into motion for their researches?

Still, I do aid the scientists in this whole splendid undertaking. They come to me as the expert. The native expert, with his brown blood for studying and his white blood for trusting. All the languages he speaks. And his skills with a pen—such as they are. I write the stories. I write the ways of the people and send my missives off. As to what constitutes savagery, and what does not, well on that I have my own beliefs.

It is a questionable business being an ethnographer, as my appellation has been given, but one I've come at last to feel I have resolved in myself, though I'd not get ahead of myself by so saying. Yet, even now, I believe the resolution of those questions is at the heart of this story of mine.

Anyhow, out of Teguxste and into the forest I went, following the stream uphill. Undergrowth covered the old path, huckleberry and skunk cabbage. I hadn't trod that path in more than forty years, and my memory of it was hazy at best. Still, it was along the stream that I remember following those shamans as had bathed me first in the ocean, following behind them filled up with excitement at what might happen, at what I was about to learn.

As the evening set in, so the storm I had seen earlier did arrive. I flensed a few branches and put fronds over them against the rain. I had brung dry tinder enough to get a fire going, though I weren't averse this time around to using matches. The fasting made my stomach churn and cramp.

I sat beneath my shelter, getting dripped on as the rain wound itself up into a frenzy, and staring out at the woods. The forest was strung by shadows, the trees great lumbering beasts come to rest, shabby in their rags of vine and moss. I was among swordfern, wild lilies and elderberries, vicious-spiking devil's club and dogwood. White man's names. I could
name them all, as well, in Kwakwala, and list the people's uses for them. Swordfern. Sakuam: the fronds line steampits and storage boxes, cover floors, and is lain out for fish to dry. Scientists call it
Polystichum munitum
, in that dead man's tongue, Latin.

I sat there feeling alien to it all. Me, who used to speak to the trees, hold discourse with them. Used to sing ritual songs when the jays buzzed past, nervy and neat. I had led the scientists in, and they had pasted labels through the forest. Every bract and catkin, stamen, spike, and rhizome probed till it all weren't more than the engine parts on the floor of Harry's workshop. What is left of wonder in the world?

The next morning I was soaked through. I drunk a little water, then upped and walked—trudging always uphill. But my mind was far from clear by then, even as to where I was headed. I just knew to place my boots one after the other, and always uphill. Answers would come, just so long as those boots kept plodding.

Soon enough the stream was gone. The undergrowth clung and twined about everything. Blood veins, I was thinking. Whipcord muscles of a body cut open. A twig gouged my cheek—the side as is paralyzed. I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody. I have to be careful of such things. The ship's surgeon told me I had broken the nerves of my face. That I couldn't never feel anything again on that side of my head.

I wander in my narrative like I am still now bumbling in the wilds. What ship's surgeon? Well: tell a tale out of the past and it might help some in understanding all this. It is a story I was recounting to myself there in the forest—reliving, feverish with grief and fasting as I was.

Four canoes is approaching the beach at Rupert. Young George Hunt, nine years old, waiting on the shore for them to come in. He is beside his mother, Anaîn—her beautiful name. And all the people gathered on the shore as well to watch the arrival of the great Chief Shaiks of the Northern Tlingit, come south out of Alaska.

He was my great-uncle. He carried the crests and dances, masks and privilege of our ancestry, to which I was entitled, since, among the Tlingit, it all comes down through the mother's line.

Shaiks was at the prow of a war canoe full sixty feet in length, twenty warriors at the oars, painted in design of the Killer Whale, blood daubed at its mouth for all those it had eaten in war. Three other canoes followed behind. Slabs of black hardwood covered every part of Shaiks's body, all strapped with leather tight against him, and with dense carvings across them. On his head was a helmet with curling earflaps.

Shaiks's speaker was standing just behind him in the prow of the canoe, low and wide with a blanket about him, bear-skin hat on his head. He drew himself up, self-important, and called out across the water in some bastard version of Kwakwala.

“You Kwagiulth! Listen,” he says. “Here great chieftain Shaiks. He the Raven. He the Ganaxadi Clan of Tantakwan people of the north. He have from ancestor crest of Killer Whale and Raven, and other many he win from killing and from marry.”

I felt the excitement foaming in me, knowing him for my relative, seeing the nervous ways the people next to me was shifting and mumbling to each other. My mother had told them he was coming, peaceable, to visit. But seeing the warrior of an enemy tribe, this legend, plying in towards them with a hundred men or more: well it made for quite the fearsome spectacle. There weren't but a few men in Rupert then. Not enough to defend theirselves, and hardly a white man in the fort, away along the beach, barring my father, a few traders, and the missionary.

The shoreline comes up sharp and shallow at Rupert when the tide is high. Now the chief's canoe crashed into it, and still at speed. My great-uncle was thrown forward, hardly holding himself against the prow's high peak. The speaker was not so fortunate. He flew out, doing a tidy somersault and crashing on his back into the surf.

There he was, spluttering and gasping, being dragged and drawn by the tide, and the people guffawing and shouting their ridicule. A grand sight. They still talk of it even now. But the northern men put down their paddles, and some of them took up war clubs. A few had old muskets. They started to shouting back in anger at the people's mockery, and there was danger then of fighting.

My mother pulled me backwards and away up the pebbles. Those sharp nails on my arm. Not out of fear, though. She was but protecting her son. She was arrogant and fearless. An aristocrat.

Nakapankam came forward, him not one to roll about like some tomfool in laughter. He was chieftain then of the Kwagiulth. I called him father, so kind a man he was to me. Still call him father now in memory, though he is long dead. He was uncle to old Charley Seaweed.

Nakapankam was a tall man, bigger even than I grew to be, and in his middle years at that time. He called out, and his people came quiet to hear him. “Shaiks. Great northern chief. Chief of those we have had war with for many lifetimes. Come down from your canoe. We respect our enemies. We will not fight. We will not attack you. Come down from your canoe. We will feed you with our own food. Come down from your canoe.”

Shaiks was an old man, I saw then, long hair, lank and thin and grey from out of his helmet. His face was made of cracked leather, and a fat scar ran from before his right ear down below the neckline of his armour; but his body was brawny still. He leapt down into the surf, the whoosh of the water up around him, and he didn't stagger when he landed.

The speaker was still on his hands and knees. Shaiks took him by his scruff and dragged him upright. Then he laughed, booming, holding the sorry fucker there like a drowning dog. Shook him so the water droplets flew out in arcs. Those on shore they laughed as well, and they on the canoes joined in, beating their clubs against the boats' hulls.

The beating clubs sounded like a storm looming. It quieted many of the Kwagiulth, recalling the threat that was posed by all these men of an enemy tribe. But Nakapankam walked straight into the water and put out his hand in the manner of the white man. Shaiks looked down at the hand. Everyone looking at that hand. Nakapankam's fingers callused and broken, the grime etched in every crevice. The black nails.

Shaiks let go his speaker and took the hand. They moved their arms up and down, not knowing truly how it was done. Proud chiefs but smiling. Just a little.

So brave a gesture from Nakapankam. Chieftains didn't never touch each other, nor was they ever touched theirselves. Many things it was,
and maybe memory makes it more. A reference to the whites, to old Nakapankam's influence with them, and so to the protection the white man's fort along the beach did afford the people, should Shaiks be planning trouble. And, by that argument, I suppose, it did tell of the white men's place like gods, protective of the people.

And it spoke of the world as it had turned as well. The new world that was upon us all, the old ways of violence over—some things good, and some less so. And perhaps it was a sign of conniving between them two chieftains as well. Knowing they were subject, both of them, to the world and to its changing.