The Cannibal Spirit (24 page)

“Indian in village come here if trouble from other tribe,” Charley whispered. “In old days. Finish now, amen.” He led Harry over to one side of the hilltop. “Not speak,” he said again.

They crouched behind the remnants of a low, fallen defence, around which a young stand of canoe birch was growing, their trunks not more than eight inches across, the papery bark already peeling. Harry laid his face for a second in the cool wet moss on the fallen buttress's surface. Then, copying Charley, he raised his head up cautiously and looked over.

Through the birch trunks, in the dim twilight, he could still just about see the beach stretching away for a hundred yards or so, before it petered out and the forest came down to the water's edge. The
Hesperus
lay beached halfway along. An Indian war canoe was pulled up beside it. Two men were standing by the broken owl pole and looking down at that place where their camp had been, and George's before them.

The first was short but bulky, his gestures blunt, terse, so that he gave off an air of hardly suppressed fury. Even with his vision blurred, Harry could see that it was Walewid.

The other had long hair that swung about its face. It carried slackly in one hand a knuckle-ended war club. Now it crouched and moved about on all four of its thin, sinewy limbs, as if it were some giant insect. It seemed to sniff the ground about the camp. Otherwise it was naked, its body inky black. Harry remembered the sallow teeth and the long nails of the dreamer's hands, stretching out toward him as they had passed through the rapids.

“Men come go beach, look for us,” Charley said, pointing down to their left.

The pebbles of the beach ran round behind the base of the hillock, leaving a gap between it and the forest of perhaps twenty yards. Eight men were walking there in the direction of the boats. They were men of Blunden Harbour, Harry recognizing a few of them, dressed for war, bare chests and faces painted black, clubs in their hands and long knives in their belts, and one with a logger's axe. Two carried rifles. A little ahead of the men, the stream wound down the beach. As they crossed it, one called out, and Walewid and the other turned toward them.

“Say not find us. Too dark make easy see track,” Charley said, his voice a whisper. “Tomorrow see for sure.”

“Is not here the first place they'd look?” And, even as he said this, the dreamer turned up its face until it seemed to stare directly at them. Harry could hardly keep himself from ducking back below the parapet, though in that light and through the dense canoe birch, it was impossible they could be seen.

“Come up here on hill no good in dark. Maybe we have gun. Maybe more us here. Men don't know. Tomorrow Walewid see track, make plan. We go in night.”

“But where? There ain't no more than bloody wilderness, and they have my boat to ransack at their will.”

Charley shrugged. “Go forest,” he said.

They watched as the men, at Walewid's direction, set about George's broken canoe with axes and hatchets. With the shattered planking they made up a fire, high on the beach, since the tide was coming in.

“Big insult,” said Charley. “Burn man canoe.”

The dreamer spoke with Walewid. Then it took up a blanket and came forward along the beach as far as the stream. It hunkered down beside the water and laid the club before it. It drew the blanket about itself and now it seemed no more than another rock upon the shore.

The flames from the fire began to rise up against the darkness. Watching the dreamer, Harry fancied he saw a glimmer that might have been its eyes reflecting the blaze.

“Dreamer make trouble,” Charley spoke quietly and laid his hand on Harry's shoulder. “Him know if we here on hill, must go down near where he sit.”

“What about the other side?” Harry motioned back over his shoulder.

“Cliff and water.”

“Could we come down the cliff? The water at the bottom's calm enough.”

“Me maybe. You no.”

“Have we rope?”

“No.”

“Then we are fucked.”

“Ek.”

“Do we not just shoot the bastards? Pick them off. That black-skin fucker first.”

“You quick for kill people now.”

“They'll be quick enough in killing us, will they not?”

Charley didn't say anything.

“What in all hell's going to stop them?”

“Maybe thing change. But kill one two just make more angry. Then we die sure.”

Harry put his forehead in the soaking moss once more. After a while, it seemed he was drifting between trees in a forest. It was night, though there was enough light to see other forms that were moving with him. They
darted between shadows so he could not make them out. They moved toward a definite goal. Somewhere inside himself he understood what that goal might be, and it was important he should have that knowledge prior to arriving there himself. Behind him, a voice was whispering his name. Its tongue was sibilant, such that it might be a snake. He could not move his head, but now ahead of him through the forest a red light gleamed. A silhouette was forming against the bloody glow, its hair long and lank. Sharp black teeth in the darkness, the voice at his ear, and a hand drawn round his face from behind, black talons before his eyes.

“Fat Harry!” It was Charley. “Quiet.” Charley's hand it was upon his mouth. “You talk you sleep. Stay wake better.” Harry rolled to his side and retched, keeping as quiet as he was able. Charley knelt above him, looking out across the low parapet, one hand on the rifle resting there, the other holding him down against the earth.

The nausea receded at last. He lay curled on his side, yet shivering hard enough to magnify the pain in his head and in his shoulder. He fell once more into unconsciousness.

He woke this time wrapped in a blanket on the tarpaulin. Beside him, Charley lay, gazing out. A cloth rag was tied about Harry's head so that it covered his mouth, but kept his nose clear. It had been soaked in water, and he sucked at it desperately. He felt for a moment more clear than before, his fever less intense. He reached up with his good arm and drew down the cloth. Charley looked at him.

“How long?” Harry said, his voice a low rasp.

Charley seemed to understand. “Sleep three hour,” said Charley.

Now he could hear the sounds of voices raised. “What's going on?”

“Men go on
Hesperus
.”

“Fuck and damnation!” Harry dragged himself up to see.

The tide was in and the
Hesperus
was afloat once more, rolling slightly with the inlet's gentle waves. The oil lamp from the pilothouse was alight and resting on the deck. Two figures moved near the entrance to the hold, the door of which had been swung open.

On shore, the fire burned high and hard, great flames rising twenty feet into the air and throwing sparks farther still, which glowed amber and red before dispersing into the darkness. Most of the canoe wood seemed to have been burned, and two men were gathering timber from the old buildings.

Four of the men stood about the fire, their voices raised against its roar. They seemed caught up in some bragging contest, as Harry had seen many times before, chins jutting and chests inflated, two waving war clubs, and all dressed only in blankets knotted like skirts about their waists. They held bottles, and these they sucked on between their taunts and curses.

“Fucking heathens,” said Harry. “Perhaps we've a chance of getting off this rock while they're busy with my liquor.”

“No, look,” said Charley, nodding down toward the nearer part of the beach.

There were two figures now beside the stream. The dreamer had cast off its blanket, and its black body reflected the firelight so that the skin shone like obsidian. It rested on one knee and held the war club across the thigh of its other leg. Its eyes moved over the edges of the forest, then up toward the hillock and back.

Beside it, Walewid's squat form crouched, a cloak of cedar bark about him, and on his head was the mask of the wolf. The jaws of that great carven countenance were pointed toward the forest. Of all its painted colours only the blacks and reds of its eyes and snout were plain in the firelight.

“Christ,” said Harry. “Can we not shoot those two cocksuckers at least? We might sow enough confusion to make it to the forest.” He wondered at his own call to action, and what point there was in any of this. They had found George and he had failed to help. Failed to be anything but another dancing, headhunting savage in the wilds. Now Harry ticked on borrowed time. He might as well die up here as anywhere else.

“Not kill dreamer,” said Charley.

“Can't kill, or won't?”

“Not kill,” he said.

Anger was what he had still. Anger. “Well what about those fucks on board my boat, at least?” Charley did not answer. “Maybe Walewid and that black devil will hit the liquor too.”

“Not think so.”

Harry stared down through the canoe birch at them. They were both motionless except for the dreamer's hawkish eyes. “No,” he said, and rested his head down on his forearms. His breath came so short now.

“Even should we make it off this rock,” he said, “I'd not get a hundred yards through the forest.” He panted for a time to get breath enough to speak. “You got to go, Charley. Try your luck with the cliff. Go back and get hold of George. Kick the life back into him, if you have to. Maybe he's finished with his rage, medicine dance, whatever in all the black hells it was.”

Charley stared at him in silence.

“I'll keep the rifle,” Harry said. “Place a slug in any of them comes after you.”

“You not shoot tree trunk front you, stupid man.”

“I'll put the wind up them, if nothing else.”

“Wait see more time yet.” Charley turned back to watch the beach once more. “Maybe new thing happen.”

Harry did all he might to keep his focus. But the leaping fire threw crazy, dancing shadows through the canoe birch, and the drunken chants, the rolling waves of heat and cold that coursed through him, and the growing certainty of death—all furled about him, until he seemed to spin slowly up from himself, to writhe in a vertigo like that he'd felt the first time he had gone high into the rigging in a fierce swell. A lurching, tumbling loss of control.

The cries below were the howls of wolves. Their tearing teeth might close on his body. If he had only found George, not that fool in the despair of his grief up in the forest. If he had but found the man he'd known, he'd have had answers for all this, so he would.

But Harry would be taken instead by the forest, broken down and eaten. If not by the wolves and their crude predations, then by the roots of grass and fern and tree. That was right and proper to the way of things. Perhaps
he had become an Indian indeed, to think such thoughts. God might take that part of him which He desired, yet the forest could have the parts that touched and smelled and tasted, that heard the breeze-blown leaves whispering … and now he could go. He could go. He could leave.

“Not die yet!” Shaking. Leaves and the whisper of the wind. “You not die yet!” And pain. Fire in his body. Heat. Water on his lips. Spluttering, but a hand clamped across his mouth. Charley hissing above him, “Not die yet. Something happen.” Pulling him up. Pulling his head around by his hair. “Open eyes!” The beach. Yes, all of this was real, and he must understand it.

Walewid was on his feet by the stream. The dreamer crouched beside him, looking like a dog that scented quarry. Its face was pointed toward the forest. Walewid spoke something to it. It leapt up, its club swinging circles. It ran toward where the stream broke from the undergrowth.

Charley raised up the rifle. Before Harry could come to his senses enough to make a judgment of his own, Charley fired in the dreamer's direction. The rifle's bark exploded in Harry's ears. He ducked sideways, clutching at his head. Before he slid away to the ground, Harry saw the dreamer plunge into the deep woods. Just before it disappeared, its head turned back toward them, a grin of triumph on its face.

“Christ almighty,” Harry said, lying back down on his side and hacking coughs, bloody spittle running out the side of his mouth and onto his hands. “I thought you weren't to kill the fucking dreamer.”

“Think George come. Dreamer know,” Charley said. “Now them know we here.”

“You don't know it's George. It might have been a wile to flush us into the open.”

“Then good wile,” Charley said.

“If it is George, he'll have heard the rifle shot at least. Will he not still be too crazy to understand?”

Charley said nothing.

Harry heard shouting. “What's that now?”

“Walewid run back to fire. Men stupid drunk. Walewid shout. Now them grab thing go back hide by pole.” A moment later, Harry heard a low
hiss above him in the trees, and a rifle shot rang out. “Them shoot us,” said Charley.

“Shoot back.”

“No. Shoot again, them know place on hill we be for sure. Stay quiet now.”

Harry lay on his side, curled in a ball, and tried to remain conscious. Every minute or so a rifle barked, and a bullet would thuck into the stand of trees, or hiss through.

“Stupid drunk men fire.” Charley was watching the beach below. “Keep us here till day come.”

All was quiet for a time. Then Harry heard something else. It sounded like an Indian chant, but far off and muffled. He would have taken it for his imagination if Charley had not tensed beside him.

“What is it?” he said, but the old Indian ignored him.

Harry tried to lift himself from the tarpaulin, but he couldn't do it. After a moment, Charley took hold of his biceps and heaved him up until he was propped once more on the wet moss.

All was consternation among the Indians on the beach. Though they sheltered behind the owl pole, Harry saw the shaking of their heads and their arms gesturing. They seemed caught up in dispute. He could not make out details, nor could he see which might be Walewid. Meanwhile, the chanting continued, more clearly now, though he could not pinpoint from where it might be coming.