The Cannibal Spirit (42 page)

The three other dancers took off their masks. One of them was To-Cop. I wondered what view the missionaries might take if they knew that this, their own young man—as I had seen from the gold cross at his neck—did partake of such Satanic spectacles.

Later, I sat with Big Mountain. He had removed the wooden armour earlier, and now he tucked his blanket tightly about his elsewise naked body. He stared into the fire for a while. At last he says to me, “Did you kill them?”

“I did not,” says I. I told him how I had taken their boots and their weapons.

“They will be unhappy at you,” he says, and I agree that he might have a point.

“And with me,” says he.

Well, they was already a mite unhappy with him, wasn't they, says I, or had he forgot the reason I was here. “The power is with you again,” I tell him. “The people are with you again.”

He nodded. “They try to compete with me. I beat them. But beat them using you. They won't like it that you, a breed, should beat them. They will be shamed.”

“Which was part why you brung me here, I reckon.”

At which he smiled. “Your dreamer made a good argument for it,” says he.

“Anyway, be damned with foul witchery. I hate it. I stamp on it wherever I do find it,” says I. Then I get down to my other business. “I've heard the canneries aren't hiring so many this spring. And Seal Singer sends his daughters away south.”

I saw that To-Cop was watching from across the fire. I spoke quietly now to Big Mountain. “I've money to offer you,” I tell him. He says he guessed it. I am here to buy his suit of armour, says I.

“You won't!” says he. I'll give him fifty dollars. “No!” says he. I'll pay him now, before the new season begins.

“I have heard,” says he, “that in your book it's written that we eat the bodies of dead people for real.”

I tell him it don't say that at all.

“Many are angry,” says he. “And they are ashamed. The book tells we are savage men.”

I thought on the two sorcerers performing their tricks out in the forest. I thought as well about the carcass that had just been consumed and, in its consumption, how the wilds is tamed. How fear is tamed. “The book don't say that we are savage men,” I says. “It tells our stories and the ways we live.”

“There is nothing as beautiful as my armour,” says he. “I will give it to my son.” But there ain't no money in the villages. The Chinese come from Vancouver to work the canneries. Japaners work the fishing boats. Whites take the land. I tell him I'll be away before the sun comes. No one will see me go.

The chief pulled a charred stick from the edge of the fire. He drew shapes in the earth in front of him. I looked down at the shapes. I nodded.

Big Mountain threw the stick back into the fire. Then he walked away across the room and went out through the door. I swept my fingers in the earth and wiped away the numbers there.

To-Cop found me later that evening on the beach. I was making certain my canoe was tightly moored but ready for the early start.

“The great shaman cured the chief of sorcery,” To-Cop says to me in English. I did not respond, but To-Cop went on. “I've not seen my uncle, but I am sure he'd want to speak with you of the secret knowledge of shamans.”

“Your uncle?” says I.

“Copper Dancer,” says he. “I wonder where my uncle is. Sometimes the wilderness takes a man.”

“Sometimes it don't,” I says. “He'll be back with time. I know it.”

To-Cop walked up and down alongside my canoe. “Killer whale at your prow,” he says. “Strong totem.” Then he tells me he works for the mission.

“I see the cross you wear.”

“But my blood is of the people,” says he. I tell him how I witnessed that today at the ritual. I could see he wondered at my implication by that. He looked as if his head was fair being boiled by his anger. I wondered if he was gearing up for some physical assault on me. But instead he turned away and walked off.

“I read your book,” he says over his shoulder. “I did not enjoy it.”

To-Cop, Copper Dancer, and Inviter, the three of them waiting outside the courthouse to view their revenge as it will be played out upon me. The chieftain, Big Mountain, was back in his village. Him, what had refused to help me in my time of need—though in that I do not blame him. This suit of armour I had been packing and writing on the very day David did come back to me dead, and what Francine had posted onto a steamer south, after I was gone into the wilderness.

So I was alone, but for old Charley. I spoke now to him: told him to cease his spitting upon the steps. “We're in midst of the civilized,” says I, but he don't look overly impressed.

To-Cop called across to me then. “I hope that is a bible you are holding, Mr. Hunt,” says he. I turned the book over what I had in my hands, to look at its front cover. “And if it is, I hope you may find some solution in its pages.”

To-Cop. What should I make of this man: proud, filled with the belief in his superior position? With his bowl-cut hair, still in the style it must have been when he were a boy in the mission school. Yet, as well, a willing participant in the pagan ritual for which I stood accused. Participant, and also chief prosecution witness! And now beating down on me with his Christian sermonizing. What could I comprehend of such two-facedness? Such deception? But he stood there glaring over at me and there weren't a shred of self-doubt in him, his eyes glowing fire—the bright flames of his most true belief. It didn't make no sense at all.

Well, there ain't nothing of sense to any of it, excepting when I sees his relatives what I wronged beside him—relatives what is practitioners of black arts of sorcery which the Christian church does most heavily frown upon, and which To-Cop would have been raised in the mission school to despise.

But not so. There he stands, carrying both parts inside hisself and without a faltering shadow to be seen.

So, then, did I understand that beliefs ain't more than the uses to which they is put. Circumstance is all. And what of circumstance? What drives a man whilst he is caught up in the complications of the moment? Well, it ain't no higher sanctity, of that I was certain, looking on To-Cop.

Beliefs, they mould theirselves to circumstance. And so does our character do the same—our very nature, perhaps. Like a sandbar in shallow water. Each time the tide rolls back, it is the same sand, but in different shapes, different forms. That's all there is. And it ain't about there being monsters or otherwise. It ain't the truth of monsters. It is the wilderness itself. We are the wilderness.

Could we be more than that? I wondered at it, there on the steps, my fate like a sparrow in the beak of a raven. Could belief be such that it was stronger to resist the tide of circumstance? Weren't that the ways of the great man—the man what changes worlds?

To-Cop had said he hoped I might find solution in the book I held in my hands. “I believe I have done so,” I speaks over to him by return.

“Though it will not save you from the consequences of your crimes,” says he.

I turned the book over and over in my hands, thinking on his words.

“It may yet,” says I at last, though quietly enough that he could not have heard.

I opened the book to the title page. I ran my fingers across its text. Then I closed it up once more and waited on Bowser's arrival.

Fact is, we weren't the only ones what was stood about on those steps. For my trial had caused quite a stir, it seemed, and many had come to be in the viewers' gallery inside. Come to view a real-life cannibal, I imagine. They must have been reading the morning newspapers, for there hadn't been more than a few reporters present the day prior. I had seen the newspaper headlines that morning—“Disgusting Orgies,” “Human Bodies Were Consumed,” “Corpses Being Cut Up.” Oh, but it was juicy material!

Inside—as we all did file in together—the court's furniture and fittings was constructed of dark wood, polished and polished till they shone in the light what come in through the many tall windows. Me and Bowser was up front with Mr. Cane the prosecutor on our right. What I was feeling— sitting there that second morning with all the eyes of the white world upon me, a sense, in the rustle and buzz of the courtroom, almost of festival, of public entertainments being performed—what I was feeling, before the judge and jury did come in, was mostly excitement. Something akin to jubilation even. Elation—that is the word for it. My pulse throbbed. My breathing came short, like I'd been a hard few hours paddling. A thin gloss of sweat was upon my skin. Let these people come to watch, I was thinking. Let them see the man I am! Let them fear the forest—the wilds—and what goes on out there. It seemed almost a disappointment to be fighting against the stories what had been told by To-Cop and the prosecution the day before, to be working to disavow these people of their most succulent fascinations.

“All rise!” came the call and we was on our feet for the judge and jury. The jury lined up to one side. They was all stiff collars, tight suits, and
smartly crafted moustaches. But I could see they was caught up like everyone else there in the pure salivating grotesquery of the case.

Well, Inviter and Copper Dancer was first up to give witness. They was translated by the interpreter—a breed out of Victoria and none too certain in his comprehension. Still, there wasn't much as was new to hear. They scowled a bit at me and caused enough stirs with their grim fantasies on my hacking, chopping ways, to add to To-Cop's from the day before, as did keep the gallery gasping and amused. Then Mr. Cane made a summation of all those vile lies and so, at last, he rested the prosecution.

Now Mr. Bowser stood up and walked out into the centre of the courtroom to make his statements.

“Our case will consist of a complete refutation of those stories told by the Crown,” says he, his manner so soft you might almost imagine he was discussing the planting of flowers in his garden. “We will state that Mr. Hunt was the victim of a vindictive trap set by To-Cop and these other witnesses, all of whom it will be noted are members of To-Cop's immediate family.”

He stepped over and he lifted my book from off the table in front of me. “I will show,” he says, and at last the volume of his voice rose some, “that Mr. Hunt, far from being the brutal, cannibal savage portrayed, is in fact a man of science. He was no more than a spectator that day and, even when called upon, did nothing more than observe the actions of the ritual. Which ritual, we also allege, was in fact a pantomime, and no human corpse was even involved.”

Well, he called old Charley first to the stand. Laughter played through the crowd at this gargoyle clown as he waddled across the floor to the witness chair. The interpreter translated for him. He stated clear enough that there was nothing but the meat of a deer at the ceremony, and I didn't even go near to that. Mr. Cane don't bother with cross-examining him. “No questions,” says he, but he played funny to the jury, raising his eyes up to heaven as if to say, “Look at this monster before us! Can any of you believe such a man?” At least Charley left off from leering at anyone.

So then it comes to me. Here he is at last! The real monster. The cannibal. Here before our very eyes! A real live consumer of human flesh.

Throw him a missionary. Watch him heat the pot. I didn't give two shits for any of them. I strutted cross the floor and positioned myself in the chair. I tells my name and placed my hand upon the bible to make my declarations of fidelity.

Mr. Bowser said not a word at first, just stood there, the thumb of one hand hooked in his waistcoat pocket, the other hand resting flat on our table, seeming lost in thought. That set a muttering in the gallery. But then he hefted and carried over my book. He put it in my hands.

“Mr. Hunt,” says he, “would you care to open this book to the title page? Thank you. Now would you please read out to the court what is written there.”

So that is what I do. “Smithsonian Institution. United States National Museum,
The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians
, by Franz Boas. Washington, the year eighteen hundred and ninety-seven.”

“And after?” Bowser says.

“Based on personal observations and on notes made by Mr. George Hunt.”

“Now please turn to the preface and read that section of the first page which is underlined.”

“‘The great body of facts presented here were observed and recorded by Mr. George Hunt, of Fort Rupert, British Columbia, who takes a deep interest in everything pertaining to the ethnology of the Kwakiutl Indians and to whom I am under great obligations. I am indebted to him also for explanations of ceremonials witnessed by myself, but the purport of which was difficult to understand, and for finding the Indians who were able to give explanations on certain points.'”

“Mr. Hunt,” says he, “are you a cannibal?”

“I most certainly ain't.”

“Are you, in fact, a man of science, an ethnographer and researcher working with other scientists, such as the famous professor Franz Boas, in the study of that people called in this book the Kwakiutl?”

“I guess I am just that,” says I.

The atmosphere in the courtroom sank down with every word we spoke. I was, indeed, a most profound disappointment to all those present. I was not at all the thing. Not at all what they had come hoping to see. I was that most awful of categories: an ordinary man. Strange though it might sound to say, when Bowser did finish his examination of me, and turning to the jury, held up the book and shrugged, before walking over to place it before the judge—well, in that moment, I felt every bit as disenchanted by myself as did they.