Over the Darkened Landscape

by Derryl Murphy

  Samuel scratched his head but couldn’t help smiling in response to Ed’s infectious good humour. “Hell, Ed,” he responded, “there’s no guarantee that they won’t bring along their own photographer or at least send along someone who’s capable of using a camera.”

  “Yeah, but the body won’t be here by the time anybody arrives. Just bones by then, I expect.”

  This bit of news brought Samuel up short. “How’s that again?”

  “Jesus, Samuel, what’ve you been doin’ all morning? It’s practically all anyone in town has been talkin’ about. You even walked right by it when you came through the door.” He smiled again and puffed out his chest. “My printing press, and I did the layout for it, too.”

  Samuel blinked away his momentary rush of confusion and looked over to the door where Ed had waved his finger. On it was tacked a small poster with the words at top big enough, all in capitals and bold type, that he could read them from across the room:

  SPECIAL TOWNWIDE PREHISTORIC FEAST!!!

  “Holy shit, Ed, no,” said Samuel in a low and worried voice, and he rushed over the read the rest of the poster.

  Come celebrate the amazing mammoth discovery this Saturday night, 7pm, at the Klondiker Hall. $5/head gets you a THREE course meal INCLUDING STEW made of choice cuts from 6 THOUSAND YEAR OLD baby MAMMOTH. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity! Tickets from Pete Marliss.

  Without another word to Ed, Samuel ran out the door and down the road to the Klondiker, blood rushing in rage through his head, keen to find Pete and give him a piece of his mind. At the very least.

  “Marliss!” shouted Samuel as he slammed through the doors into the hotel lobby. His target looked up from whatever he was working on at the front counter and smiled, but before he could say anything Samuel proceeded to tear into him. “What the blue blazes do you think you’re doing, offering up that fossil for a fuckin’ banquet?”

  “I bought the body from Mick and Temple,” replied Pete. “It’s mine now, and I get to do with it what I like. And since it cost me money, I aim to make back that investment and then some.”

  Samuel was beside himself with rage, and for a moment he had trouble finding any words. This was a travesty, a crime against science and reason and humanity. Finally, unable to think of anything else but needing to say something in response to the smirk that had formed on Marliss’ face, he said, “But you can’t! The body should be preserved for the scientists to study.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be happy with a complete skeleton, don’t you think? I expect there will be plenty of museums willing to pay for one. And maybe a different one to pay for the hide, too.”

  Samuel’s hands bunched into fists, but before he could take a step toward Marliss the man had calmly placed a shotgun on the counter. Still smiling, he said, “Now, Samuel, you stay calm with me, and I just might have a present to give you.” Seeing where Samuel’s eyes were looking, he chuckled and said, “No, not a rear full of buckshot.”

  “Then what? What the hell do you have that I could possibly want?”

  Marliss reached under the counter and came up with something small that he tossed across the room to Samuel. It looked like a stone, but just before he caught it he saw that it was a spear point. As his hand closed over it the sharp edge bit into his palm, and for a brief second he could feel his blood spill over the artifact.

  And then everything faded away.

  There are precisely a hand of them able to hunt, not enough to hold off starvation much longer. This will be their last attempt before they again have to run from the ice and snow, and the shaman knows that the magic for this hunt has to be especially strong.

  He starts with a dance that represents their prey, one of the hairy long noses that are still in the valley, eating the last of the green before they also escape the oncoming wall of ice. The five hunters sway in time to his chants, skins and furs dangling loose from scrawny bodies. Outside of the small circle, the women and children and elders watch and wait for him to finish, only the oldest of them able to conceal the desperation and hunger that crosses the faces of the others.

  Or the anger. He knows that a ruined hunt this time might indeed do worse than damage his reputation as the holder of the magic, that failure will, at best, result in banishment from the tribe, at worst bring about a demand for his sacrifice, either to feed the tribe through the strong magic that would come from his death or by a more direct and hideous route.

  Once done with the dance, but still chanting, he grabs the spear from their strongest hunter and slashes his palm, then takes the hand of each hunter in turn and does the same, intermingling the blood of each of them. He then takes the spear to the outer circle and cuts in turn the palm of each tribe member’s palm, until that one spear is imbued with the power of the blood of the shaman’s entire tribe, now truly glowing with the strength of their unity of purpose and desire. His words grow stronger, calling down all the magic he knows and much more than that, magic he can sense and see but magic whose full capabilities he is unaware of. Everything in or nothing out. He repeats this ritual with four other spears, although only with his own blood and that of the other hunters, and then presses his bloody hand to the ground beneath his feet, feeds some of his life to the life that surrounds them, an offering in return for the upcoming life that he and his tribe plan to take.

  It is all he can do. All five spears stand high above the heads of the hunters, sharpened edges crusted over with their blood, power shining from each and every one of them. After a short nod to his young assistant, he shouts the finality of the ritual to the tribe and to the sun and the earth, and they go. The hunters casually wave aside all the calls of goodbye and the imprecations and pleadings, stern and strong and anxious to prove that they can still provide for the tribe, and yet cautious not to show any break in their masks, for fear that they might be seen as weak or afraid.

  Normally the shaman would not go with them, but he needs to keep these five in sight and in earshot, make sure that they are not conspiring against him. Certainly these are lean times, but he has kept them all alive through worse than this, and he is not yet ready to hand it all over to his apprentice. He knows that his apprentice does not feel he is ready, either, and so feels safe leaving him behind with the weaker members of the tribe.

  The walk to where the long noses are supposed to be is almost a half a day, leading them away from the running water and over fields and small hills, places mostly still green and alive but increasingly covered in white as snow falls and refuses to melt under the gaze of the weakened sun. As they approach the bottom of the hill that leads to the overlook where their prey should be, the shaman feels relief wash through him, powerful enough to weaken his knees for a moment, when he hears the sounds of the creatures in the distance.

  He has the hunters lean their spears inward one last time, all of the points touching, and chants and prays some more, adding strength and luck at this final stage. Then he separates from them, goes to find a safe place from where he can watch the hunt.

  The long noses have been tracked by the tribe as they walked their path over this plateau, finding their way through the green and away from the ice. But almost everywhere they’ve been it has been impossible for the hunters to get close enough to make a kill. So the hunters scouted ahead, and the shaman consulted his secrets, and together they came to an agreement that, on this day at this time, the long noses would be here, in a place where they could be more readily and more safely hunted.

  He makes it to the top of the hill and settles in behind some rocks, watches as the hunters flow down the hill, almost invisible even to him. He sees even before they single it out that their target will be a young one, off grazing far from its mother and in the right direction as well.

  The hunters jump as one then, screaming and slashing the air with their spears, the magic in the points amplifying everything, noise as well as numbers, and the long noses go wild with fear and scatter in all directions, the young on
e ever further separated from its mother and the rest of its family. It runs up the hill opposite the shaman—a mistake—as it stumbles on the loose rocks there, and it realizes this mistake and turns to come back down but instead sees what it thinks might be an opening and is running across the side of the hill, somehow managing the increased steepness.

  All of the hunters still chase it, and two, including the strongest, raise their arms and hurl their spears. The shaman speaks words to the air to aid the flight of the spears. The words connect, and one spear flies true, stabbing into the side of the young long nose; it stumbles and bleats in agony. He is so sure of the kill to come that he doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t see the adult long nose rush up the hill until it is already in the midst of the hunters, throwing them angrily through the air with its tusks and crushing them with its huge stamping feet. He is then so intent on watching the future of his tribe die before him that he doesn’t see the young long nose lose its footing and fall.

  All he can see is that none of the hunters are getting up, or even moving. As the snow begins to fall, heavier and heavier with each passing moment, he searches for and finds one last incantation of magic that he pulls deep from the earth and sends it toward the animal that had so indiscriminately killed the hunters of his tribe, the adult long nose . . . and toward the rest of its herd. The magic is invoked in a fit of anger that the beasts probably do not deserve, but this act of vengeance makes him feel at least slightly better—at least for a brief moment. And then he picks his way back down the hill and tries to retrace his path back to his people, all the while worrying at the scab on the palm of his hand.

  Samuel woke up on a chair in Smitty’s Barbershop, across the street from the Klondiker. Fanny Alice was there, leaning over him and looking with no small amount of concern into his eyes. “You still in there?” she asked.

  He tried to talk, but his mouth was too dry. A moment taken to reinvigorate it with spit, and then Samuel croaked, “I’m fine. How . . .” He paused, found more spit. “What the hell am I doing here?”

  “Ed was worried about you,” she replied. “Once he saw you running over to the ’Diker, he came and found some folks who could get you out of there before you went and did somethin’ stupid.”

  “Stupid.” Samuel looked down to his hand, saw that it was still balled into a fist, blood crusted underneath his nails and even down to his wrist. He opened it and stared at the spear point, stained with blood both ancient and new. “They tried to kill that mammoth, wanted to eat it.” He looked up, saw that Fanny Alice was not the only one in Smitty’s, that perhaps a dozen people were there, all watching him with worried eyes. But in Fanny Alice he could see something else, a spark of some sort of recognition.

  Smitty himself stepped forward. “Hell, Samuel, ain’t nobody coulda killed that mammoth. It was deader than a doorknob when Mick and Temple found it. You know that.” He rubbed his hands anxiously, probably worried that with Samuel taking up a seat and everyone in here just standing around he had no chance of getting any business.

  Samuel stood up and pocketed the spear point, then with a nod of encouragement from Smitty dipped his hand into a basin of ice-cold water. He spoke as he scrubbed away the excess dried blood. “It’s wrong what Marliss is doing, you know.” Nobody interrupted, nobody argued, so he continued on, now drying his hands on his jacket and looking around for a clean cloth he could wrap around the wound on his hand, which he had reopened. “That creature is an amazing find, a find that should be dedicated to science, not to some base desire to consume so precious a rarity.”

  Looking somewhat aghast at the blood dripping onto the floor, something that shouldn’t have bothered him considering his reputation with a razor, Smitty tore off a strip from a relatively clean white towel and handed it to Samuel, then said, “He bought it fair and square, Pete did. I don’t see how anybody can stop him from doin’ this.”

  “Besides,” interjected Loudon McRae, a trapper who had been one of Samuel’s students and had likely come into town to trade some pelts for supplies, “there’s plenty of folks who’ve bought tickets already. I expect if he doesn’t watch how many he sells he may have trouble feeding everyone. Just about the whole damn town wants to go, although mostly only the business folk can afford it.”

  Samuel tapped the pocket where the spear point rested, some small part of him aware that his behaviour was scaring the rest of them. And so instead of carrying on in front of them, with the slightest of nods to Smitty and to Fanny Alice and then the rest, he stalked out the door and headed back home.

  The scent of defeat and loss followed along behind him, whether from the here and now or from his prehistoric hallucinations he couldn’t be sure. Certainly there was enough to go around.

  As the night of the banquet approached, Samuel noticed more and more that the people of Dawson were avoiding him, giving him wide berth wherever he went, and not visiting him for lessons or company when he was home in his cabin. His one attempt to go out for drinks—not at the Klondiker, never again at the Klondiker—was a sour and shortened evening at the Northern Light, a bar poorly populated as most carousers that night were already off celebrating with Pete Marliss, even though the banquet was still a day away. Even the patrons at this bar, though, were unwilling to come near him, lest he harangue them about the atrocities being visited on science and knowledge and their complicity in it.

  The day of the banquet he had been out for another unhappy walk, and when he returned to the cabin he saw that two pieces of paper were nailed to his door. The first was a telegram, from a fellow at the Museum of Natural History, all the way down in New York City: Sending team from Edmonton to preserve/ship mammoth. Pls keep frozen. Advise of any problems.

  He crumpled the telegram into a tight little ball and stuffed it into his pocket as he leaned back against the doorframe. Even if some miracle brought the team into town today, he could be sure the bones had mostly been picked clean by now, what with the banquet only hours away. He thought for a moment about heading back to the telegraph office and sending off a message telling the museum director to recall his team, but then he thought that they could at least recover the skeleton. He left it for the time being, figuring he could spare at least a day before he had to make a hard and fast decision.

  The other piece of paper was a yellowed envelope. He opened it carefully and then blew into it to open it wide. Inside were a note and two small chits with numbers on them. He read the note first:

  Samule, I know you dont want ta go, but i got theese tikets from a customer and need some one to go with. We dont have to eat the thing, but I figure we shold be there so you can no about it and tell about it. FA.

  Samuel sat down on the porch, heedless of the cold wind blowing up the deserted street. Should he go? He knew that everyone important in town was going to be there and that most of them would be dressing up in their Sunday finest, or even nicer if they had it. He had no nice clothes to speak of, and Fanny Alice had known well enough to suggest that they needn’t eat the primeval stew. He sat there and turned things over and over again in his head, trying to find one good reason to go, and then, after finding that, searching for one good reason to turn down the invitation. By the time Fanny Alice came to collect him, he had come up with at least a dozen good reasons in either direction, the last being that it would at least be warm in the banquet hall of the Klondiker after all those hours spent sitting out in the wind.

  She helped him pick an outfit that would at least not peg him as a grubstaker just in from the bush, and then they walked on to face the desecration of the past, her hand resting gently on his elbow. In another situation the looks he got when he presented the two tickets would have perhaps made it all worthwhile, but there was no way in hell he was going to grant anyone satisfaction out of this evening, especially himself. He allowed that he would be good company for Fanny Alice and that he needn’t harass each diner this evening—his presence here was scold enough, he felt—but that would be the outer li
mit of whatever good nature he normally had.

  It turned out that Marliss had known, or at least hoped, that he was coming and had arranged for Samuel and Fanny Alice to sit at a special table up front, along with Mick and Temple as well as Marliss, his wife (who was decidedly uncomfortable in the presence of Fanny Alice), and the mayor. Upon hearing this Samuel had started to beg off and insist that he would sit in the back, but one look from Fanny Alice had quashed that attempt. She had a way of bringing out the meek in him, he realized.

  Drinks weren’t a part of the price of the evening, but there was very little grumbling over that situation as pretty much everyone in town knew what Pete Marliss was like and had expected nothing more. But Marliss did buy a round of drinks for the VIP table, and once they arrived he stood on his chair and waited for the crowd of diners, some sixty strong, to quiet down.

  “You all know,” he started, looking what Samuel thought was pretty damned smug, “that our friends Michael Callahan and Roger Templeton recently found the whole remains of a supposedly ancient baby mammoth—” Someone at another table raised a hand, and Marliss paused, obviously trying very hard to not get angry at being interrupted so early in his speech. “What?”

  “Um. Who found the mammoth?”

  Marliss rolled his eyes and then looked down and gestured to Mick and Temple to stand. When they did, he said, “These guys,” which was followed by a lot of muttering and nods as people who had never in their lives heard Mick and Temple’s proper names finally understood. Applause followed, and Marliss had to wait even longer, and finally he pointed at their chairs; the two miners, both somewhat red-faced, sat back down.