The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  “What’s he saying?” Harry asked Yagis, but the old man only motioned him to silence.

  Charley leaned in and whispered along with the narration. “Talk about clan and ancestor. Make list of he names and dance and crest. Same way chief always start talk.” Now Walewid began to speak with greater passion. Charley was silent listening. Then he said, “Say you attack. Them come boat fight back. Fat Harry and he family sell whisky, make Indian man poor and crazy. He say Killer Whale, meaning you and me people, soon get dead in belly of Wolf, mean him.”

  He was silent again listening, and Harry heard notes of agreement muttered from the people on the shore. Charley shook his head. “Talk about George, he book, and about funeral. Say that not how Indian do. Shame to us.” He listened again. “Say him know old George out in forest somewhere in land of Nakwakto. Say you and George same family. So all same bad and must make punish from Indian. If him brother Poodlas die, then you, me, old George go be skull in Wal’wid house.”

  Walewid finished speaking. Now he leapt forward into a crouch, the huge wolf mask shaking from side to side, the jaws snapping at the people nearby. He stood again and made threatening steps toward the Hesperus. He jumped back, then leapt forward again, howling out now, his voice almost a shriek at the end of its breath. Then he spun about and disappeared back inside.

  “He speak enough true for men think too much now,” said Yagis. “All know he a fool and too much angry. But people also angry about George. Yes,” he said, as Harry, groggy now from pain, looked across to him. “This we all hear. Everyone hear all up and down coast for sure. George do bad things at he son funeral. If white man hear then more shame for us, they think we savages. And there be bad words to speak.” He spoke in Kwakwala to Charley, who shrugged and muttered something terse in reply. “Best you go quick,” Yagis said.

  The Hesperus was floating now, although Harry could feel its bottom clipping the mud beneath on every ripple of the incoming tide. He reached behind him and tried to pull himself up with his good arm on the gunnels, but he gasped and slumped back to the deck.

  “Not move,” said Charley. “I do.”

  “Put me forward so I can help see the way at least.”

  Yagis and Charley put their arms behind him. He groaned as they lifted him to his feet. He might have lost consciousness if his shoulder was not so shrill inside his head. Instead he was propped against the front of the pilothouse. Yagis raised his voice and one of his sons came aboard. Charley pointed. The son took a bucket and leaned over the side. He threw several bucketloads of water across the deck, and it carried much of the blood away with it.

  Yagis and his son stepped back ashore. They unmoored the Hesperus and pushed her back as Charley fired the engine. She chugged away from the village in reverse. Harry breathed as slowly as he was able. He watched the people on the plankway, who all were staring silently their way. He could not make out their expressions, standing with their backs to the shore-light, almost in silhouette. They did not move nor make a sound, and Yagis and his sons there with them, until the boat swung about and Harry could not see them any more.

  “Go Alert Bay,” said Charley, when they had travelled a mile or so out into the waters of the inlet. “See doctor.”

  Harry lay propped against the pilothouse. Charley had laid some sailcloth behind him and Harry’s greatcoat over him. His head rolled with the swell. His mind drifted with blood loss and with whisky. He wanted nothing more than sleep.

  He bent his right knee and pushed a little weight down through his leg. The wound on his shin smarted, but he could walk on it. His shoulder was worse, and the damage there would take far longer to repair.

  Two things needed consideration. Firstly, his injuries. The one on his leg was near eight inches long, but not deep. The knife had merely slid along his shinbone and the wound should heal in time. The ragged, zigzag gash that ran down across his shoulder, resembling the broken skin of some dropped fruit, was not so good. It was a deep wound, and all around it heavily bruised from the impact of the war club. He’d seen dislocations before. It took many weeks to gain use again, and always discomfort to follow. Yet he had been fortunate: if it had connected directly, rather than just that glancing blow, it would surely have shattered the bones. Well, he’d broken bones before, his body was scarred in numerous places already, and of aches and grumbling joints he was possessed of plenty. A couple more were neither here nor there in the grander scheme.

  With his good hand he drew the tattered edges of his shirt together until he felt more confident there were no parts missing that might have been buried in the wound, threatening infection. Still, with such gaping holes in him, the risk of contamination was there. He had sufficient iodine to bathe his injuries for many days as yet, however, and he’d weathered similar or worse before.

  The second consideration was how quickly his strength would return. Well, he would eat something now, despite the nausea in his stomach, and he would drink water in quantity. Then sleep and, in the morning, he would know more about his condition.

  “Charley,” he said, “let’s lay up somewhere safe for the night. Then we’d best be finding George, and quickly, now that we know so many are against him everywhere.”

  “You sick.”

  “I ain’t dying yet. We’ll lay some miles between us and Walewid, then hove to. See if I’m in better form with the light of day.”

  “Think Poodlas die tonight.” Harry heard him spit.

  “Well, I am sorry for that.” He was sorry. The man was a thief, it was true, but there was something not entirely right with the night’s events. Something he couldn’t think through at this moment. Something that made him feel all the sicker somehow.

  “All be sorry soon,” said Charley.

  Harry chewed on some dried salmon and hard bread. He nearly threw it straight back up, but he fought the nausea with drafts of water. Charley had pointed the Hesperus south at first. Now he turned west and, keeping the dim black outline of the mainland to starboard, a mile off, he followed the coast west then northwest.

  “Stop by Gwax-laelaa,” he said, pointing ahead. “Stuart Point.” But Harry heard him only distantly. He shivered as he felt again through his hand the machete blade impact against Poodlas’s bone, the flesh-impeded slither up along the arm and into the armpit. Blood was warm again across his fingers. Then he slept.

  He woke in the early dawn. His gummed eyelids held together for a moment, and then snapped open. He moaned, fuddled by alcohol, images from black dreams, and the slow awakening of his senses to the injuries on his body. He levered himself up against the pilothouse. With his good arm, he brushed at the dew on his greatcoat.

  He could hear Charley snoring from the open latch to the forward hold. There was a jar of water beside him. He lifted it and guzzled. His tobacco tin was also there. He cursed when he had to use the hand on the side of his damaged shoulder—the whole arm numb and riddled with pins and needles from the tightness of the strapping—to roll the cigarette. He flipped the match alight with his thumbnail, and took stock.

  They were anchored a hundred yards from shore in a small cove indented in a headland that arced, low and forested, from northeast to southwest, sheltering them from the ocean proper. The day was clear and cold with a light wind from the north, and clouds far off in that direction threatening rain.

  He pushed himself up. He felt as if he had been beaten over the whole of his body. The pain in his leg wound was intense now, yet he could put enough weight on it to limp. His shoulder was near the limit of what he could bear, but that was to be expected for now. The shock was gone and he did not think there was infection in him. He was not sweating, nor did he feel in any way feverish. Indeed, he felt clear in his mind. Clearer than he remembered feeling in he couldn’t say how long, in fact. How was that? Something was missing.

  He realized then that it was the absence of anger. There was no trace of the relentless vitriol with which these past days had been filled. Nearly getting killed a
nd maybe murdering another would do that, he supposed.

  He heard Charley grumble and swear and shift about, and knew that he was awake. So he shuffled around the pilothouse and inside.

  He brewed coffee on the small gas stove. He brought two cups out on deck and handed one to Charley, who stood blinking and scowling, and helping himself to Harry’s tobacco.

  “How you?” Charley said, once he had a cigarette glowing.

  “I’m thinking we keep going till we find him,” Harry said, “though where we go I don’t got no idea.”

  Charley looked him up and down. “Big mess,” he said. “Good idea change clothe.” Harry eyed himself. His shirt was black and flaking dried blood. On the side where it had been torn, it was held together only by its collar. His trousers had been ripped to the knee. The bandages on both shoulder and leg were caked in blood as well. “You face too,” said Charley, “not blood you. Blood him.” Harry felt across his face and spots of blood came off as dust. He ran his fingers up through his hair. It was clammy, and not just with the morning’s dew. The decking was stained almost black all about.

  So he stripped off his clothes with Charley’s knife, and Charley went below to fetch a change. Harry had soap in the pilothouse. When Charley came back up on deck, he drew buckets of water from the sea. They removed the strapping from his arm. He scrubbed himself as best he could with salt water, and Charley helped as well, pouring fresh water from their rain keg over him at the last until he shivered against it.

  When he was dry, Charley unpeeled the bandages, which tugged at the wounds beneath as they came away. They inspected Charley’s handiwork of the night before. There was no invidious purple in the frayed edges of skin where they were drawn together with sail twine. Charley poured iodine upon them. Harry drew short breaths and looked up at the sky. Then Charley re-bandaged the wounds. He said, “Not know you fighting man.”

  “Not so great a one, though, is I?” said Harry.

  “Tell story last night now.”

  So Harry related what had occurred. He was honest enough to say that it was he who first stepped forward to do injury to the thieves. At the end of the recounting, Charley merely nodded and pondered for a while in silence. Then he said, staring out toward the ocean as he spoke, “Kill man before?”

  Harry thought on this. He had kept his history to himself before now. “I have,” he said at last.

  Charley nodded again. “You win fight. Many people think good you fight you property. All know Walewid fool. Know he drink. But you white. Some also think same he. Hear he lies. Be anger you.” He shrugged. “Maybe Poodlas live.”

  “Where should we be heading?”

  “Know now where go.”

  Harry waited. Eventually, he said, “And where is that?”

  “He go Teguxste,” said Charley, “where he make be paxala before, like Yagis say.”

  “And how come you to be so certain?”

  “Just know. George cannot save son. George like ocean. Go deep. Now he go back for memory.” Harry wondered again at the insights of old Charley Seaweed. “You know the way?” he said.

  “No and yes.”

  “No and yes?”

  “Not go there. Hear what people say before. Know many story. Go up past Nakwakto rapid. After, look.”

  Harry pushed himself up. “Then let’s find him before some other fucker does,” he said.

  The Hesperus rode the growing swell, her prow to the westerly wind, engine sputtering enough to hold her stationary. Harry and Charley sat on the gunnels to either side of the rudder. They watched the vast storm front fermenting on the horizon.

  “Three hour come,” said Charley, and Harry grunted agreement.

  A day and a night and half of a morning had passed. From Blunden Harbour they had headed north and a little west, following the coast. The wind had come hard and cold from the north, though the weather stayed clear. They’d had so tough a time beating into it, as close-hauled as the Hesperus could sail, both of them needed to work the boat, with Harry propped at the tiller barking orders to Charley—crying “Watch for the boom, you damned idiot!” on every tack—that he was soon exhausted, and they’d used the engine more than Harry would’ve liked with limited stocks of gasoline aboard. But, at last, the wind had turned westerly, an hour before.

  Now, they were holding a few cables off an archipelago of small islets, each no more than a hundred yards across, with sparse trees and brush, and seabirds thick on each of them. Behind these islets, Branham Island was visible, dense with evergreen and curving away to the west and north. A narrow waterway, which Harry knew as Schooner Channel, ran north between it and the mainland.

  “Tide change maybe two three hour more,” Charley said, following Harry’s gaze toward the waters streaming down Schooner Channel to collide with the ocean waves in flume and turmoil, a maelstrom from which they were protected by the archipelago. “Tide still go out, but storm wave get big make water crazy.”

  Up the channel at its end, as yet invisible, there was a narrow break between two headlands. On the far side lay tens of miles of inlets, and all the waters of their ebb and flood passing through a gap no more than two hundred yards across, with only ten minutes of slack water between the tides. These were the Nakwakto Rapids. To the people, Charley had told him, they were the Cannibal’s Teeth, and you darted through them fast and silent, or be torn and swallowed.

  Charley had been inside before as a boy, but only travelling by canoe, he’d said. They had discussed as many details as Charley could remember. Beyond were old villages, now dead. As Yagis had said, what people had survived the spread of diseases and the wars that followed had moved to be nearer the sea and the trade that plied its way along the coast.

  “First gunboat of English, now Royal Canada Gov’ment come stop war party of other tribes,” as Charley put it. “After, people don’t need hide in waterway same before. Now Nakwakto sell skin, work the cannery and ship.” Harry had met some as had seen Japan, and one Indian he’d spoken to had been as far as England.

  There was some spirit left in the buggers, sure enough. Harry shrugged his shoulders and felt a dart of pain. “We’ll go in closer and lay anchor till the rapids are ready for us,” he said. He rolled himself a cigarette and passed the tin across.

  Charley said, “Cannot go against tide. Too strong. Must wait turn. Then run with tide all way up channel and through.” They smoked in silence for a while. Then Charley said, “How long you have Hep’rus?”

  “Three years now, it is,” said Harry.

  “Do what before come Rupert?”

  “I was selling liquor up and down the coast, as far as Fort William.”

  Charley was silent for a time. Then he said, “Where you from?”

  “San Francisco.” All this time and only now did Charley show some interest in Harry’s life. A little knife work and he was become a somebody. “Leastways, it was there I spent my first years. Enough time at sea and your roots get pulled in the end.” What roots of any kind there’d been. “I’m as much from Rupert as I’m from anywheres else, I guess.”

  “Why come here?”

  Harry shrugged.

  “Why not go south? Same go north go south.”

  Harry rubbed his palms together slowly. “The sloop’s big enough for cargo and I heard there was trade growing in Canada. I might’ve gone on past and all the way to Russia if I’d not stopped off at Rupert.”

  “You bring whisky,” said Charley.

  Harry finished his cigarette and flicked it out onto the water. “I did bring whisky,” he said. “I’ve a deal with my man down south. I’d take it up and down the coast. This trip I had sold the most of it already by the time I landed at Rupert.”

  “Find more than trade,” said Charley. “Find wife. Family too.”

  “Aye, and I’m blessed.” He wondered that such words poured out from him so easily.

  Charley was quiet beside him. Then he said, “You not drink whisky more than polite. Drink more b
efore?”

  Harry pressed his fingertips against each other. “There was a time I did,” he said.

  “Before, I not know man you are,” Charley said. “Now see you fighting man. Maybe know better now. Good Christian white man say whisky bad for Indian. Hal’day, Crosby. But most man cannot choose do what good what bad.” He looked over at Harry. “You life a long story, maybe.”

  Harry squeezed the calluses of his palms together. “Long, maybe,” he said. “But without much of meaning to it, far as I see. As is true for most men, I think.”

  Charley lifted a hand to shield his eyes. “Look,” he said, pointing. “Comox come.” The Union Steamship Company’s SS Comox was rounding the headland to the south and bearing north. “Go Queen Charlotte Islands,” Charley said.

  “Aye, and she’ll be turning round and heading back past Alert Bay soon enough. We’ll hail her and send a message to Halliday.”

  “About what, send message?”

  “About Blunden Harbour. They’d as best know there’s more than white men’s legal issues afoot.”

  “About you stab Poodlas?”

  “They were thieving from my boat. I was in my rights to go at them.”

  “Walewid say different.”

  “There’s plenty and wise enough who saw what happened, and you and Yagis among them. I’ll not fear for myself for that. And if George is returned home while we’re away, then it’s best he and the others know the sentiments of the people.”

  “He know by now,” said Charley quietly, but Harry was already running the engine higher and bringing the sloop about.

  In fact, the Comox turned their way before they’d moved more than a hundred yards. So they lay off and waited. Harry watched the figures on the upper deck of the old steamship out front of the pilothouse. He could see Captain Eddlestone, old vulture, his stick arms directing his crew, as he took stock of the flood before him. He’d met Eddlestone once before, when the Comox had stopped off at Rupert.