The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  Under the awning behind the pilothouse, various passengers were standing, though none Harry recognized.

  “No good tell Hal’day ’bout Blunden Harbour,” said Charley.

  “It’s better I do,” Harry said.

  “No good.”

  “Well, if you’d persuade me otherwise, you’ve to do better than that.”

  “Maybe Hal’day think George problem make Indian anger more. He give George more problem. Only make more trouble.”

  “But this is about me, man, and what happened. I’ll have myself in trouble if he don’t hear it from me first.”

  “Hal’day not do right thing.”

  The Comox, through the torrent now and into the calmer seas of the archipelago, slowed and stopped five hundred yards away. He saw the forward anchor slide into the water.

  “They’ll be riding out the storm here,” Harry said. He engaged the engine and took the Hesperus over toward her.

  A couple of lumbermen in heavy woollen jackets leaned on the lower deck rail, smoking and spitting over the side, watching their approach.

  As they pulled alongside, Harry called, “Captain Eddlestone, hello to you!” Eddlestone was looking down at them. Harry saw his enormous Adam’s apple wander seemingly at random across his scrawny throat.

  “Aye, greetings to you,” the captain said. “Mr. Cadwallader, ain’t it? And what the fuck do you be wanting? Hoping to wait out this god-fucking storm with us, are ye?”

  “I’m not. We’re going through the rapids when they turn,” Harry said. “Can you take a message south for me, to Indian Agent Halliday at Alert Bay?”

  “Well I’m heading north, you mole-eyed prick. Do you lack sight as well as reason?”

  Harry was accustomed, as were all along the coast, to Eddlestone’s foul mouth, knowing it for his manner more than his intent. “I was thinking you might be stopping there on your way back south thereafter.”

  “Come aboard, then, and do what you need to do. We’ll share a shot before you and your black lackey drown in them fucking rapids.”

  Harry killed the engine. Charley tied off and then stepped up and over the lower deck rail. He leaned an arm over and Harry put his bandaged leg onto the gunnels. He reached up his good hand. Charley took his weight and the bad shoulder shifted so that he groaned as he stepped up, threw his leg over the railing, and came on deck. The lumbermen nodded to him.

  “Are ye coming up then, damnation?” Eddlestone was in drink, which was his usual state. They climbed the stairwell to the upper deck.

  Of the passengers, there were three Chinamen, no doubt heading for the canneries, huddled in a circle, gaming, with two Indians watching behind them. There were a number of white men who looked to be farmers back from trading in Vancouver or Victoria. There was a priest, diminutive in black, and two men in battered wide-brimmed hats, ragged clothes, and with heavy sacks beside them, who looked to be gold prospectors. They had that bitterness of mouth and rancorous expression, which told Harry they had never flourished nor were ever likely to.

  Two Indian hands were leaning on the rail. One Harry vaguely recognized, and he raised an eyebrow to him but received no response. Charley walked across to stand near them.

  Eddlestone’s bulbous nose, sitting strangely on a concave face, was festooned with broken veins, which ran down and over his cheeks. He held out a hand. Harry shook it. They stepped into the pilothouse. The captain ordered a greybeard steersman to fuck off, and the man shuffled out. Then he picked a stone jar from the jury-rigged iron frame in which it rested, took two filthy glasses and poured.

  “You is a sorry fucking sight and no mistake,” said Eddlestone, looking him up and down. “You look like Satan hisself been buggering you. What happened then, eh? Out with it.”

  “I fell on board and slipped my shoulder. Damn fool I am. How’ve been your travels?” He took a sip of whisky and placed the glass back on the table. Eddlestone threw his down and eyed Harry’s drink. Then he poured himself another.

  “Fucking terrible, and every limpdick retard whining over fares and stowage, every nigger Indian drunk, and the ignorant fucking white men worse.” The phlegm rattled in him as he laughed. “Nothing from the usual. And what brings you to risk death at the rapids, in a sloop too large to have a pinched arsehole’s hope of making it through?” He stared at Harry and seemed less in drink for a moment than he’d been before.

  “I’ve a shallow draft and I hear there’s ten feet clearance in surge. I’m trading.”

  “Trading your sanity to the Devil. Every red cunt’s come outta them fee-jords years back now, that weren’t already dead.”

  “Well, and you’ll forgive me, I’m on private business.”

  “And you’ll forgive me, but I’m wondering if it be anything to do with events among them shite-worshipping savages back at Blunden?”

  Harry looked stupidly at him a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “I been plying this coast for fifty fucking years, and my father captain of the Beaver before me. I seen the way things are among the Indians. I know they’s as likely slice you as fuck you, and good luck to them. If I was red, I’d not be near as kind as they’s been with us, with all we done. Still, I knows they’s murdering, headhunting fucking savages as well, when they’s like to be. And I seen it before.”

  He drank down the shot he had in his hands and placed the glass down. “In ’66 it was, when they was up in arms against each other at Rupert, all for trade with the white man and who had the access to it. My father kept me aboard, but I see all them red man bodies floating in the water along the shore, and most with no heads, and the white men hiding scared in the fort.”

  He poured himself another shot but rolled the glass in his fingers. “Aye, they’ll fuck with you or anyone if they’s holding grudges, and shit-faced enough.”

  “But what of Blunden Harbour?”

  “Seen that godless fuck the chief there. Wool-shit?”

  “Walewid.”

  “Shouting abuse, warning us off, half of them all clothed up in their heathen fancies, feathers and skins and skulls and assorted other horribles, and a canoe being made a-ready. Tell you I seen it before. They’s planning to fuck with someone, and proper.” He drank down his glass and looked Harry up and down again. “Still, to them as has it coming, they’s probably owed it.”

  “When was this?” Harry said.

  “Hah! Late in yesterday. I fucking knewed you had a part in it.” Eddlestone leered at him. “Been trading hooch and lacing it with poison, have ye? Nitric acid burned some old doxy’s stomach out through her cunt, and her boy’s on the warpath?”

  “Not that, nor nothing like it. I’m no more than interested, since I’m sailing in the region.”

  “Aye, well, you’ll do well to sail clear a them goat-prick bastards for a while, whatever your tale may be.” He looked out the window toward the west. “That fucking storm’ll slow them, wherever they be going. And you’ll wait it out too, if you’ve still some sense left in you. I’d not risk the surge through Schooner Channel that’s coming.”

  Harry stepped around the table. “With your permission,” he said, and took a sheet of paper from a stack.

  “Go ahead, scrawl out your will whilst you’re at it. You’re a fucking deadman ghost a-walking already, by my thinking.”

  Harry wrote, Mr. Halliday, I am up near Blunden Harbour. Not found Gorge yet. I here Indians got rumors goin bout Gorge and are not happy bout him and may be war party even. Just thort you shood know it. I am still looking most diligente. We have a good idea where he is, so I ask you most humbly to not take the tresures of the family til we come back. Yours most sincerly, Harry C.

  He folded the paper and said, “You’ve envelopes?” Eddlestone pointed absently toward a drawer, still watching westward. Harry sealed the letter and addressed it. “Here,” he said, stepping up to stand beside the captain. “And my thanks.”

  “Well if you will be going through the rapids, you’d best be in a fu
cking hurry about it,” said Eddlestone. Harry looked out the window.

  He had felt the swell beneath the Comox growing in the minutes previously and the gusting hammer of the wind, but now the waves were steepling in and straggled at their tops with flume. The wind was heavier, and the first broken clouds were covering the late-morning sun. Behind them came a cloudscape of indigo violence, banked miles uncountable into the sky. Shadows clawed on the ocean and darkness raced behind those shadows.

  Harry stepped outside. He shivered, feeling chill. His shoulder ached, and he wondered if there might yet be infection in his injuries after all.

  Charley was there waiting. “Go now,” he said.

  “Perhaps we’d better wait this out.”

  “Think Poodlas dead, Walewid come.”

  “You heard about Blunden, then.”

  “Crew tell me. Better go. Hurry. After maybe them come.”

  “They’ll not be coming through this.”

  “Canoe can stay close land. But when them leave? Don’t know. Them come after us? Maybe them think. Maybe go Teguxste. Go small river in canoe. Walewid bastard. Not stupid bastard. Go now.”

  Harry looked toward the entrance to Schooner Channel. The pace of the outgoing tide seemed less, and the incoming waves were beginning to make some headway into the channel.

  “We’re going then,” Harry said through the pilothouse door to Eddlestone, raising his voice against the wind.

  “I’ll see you next chasing apes in Hell, you shit-for-brains fool.” But he put out his hand, and Harry shook it.

  “I’d give a lot to know when the ebb’ll turn,” said Harry. They were making their way through the flat water between two islets toward the mouth of Schooner Channel. Ahead, perhaps a hundred yards, out beyond where the small archipelago protected them, the retreating tide still roared down the channel from the direction of the Nakwakto Rapids and thundered out toward the ocean proper. But it was less intense than it had been half an hour before. “We need to travel in on its end, against the water’s flow, as it weakens. Then we drop through the rapids just as it turns to flood.”

  “Think too late maybe now go right through all way. Look.”

  Harry eyed the storm front rushing down the world toward them. “Then best we get on. We’ll be hard pushed stopping once we’re in waters driven by that,” he said. “Take the front.”

  With Charley at the prow, Harry with both hands to the rudder arm, his sling flapping loose where he’d slipped his injured arm out from it, and with the engine set at three-quarter full, they moved out into the churning waters of the channel.

  The hull jittered. They heeled and dragged until Harry brought the sloop round. And now it scythed the tide so that the water leapt and spat. Standing waves reared above squat Charley to soak him. They broke against the pilothouse, and Harry’s eyes were stung so that he had to slit his eyelids thin to see. He drove for the centre of the channel, and the waves in the deeper water became less violent, though the volumes beneath them greater, as if they surged and bobbed upon the blubber of some vast whale in its death throes.

  Harry took a sight against the islet off his port bow. Almost immeasurably slowly, but it seemed they made some progress, which meant the ebb was indeed lessening. He leaned forward and set the engine full, and now they were travelling at maybe four knots, Charley up front wiping at his face and shaking his head so that his lank hair threw droplet patterns about him.

  They held to the centre of the channel for the next hour, the tide’s strength diminishing and the day darkening around them. Along the shore, not fifty yards away on either side, the waters formed whirlpools, overfalls, and back eddies, roiling and curling in charcoals and steel blues. They watched for tendrils of kelp that warned of rocks in shallow water.

  And then the tide that held them back at last was gone beneath the hull.

  “Too soon!” called Charley. “We too far. Ten minute slack between tide at rapid only.”

  The first rain began to fall, splatters of heavy drops in intermittent gusts. Harry looked back. The storm hung impossibly vast above them, black beneath. The flood came now in spume and scudding wavetops toward them, and was no more than a minute away. He eyed the shore but there were only rocks and brush. Nowhere that might prove a haven. “Take hold of something, Charley!” he shouted.

  “Look!” Charley was pointing. Harry saw the tip of Branham Island and, coming round it, huge waves from out of Slingsby Channel to the north. Ahead and to starboard were the rapids. The storm-fed tidal flood from Slingsby battered through the narrow gap, throwing spindrift in tornado curls above the tiny islet that lay directly at the rapids’ centre, and around which it seemed not possible to plot a course. There was a small bay just to the south of the entrance.

  “Jesus!” Harry shouted. “We’ll make for the bay and try to anchor ourselves there.”

  “No. Look!” And Charley thrust his finger vigorously ahead. Harry peered. Now he could make out what seemed a carven figure standing on the end of the headland between the bay and the rapids. The rain came now in sheets and he lost sight of it. Then, as the wind blew harder and it cleared for a moment, he saw the figure was human in shape and naked. It held what looked a long war club, though he could not be sure. Its long hair blew against the gale, and then its head turned toward them and Harry knew it was no statue placed to guard the entrance to some Indian holy place, as he had seen them before.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “Dreamer,” said Charley.

  “What?”

  “It come see and know. We must go quick. No stop.” And Harry would have asked more, but the waves were now upon them. The stern rose up and they were heaved forward. The boat began to slew sideways, until he leaned hard against the rudder and brought her round. They fled before the surge.

  “We make for the bay!” he shouted forward.

  But Charley pulled himself along the deck and, clinging to the pilothouse roof, called back, “No! Dreamer tell Walewid we come. Them wait us. We stop now, them ready other side. Go now or not go at all.”

  “What in all the fucking heavens is a dreamer?”

  “Them come go. Know secret. Tell secret.” But now the sloop listed and threatened to swamp as it hit the tide from out of Slingsby Channel. Waves rushed across the deck from the port side. Charley was thrown sideways and into the starboard gunnels. He slid forward and out of sight behind the pilothouse. Harry turned down the engine and heaved against the rudder, water washing over him.

  “Charley!” he shouted. He cursed when there was no reply. The storm was now fully upon them. It was not possible to see ahead through the rain. The two tidal flows were united and the Hesperus was caught. It shuddered and pulled and flew forward. Harry could not now have directed his boat into the bay or anywhere else, whatever his decision might have been.

  Ahead then, for a moment, he saw again the small island that sat directly in the middle of the rapids. It came at him so fast it could not be avoided, the waters swelling up in spate along its sides. At the last moment, the Hesperus lurched and followed the tide hard around the island, so close that Harry could have plucked a leaf from one of the few sparse evergreens. He felt the hull grind against rock and then come free.

  He looked south toward the low headland he knew must be close upon his starboard bow. The rain lifted for a second. The dreamer was squatting on its haunches on the shore no more than twenty yards away. Its face was black and its hair hung down about it. Harry could see the wild whites of its eyes and the sallow snarl. Its naked body, pitch-black and filthy, bobbed up and down, as if it longed to throw itself forward. It reached out one hand, or what seemed a claw, its talons angling out toward Harry, before the flood drew him on and the rain obscured it.

  I WAS AWAY BEFORE DAWN the morning after David’s funeral. I took my hunting gear and off I goes north and west across the water. I did not flee in the madness of grief, as some have said it. I had a mission, though I couldn’t say for certain if
I understood it full clearly at that time. Whether my actions was those of a rational man, I don’t know.

  So I paddled north and west. I passed near to Blunden Harbour, though I did not stop there. Then on through narrow ways towards the waters of Belize Inlet, ways as don’t require me braving the Nakwakto Rapids, as did those foolhardy idiots what followed me. And theirs was a grand tale, but it weren’t mine. Least, not yet it weren’t.

  In two days, I was paddling on that inlet, and I had not eaten all that time. I’d not consciously decided on it. Still, something in me had resolved that I would fast. Four days is the period the Indian usually does it. It was six before I would partake of food again. In that fevered state, strange things does one see indeed.

  That afternoon, a mist lay upon the ocean—me passing through it like I was some phantom. Just the faint splash from my paddle the only sound. I could not see much further than to the eyes painted at my prow.

  I noticed a swell forming beside me. Glancing down into the dull, silvery water, I saw something black, gigantic, rising up beneath me. It broke the surface, water running off it like oil, not a foot away. Black nose and white jaw and belly, and those teeth what look like files of razor-armoured soldier crabs. The pool of its eye stared black, not two feet away, then rolled up into its socket, turning to white. The dorsal fin come up, tall as a man and broken at its tip, product I suppose of underwater combat, of great tearing teeth out in the cold waters of the Pacific.

  Perhaps I get carried away in the telling, but it was the state I was in: grief and hunger addling me, and now this. I ran my fingers down the killer whale’s flank. Old orca, rough-edge scars upon its skin. Then it spouted and arched up to dive. Its flukes reared from the water to hang above the canoe, like some massive totem statue of flesh, before it slid back under the surface. Spume drifted over me, rank fish and brine, the full, foul sweetness of its lungs. I watched the white of the whale flicker in the darkness. Then it was gone.

  Well, I might have wept then—as I might almost now—seeing that great hulk rise up beside me, with all the images it called up out of my past. But the cold of the world, and of David’s death, was deep inside my bones, so I just paddled on, my face set hard. No tears had I shed for David. There seemed nothing of them in me.