Night was coming. I heard the swoosh of a shoreline, and shortly, a pebbled shore showed itself. I was exactly where I had planned on being, almost to the yard, despite the mist and tides. There was comfort in that.
Up the beach a fallen totem pole lay buried in moss, the carved face of an owl still faintly showing. Behind, the forest dripped shadows. I dragged the canoe out of the water, the canoe I made with David, when he was still a boy. And it was he what painted the eyes of the whale at its prow.
The mist had risen by then, a raw wind coming off the mountains to the east. I stood for a time looking out over that great inlet. The moisture in the air caught the light and everything was crimson. Then the sun touched the water and it was dusk.
Why do I relate all this in such detail? After that killer whale paid its visit on me, every act and thought became like crystal. I felt like I was at a distance to myself, but watching, bearing witness. I was outside of things, all emotions leeched out of me, like a deer that’s been hung to bleed.
And I was back at Teguxste. Teguxste: where my current wife, old Francine, was born, sister to Making-Alive, what first got me into being a healer. I was back at that place where I healed the boy of his affliction— when I was but a young man, and Francine then still a child. There, beside the waters where that memory, or that vision, or that dream of the Killer Whale Spirit had come to me. Lagoyewilé was its name. Rolling Over in Mid-Ocean. Now I had come here again, and a whale had lifted up its flukes above me once again. What did that signify? Something. Surely something.
Anyhow, I took out my pack and my gun—the ’92 Winchester carbine what Professor Boas gave me some years before, gift for acting as guide and translator, whilst he was conducting his researches among the people those years past.
I made my camp beside the old totem pole. I walked into the gloom of the forest, to cut bark from the cedars for a roof. I saw the old scars upon the trunks from the past peoples what had gone about the same task. I stripped cedar bark from the trees, muttering the litanies as was appropriate.
I gathered up driftwood. I was averse for some reason to using the matches I had on me. Perhaps they represented too much the world I had left behind. So instead I took out my old fire drill and drove and spun that long splint at the shreds of bark inside, until I’d sparks enough to place in the hearth. By time I looked up again, night had fallen.
I sat with my face toward the fire, an old man in a primitive shelter on a beach, with the ruined totems of a dead village all about, the forest looming black and silent, alone in the dark with the stars falling down the heavens above me.
I was thinking about the killer whale. I was thinking I should have followed it down into the deep waters of the ocean. And further down to the bottom of the world, to the palace of the Qomogwe, the king under the water. I’d float through the gates guarded by killer whales into the palace proper, passing seals and the spirits of the eulachon and salmon, of the sea otter whose fur was the wealth and the destruction of my mother’s people.
I would enter into the throne room and there he would be: Qomogwe, transforming himself from octopus to whale to man and thence back again. I’d hang in the water before him, voicing threats, swaggering and boasting, laying out the totems of my house. I’d claim his daughter in marriage, and I’d win her with my arrogance, watching as she changed then from a seal into a girl. I’d bring her back up through the cold ocean and we’d scramble onto the shore, shivering and creeping like sodden ghosts up the shingle and into a darkened house, its door frames heavy over us. I’d have sons with her and daughters, till at last she’d hear a call one night, like a loon but out on the ocean, wailing, singing out like to a great whale, perhaps. And she would slip away back to the sea.
On the pebbles I stand, night after night, and call her name and call her name and she won’t never come back, but I call her name and call her name. I call: Lucy! Lucy! She is gone though, into the deeps forever. But I will have the totems of her house for my sons to dance, and the husbands of my daughters. And I will stand in the cedar houses by the huge fires with the masks of seal and whale, and show my stories and my ancestry, and be a chief, and so will my sons be chiefs of the whale and the seal and the raven, and of the Qomogwe himself, forever. Lah.
So do the stories go.
I stared into the fire, these mind imaginings and travellings flowing in amongst the flames as they crawled on and tore at the logs there. After a time, I stood and took up my hatchet. I went down to the canoe and I hacked holes through its eyes, and, after, all along its hull, till it was beyond any hope of repair. Then I went back up to the shelter. I sat again by the fire and I stared into its hot heart.
The next morning I came awake in the early dawn. First thing I did was tear off my clothes and pace naked down the pebbles to the water, what was rippled by the bitter breeze coming still off the mountains in the east, behind which the sun still was hid.
I stood waist deep in the ocean, the cold setting my muscles to shaking. I looked back toward the shore and the old village. I saw the silhouettes of the ruined houses against the forest. The timber frames was like the skeletons of those gigantic, ancient creatures what I have heard walked the earth before ever man did exist.
I plunged my head down into the ocean and plunged again, and twice more. On the last, I held my head beneath with my eyes closed. I sank down to my knees.
I remembered the shamans of the village washing me thus before I could be showed their secrets. Four times must I be dunked beneath the waves. Then, them leading me back into the cold air, and we was away into the forest, away to learn what they did have to teach.
I opened my eyes under the water. My breath, and the eddies from my body as it moved, bubbled past. I guess I half fancied seeing the whale staring back at me. But all I saw was murk, the colour of the deep woods at twilight.
After, I dressed and then I walked along the pebbled beach toward the steep hill what stands guard at the centre of the village. The distance I had felt from myself the evening before—even whilst I was hacking away at my canoe—was gone, though still the world did appear almost disgracefully clear in its every detail. But now my mind was laced with torment, the faces of my dead so vivid that almost I felt they walked beside me, lamenting. It wasn’t David, though, I saw. It was my mother, not three years dead herself of consumption. Then my brother and my sister what had died. I saw the little one who died in her first year, her pale little face, choked up with coughing. And Lucy. Her soft voice, and we married out of love, however useful was the marriage to me: her a princess, no less, of the old families, of the sun and seal and raven, and of the people what dance the ways of the King of the Ocean.
I sat on a fallen house post. Carved into it was the face of the Dzonokwa, just as they are in our greathouse in Rupert, her mouth open, round in surprise. Foolish old ogress that she is, with her sack of stolen children.
When I did misbehave as a child, my mother’d tell me the Dzonokwa would come for me. In the night, she’d sneak through the rear of the house and drag me out by the foot into the forest. She’d throw me in her sack to squirm and whimper with the other wicked children. I would lie in my bed in the darkness thinking of those bouncing limbs all about me, tangling, bruising, airless, panicked, going deep through the woods to her cave. There, the sack would be hung up on a great hook, and we’d be plucked one by one out into that terrible cave. The Dzonokwa father and child are there, huge, and their shoulders hunched up so they don’t have no necks, and thundering around, bent brown teeth, leers and slobber and grunting like huge pigs at a trough. A sharp spike of wood gets held up to rumbles of satisfaction, and then, as I squeal and squirm, it is slid neatly up under my tailbone, and on bumping against vertebrae along behind the spine, coming out at the base of my skull. After, I hang, bouncing some with my own weight, over the fire, arms tied tight to my body, legs doubled back, ankles strapped to thighs, heels on buttocks, my flesh cooking, stinking, the vision fading as my eyes come to the
boil, and the sizzle of skin before my eardrums split and I hear no more, and I don’t scream, locked as I am in silence. I feel the belly of my skin crack open, and the spill of my intestines down into the flames. Then there ain’t but the vague feeling of the Dzonokwa child prodding, poking with a stick inside me, until all feeling ends.
A boy’s imaginings, and darker than pitch. Yet more vivid even than such fantasies were the true dyings of the people what I did witness. The plagues swept through us during the sixties. Rasp and wrack, black phlegm and bloody, flowing shit, sores and sunken eyes, the hair in clumps from women’s heads, bones showing clear through skin. Always some new sweet stench at which to nauseate and shiver—gist for a child in the night, staring up at the shadows of the masks creeping on the walls and high among the timbers of the roof.
I walked on down the beach until I came to that place what was my destination: the greathouse where I had first healed the boy.
All that was left now was ruins, the ground thick with grass, the timbers heaped about, rotten, bled dry of memory.
I stood in the centre of that ruin. I watched seals roll in the water offshore. Now the clouds split apart and the late-afternoon sun flooded over the ocean onto me. I shut my eyes. The light was pink against my eyelids. The whole day had drifted away without me noticing. I opened my eyes again and walked back along the beach to my camp.
I went through my pack. At the bottom lay a wooden box with killer whale carvings on it. But I did not take it out, as I had meant to. I did not walk back along the shore to the greathouse, to perform the ritual for which I was come.
I thought on those shamans bathing me in the water. I remembered the excitement of that time. The emptiness of the world as now it was. I knew that there was something else I must do instead.
The box went back into the pack and some few of my necessaries for the wilderness went with it. I made my way along the beach, as far as the clear-water stream what was the reason surely for the village first being settled there, whatever the old myths might tell of thunderbirds and other fierce creatures of the sky coming down and transforming into human beings to settle on that lonely stretch of sand.
A storm was rearing its ugliness away to the south and west. I squatted down and splashed water on my face. Then I followed the stream’s path into the forest.
I feel like I have been standing here, before this museum mannequin and its suit of armour, for ten thousand years. I must move my eyes off it and go among the other exhibits. The light washes in through the high windows across the floor and the glass cases. The very few people in here, what wander between the masks and poles, the great carven boxes, the old high-prow canoes, like they is half somewhere else, they give the dust to swirl like convoluting whirlpool eddies in a low tide. I am awash with ghosts, with shadows, with the fermenting juices of my own history.
I had gone to Teguxste to atone. That’s a Christian word, but there it is. I had broken my canoe, and so made my decision not to go back to the world. Was it death then I was seeking for? Maybe it was. I wonder on it still.
Yet when I stood in the ruined greathouse of the old chief whose grandson had been sick and I had healed, all those years before, it did not seem that I had come to the origin of my sorrow after all. I don’t know if that ain’t just the sentiment of hindsight. Who can know in the retelling of events? Now and then are but random pointers in this creation. They mould theirselves together into that which we may recount to others, and so dream that we do comprehend this elsewise senseless, pitiless place of our being.
As I was moving forward, so was I travelling backwards. Back to where? Some origin, I imagine it to be. The heartland. The first place from which all else did follow. I see it in the researches of those scientists what come along the coast. They seek for a world from which they dream their own grand civilization, what hums and whirs and broods, sprung up. A world out of the past. As if the Indian ain’t lived the same number of years of the world’s history as have they. Years of unrelenting change. Years of history, as they use the word. Yet have we all lived the same number of years on this Earth. Where do they think the Indians had gone off to for all that time between? Have they been frozen, like as to statues in the wilderness, just waiting for the white man to arrive—to pour electricity through them, perhaps, and so draw them once more into motion for their researches?
Still, I do aid the scientists in this whole splendid undertaking. They come to me as the expert. The native expert, with his brown blood for studying and his white blood for trusting. All the languages he speaks. And his skills with a pen—such as they are. I write the stories. I write the ways of the people and send my missives off. As to what constitutes savagery, and what does not, well on that I have my own beliefs.
It is a questionable business being an ethnographer, as my appellation has been given, but one I’ve come at last to feel I have resolved in myself, though I’d not get ahead of myself by so saying. Yet, even now, I believe the resolution of those questions is at the heart of this story of mine.
Anyhow, out of Teguxste and into the forest I went, following the stream uphill. Undergrowth covered the old path, huckleberry and skunk cabbage. I hadn’t trod that path in more than forty years, and my memory of it was hazy at best. Still, it was along the stream that I remember following those shamans as had bathed me first in the ocean, following behind them filled up with excitement at what might happen, at what I was about to learn.
As the evening set in, so the storm I had seen earlier did arrive. I flensed a few branches and put fronds over them against the rain. I had brung dry tinder enough to get a fire going, though I weren’t averse this time around to using matches. The fasting made my stomach churn and cramp.
I sat beneath my shelter, getting dripped on as the rain wound itself up into a frenzy, and staring out at the woods. The forest was strung by shadows, the trees great lumbering beasts come to rest, shabby in their rags of vine and moss. I was among swordfern, wild lilies and elderberries, vicious-spiking devil’s club and dogwood. White man’s names. I could name them all, as well, in Kwakwala, and list the people’s uses for them. Swordfern. Sakuam: the fronds line steampits and storage boxes, cover floors, and is lain out for fish to dry. Scientists call it Polystichum munitum, in that dead man’s tongue, Latin.
I sat there feeling alien to it all. Me, who used to speak to the trees, hold discourse with them. Used to sing ritual songs when the jays buzzed past, nervy and neat. I had led the scientists in, and they had pasted labels through the forest. Every bract and catkin, stamen, spike, and rhizome probed till it all weren’t more than the engine parts on the floor of Harry’s workshop. What is left of wonder in the world?
The next morning I was soaked through. I drunk a little water, then upped and walked—trudging always uphill. But my mind was far from clear by then, even as to where I was headed. I just knew to place my boots one after the other, and always uphill. Answers would come, just so long as those boots kept plodding.
Soon enough the stream was gone. The undergrowth clung and twined about everything. Blood veins, I was thinking. Whipcord muscles of a body cut open. A twig gouged my cheek—the side as is paralyzed. I touched my face and my fingers came away bloody. I have to be careful of such things. The ship’s surgeon told me I had broken the nerves of my face. That I couldn’t never feel anything again on that side of my head.
I wander in my narrative like I am still now bumbling in the wilds. What ship’s surgeon? Well: tell a tale out of the past and it might help some in understanding all this. It is a story I was recounting to myself there in the forest—reliving, feverish with grief and fasting as I was.
Four canoes is approaching the beach at Rupert. Young George Hunt, nine years old, waiting on the shore for them to come in. He is beside his mother, Anaîn—her beautiful name. And all the people gathered on the shore as well to watch the arrival of the great Chief Shaiks of the Northern Tlingit, come south out of Alaska.
He was my great-uncle.
He carried the crests and dances, masks and privilege of our ancestry, to which I was entitled, since, among the Tlingit, it all comes down through the mother’s line.
Shaiks was at the prow of a war canoe full sixty feet in length, twenty warriors at the oars, painted in design of the Killer Whale, blood daubed at its mouth for all those it had eaten in war. Three other canoes followed behind. Slabs of black hardwood covered every part of Shaiks’s body, all strapped with leather tight against him, and with dense carvings across them. On his head was a helmet with curling earflaps.
Shaiks’s speaker was standing just behind him in the prow of the canoe, low and wide with a blanket about him, bear-skin hat on his head. He drew himself up, self-important, and called out across the water in some bastard version of Kwakwala.
“You Kwagiulth! Listen,” he says. “Here great chieftain Shaiks. He the Raven. He the Ganaxadi Clan of Tantakwan people of the north. He have from ancestor crest of Killer Whale and Raven, and other many he win from killing and from marry.”
I felt the excitement foaming in me, knowing him for my relative, seeing the nervous ways the people next to me was shifting and mumbling to each other. My mother had told them he was coming, peaceable, to visit. But seeing the warrior of an enemy tribe, this legend, plying in towards them with a hundred men or more: well it made for quite the fearsome spectacle. There weren’t but a few men in Rupert then. Not enough to defend theirselves, and hardly a white man in the fort, away along the beach, barring my father, a few traders, and the missionary.
The shoreline comes up sharp and shallow at Rupert when the tide is high. Now the chief’s canoe crashed into it, and still at speed. My great-uncle was thrown forward, hardly holding himself against the prow’s high peak. The speaker was not so fortunate. He flew out, doing a tidy somersault and crashing on his back into the surf.
The Cannibal Spirit Page 12