The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  There he was, spluttering and gasping, being dragged and drawn by the tide, and the people guffawing and shouting their ridicule. A grand sight. They still talk of it even now. But the northern men put down their paddles, and some of them took up war clubs. A few had old muskets. They started to shouting back in anger at the people’s mockery, and there was danger then of fighting.

  My mother pulled me backwards and away up the pebbles. Those sharp nails on my arm. Not out of fear, though. She was but protecting her son. She was arrogant and fearless. An aristocrat.

  Nakapankam came forward, him not one to roll about like some tomfool in laughter. He was chieftain then of the Kwagiulth. I called him father, so kind a man he was to me. Still call him father now in memory, though he is long dead. He was uncle to old Charley Seaweed.

  Nakapankam was a tall man, bigger even than I grew to be, and in his middle years at that time. He called out, and his people came quiet to hear him. “Shaiks. Great northern chief. Chief of those we have had war with for many lifetimes. Come down from your canoe. We respect our enemies. We will not fight. We will not attack you. Come down from your canoe. We will feed you with our own food. Come down from your canoe.”

  Shaiks was an old man, I saw then, long hair, lank and thin and grey from out of his helmet. His face was made of cracked leather, and a fat scar ran from before his right ear down below the neckline of his armour; but his body was brawny still. He leapt down into the surf, the whoosh of the water up around him, and he didn’t stagger when he landed.

  The speaker was still on his hands and knees. Shaiks took him by his scruff and dragged him upright. Then he laughed, booming, holding the sorry fucker there like a drowning dog. Shook him so the water droplets flew out in arcs. Those on shore they laughed as well, and they on the canoes joined in, beating their clubs against the boats’ hulls.

  The beating clubs sounded like a storm looming. It quieted many of the Kwagiulth, recalling the threat that was posed by all these men of an enemy tribe. But Nakapankam walked straight into the water and put out his hand in the manner of the white man. Shaiks looked down at the hand. Everyone looking at that hand. Nakapankam’s fingers callused and broken, the grime etched in every crevice. The black nails.

  Shaiks let go his speaker and took the hand. They moved their arms up and down, not knowing truly how it was done. Proud chiefs but smiling. Just a little.

  So brave a gesture from Nakapankam. Chieftains didn’t never touch each other, nor was they ever touched theirselves. Many things it was, and maybe memory makes it more. A reference to the whites, to old Nakapankam’s influence with them, and so to the protection the white man’s fort along the beach did afford the people, should Shaiks be planning trouble. And, by that argument, I suppose, it did tell of the white men’s place like gods, protective of the people.

  And it spoke of the world as it had turned as well. The new world that was upon us all, the old ways of violence over—some things good, and some less so. And perhaps it was a sign of conniving between them two chieftains as well. Knowing they were subject, both of them, to the world and to its changing.

  My mother and my father did first meet on that same beach at Rupert. It was back in the days what followed the building of the fort. I wonder was their meeting much the same? The canoes coming in. Anaîn sitting proud among the men of the north, her people. They was on their way to trade in the young cities of the south.

  My father was newly come from England, and was working in the fort. Those days, of course, it was still run by the Hudson’s Bay Company what founded it. He’d been smart enough for the factor to take notice of him. Back then the Company tried to marry off their traders to the Indian aristocracy. How it all changed in the years what followed. The Indians is considered like children now, since the missionaries wound their interfering ways among the people and the new administrators from the East come sneering at the savages.

  Anaîn was fifteen and my father thirty when they was married. The plans had been made right there and then, maybe in a circle on the beach like the peoples of Shaiks and Nakapankam made, once all was on shore.

  My mother was dead before David, thankfully, though she saw plenty of death herself: two of her own children—one drowned like her mother, my grandmother, was—and most of her friends taken before their right age. Illness, and the liquor-driven ugliness what stole her brother in a knife fight twenty years ago. She’d seen much of death, and so had I. Even at that tender age.

  The smallpox had raged through the village earlier that year of Shaiks’s visit. There was bodies all along the beach where they’d been thrown into the sea and floated back with the tide. The stench swathed the shore. How is it humans do smell so much worse than animals in decay? The honey rot. Perhaps it’s knowing it to be the canker from such flesh as clothes one’s own body? It smelled then like the most bitter end of things. And such it was.

  Outside the fort, the Indians died of pox. Inside, I was locked up safe with the other whites. But I would lie up on a ledge above the gate, watching as the sharks came threshing in the surf, their fins rolling sideways as they tore at the bodies, till the foam ran black, the gulls screaming above, and hawks and eagles dropping down to feast.

  There were killer whales even, further out, a whole pod of them, rolling and rowdy. I saw one limp corpse thrown up into the air, fantastical, twisting like some broken puppet. Such sights flood straight to a boy’s deepest insides, with no obstacles of age and of experience to check their torrent.

  Those of the Indian men as weren’t dead found solace in drink. Pitching down the shore, naked and screeching, they fought each other, and sang drinking songs. They called curses to the fort, threw things, even tried to lay a fire at the wall one time. I heard the men dousing water down upon it. Damned heathen fucks, they said, and other such. Me and my siblings was banned from coming out. My eldest sister, Annie, was already in blood, chatting up the sailors when she got the chance. All the youngsters whispering slurs against the Kwagiulths. Brown-skin savages. Barbarous dogs. Spoken from inside their own breed skins. Even back then I felt more kinship with the Indians than I did with my father’s stock.

  I have heard it said there was upwards of two thousand Kwagiulths camped about Fort Rupert after it was built. And if that number sounds high, it was anyhow true no more than a hundred stood awaiting Shaiks that day. And hardly more back in the village. Scarce twenty years it took to so break a people.

  Anyhow, Shaiks was now on the beach. He called over my mother, and me following behind. He took me by my shoulders, fingers—great talons they seemed—bruising. He stared down at me. I stood firm though, firm as I was able, and met his gaze, his eyes half-hidden by their folds, beading black like a raven’s. It was the first time I felt what it might be like to be a man—more even than when I first landed a harpoon, and the blood what foamed out the dolphin’s back.

  “My heir,” said Shaiks to my mother. His voice was like the draw of pebbles in a soft tide.

  My heir!

  Then the speeches that came after, interminable to a boy as young as was I, my back creaking, sitting straight as I could next to this enemy chieftain, this killer, this warrior, my great-uncle. Where were the other boys? I was thinking, hoping they were watching somewhere. Watching me in my glory.

  And now I saw my father, Robert Hunt, coming from the fort with his deliberate stride. My mother had been secretive earlier, ushering me from the fort gates when the calls first went out that canoes was sighted.

  What a temper that man had. All the years trading did nothing to ease it. Ranting on the people’s ignorance and savagery to the ships’ officers, the British, French, and the Americans—even the Russians that sometimes landed still, back then—who came buying up the fur or timber, drawing water or purchasing supplies, though less and less of any of them as the years marched by. My father raved at them all on the many ills of the dark races, even if he had married among them.

  Shaiks’s speaker was telling of the w
ar with the Tsimshian tribe, the war that won their ancestors the Killer Whale canoe, and with it the great name Shaiks: Splasher of the Whale. It was a proud tale the speaker told, and the heavy little man was proud in the telling. And I guess that story is the reason I am remembering this one now, though I go about it in a roundabout way.

  This, then, is the manner by which my Tlingit ancestors won the name of Shaiks from the Tsimshian tribe.

  A Tlingit chieftain of the Wolf Clan died. They burned his body, but dried and kept his head, and put it in a carved box. But the Tsimshian tribe stole the box in a raid, and afterwards they throwed out the chieftain’s head, just keeping hold on the box. When the Wolf Clan learned what had occurred to the chieftain’s head, there followed years of raids and skirmishes between them.

  At last, the Tsimshian made up their minds to destroy the Tlingit Wolf Clan, who was far fewer in number than was they. So they gathered up a war party from many of their villages, until they so far outnumbered their enemy as to be guaranteed of success.

  But a shaman of the Wolf Clan did predict their coming. In his vision, he said that during the battle they would see a killer whale floundering in the slough and trying to escape.

  The Tsimshian rode in on the tide. Their canoes advanced side by side so that they seemed to the people of the Wolf Clan to stretch for miles across the ocean. So many were they that they came straight at the village for an open fight. The Tsimshian chief, whose name was Yakwek, was at their head in his canoe.

  “Run away to the woods and hide,” shouted Yakwek to Chief Gooksin of the Wolf Clan.

  “I challenge you,” said Gooksin. “We two will fight alone.” And Yakwek laughed at that.

  The Tsimshian landed. Instead of fighting, they spread their mats and played a gambling game. “Wait until we finish the game,” they called to the Wolf Clan, to show their scorn, “then we will come and slaughter you.”

  The Wolf Clan men stood further up the beach, tense and fearful in the face of so many of their enemies.

  At first the battle went badly for the Wolf Clan. However, when they first had heard the shaman’s vision, they had gone and called upon their Tlingit brothers from the Raven Clan to help them. These men were now hiding in the houses in the village, waiting to come out and surprise the enemy.

  When the time came, the Ravens leapt out from the houses and attacked the Tsimshian from the rear. This was too much for the Tsimshian. They began to be slaughtered. Chief Gooksin, seeing this, shouted to his enemy Yakwek, “Will you gamble now with me?”

  Yakwek, seeing defeat was upon him, fled for his great canoe, what’s name was Killer Whale. But the Wolves saw this and chased him. They captured him, the canoe, and all his men as they floundered in the surf, and the shaman’s vision was seen to have been true.

  The Wolves decided they would honour the enemy dead by burning them. Those who are burned in death spend their days in heaven close to a fire. Those that are not will wander always trying to find warmth.

  Yakwek was happy when they told him this. To him, it was as if they had paid the blood-price for all of the dead. He agreed there would be peace and no more war.

  So they performed the peace ceremony. They gave speeches and they danced. The Tsimshian gave Gooksin the great name Shaiks, and as well many songs and dances with masks and mourning songs, and also they gave them the canoe named Killer Whale.

  And they gave back into the hands of Gooksin the box in which that chieftain’s head had been kept. The box that started the war between them. Gooksin, first of the Tlingit chiefs to be named Shaiks, kept the box and the canoe for himself.

  There it is. My great-uncle had come paddling down to Rupert in that very canoe.

  Shaiks’s speaker was telling that story to the crowd gathered on the beach. Afterwards, he pointed to my great-uncle. “Here is Shaiks number five since the name was won,” he said. “And he is most great of them.”

  Now all this time my father, Robert Hunt, was standing behind the Kwagiulth, my mother shifting nervous, and all the people holding theirselves tense by his presence. He was a tall man—I took that from him— but bulkier, swelling at the waist in his later years. He was fearsome in his black clothes, his thick black hair drawn into a knot at the crown, like he were a Chinaman, and beneath his low forehead, the puckered-up features of his angry countenance.

  Nakapankam pulled himself upright. He addressed the Tlingit. “Here is Robert Hunt,” he said. “Senior factor of Fort Rupert. Most senior white man in the fort. Blood father to George Hunt who sits beside the great chief Shaiks, and husband to his noble mother, Shaiks’s niece, and so he is family to the great chief.”

  Then he spoke to Robert Hunt. “Mis’r Hunt,” he said, his English just about as bad as old Charley’s. “Come visit chief from north, important family you.”

  Shaiks spoke, and I didn’t expect him, somehow, to have any English. “I am Shaiks,” he says. “Chief of Ravens of Tantakwan Tlingit.”

  “Aye, I know of ye a course, Chief,” says my father, in that outmoded way of speaking he had, “and I call ye father.” He had skill with Indian politics, whatever his feelings might’ve been. But he did not put out his hand. Instead he stared over towards my mother. He looked how a volcano must be before it blows. “I’m surprised not to have heard ye was coming. I would’ve organized a welcome proper to yer station.”

  Shaiks told him he was going to Victoria to trade. “I just stop meet boy who take my place when I am dead,” he says.

  “I see,” says my father, and only after he’d been silent for a time, glaring round at all those gathered. He bade Shaiks come to the fort to visit with him once he was done on the beach. Then he was off and away along the beach.

  Some hours of talk and eating, and even a little trading, later—when promises of goodwill had been made, and of grievances forgotten, and I was fit to screaming from the boredom of it, from the excitement of having Shaiks there sat beside me, and from the fear my father’s rumbling temper had put into me—those hours later, when the sun was low over the island, five of the older Tlingits went with Shaiks and his speaker along the beach towards the fort, me and my mother pacing, nervous, alongside. We passed through the fort’s high wooden gate—all gone now, since the fire, ten years back. Various few white men traders were stood about the small square watching us. The home and office to the Company man was but a singlestorey building back then, of plank-work structure, just inside the gate.

  But the Company man was not to be seen outside. Shaiks and the speaker came in with us, the others waiting outside. He was like to some rat spirit, that speaker, with his tusk teeth and his darting eyes.

  Robert Hunt was at the table inside. He had a whisky bottle by his hand, and deep enough in drink and thinking that he seemed not to hear us coming in.

  Shaiks had left his helmet at the boats, but still he looked too giant in his armour and his lineage and his history to be bound by that or any room. He loomed over my father in his seat, who looked up, face filled for a bare second with what I might now call loathing. Then that grim smile of his to follow.

  He sent his wife off to fetch glasses, and me to the far end of the table. I scuttled away to perch like some duck chick with ravens overhead.

  Shaiks was stiff on his chair, his speaker behind him, standing, and Shaiks’s eyes following after his niece, royal woman, as she was sent to serve and carry.

  Soon she was back with the glasses. Father slopped whisky into them and over the wood. He pushed the glasses forward. Lifted his own.

  “To progress, and to Jesus Christ” was how he put the toast, drinking, and they following him. Slammed the glass down. Poured more. They drank those down as well.

  He poured again, but turned his glass in his fingers. “So, Chief,” he says at last, “ye are here, you say, to take my boy for heir?”

  “Not be my heir for many years, I hope,” says Shaiks, snorting.

  “That may be,” says Robert Hunt, “but you are under a misappreh
ension, for my son is a white man. And no killer nor slave taker is he.”

  Shaiks showed nothing of emotion, just asks what more my father wants from the family. He has Anaîn and all the treasures she brung south with her for the marriage.

  “I need none of yer damned trinkets,” my father says, and he leapt up and marched round the table. Then he had me by my collar. It tore loose in his hand. My heart thumping in me.

  He took hold of my face and twisted it toward the chief. “Boy’s Christian white,” he says. “No headhunting fucking cannibal savage.”

  Shaiks stood. He drew the long dagger at his waist. Going to kill him. Finish him. Then I’d be Indian and nothing else. Shaiks the Sixth of the great northern Tlingit. Maybe I am ashamed to admit it now, and maybe I ain’t, but I was full of excitement in that moment. I wished my own father dead.

  Shaiks came towards us, smaller than my father on his feet, but so single-minded in his manner that none might doubt who’d have the upper hand in combat. He held the blade for a moment before my father’s eyes, and the edge was very sharp. Then he slammed it into the table instead, where it quivered, deep buried in the wood.

  The speaker stood close behind, spinning his war club in his hand. “White fuck,” the speaker says, softly, through his bared teeth.

  Father let go my collar and straightways I tried to get away.

  I wonder now how my life might have been if I had not made that attempt. For back steps my father at that same moment I am trying to pass behind him. Both of us go down, tangling in each other’s limbs. The spittle from my father’s fury sprays across my face. His arm goes back. His fist is above me.

  It was four days before I woke, feeling first the weight of my body against the bunk bed’s edge. All of it fog and pain. The lantern swinging above me, enough to make me giddy. Pressure in my head so strong that I wailed out.

  I was on an American schooner. The President Lincoln. The ship’s surgeon hovered over me. Breath like a still, he had, voice like mist.