I wonder if I was playing out some history I imagined to be true. Some history of which I craved to be still a part. I know the ways of the people maybe better than does anyone, with all the researching I have done. Truth be, I think now I was concocting my own ritual, piecemeal, from the scatterings of knowledge what was lying about inside my gyrating head that night of the funeral. Also, there was the needing to atone for my failure as a healer, though how separating David’s head from his neck might have helped … well, there ain’t much of reason in it, when all aspects is considered.
As I washed my salmon-covered hands in the lake that morning, the vision of the killer whale as it rose up above me in the greathouse of my vision was there in my mind. Of course, I had been seeing myself through the eyes of the sick boy I healed so long ago. And what a diabolical and beastish figure was I, hulking above me, my fangs those of a wolf.
How, with that whole sackful of shams, had I healed the young boy? Perhaps it was that once I did believe in the shaman’s ways, as later I did not. But the boy believed that I would make him well. He was healed because he believed his dream of me. Belief, belief, belief.
I saved the boy and, after, failed to save so many. Failed to save David. I performed every ritual on him that I knew or I had ever heard of. Somewhere my faith in my own brown blood was lost. Yet surely it was my actions what mattered. Not my belief. The boy I healed was the one who needed the belief, not me. Maybe David knew I had no faith, and so he could have no faith in me. Then it was my lost faith what failed him. My lost faith in my Indian blood. How had it deserted me?
It was why I had come to the House of Shamans: in recognition of that failure of belief. I saw that then. And there was consequences to such understanding.
Lagoyewilé told me that. “One son is dead. The other is dying. There is consequence to all you do. Remember it.” I leapt up, and ducks flew up off the water in surprise at me. Lagoyewilé had come to me in the night! He had been beside me by the fire. He had spoken to me. Another spirit was there with him. Some demon—beaten, ragged, savage in his intensity.
Lagoyewilé spoke to me. He said there was one as yet needed saving. What was it he said?
But I could not place all the details of the night’s vision in their right order as yet. So, first things first, I says to myself. Something, at least, I knew needed doing. I went back to the camp from the lake and made free with the machete, till the base of the killer whale pole was visible all the way to the earth. My fingers tore up the turf. I burrowed like a rabbit till there was a hole two foot deep. I took up the box and put it there, in the ground. Before the soil went back in over it, however, I did lift up the lid for one last peek.
His face was lost in decrepitude. He was gone. Only the flesh remains, and that is but the rotten nothingness of the world. So I put back the lid, piled over the soil, and placed the turf back over the top.
And there was an end to it. There weren’t nothing else. There weren’t nothing left to think.
Boas wrote me a letter once. Get me Indian dreams. I wrote him one of my own. I fly upwards, as if going to the place where are the stars, for they are showing, though it be still daytime. I see all around the world: the great curve of the Earth, as it is described. Then I want to go down again, but in vain. Instead, I hang there as if from the edge of some impossible high cliff, the vertigo spoiling in me till I cry out with the terror of it.
I lay on my back on the damp grass beside the old pole. Lying there, faced with deciding what came next, I felt that same vertigo I had had in my dream. There was something, some words spoken to me in the night that had intention in them. But I could not grasp hold of them as yet.
Over me, an eagle soared in the sky. He must’ve been watching to see if I would ever rise again. I had no notion if I ever would.
The clouds, the eagles, ravens loafing towards their daily business, ducks come flapping in to land upon the lake. The day passed over me as I did lie there with my face pointed skywards, beside the ruins of the House of Shamans. There weren’t no decisions I had come to about myself. There weren’t even a plan fermenting in my mind on what I should do next. I just lay there like some blank page over which a writer sits with his pen in his mouth, head as empty as the page itself. I was done with what it was I’d come to do. Now there weren’t nothing left.
But there was just something what stirred inside me. Something in the words of the vision that Lagoyewilé had spoke. One son is dead, the other is dying. On the beach a son is dying. Then I saw more clearly in my memory the face of that other demon who had been with Lagoyewilé. I recalled how my shirt had been wrapped about my burnt arm, soaked in water, though I could not have done such a thing myself, lying as I was in the fire.
I dragged myself to my feet. I scanned the ground surrounding my camp. I saw that I had indeed not been alone the night before. I saw then the crooked old face of Lagoyewilé as he spoke to me. Charley Seaweed. I could almost have lost myself to rage once more, so shamed did I feel at myself in that moment of realizing. And Harry with him. Harry sick to dying.
I pulled my gear into my pack. I threw the reed mats I had made upon the fire so that they roared up in final reverence to David. I placed my hand down one last time on the turf under which my son was finally laid to rest. Then I made my way towards the forest’s edge and passed inside, this time following close by the stream that emptied from the lake, knowing it for that water which eventually pours out onto the beach at Teguxste.
Down through the thick woods, during the rest of that day and on into the night, and never stopping, not for rest nor water nor food. As the dark came on, something started voicing itself to me. Did it come from out the trees? Or was it just some dreamfulness still festering in my head from the days of my fasting? It didn’t have no words. Least not as I had language to understand them. Voices whispered all about me. Suggestions was proffered. Questions being asked. I tramped amongst the wild woods and just let the voices swirl about me without mind to them. And as I walked, I took my machete, cut fronds, and I drew on the forest as I would a cloak.
Now the smells and tastes of every plant and animal came clear as day to me. All of me was sense and knowing, sound and smell and rich suggestion. All the life of that black wilderness felt like it were a wind blowing through me, cleaning, scouring all in its path until I was all cleared out inside and free to sense the wilds in their fullest manner. Speaking it here in the middle of this city of machines and numbers beyond comprehension: well, it don’t sound sensible even to me now. But there it is and I must stand by my experience, be it reasoned or otherwise.
So I went on through the trees, sensing all that was around me. I crunched the undergrowth under my feet, making enough noise so that I could hear the animals of the forest darting off to hide, and I could name them as they disappeared. A mule deer, two racoons, a marten, an owl above me, whooshing away.
At last, I saw in the distance the orange glimmerings of fire, and I guessed it must be on the beach at Teguxste. But then a rifle fired, and after more. Of that I could make no sense, trying to work through my memories of what I had understood to be a vision, but now was coming real, words of that gnarled old spirit, Lagoyewilé, what had passed straight through me when they should have stuck. Some threat what I should know of. I was filled with wariness then, such that I stopped and felt myself as silent as the roots of the very cedars themselves.
Then I edged forward. It weren’t fear in me that made me wary, but a desire for destruction. The Cannibal Spirit from the ends of the world, come hunting men along the borders of the civilized lands. Such was I. I was like the wolf as it might pause in the stalking of its prey, silent, hardly breathing, grey snout forward, eyes not blinking, hackles coming up, planted paw, nostrils widening.
Something was moving up ahead of me, coming towards me fast, but then almost straightways slower, and then more slowly still, until it was near to silent. Now there weren’t no more than a feeling of it, but I did not doubt my
senses. It was come hunting too. I knew it for what it was: not quite human, not at least no longer, lost now to the wilds, and sniffing out the hiding places, knowing, listening, hearing things, taking secrets to the ears of shamans, making witchery.
Gossip’s witchery in the Indian villages. I despise it. The terrors of who is making potions, plotting, talking against you among the people on which you do rely for your survival. Just knowing they is out there whispering against you is enough to kill. Small groups, they need their unity. Outside ain’t nothing but the cold, and death.
It came on more definitely now, almost but not quite silent. All I could hear was a faint brushing of leaves in the darkness. An owl called out. I was not more than a tree, a bush. It cannot hear me. Upwind, it cannot smell me. I had my rifle slung at my shoulder. But instead I slid the machete from my belt and gripped the cold bone of its handle.
Some yards in front of me, faint in the dim glimmer of the fire through the trees, I saw long nails part the foliage. And then there was jutting teeth, what looked like a pig’s tusks foraging. The black paint all over its face and its body, that was there to strike fear of the otherworld into those what saw it.
Come on then, find me! I am deep in the wilds. For all my half-white blood, I am more savage than even you can know.
It disappeared behind tree trunks and I couldn’t no longer see it, nor hear it either. Then the undergrowth exploded next to me. It was quicksilver fast all right, and I weren’t prepared for it, for all of my pretensions. I saw the club swing, and there was pain all up my arm. The machete fell from my grip. I grabbed for its throat. Then its blood-webbed eyes was right before me. Claws was at my face. We hit the earth, all tangled up in one another. Its club rolled under us and was gone, and my one arm still numb with the blow it had received. I wrapped my legs about its slithering body. I was heavier than it. It thrashed under me. Go on, thrash, you long streak of piss! I have you!
My body weight was on it, but its talons still was all about me. Then there was agony in my left eye and all down my face. But my hands caught hold of its wrists, the one at the end of my numb forearm struggling still for grip, but holding fast enough. I leaned in, bit down, tore upwards. I tasted the iron and salt of blood in my mouth, and the gristle what was the better part of its nose.
Even then it made no sound more than a grunt. The putrefying smell of the forest floor was all about us. I bit at its face again, tearing at its cheek. I felt its own teeth score across my neck. My old body didn’t got much more vigour left in it. But it was weaker too. Just for a second it hung loose in my hands. My fingers let go its wrists. I took its head and drove it down, again and again in the darkness, till it was limp under me. Still I went at it, crushing its skull to broken pieces. Then the pain in my eye had me rolling away, moaning and gasping for air on the soaking earth.
I came out from the forest onto the beach swinging that brute bastard’s head in my hands. I must’ve looked a spectacle, my face all gored up where its talons had torn me, my body covered all over with leaves and branches. I was singing: “The Cannibal Spirit made me pure. Great magician, Cannibal Spirit—you taught me to devour lives. You live on nothing but blood. I give you lives to eat! I give you lives to eat! I push down your wildness. I am the life maker.” Which I suppose was ironical, given how recently I had taken a life. I had started to singing as I was chopping off its head, out there in the darkness, its stoved-in skull sopping wet, loose in my hands. Maybe singing helped ease the shock of it. I do not now recall. By the time I stepped out on the beach, the singing was such a part of me that all the world felt tangled up in its rhythms.
Standing there on the beach was the chieftain Walewid, from up at Blunden Harbour. He was wearing his wolf mask, and fired up with anger and deathly purpose against me, so it seemed. We’d swapped a few words prior to my emerging on the beach already, and Charley Seaweed had been shouting down to warn me of the chieftain’s dreamer being somewheres about in the forest, not knowing what had already occurred. Hearing Charley’s voice confirmed what had gone on the night before at the House of Shamans was real, after all, not just product of the days of my fasting, as part of me had been suspecting. I heard Charley and it all fell clean into place, without no confusion in my head. I saw the two of them there by the fire the night before. What Harry must have made of that! I thought. He must be lying up there despairing of all us monsters.
Charley spoke some on what was happening: that I was accused by the agent Halliday, that he and Harry had come searching to bring me back to answer, that Walewid here had trouble with my son-in-law, that Harry was up there beside him dying.
Well, if Walewid now was angry, I weren’t in no mood to be receptive to dialogue neither. He and I swapped more angry words and I showed him what I had done to his dreamer. I says to him, if Harry dies I’d have them all to pay for it. I says I’ve the spirit of the forest in me and I didn’t give two shits for Walewid’s men, however many of them there was. I’d took his dreamer’s head. I’d take them all.
Then Charley spoke up again. “You all know me,” says he. “My clan is Raven. I have the body, the bones, the blood that is made out of thorns.
I have the privilege to speak to you because I also am a chieftain of the Kwagiulth.”
Then he told the men with Walewid, what was gathered further along the beach, how the dreamer of Walewid had been sent by me back to the wilderness, which was right and proper. So did I have confirmed to me, as I had guessed it, whose head it was I’d taken. He said it was wrong a dreamer should turn to a beast, as the dreamer of Walewid had done. It was wrong a dreamer should go hunting man in the forest, as if he was a Dzonokwa. It was wrong that a dreamer should go to kill another man.
“What has become of us,” he says, “that we should fight here now when all are dying? What has become of us that the short-life bringers can laugh as we fight and kill each other, even as we die from their diseases? What has become of us that this should be so?”
He told them all my titles as a chieftain and a shaman. And he told them then that he, Charley, was my dreamer. “I am that spirit what is the Killer Whale,” says he. “I am named Lagoyewilé.” So did that secret come out into the open after all these many years.
He told them he knew I was a true shaman, which was the reason he had knowed to come here and find me in the first place. Then he says Walewid can have all Charley’s secrets in payment for the loss of his own dreamer, Charley’s dreaming is greater than that of the dead. “Do not think George is our enemy, men of the Nakwakto,” says he. “He is one of the people. I know this.”
Then he spoke to me. He tells me he can see my rage boiling, and that it weren’t no good. He tells me how Walewid’s brother Poodlas was dead, killed by Harry, and how Harry hisself was dying. “Many times men fight and die and there ain’t nothing of use in the dying. These are days when all are dying,” says he. These are days when liquor makes men fight. Poodlas was in drink, he tells me. He tried to take from Harry’s boat. Harry fought him. But still, Harry is one of those white men who sells the liquor, and so has his own responsibilities to bear.
“All is in the mist,” says Charley. “Nothing can be seen clearly.”
He’s a great one with words, old Charley, though a person mightn’t imagine it to look at him. He don’t hold much with speaking English, though I have noticed he understands it well enough, which I always did find a mite suspicious. Still, when he is speechifying in Kwakwala, he can be all fired up like a preacher, which is what he is, I suppose, to those of us what know him properly.
I had come back down to Teguxste fast as I could. Now I was here stuck with Walewid, when Harry was up there dying. To lose another son! As I did clearly see him to be at last. I stared at the wolf head opposite, and it twisted crazy in my eyes. This creature whose kind had set to my daughter’s husband. I saw my machete hacking through the wolf head till it came to skull and brain, me tearing open its jaws and my skinning blade thrust deep inside, the blood f
ountain and the screaming. Terrible things.
Yet I did hear the words of my dreamer. I have always listened to Charley, old cripple, but wise. So I fought my fury hard, until at last I did become aware again that it was a man what stood before me: Walewid, the dreamer’s head at his feet, the wolf mask covering his face. Now I could see, through the open jaws, the dim shape of his face. I could see there was fear in his eyes. Everything was silence, excepting for the roar and crackle of the fire.
Walewid reached up and lifted that great mask from his head. He says, “I am the shaman, the chieftain of the Nakwakto, Walewid. My dreamer is dead. My brother is dead. I am at feud with your family. Yet I hear the words of this, your dreamer. I will accept his secrets in payment for the dreaming I have lost this night.” And he said to bring down Fat Harry and lay him by the fire. Then we would talk. And, after, he went off back to his men.
Charley yelled down for me to keep an eye on them drunken men by the fire, who couldn’t rightly be trusted not to put a bullet in us, whatever Walewid might say. He spoke that Harry was soon to be dead. I wanted to know more of what had brung them here, of what was wrong with him, but he said, talk later. He asked if I had white medicine of any sort, which I did not.
“Well, you got to save him anyhow,” says Charley.
When the two of them come from out the undergrowth at the bottom of the hill, Harry half draped across old humpback Charley’s shoulders, his feet stepping one in front of the other, but his face pale enough to seem like he was dead already—well, when they showed up I wanted to tear at myself for my craziness in not seeing them for who they was the night before. Charley, what is my dreamer, my whisperer of secrets: I had called him up, the spirit of him, so I had imagined it, and Harry just some ghost following behind. Now maybe I’d done for his life by not tending to him back then. Done for him like so many before I hadn’t been able to save.
The Cannibal Spirit Page 19