The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  We got him laid out beside the fire, and he was ranting, not making any sense, staring off ghoulish at the trees as if he was seeing spirits of his own. I kneeled down over him, but, when he sees my face, he comes over terrified, struggling as if to escape from under me. I held him, along with Charley.

  “Harry,” says I, and all the pain of those numberless wrongs I had inflicted on the world, as I saw it then, was in my voice. “Hear me. It’s I—George. There won’t be no more horrors from me, I promise you.”

  He seemed to run out of steam then. He lay still and looked up at me a moment. The pale of his eyes was shot with black streaks of blood veins. They seemed to float beneath milky water, like an old woman’s rheum.

  “I know why you done it,” Harry whispers.

  “I just seen too much,” says I.

  “I know.” He looked off towards the forest, his eyes roaming like he was viewing all sorts of things that I could not. I did not know, still don’t, what rivers run through Harry. But, in that moment, I knew that they run as deep as do my own.

  He smiled and held on to my hand, almost like he was reassuring me. Then he lay his head back. He closed his eyes, his breathing coming in short little puffs, his skin like white wax, snot running out from his nose, blood spittle at his lips. And oh, but it was a most terrible perfume what wafted up from Harry’s shoulder. It took me back to the reek of the smallpox cankers on the people’s bodies, as they lay dying in my village when I was still a child.

  One of Walewid’s soldiers brung water from their side of the fire in a wooden bowl. I drizzled some on Harry’s lips, and he gasped and licked at the moisture. I wanted to wail and shake him, to clutch him against my chest. My last surviving son. Burning up, drifting like ash away from me.

  But now Walewid spoke out in the high Kwakwala. He said Charley’s words had set his head to wandering, but now his head was back, and he had things to say to me. Walewid was near his men on the opposite side of the fire, but to one side, so that he was not hidden by the flames.

  Walewid tells me I am a white man by what I do, telling secret stories of the people to those who should not know them, taking treasures that was our ancestors’ since the beginning of the world, buying them up with the white men’s money.

  “I say you are a demon,” he tells me, pointing across the fire. “No demon of the forest, dressed though you are as one. You are a demon of the great villages of the white men in the south.” He says I am in part accountable for the diseases that they bring. What can I tell him, says he, so he will believe I ain’t cursed by the bad white blood what flows so foul in my veins?

  His men was growling and speaking curses across the fire, rapping their weapons upon the earth to show their approval of their chieftain’s words. But I turned my eyes away and stared down at my son-in-law, as his features was squirming and clenching in torment.

  “Must answer,” Charley says to me, his hand upon my arm. So I set him to taking the bandage from Harry’s shoulder, and I pushed myself to my feet. Now I could see them all ranged round the far side of the fire. Most of them glowered at me such that I knew our lives did hang, uncertain, in the balance.

  I tell them I have been in the wilds for many days. I walked up through the forest till I came to the place where the spirit of the Killer Whale lives, the place where first I come to be a shaman. I had took my eldest son, David, there to lie in his death. I did not put him in a Christian burial ground. His body lies in the trees on the burial island at Rupert. I took his head in the ways of the northern people, the Tlingits, from which I am sprung. And now his head lies with the Killer Whale Spirit of the shamans in the famous box my great-uncle Shaiks did give to me. If that ain’t properly the ways of the Kwagiulth, I do admit it. Still it does honour to the old ways of the northern people, of which I and my son was chieftains also. If that action of taking my son’s head was not agreeable to the whites, then I do call damnation on them for trying to put me, to put us all, inside a cage of Christian bars. And if it shames the people, then damnation is coming to us all, I says. For all our pride is gone.

  Then I spoke to them about the Killer Whale Spirit I had seen in my vision by the lake. “He hung there above me, as he has done before—and he has even spoken to me, guiding my actions. He would not show himself to me if I were only a white man.

  “But Walewid,” says I, “many of those words you brung back from your mind’s wandering are the same words I have been asking of myself. I have taken the stories of the people and I have written them in the books of the white men. I have taken many of the treasures of the people for the white men’s houses of knowledge.” I do not know if my actions are good or if they are bad, says I. I am Indian by birth, as the Tlingits do trace their ancestry through their mother’s line, and by my marriages am I Kwagiulth. “Does anyone here question this of me? I did not bring the white man here. But here he is. The people die. How many in Walewid’s village still live? Of every four men there is now only one. But those who are dead still speak in the words what I have written, in the treasures that now are with the white men in their museums.

  “But do not call me a white man,” I says. “To the white man my skin will always be brown. To the white man I am always Indian. My son was a great chieftain. He was chief of the hamatsa of the Fort Rupert Kwagiulth. Now he is dead. My daughterson lies dying before me. All comes to nothing. Lah.”

  After, I stood there gulping at the air. Then I tore off the leaves and fronds and branches of the forest that were wrapped about me, throwing them all upon the fire. Great plumes of smoke billowed up where they burned, until we could not see each other at all for some time. I thought: Yes, all is like the mist. Charley is right.

  “I have heard George Hunt and Lagoyewilé,” says Walewid at last. “It is true the people die. But we are not yet dead. We are still here. We are not shadows. We are not the white man’s shadows. White blood in George Hunt’s veins makes him forget his strength. He must choose his blood. Yet I know how it is he forgets. The people live by fear and rage. Lagoyewilé has spoken the words that are good. White men laugh at our fighting. Every death is a victory for them. George Hunt should remember that he shows his blood only by his actions.”

  Walewid came up to his feet. “There will be a blood-price paid for the death of my brother,” he says. “So we will sit and we will watch this white man, Fat Harry, come to his death. When he has gone, there will be an end to matters.”

  Once he was finished, there was hollering and wide assent from Walewid’s men. But I jumped up, my machete in my hand. I kicked at the fire and a brand leapt in the air, cinders flaring, near blinding me.

  “No!” I fair to screamed the word. “There’s too many of my children already dead. I’ll not lose another!” I would kill all of these men here if need be. I sensed Charley beside me, on one knee, the rifle he carried aimed now towards Walewid’s men. One of them, gaudy in a yellow woman’s lacy shirt, torn near to ribbons so that it ruffled about his torso, made to lift a gun from the ground beside him. Charley fired off a shot, and the pebbles exploded close by the gun’s butt. The man flinched away, holding his face, and blood flowed through his fingers where a fragment of stone must have caught him.

  The others made to rise, but Walewid yelled to his men to stay where they were. He strode over to the man in the yellow shirt and took to cuffing him about the head, cursing him for the addlepate he was, till the man scuttled off with his arms over his head to lurk and sulk at the edge of the firelight. Some of the men jeered, but Walewid spoke hard words and they shut up soon enough.

  Walewid spun round then and stood squarely facing me. We met each other’s eyes for a time. I know there was violence in mine, but he faced me and he looked like he was thinking pretty deep, the right side of his upper lip twitching just enough for his canine to show faintly orange beneath.

  So I says to him, “One death won’t count for another. Come. From what Charley says, it weren’t so simple, what did happen aboard Harry’
s boat. There is two stories here.”

  We was silent for a time, me panting and sweating, even if my voice had strained to sound even-handed. Finally, Walewid sat back down, stretching out his arms to each side and beckoning for his men to do the same. There was much muttering at that. The man in the yellow shirt had smeared his own blood from the wound at his cheek across his face, in finger-lines. His eyes gleamed out, full of malice, between the stripes of drying fluid.

  Walewid spoke. He says that Charley reckoned I was a true shaman. “Then go on and try to save your daughterson,” he tells me. His men weren’t happy with that, but he held up one hand. “Listen,” he says, and he laid out my choices for me.

  His choices was these: If I failed to save Harry, then that was good, because the man who killed Walewid’s brother would go to his death. Yet if that happened, he would kill me as well, since then he’d know that I only pretend, and am not a true shaman. He’d know my vision of the Killer Whale story was lies, and that I was but a vile white demon who only acted a shaman.

  If I did nothing and Harry died, that was good, because his enemy would still also die. Yet he’d kill me, because he’d know I was afraid to show my skills, since they was false.

  If I tried to save Harry and I succeeded, then he would say that that as well was good, because I was fit to be called a Nakwakto shaman. So would he count my daughterson Nakwakto also. Harry would become like a son to Walewid. Both of us would live. He would think George Hunt was a man of proper blood, and a man with strength enough to speak on the people’s behalf among the white men.

  If I did nothing and Harry lived, then he would kill us both as blood-price for the death of his brother.

  So he ain’t all wind and piss after all, thought I. Quite the crafty wolf.

  “Do you promise to keep your men from us for as long as it will take?” Charley asks him, and he says he will.

  “I don’t know if ever I wanted to be one who speaks on behalf of the people to the white man,” I says. “Yet these are good words from this, our friend Walewid. I accept them. For I will not want my life if my daughterson dies.”

  Charley spoke to me. “His men are all drunk from whisky off the Hesperus.”

  “I seen already the bottles strewn about,” says I.

  “Walewid ain’t in drink yet, though,” says Charley.

  “Well, let’s watch that he don’t start,” says I.

  “Truth is, I ain’t never seen him in finer form,” says Charley. “He’s more a chief than ever I give him credit for.”

  I explored Harry’s rotting shoulder. Pus bubbled from it, and its edges was black. His body shook as my fingers delved inside the wound.

  “He’ll be dead, and soon,” Charley says. “Though he has spirit to have lasted this long.”

  But my mind was working like quick-fire. I whispered with Charley, sending him off into the forest to search out red peat moss, chokecherry, white spruce, and devil’s club. Charley whined on the ruinous state of my eye and face, but I couldn’t feel nothing from it, so intent was I on the task before me. He muttered at how I didn’t know owl shit from putty, but he went off anyhow into the forest to do what I had told him.

  I was thinking about belief. About my own. About Harry’s as well. Was there ought of belief in him that I might work with? Some belief that he might have, at least, in me? As a man? After what he had seen up at the House of Shamans, I could not believe that he did. He’d struggled to get away from me when I was over him just before. And the last time we had properly spoken, back at Rupert, it had been in anger. I had told him he was not to be trusted. But here he was: come all this way into the wilderness searching for me, and taken an injury so bad it might mean his death. Then I had spurned him in my trance up in the wilds.

  That boy what I first cured when I was young: he had all the belief for both of us that day. It’s the victim what must have the belief. They must have some sort of faith in the doctor. Though had not my vision been telling me the doctor hisself needed belief as well?

  I looked down at Harry. His breath came light as a sparrow’s. But now his eyes was open again. They looked up at me, and almost they looked a child’s—innocent, like all the dark portions of his life was erased, and he was as free of the world’s burdens as a newborn. He said something, but so quiet I could not make it out. I leaned close.

  “What will you do to me?” he said.

  I put my hand upon his cheek. “I am saving you, boy. See if I don’t.”

  He nodded. “All right,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  I called for more water and placed it to boil in the fire. After some time had passed—and I thought it eternity—I heard Charley coming back from the forest. I saw he had all I had asked for, and had brought as well some bark of the red cedar. I pulled my skinning knife from out my boot and heated the blade in the coals of the fire, until its edges glowed white. Then I thrust it into the boiling water, watching the steam spiral up.

  Once it had cooled some I had Charley over, holding on to Harry, though he seemed unconscious. So I started to stripping away what was rank from Harry’s shoulder. I flicked the first piece of black flesh from the blade into the fire. But then Charley says, “No,” and he goes off and fetches a red cedar leaf. “Put it all on here.”

  It was a mercy Harry was under. Even then, he writhed about till Charley had to rest his knees upon his chest and on his healthy shoulder to keep him still enough for me to work. He kept yelling about not passing through a door, how no one would know where he was gone. Soon enough, though, he fell into some deeper unconsciousness and, after, he lay still— so still, there was times I had to lean forward and listen for his breathing to be sure he weren’t dead yet.

  I told Charley to flense the bark off the white spruce branches he’d brung from the forest. He named me an old woman. Hadn’t it been him what showed me the trick in the first place, those years ago? I just tells him to boil up the water first for it to go in.

  Charley set another tin of water on the fire. He peeled and scraped out the inner bark, and tossed it in the tin as it was coming up to boil. “Take pity on him who lies before us,” he sang to it.

  Charley then took another pan from Walewid’s side of the fire—asking with a pointed finger first, the chieftain nodding, terse, by return. He set it with water from the stream to boil as well. He tore off the fruit from the chokecherry what he’d gathered, then stripped and broke the stems and threw them all in the can, with the sharp-tooth leaves to follow. They’d have to distill for some hours before we could feed the brew to Harry, but they was the best I knew for easing fevers, and for cleaning out the blood.

  I worked slow, trying to keep from slicing the tendons and longer muscles what passed through the shoulder, but I was taking much away that would stop Harry’s shoulder working properly again, if he survived. I had already performed some fell surgery that night, just earlier in the darkness of the woods, with my machete. But I held firm and did not dwell on that. There was images what came to me as well from the night of David’s funeral, and they was harder still to ignore.

  On the other side of the fire, the men of Blunden Harbour had gathered together. They was speaking in high, bragging tones, swigging from the bottles they still had, and hurling words of scorn our way. Walewid alone sat in silence, watching us without expression. I wondered if he had the control over his men we would need, if we was to survive this night.

  Eventually, I ceased my knife work. There was now a great gaping hole in Harry’s shoulder. Blood welled at its bottom, but I could not see anything else that looked infected.

  “Do you have the red peat moss?” says I.

  But before he handed it over, Charley whispers to me, “You ain’t making the proper performance of it.”

  “Be damned with performance,” says I. “Harry’s cold and won’t remember none of it anyhow.”

  “But they,” and he pointed across the fire, “they won’t forget none of it. Leastwise not Walewid. Show th
em you’s a proper man of medicine, George.”

  “I ain’t got the tools what I need for it,” says I. He just shrugged. Well I cursed the old fool, but he was right. So I stripped some of the red cedar and twisted them into a neckring for myself to wear—which was why Charley had brung it out of the forest in the first place, of course.

  “Take the damned spruce bark off the fire and cool it,” I tells him. I dredged up my old song what I used to sing when I was performing my healings as a younger man. Then up gets I and walked four times around poor Harry, all the time singing my sacred song. The men had fallen silent now, watching me. I took off the cedar ring from about my neck and ran it up and down Harry’s body.

  “His clothes have to come off. Burn them with the cedar ring,” Charley whispers to me, like I don’t know it. But first, I turned towards the ocean. The moon lit up the water. I could see out across it for miles, the mountains black menaces in the distance. I called out. “Carry away all that is bad, Supernatural One, Long-Life Maker. You Killer Whale Spirit!” I almost thought I might see that killer whale what rose beside me when I first came into the inlet. But the waters were still, and there was no other sound.

  I turned back and knelt beside Harry. I took off his boots. Then I cut away his clothing with the skinning knife till he was naked. I bundled those rags together and I pushed the cedar ring around them. Then I stood and faced the fire. The men was all watching me still. “I pull out the sickness and I burn it,” says I. I sang my song and I threw the bundle into the flames. They crackled and flared as they took my gift.

  At my feet, Harry looked grey, sunken of chest, and already dead. I knelt by him now. Charley handed me the tin with the spruce bark mulch. I poured off what excess water there was. I pushed my hands into that larger pan of water what was bubbling away on the fire. I rubbed my fingers together in the blistering heat of it, till I reckoned they must be clean of dirt.

  I took out the white spruce mulch and layered it down into Harry’s wound, spreading it about the edges as well. Then I pressed some of the red peat moss across the top of the wound.