The Cannibal Spirit

by Harry Whitehead

  I was sitting further back in the shadows, with the women and the lesser men and children. I had my notebook open, a pencil stub in hand, and my skinning knife by my boot for its resharpening. Charley was lurking somewheres about. He had come paddling in that afternoon, visiting with his cousins, as he told the people.

  Four women entered, cradling a large bowl carved with images of eagle, whale, and raven, five feet long and filled with eulachon oil. They knelt down before the fire. The men shuffled in and gathered about it, took up the wooden spoons, and with much slurping gusto, set about the meal.

  Big Mountain was among them. His body was covered by armour of wooden plates, painted black. All about the middle of the armour was drawn the image of the Sisiutl, the great twin-headed snake that coils beneath the world, and on which we must walk so careful. Each plate was secured about his body with thin strips of hide, so that it followed the chieftain’s every movement. He seemed almost a carven figure hisself, and I was reminded of that armour what I had seen Shaiks wearing all the long years ago, if the designs was not so much alike, they being of differing tribes.

  The chieftain waved me over. “This great shaman comes and cleans the sorcery from us,” he says. “He is truly of the people.”

  I joined with them in eating the eulachon oil. There’s comfort in its acrid taste. The comfort of long winters when the food is nearly gone and only the kegs of grease remain. Or the comfort of the feast, and the rituals by which the people voice their union.

  There was those around the bowl who eyed me without expression as they ate. But one, a short young man of no more than twenty, with a pudding-bowl cut to his thick hair, stared black-eyed malice. The fire gleamed bloody gold on the small cross what hung at his neck. To-Cop, as I have since come to know his name. I didn’t hardly give a thought at the time to this boy and his discontent with me. There was so many didn’t like me. So what if there was one more?

  Now I heard a call from outside, from the forest behind the house. “Hap hap hap!” came the call, the call of the cannibal, the call of the hamatsa what was yet to be tamed.

  Three men, one of them To-Cop, disappeared into the back of the house. Shortly, three figures emerged from the place where they had just gone off to, wearing masks of dog and bear. They squatted and leapt forward, the shredded bark what covered their bodies shaking and spinning out as they lunged at those watching.

  The call came again from outside. The dancers raised their heads, then fled from the house through the open front door.

  Outside could be heard the sounds of a struggle. In the open doorway a figure showed itself, two of the dancers holding its arms as if to keep it from the room. It was covered in fronds of undergrowth and of cedar, so that it seemed as if it had been created from the forest itself. Its face was daubed thick with black paint and its mouth was held wide in an O of surprise or rage. The whites of its eyes showed vivid.

  It pulled itself free and raced inside. It squatted, backside on its heels, its knees forward and arms stretched out towards us. Its face scanned the room hungrily, as the dancers filed in behind it, chanting now.

  They gathered about the hamatsa. They grabbed it and it fought, pulling at them, struggling, leaves and broken twigs scattering about the floor. Then it was free again. It grabbed at a boy’s arm and bit down upon it. The boy didn’t draw back, nor cry out. He just let hisself be bit.

  The hamatsa raced outside, disappearing into the darkness, the dancers following. Presently, they was back, this time led by the hamatsa, who spun and snapped and cried out, but was left to roam free. He was carrying something, which he lifted above his head once he was through the doorway. He came near the fire and I could see it was the dead carcass of something. It was shaped so it might have been human, but was wholly covered in evergreen leaves and fronds.

  The dancers placed the figure on two boxes. Big Mountain stood up. He raised in one hand a headdress, like to a turban and made of cedar bark. In the other, he held a fat-bladed machete, its edges glimmering black reflections. He pointed it to the four corners of the house. Then he looked over at me.

  “Will you?” says he, and I knew the honour being offered. I looked about the room at the faces of the people. Eyes as flat as slab-laid salmon gazed back.

  I shook my head. Instead, Big Mountain placed the red turban on the head of his own son, the boy whose arm had been bit, fifteen years old and struck by awe.

  “My son rips apart the bodies of dead enemies and tames the cannibal,” says the chief. Then he gave his son the blade. The boy walked round the fire singing his sacred song.

  After, the boy knelt before the carcass. He pulled some of the evergreen away. He hacked down, and again, and once more. Then he lifted up a thin leg, the leg of a young deer, strewn in bracken.

  The hamatsa leapt in and snatched the limb from his hands. It put the bloody meat to its mouth and ripped until its black face was smeared in tattered flesh and gore.

  The boy cut again at the body, severing the leaf-strewn head, the other leg, and both the upper limbs, and these he handed to the dancers, one by one. He sliced slivers from the torso and held these up to his father, who took them and distributed them amongst the men about the fire.

  The hamatsa squatted, quieter now, in front of the fire, watching the others consuming the flesh. As they ate, so it rose slowly higher till, at last, it stood fully upright. Then the three cannibal dancers was once more close about it, and now they started to lift the fronds and branches from its body.

  When all the evergreen lay about the figure’s feet, Big Mountain wiped away the black from the hamatsa’s face. Beneath, the face of a young man was now to be seen: the chieftain’s eldest son. “I am back,” says he. Men laughed and pounded him on the back and shoulders till he winced, smiling back at them, shy in his triumph and his new membership to their society.

  The three other dancers took off their masks. One of them was To-Cop. I wondered what view the missionaries might take if they knew that this, their own young man—as I had seen from the gold cross at his neck—did partake of such Satanic spectacles.

  Later, I sat with Big Mountain. He had removed the wooden armour earlier, and now he tucked his blanket tightly about his elsewise naked body. He stared into the fire for a while. At last he says to me, “Did you kill them?”

  “I did not,” says I. I told him how I had taken their boots and their weapons.

  “They will be unhappy at you,” he says, and I agree that he might have a point.

  “And with me,” says he.

  Well, they was already a mite unhappy with him, wasn’t they, says I, or had he forgot the reason I was here. “The power is with you again,” I tell him. “The people are with you again.”

  He nodded. “They try to compete with me. I beat them. But beat them using you. They won’t like it that you, a breed, should beat them. They will be shamed.”

  “Which was part why you brung me here, I reckon.”

  At which he smiled. “Your dreamer made a good argument for it,” says he.

  “Anyway, be damned with foul witchery. I hate it. I stamp on it wherever I do find it,” says I. Then I get down to my other business. “I’ve heard the canneries aren’t hiring so many this spring. And Seal Singer sends his daughters away south.”

  I saw that To-Cop was watching from across the fire. I spoke quietly now to Big Mountain. “I’ve money to offer you,” I tell him. He says he guessed it. I am here to buy his suit of armour, says I.

  “You won’t!” says he. I’ll give him fifty dollars. “No!” says he. I’ll pay him now, before the new season begins.

  “I have heard,” says he, “that in your book it’s written that we eat the bodies of dead people for real.”

  I tell him it don’t say that at all.

  “Many are angry,” says he. “And they are ashamed. The book tells we are savage men.”

  I thought on the two sorcerers performing their tricks out in the forest. I thought as well about the c
arcass that had just been consumed and, in its consumption, how the wilds is tamed. How fear is tamed. “The book don’t say that we are savage men,” I says. “It tells our stories and the ways we live.”

  “There is nothing as beautiful as my armour,” says he. “I will give it to my son.” But there ain’t no money in the villages. The Chinese come from Vancouver to work the canneries. Japaners work the fishing boats. Whites take the land. I tell him I’ll be away before the sun comes. No one will see me go.

  The chief pulled a charred stick from the edge of the fire. He drew shapes in the earth in front of him. I looked down at the shapes. I nodded.

  Big Mountain threw the stick back into the fire. Then he walked away across the room and went out through the door. I swept my fingers in the earth and wiped away the numbers there.

  To-Cop found me later that evening on the beach. I was making certain my canoe was tightly moored but ready for the early start.

  “The great shaman cured the chief of sorcery,” To-Cop says to me in English. I did not respond, but To-Cop went on. “I’ve not seen my uncle, but I am sure he’d want to speak with you of the secret knowledge of shamans.”

  “Your uncle?” says I.

  “Copper Dancer,” says he. “I wonder where my uncle is. Sometimes the wilderness takes a man.”

  “Sometimes it don’t,” I says. “He’ll be back with time. I know it.”

  To-Cop walked up and down alongside my canoe. “Killer whale at your prow,” he says. “Strong totem.” Then he tells me he works for the mission.

  “I see the cross you wear.”

  “But my blood is of the people,” says he. I tell him how I witnessed that today at the ritual. I could see he wondered at my implication by that. He looked as if his head was fair being boiled by his anger. I wondered if he was gearing up for some physical assault on me. But instead he turned away and walked off.

  “I read your book,” he says over his shoulder. “I did not enjoy it.”

  To-Cop, Copper Dancer, and Inviter, the three of them waiting outside the courthouse to view their revenge as it will be played out upon me. The chieftain, Big Mountain, was back in his village. Him, what had refused to help me in my time of need—though in that I do not blame him. This suit of armour I had been packing and writing on the very day David did come back to me dead, and what Francine had posted onto a steamer south, after I was gone into the wilderness.

  So I was alone, but for old Charley. I spoke now to him: told him to cease his spitting upon the steps. “We’re in midst of the civilized,” says I, but he don’t look overly impressed.

  To-Cop called across to me then. “I hope that is a bible you are holding, Mr. Hunt,” says he. I turned the book over what I had in my hands, to look at its front cover. “And if it is, I hope you may find some solution in its pages.”

  To-Cop. What should I make of this man: proud, filled with the belief in his superior position? With his bowl-cut hair, still in the style it must have been when he were a boy in the mission school. Yet, as well, a willing participant in the pagan ritual for which I stood accused. Participant, and also chief prosecution witness! And now beating down on me with his Christian sermonizing. What could I comprehend of such two-facedness? Such deception? But he stood there glaring over at me and there weren’t a shred of self-doubt in him, his eyes glowing fire—the bright flames of his most true belief. It didn’t make no sense at all.

  Well, there ain’t nothing of sense to any of it, excepting when I sees his relatives what I wronged beside him—relatives what is practitioners of black arts of sorcery which the Christian church does most heavily frown upon, and which To-Cop would have been raised in the mission school to despise.

  But not so. There he stands, carrying both parts inside hisself and without a faltering shadow to be seen.

  So, then, did I understand that beliefs ain’t more than the uses to which they is put. Circumstance is all. And what of circumstance? What drives a man whilst he is caught up in the complications of the moment? Well, it ain’t no higher sanctity, of that I was certain, looking on To-Cop.

  Beliefs, they mould theirselves to circumstance. And so does our character do the same—our very nature, perhaps. Like a sandbar in shallow water. Each time the tide rolls back, it is the same sand, but in different shapes, different forms. That’s all there is. And it ain’t about there being monsters or otherwise. It ain’t the truth of monsters. It is the wilderness itself. We are the wilderness.

  Could we be more than that? I wondered at it, there on the steps, my fate like a sparrow in the beak of a raven. Could belief be such that it was stronger to resist the tide of circumstance? Weren’t that the ways of the great man—the man what changes worlds?

  To-Cop had said he hoped I might find solution in the book I held in my hands. “I believe I have done so,” I speaks over to him by return.

  “Though it will not save you from the consequences of your crimes,” says he.

  I turned the book over and over in my hands, thinking on his words.

  “It may yet,” says I at last, though quietly enough that he could not have heard.

  I opened the book to the title page. I ran my fingers across its text. Then I closed it up once more and waited on Bowser’s arrival.

  Fact is, we weren’t the only ones what was stood about on those steps. For my trial had caused quite a stir, it seemed, and many had come to be in the viewers’ gallery inside. Come to view a real-life cannibal, I imagine. They must have been reading the morning newspapers, for there hadn’t been more than a few reporters present the day prior. I had seen the newspaper headlines that morning—“Disgusting Orgies,” “Human Bodies Were Consumed,” “Corpses Being Cut Up.” Oh, but it was juicy material!

  Inside—as we all did file in together—the court’s furniture and fittings was constructed of dark wood, polished and polished till they shone in the light what come in through the many tall windows. Me and Bowser was up front with Mr. Cane the prosecutor on our right. What I was feeling— sitting there that second morning with all the eyes of the white world upon me, a sense, in the rustle and buzz of the courtroom, almost of festival, of public entertainments being performed—what I was feeling, before the judge and jury did come in, was mostly excitement. Something akin to jubilation even. Elation—that is the word for it. My pulse throbbed. My breathing came short, like I’d been a hard few hours paddling. A thin gloss of sweat was upon my skin. Let these people come to watch, I was thinking. Let them see the man I am! Let them fear the forest—the wilds—and what goes on out there. It seemed almost a disappointment to be fighting against the stories what had been told by To-Cop and the prosecution the day before, to be working to disavow these people of their most succulent fascinations.

  “All rise!” came the call and we was on our feet for the judge and jury. The jury lined up to one side. They was all stiff collars, tight suits, and smartly crafted moustaches. But I could see they was caught up like everyone else there in the pure salivating grotesquery of the case.

  Well, Inviter and Copper Dancer was first up to give witness. They was translated by the interpreter—a breed out of Victoria and none too certain in his comprehension. Still, there wasn’t much as was new to hear. They scowled a bit at me and caused enough stirs with their grim fantasies on my hacking, chopping ways, to add to To-Cop’s from the day before, as did keep the gallery gasping and amused. Then Mr. Cane made a summation of all those vile lies and so, at last, he rested the prosecution.

  Now Mr. Bowser stood up and walked out into the centre of the courtroom to make his statements.

  “Our case will consist of a complete refutation of those stories told by the Crown,” says he, his manner so soft you might almost imagine he was discussing the planting of flowers in his garden. “We will state that Mr. Hunt was the victim of a vindictive trap set by To-Cop and these other witnesses, all of whom it will be noted are members of To-Cop’s immediate family.”

  He stepped over and he lifte
d my book from off the table in front of me. “I will show,” he says, and at last the volume of his voice rose some, “that Mr. Hunt, far from being the brutal, cannibal savage portrayed, is in fact a man of science. He was no more than a spectator that day and, even when called upon, did nothing more than observe the actions of the ritual. Which ritual, we also allege, was in fact a pantomime, and no human corpse was even involved.”

  Well, he called old Charley first to the stand. Laughter played through the crowd at this gargoyle clown as he waddled across the floor to the witness chair. The interpreter translated for him. He stated clear enough that there was nothing but the meat of a deer at the ceremony, and I didn’t even go near to that. Mr. Cane don’t bother with cross-examining him. “No questions,” says he, but he played funny to the jury, raising his eyes up to heaven as if to say, “Look at this monster before us! Can any of you believe such a man?” At least Charley left off from leering at anyone.

  So then it comes to me. Here he is at last! The real monster. The cannibal. Here before our very eyes! A real live consumer of human flesh.

  Throw him a missionary. Watch him heat the pot. I didn’t give two shits for any of them. I strutted cross the floor and positioned myself in the chair. I tells my name and placed my hand upon the bible to make my declarations of fidelity.

  Mr. Bowser said not a word at first, just stood there, the thumb of one hand hooked in his waistcoat pocket, the other hand resting flat on our table, seeming lost in thought. That set a muttering in the gallery. But then he hefted and carried over my book. He put it in my hands.

  “Mr. Hunt,” says he, “would you care to open this book to the title page? Thank you. Now would you please read out to the court what is written there.”

  So that is what I do. “Smithsonian Institution. United States National Museum, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, by Franz Boas. Washington, the year eighteen hundred and ninety-seven.”