Over the Darkened Landscape (26 page)

Normally the shaman would not go with them, but he needs to keep these five in sight and in earshot, make sure that they are not conspiring against him. Certainly these are lean times, but he has kept them all alive through worse than this, and he is not yet ready to hand it all over to his apprentice. He knows that his apprentice does not feel he is ready, either, and so feels safe leaving him behind with the weaker members of the tribe.

The walk to where the long noses are supposed to be is almost a half a day, leading them away from the running water and over fields and small hills, places mostly still green and alive but increasingly covered in white as snow falls and refuses to melt under the gaze of the weakened sun. As they approach the bottom of the hill that leads to the overlook where their prey should be, the shaman feels relief wash through him, powerful enough to weaken his knees for a moment, when he hears the sounds of the creatures in the distance.

He has the hunters lean their spears inward one last time, all of the points touching, and chants and prays some more, adding strength and luck at this final stage. Then he separates from them, goes to find a safe place from where he can watch the hunt.

The long noses have been tracked by the tribe as they walked their path over this plateau, finding their way through the green and away from the ice. But almost everywhere they’ve been it has been impossible for the hunters to get close enough to make a kill. So the hunters scouted ahead, and the shaman consulted his secrets, and together they came to an agreement that, on this day at this time, the long noses would be here, in a place where they could be more readily and more safely hunted.

He makes it to the top of the hill and settles in behind some rocks, watches as the hunters flow down the hill, almost invisible even to him. He sees even before they single it out that their target will be a young one, off grazing far from its mother and in the right direction as well.

The hunters jump as one then, screaming and slashing the air with their spears, the magic in the points amplifying everything, noise as well as numbers, and the long noses go wild with fear and scatter in all directions, the young one ever further separated from its mother and the rest of its family. It runs up the hill opposite the shaman—a mistake—as it stumbles on the loose rocks there, and it realizes this mistake and turns to come back down but instead sees what it thinks might be an opening and is running across the side of the hill, somehow managing the increased steepness.

All of the hunters still chase it, and two, including the strongest, raise their arms and hurl their spears. The shaman speaks words to the air to aid the flight of the spears. The words connect, and one spear flies true, stabbing into the side of the young long nose; it stumbles and bleats in agony. He is so sure of the kill to come that he doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t see the adult long nose rush up the hill until it is already in the midst of the hunters, throwing them angrily through the air with its tusks and crushing them with its huge stamping feet. He is then so intent on watching the future of his tribe die before him that he doesn’t see the young long nose lose its footing and fall.

All he can see is that none of the hunters are getting up, or even moving. As the snow begins to fall, heavier and heavier with each passing moment, he searches for and finds one last incantation of magic that he pulls deep from the earth and sends it toward the animal that had so indiscriminately killed the hunters of his tribe, the adult long nose . . . and toward the rest of its herd. The magic is invoked in a fit of anger that the beasts probably do not deserve, but this act of vengeance makes him feel at least slightly better—at least for a brief moment. And then he picks his way back down the hill and tries to retrace his path back to his people, all the while worrying at the scab on the palm of his hand.

Samuel woke up on a chair in Smitty’s Barbershop, across the street from the Klondiker. Fanny Alice was there, leaning over him and looking with no small amount of concern into his eyes. “You still in there?” she asked.

He tried to talk, but his mouth was too dry. A moment taken to reinvigorate it with spit, and then Samuel croaked, “I’m fine. How . . .” He paused, found more spit. “What the hell am I doing here?”

“Ed was worried about you,” she replied. “Once he saw you running over to the ’Diker, he came and found some folks who could get you out of there before you went and did somethin’ stupid.”

“Stupid.” Samuel looked down to his hand, saw that it was still balled into a fist, blood crusted underneath his nails and even down to his wrist. He opened it and stared at the spear point, stained with blood both ancient and new. “They tried to kill that mammoth, wanted to eat it.” He looked up, saw that Fanny Alice was not the only one in Smitty’s, that perhaps a dozen people were there, all watching him with worried eyes. But in Fanny Alice he could see something else, a spark of some sort of recognition.

Smitty himself stepped forward. “Hell, Samuel, ain’t nobody coulda killed that mammoth. It was deader than a doorknob when Mick and Temple found it. You know that.” He rubbed his hands anxiously, probably worried that with Samuel taking up a seat and everyone in here just standing around he had no chance of getting any business.

Samuel stood up and pocketed the spear point, then with a nod of encouragement from Smitty dipped his hand into a basin of ice-cold water. He spoke as he scrubbed away the excess dried blood. “It’s wrong what Marliss is doing, you know.” Nobody interrupted, nobody argued, so he continued on, now drying his hands on his jacket and looking around for a clean cloth he could wrap around the wound on his hand, which he had reopened. “That creature is an amazing find, a find that should be dedicated to science, not to some base desire to consume so precious a rarity.”

Looking somewhat aghast at the blood dripping onto the floor, something that shouldn’t have bothered him considering his reputation with a razor, Smitty tore off a strip from a relatively clean white towel and handed it to Samuel, then said, “He bought it fair and square, Pete did. I don’t see how anybody can stop him from doin’ this.”

“Besides,” interjected Loudon McRae, a trapper who had been one of Samuel’s students and had likely come into town to trade some pelts for supplies, “there’s plenty of folks who’ve bought tickets already. I expect if he doesn’t watch how many he sells he may have trouble feeding everyone. Just about the whole damn town wants to go, although mostly only the business folk can afford it.”

Samuel tapped the pocket where the spear point rested, some small part of him aware that his behaviour was scaring the rest of them. And so instead of carrying on in front of them, with the slightest of nods to Smitty and to Fanny Alice and then the rest, he stalked out the door and headed back home.

The scent of defeat and loss followed along behind him, whether from the here and now or from his prehistoric hallucinations he couldn’t be sure. Certainly there was enough to go around.

As the night of the banquet approached, Samuel noticed more and more that the people of Dawson were avoiding him, giving him wide berth wherever he went, and not visiting him for lessons or company when he was home in his cabin. His one attempt to go out for drinks—not at the Klondiker, never again at the Klondiker—was a sour and shortened evening at the Northern Light, a bar poorly populated as most carousers that night were already off celebrating with Pete Marliss, even though the banquet was still a day away. Even the patrons at this bar, though, were unwilling to come near him, lest he harangue them about the atrocities being visited on science and knowledge and their complicity in it.

The day of the banquet he had been out for another unhappy walk, and when he returned to the cabin he saw that two pieces of paper were nailed to his door. The first was a telegram, from a fellow at the Museum of Natural History, all the way down in New York City: Sending team from Edmonton to preserve/ship mammoth. Pls keep frozen. Advise of any problems.

He crumpled the telegram into a tight little ball and stuffed it into his pocket as he leaned back against the doorframe. Even if some miracle brought the team into town today, he could be sure the bones had mostly been picked clean by now, what with the banquet only hours away. He thought for a moment about heading back to the telegraph office and sending off a message telling the museum director to recall his team, but then he thought that they could at least recover the skeleton. He left it for the time being, figuring he could spare at least a day before he had to make a hard and fast decision.

The other piece of paper was a yellowed envelope. He opened it carefully and then blew into it to open it wide. Inside were a note and two small chits with numbers on them. He read the note first:

Samule, I know you dont want ta go, but i got theese tikets from a customer and need some one to go with. We dont have to eat the thing, but I figure we shold be there so you can no about it and tell about it. FA.

Samuel sat down on the porch, heedless of the cold wind blowing up the deserted street. Should he go? He knew that everyone important in town was going to be there and that most of them would be dressing up in their Sunday finest, or even nicer if they had it. He had no nice clothes to speak of, and Fanny Alice had known well enough to suggest that they needn’t eat the primeval stew. He sat there and turned things over and over again in his head, trying to find one good reason to go, and then, after finding that, searching for one good reason to turn down the invitation. By the time Fanny Alice came to collect him, he had come up with at least a dozen good reasons in either direction, the last being that it would at least be warm in the banquet hall of the Klondiker after all those hours spent sitting out in the wind.

She helped him pick an outfit that would at least not peg him as a grubstaker just in from the bush, and then they walked on to face the desecration of the past, her hand resting gently on his elbow. In another situation the looks he got when he presented the two tickets would have perhaps made it all worthwhile, but there was no way in hell he was going to grant anyone satisfaction out of this evening, especially himself. He allowed that he would be good company for Fanny Alice and that he needn’t harass each diner this evening—his presence here was scold enough, he felt—but that would be the outer limit of whatever good nature he normally had.

It turned out that Marliss had known, or at least hoped, that he was coming and had arranged for Samuel and Fanny Alice to sit at a special table up front, along with Mick and Temple as well as Marliss, his wife (who was decidedly uncomfortable in the presence of Fanny Alice), and the mayor. Upon hearing this Samuel had started to beg off and insist that he would sit in the back, but one look from Fanny Alice had quashed that attempt. She had a way of bringing out the meek in him, he realized.

Drinks weren’t a part of the price of the evening, but there was very little grumbling over that situation as pretty much everyone in town knew what Pete Marliss was like and had expected nothing more. But Marliss did buy a round of drinks for the VIP table, and once they arrived he stood on his chair and waited for the crowd of diners, some sixty strong, to quiet down.

“You all know,” he started, looking what Samuel thought was pretty damned smug, “that our friends Michael Callahan and Roger Templeton recently found the whole remains of a supposedly ancient baby mammoth—” Someone at another table raised a hand, and Marliss paused, obviously trying very hard to not get angry at being interrupted so early in his speech. “What?”

“Um. Who found the mammoth?”

Marliss rolled his eyes and then looked down and gestured to Mick and Temple to stand. When they did, he said, “These guys,” which was followed by a lot of muttering and nods as people who had never in their lives heard Mick and Temple’s proper names finally understood. Applause followed, and Marliss had to wait even longer, and finally he pointed at their chairs; the two miners, both somewhat red-faced, sat back down.

“As I was saying, Mick and Temple discovered the body, and our friend Samuel Denicola was the one who identified it.” More polite applause, although Samuel could see by the looks on the faces of most of those nearby that they were indeed worried that he was here. Marliss carried on. “Now, as you are no doubt aware, there has been some controversy over the final disposition of the body of this creature that Mick and Temple found, but I am here to tell you that I have no doubt more bodies will be found as more of the north is opened up and explored, and I also have no doubt that some of those creatures will be sacrificed on the altar of science rather than the altar of community and business. But with Ed Mortensen here to take a photograph . . .” Here he paused and gestured at Ed, who was busy setting up his camera on the stage in preparation of taking a picture of everyone as they tucked into their meal. Again, everyone applauded, and Ed took a second to wave in response. “As I was saying, with Ed here to take a photograph and to write about this historic event, we can be assured of plenty of attention by the outside world. Why, all that coupled with some good and honest hard work, and we may be able to recreate some of the action that we all remember from the peak times of the gold rush. And wouldn’t that be something!”

There were cheers and huzzahs at this, and soon enough most people in the room were standing as they applauded. There were few trappers and prospectors who would say they wanted more people coming back to Dawson, but most of the folk in the room that evening were businessmen, people whose livelihoods depended on as much custom as possible. Store owners, bar owners, hotel owners, restaurant owners, now that Samuel was paying attention he could see that most attendees held those occupations; as he’d been told in the barbershop, others from town couldn’t afford the tickets, or perhaps had been too late to buy them. At that moment he understood why his belief that the mammoth should have gone to science would have never panned out: too many people in town had a stake in the success of this evening. He sat back in his chair, finally feeling the complete acceptance of defeat.