The Cannibal Spirit (41 page)

Well, the storm passed over at last and the forest steamed and sucked. I walked the rough track, quieter now, my better ear forward, sniffing for woodsmoke.

I heard them first: words chanted that I couldn't make out, but following the rhythms of a stick being beaten on a hollow log.

Now I saw smoke ahead, rolling up amidst the trees. It was blue-dark to tell me new-cut hemlock was being burned.

A yellow cedar lay across my path where it had fallen long ago. With its trunk, its branches, and the flora it did bring down in its ruin, and all of it covered now in moss and vines, it rose full fifteen feet in height before me, and the smoke billowing from the far side.

Off to my left, I spied a rope hanging down from the top. So, taking hold, I pulled myself up.

At the top, I rested on my belly on the soaking moss. I edged forward through the undergrowth, which was like a giant spider's web. At last, near trapped among the tangles, I could see down the far side.

There was a small clearing, no more than thirty foot wide, carved out by hand from the rhododendron thickets what sprawl among the fir and cedar and the hemlock trees.

The fire in the clearing's centre was hissing and crackling as it fought the damp from the storm. There was fresh-cut branches of hemlock, their leaves still on the twigs, resting close beside the fire, which threw up clouds of smoke. The smell came to my nostrils strong and bitter.

Two men was there. Both was wearing sackcloth trousers and that's it. Their bodies and their faces was daubed in charcoal till black, but for the lines of sweat which had run down their skin to show the brown beneath.

One of them, short and bandy-legged and his hair long near to his waist, was resting on a dead log, a leg to either side, beating the wood with a length of cedar. His chest was heaving so that it was clear to me he'd been about his task some time already.

The other was more than six feet tall and thin like an aspen. He strode around the fire, throwing up calls and wails into the air, and now I could make out the words.

“Big Mountain,” says he. “You are suffering. Hah, hah, hah,” and his arms rose up each time he spoke. “The great chief soon will be dead.”

Off to one side, there was a small stream coming out from the undergrowth. It had formed into a black pond by the fallen tree trunk upon which I was hiding like a lizard. The pond rippled with the flowing-in of water, the reflections of the fire's light all shuddering and crazy in it. Beside
this pond, I saw the packs of the two men. There was an ancient Hudson's Bay Company musket as well, sawn down to half its length, its stock green now with age, but its iron still oiled and clean.

The man beating time shouted out, “Make him dead! Make him dead!” The other one went over to the far side of the fire and now I saw a shape lying on the wet earth. Beside it was a blanket laid out and items resting upon it.

The tall man stooped down and lifted up a skinning knife from off the blanket. Then he took hold of the shape. I squinted harder and now I knew that what I had come to discover was true, for lying there was a human body.

Its legs was curled up against its torso and it had been dead for many years, its skin all leathered and black. The body was dried and shrunk, as they do, till it looked more a child in size than the adult it once was. Its head had been hacked off and lay in the mud some little ways off. I could see by the length of its grey, straggling hair that it was the remains of an old woman.

So the man with the skinning knife gripped one of the corpse's arms and put his knee between its legs and its body. He pulled upwards and pressed down with his knee, grunting, till there was a crunching sort of a dull explosion. The corpse's legs snapped forward to hang, still curled, but loose from the torso, and the body flopped onto the ground as the tall man dropped it.

Then he hunkered down. With the knife he did something I couldn't clearly see. Shortly, he stood once more and held up what looked a leather pouch, but was the withered tit of the dead old woman.

He rolled the body away with his foot and I saw that most of the skin from the corpse's right side had already been took off. The tall man knelt on the blanket and dropped the tit beside him. He rooted among the other paraphernalia what was there.

I spied another rope tied off nearby me that fell down toward the clearing, ending just before the edge of the black pond.

The tall man was still at work on the blanket, and the other one beating his rhythms on the hollow log. Both was facing away from me.

I eased myself around so that my feet, instead of my head, was now aimed towards the clearing. I pulled my rifle from off my shoulder into my hand, checked my machete was secure and that my knife was safe in its bootsheath. Then I took the rope in my empty hand.

Keeping watch on the two sorcerers in the clearing all the while, I lowered myself down the tree trunk till the slope was steep enough that I was hanging only by the strength of my arm. Then I let go of the rope.

I slipped on the mud at the edge of the pond and went down on one knee, even as the man beating rhythm at the hollow log swung about and spied me.

I jumped up smartly and ran round the pond, slipping and slithering, to the two men's packs on the other side. The tall man spied me now as well. The man at the log was on his feet and scuttling my way.

I got to their packs and took up the Hudson's Bay Company musket. I tossed it into the pool and raised up my own rifle. At that moment, something thumped against my chest and knocked me backwards a step.

But I held up the rifle to my shoulder and looked along its barrel at the men, who was standing still now, gazing black murder at me. I glanced down for a moment. There was the tall man's skinning knife what he had used to chop off that dead old woman's tit, lying on the ground at my feet, and that he must have throwed at me. I checked my shirt for blood but there weren't none. It had hit me handle side round.

So I smiled across at him. “Copper Dancer,” says I, “your luck ain't worth a shit today.”

Well, there was bad words spoke between us then. But eventually we was all sitting round the fire and my rifle still aimed at their sorcerous hearts should they be minded to try any fancy stuff.

“Go on,” Copper Dancer says, “take our knowledge for your own, so that you become a powerful sorcerer like us.” And it was true I wanted to know all that they had been up to, though I had other reasons than sorcery for wishing such knowledge.

The next afternoon, I arrived back into the village. By the way the people viewed me, I knew some guessed what my mission had been, and others had had it told them. So when I held up the bag in which I lugged the game,
they fell back and murmured amongst theirselves, or else they turned away and spat upon the ground. A few backed through the doorways of their cabins into darkness.

“In the witchcraft place,” I tell Chief Big Mountain, as we stood beside the ocean, “I beat the sorcerers and I took away the game. The game what is the cedar bark with which they caught your breath as you was sleeping, and your piss and shit, and as well a stick you used for eating. These had they buried in the ground, wrapped in a corpse's skin, beneath a fire of hemlock. I dug them up and I was careful I did not disturb the contents inside the skin. I put it in this bag and brung it here. Now take it and throw it away into the sea.”

The chieftain hurled the bag out into the water. I had placed a stone inside and it disappeared under the surface. Big Mountain spat on the pebbles for fortune. “You have saved me,” says he.

“And put the Devil to witchery,” says I.

“Now the hamatsa can be called in from the forest.”

We went back up the beach to the chieftain's greathouse. The people watched me, but I weren't certain there was much of admiration in their eyes.

Later, the fire danced high into the timbers of the roof. The leading men of the village clans and their sons sat, stolid and sweating, about it, affecting to ignore the danger to the building what the flames threatened. Each had a Bay blanket wrapped about them. Some wore bear-skin hats and others was bareheaded, but all had their faces painted black, as members of the hamatsa society are in the habit of at such occasions.

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.