The Cannibal Spirit (16 page)

“We make for the bay!” he shouted forward.

But Charley pulled himself along the deck and, clinging to the pilothouse roof, called back, “No! Dreamer tell Walewid we come. Them wait us. We stop now, them ready other side. Go now or not go at all.”

“What in all the fucking heavens is a dreamer?”

“Them come go. Know secret. Tell secret.” But now the sloop listed and threatened to swamp as it hit the tide from out of Slingsby Channel. Waves rushed across the deck from the port side. Charley was thrown sideways and into the starboard gunnels. He slid forward and out of sight behind the pilothouse. Harry turned down the engine and heaved against the rudder, water washing over him.

“Charley!” he shouted. He cursed when there was no reply. The storm was now fully upon them. It was not possible to see ahead through the rain. The two tidal flows were united and the
Hesperus
was caught. It shuddered and pulled and flew forward. Harry could not now have directed his boat into the bay or anywhere else, whatever his decision might have been.

Ahead then, for a moment, he saw again the small island that sat directly in the middle of the rapids. It came at him so fast it could not be avoided, the waters swelling up in spate along its sides. At the last moment, the
Hesperus
lurched and followed the tide hard around the island, so close that Harry could have plucked a leaf from one of the few sparse evergreens. He felt the hull grind against rock and then come free.

He looked south toward the low headland he knew must be close upon his starboard bow. The rain lifted for a second. The dreamer was squatting on its haunches on the shore no more than twenty yards away. Its face was black and its hair hung down about it. Harry could see the wild whites of its eyes and the sallow snarl. Its naked body, pitch-black and filthy, bobbed up and down, as if it longed to throw itself forward. It reached out one hand, or what seemed a claw, its talons angling out toward Harry, before the flood drew him on and the rain obscured it.

I WAS AWAY BEFORE DAWN
the morning after David's funeral. I took my hunting gear and off I goes north and west across the water. I did not flee in the madness of grief, as some have said it. I had a mission, though I couldn't say for certain if I understood it full clearly at that time. Whether my actions was those of a rational man, I don't know.

So I paddled north and west. I passed near to Blunden Harbour, though I did not stop there. Then on through narrow ways towards the waters of Belize Inlet, ways as don't require me braving the Nakwakto Rapids, as did those foolhardy idiots what followed me. And theirs was a grand tale, but it weren't mine. Least, not yet it weren't.

In two days, I was paddling on that inlet, and I had not eaten all that time. I'd not consciously decided on it. Still, something in me had resolved that I would fast. Four days is the period the Indian usually does it. It was six before I would partake of food again. In that fevered state, strange things does one see indeed.

That afternoon, a mist lay upon the ocean—me passing through it like I was some phantom. Just the faint splash from my paddle the only sound. I could not see much further than to the eyes painted at my prow.

I noticed a swell forming beside me. Glancing down into the dull, silvery water, I saw something black, gigantic, rising up beneath me. It broke the surface, water running off it like oil, not a foot away. Black nose and white jaw and belly, and those teeth what look like files of razor-armoured soldier crabs. The pool of its eye stared black, not two feet away, then rolled up into its socket, turning to white. The dorsal fin come up, tall as a man and broken at its tip, product I suppose of underwater combat, of great tearing teeth out in the cold waters of the Pacific.

Perhaps I get carried away in the telling, but it was the state I was in: grief and hunger addling me, and now this. I ran my fingers down the killer whale's flank. Old orca, rough-edge scars upon its skin. Then it spouted and arched up to dive. Its flukes reared from the water to hang above the
canoe, like some massive totem statue of flesh, before it slid back under the surface. Spume drifted over me, rank fish and brine, the full, foul sweetness of its lungs. I watched the white of the whale flicker in the darkness. Then it was gone.

Well, I might have wept then—as I might almost now—seeing that great hulk rise up beside me, with all the images it called up out of my past. But the cold of the world, and of David's death, was deep inside my bones, so I just paddled on, my face set hard. No tears had I shed for David. There seemed nothing of them in me.

Night was coming. I heard the swoosh of a shoreline, and shortly, a pebbled shore showed itself. I was exactly where I had planned on being, almost to the yard, despite the mist and tides. There was comfort in that.

Up the beach a fallen totem pole lay buried in moss, the carved face of an owl still faintly showing. Behind, the forest dripped shadows. I dragged the canoe out of the water, the canoe I made with David, when he was still a boy. And it was he what painted the eyes of the whale at its prow.

The mist had risen by then, a raw wind coming off the mountains to the east. I stood for a time looking out over that great inlet. The moisture in the air caught the light and everything was crimson. Then the sun touched the water and it was dusk.

Why do I relate all this in such detail? After that killer whale paid its visit on me, every act and thought became like crystal. I felt like I was at a distance to myself, but watching, bearing witness. I was outside of things, all emotions leeched out of me, like a deer that's been hung to bleed.

And I was back at Teguxste. Teguxste: where my current wife, old Francine, was born, sister to Making-Alive, what first got me into being a healer. I was back at that place where I healed the boy of his affliction— when I was but a young man, and Francine then still a child. There, beside the waters where that memory, or that vision, or that dream of the Killer Whale Spirit had come to me. Lagoyewilé was its name. Rolling Over in Mid-Ocean. Now I had come here again, and a whale had lifted up its flukes above me once again. What did that signify? Something. Surely something.

Anyhow, I took out my pack and my gun—the '92 Winchester carbine what Professor Boas gave me some years before, gift for acting as guide and translator, whilst he was conducting his researches among the people those years past.

I made my camp beside the old totem pole. I walked into the gloom of the forest, to cut bark from the cedars for a roof. I saw the old scars upon the trunks from the past peoples what had gone about the same task. I stripped cedar bark from the trees, muttering the litanies as was appropriate.

I gathered up driftwood. I was averse for some reason to using the matches I had on me. Perhaps they represented too much the world I had left behind. So instead I took out my old fire drill and drove and spun that long splint at the shreds of bark inside, until I'd sparks enough to place in the hearth. By time I looked up again, night had fallen.

I sat with my face toward the fire, an old man in a primitive shelter on a beach, with the ruined totems of a dead village all about, the forest looming black and silent, alone in the dark with the stars falling down the heavens above me.

I was thinking about the killer whale. I was thinking I should have followed it down into the deep waters of the ocean. And further down to the bottom of the world, to the palace of the Qomogwe, the king under the water. I'd float through the gates guarded by killer whales into the palace proper, passing seals and the spirits of the eulachon and salmon, of the sea otter whose fur was the wealth and the destruction of my mother's people.

I would enter into the throne room and there he would be: Qomogwe, transforming himself from octopus to whale to man and thence back again. I'd hang in the water before him, voicing threats, swaggering and boasting, laying out the totems of my house. I'd claim his daughter in marriage, and I'd win her with my arrogance, watching as she changed then from a seal into a girl. I'd bring her back up through the cold ocean and we'd scramble onto the shore, shivering and creeping like sodden ghosts up the shingle and into a darkened house, its door frames heavy over us. I'd have sons with her and daughters, till at last she'd hear a call one night, like a loon
but out on the ocean, wailing, singing out like to a great whale, perhaps. And she would slip away back to the sea.

On the pebbles I stand, night after night, and call her name and call her name and she won't never come back, but I call her name and call her name. I call: Lucy! Lucy! She is gone though, into the deeps forever. But I will have the totems of her house for my sons to dance, and the husbands of my daughters. And I will stand in the cedar houses by the huge fires with the masks of seal and whale, and show my stories and my ancestry, and be a chief, and so will my sons be chiefs of the whale and the seal and the raven, and of the Qomogwe himself, forever. Lah.

So do the stories go.

I stared into the fire, these mind imaginings and travellings flowing in amongst the flames as they crawled on and tore at the logs there. After a time, I stood and took up my hatchet. I went down to the canoe and I hacked holes through its eyes, and, after, all along its hull, till it was beyond any hope of repair. Then I went back up to the shelter. I sat again by the fire and I stared into its hot heart.

The next morning I came awake in the early dawn. First thing I did was tear off my clothes and pace naked down the pebbles to the water, what was rippled by the bitter breeze coming still off the mountains in the east, behind which the sun still was hid.

I stood waist deep in the ocean, the cold setting my muscles to shaking. I looked back toward the shore and the old village. I saw the silhouettes of the ruined houses against the forest. The timber frames was like the skeletons of those gigantic, ancient creatures what I have heard walked the earth before ever man did exist.

I plunged my head down into the ocean and plunged again, and twice more. On the last, I held my head beneath with my eyes closed. I sank down to my knees.

I remembered the shamans of the village washing me thus before I could be showed their secrets. Four times must I be dunked beneath the waves. Then, them leading me back into the cold air, and we was away into the forest, away to learn what they did have to teach.

I opened my eyes under the water. My breath, and the eddies from my body as it moved, bubbled past. I guess I half fancied seeing the whale staring back at me. But all I saw was murk, the colour of the deep woods at twilight.

After, I dressed and then I walked along the pebbled beach toward the steep hill what stands guard at the centre of the village. The distance I had felt from myself the evening before—even whilst I was hacking away at my canoe—was gone, though still the world did appear almost disgracefully clear in its every detail. But now my mind was laced with torment, the faces of my dead so vivid that almost I felt they walked beside me, lamenting. It wasn't David, though, I saw. It was my mother, not three years dead herself of consumption. Then my brother and my sister what had died. I saw the little one who died in her first year, her pale little face, choked up with coughing. And Lucy. Her soft voice, and we married out of love, however useful was the marriage to me: her a princess, no less, of the old families, of the sun and seal and raven, and of the people what dance the ways of the King of the Ocean.

I sat on a fallen house post. Carved into it was the face of the Dzonokwa, just as they are in our greathouse in Rupert, her mouth open, round in surprise. Foolish old ogress that she is, with her sack of stolen children.

When I did misbehave as a child, my mother'd tell me the Dzonokwa would come for me. In the night, she'd sneak through the rear of the house and drag me out by the foot into the forest. She'd throw me in her sack to squirm and whimper with the other wicked children. I would lie in my bed in the darkness thinking of those bouncing limbs all about me, tangling, bruising, airless, panicked, going deep through the woods to her cave. There, the sack would be hung up on a great hook, and we'd be plucked one by one out into that terrible cave. The Dzonokwa father and child are there, huge, and their shoulders hunched up so they don't have no necks, and thundering around, bent brown teeth, leers and slobber and grunting like huge pigs at a trough. A sharp spike of wood gets held up to rumbles of satisfaction, and then, as I squeal and squirm, it is slid neatly up under my tailbone, and on bumping against vertebrae along behind the spine, coming out at the base of my skull. After, I hang, bouncing some with my
own weight, over the fire, arms tied tight to my body, legs doubled back, ankles strapped to thighs, heels on buttocks, my flesh cooking, stinking, the vision fading as my eyes come to the boil, and the sizzle of skin before my eardrums split and I hear no more, and I don't scream, locked as I am in silence. I feel the belly of my skin crack open, and the spill of my intestines down into the flames. Then there ain't but the vague feeling of the Dzonokwa child prodding, poking with a stick inside me, until all feeling ends.