Read Online The Cannibal Spirit by Harry Whitehead - Free Book Online

people have I watched die. Dead of consumption, like David, of grippe, pneumonia, smallpox. Dead of the loss of their land and family and all the old ways of living they have knowed. Dead of disease, whisky, and despair. And David, proud believer, Indian by choice as well as blood, lungs gone hacking, rasping to his ruin. Me lingering on with my rages, though they was never enough to kill me, even as my own son’s soul skeltered off into oblivion.
    I watched the canoe’s wake. I tried to keep my focus. But when I looked up again, Henry’s face swelled up, then twisted into shapes past all sanity, beaked and fanged and clacking open and shut, snapping, then curling back inside itself, round and down, like to some sucking whirlpool of eyes and teeth and tongue.
    I closed my eyes and heard my own groans. I knew I held by a fingernail from fading and being taken hold of by my rage. On this day when it must not happen! When my son must be honoured. Honoured by me. So I reached down into the flume and threw water up into my face, again and again. The world came drifting back and I looked along the boat, almost dreading what I’d see. But all the faces was human now, watching me close, knowing me, nervous. That almost brung me to laughter. These, my people: they know what a crazed specimen they harbour.
    So I pulled it back. But I cannot say that I was full sane again. As I suppose events what later transpired would show.

HARRY SAT WITH HIS BACKSIDE on the port quarter gunnels of the Hesperus . His boot rested on the long-armed rudder, as he watched his way in among the canoes and other small boats toward the Island of Graves.
    The women were gathered forward of the deckhouse and the mast. There were ten of them sitting there, their basket hats bobbing almost comically as they keened and wailed in unison.
    The island was four hundred yards across and a hundred deep, low and forested, shaped as a shallow horseshoe with a beach at its concave centre. Thatched ceremonial houses lined the shore and there were graveboxes in the trees, where the people were sometimes in the custom of placing their dead. A desiccated body, half devoured by eagles, spilled from one broken box. Clouds had drawn down the light; the wind was growing and rain was imminent.
    Harry stood up so that he could see over the pilothouse roof to the shore, now fifty yards away. He ran the engine faster for a moment and the boat made a run for the beach. He flicked off the engine switch a moment before there came the crunch of pebbles beneath the prow. He ran, sprightly, along the port gunnels, leapt over the side and into the shallows with a line in his hand. He tied off to a mooring stake that was driven deep into the beach some twenty yards from the water’s edge. A man came forward to help the women down.
    David’s gravebox was lifted from the prow of the canoe, George standing close by. The lines of the old man’s face seemed deeper even than before, until he looked another carved totem of some long-dead ancestor among the others lining the forest’s edge.
    Harry had once seen a man pitched overboard in a winter sea who, by a miracle of good fortune, had been holding a line, and clung to it long enough to be dragged close by the hull and hooked back on deck. The man lay there, saturated, as they pounded at his limbs to waken them, but his innards were frozen and Harry watched him drift away, without emotion,as it seemed, into death. Frozen: maybe that was how Harry might describe himself now. His mind was frozen.
    Well, be fucked with George Hunt and his barbarous ways. And be fucked with his precious family as well, and with all these savages who sneered at him. He’d be away to sea before any of them could foment more trouble. He could almost turn around right now, while the ceremonies were taking place, and be gone before anyone had noticed.
    He thought on Crosby’s angry words. The man had passed comment on Harry’s