The Cannibal Spirit by Harry Whitehead

skins, stacked into the canted, spider-ridden corners. And there were blankets piled everywhere, great mounds of them, slowly moulding.
    â€œMany blankets,” Harry said.
    â€œBlankets is wealth,” the old chief said.
    â€œThough they ain’t what they were, now the ceremonies have been banned. And we’ve more than we need already, you can see.” Once they had been virtually the coin of the coast. Harry’d been offered them in exchange for his whisky many times, great rotting stacks of them, of little use to anyone nowadays.
    â€œOld ways change. Always worse,” said Owadi.
    â€œRight enough.”
    Owadi lapsed into a ponderous silence.
    So the old man wasn’t here to trade blankets. He watched the chieftain from the corner of his eye, erect, stiff, his eyelids half-closed in thought. “The world comes always faster,” Harry said, “even here on the coast.”
    â€œKilling people as it comes,” said Owadi.
    â€œAye, and sad it is. Even for me, if I ain’t more than a white man.”
    Owadi looked at him then, and Harry realized he rarely met the eyes of any Indian man. “What can we do against you?” the old chief said at last.
    Harry chose his words and was careful in voicing them. “I’m proud being a part of the Kwagiulth through marriage. I hope I’m to be trusted by you, that I’ve shown myself an ally to the people.” Though he looked to the floor as he spoke the words.
    Owadi nodded faintly, gazing sharply at him. “Fat Harry,” he said slowly, “old George family is great among us. But for many, they is not Kwagiulth. You know George father, he was white, from England. And George mother Tlingit tribe, from the north. We had three hundred years of war with them people. When George marry with first wife Lucy, Tlingit and Kwagiulth come together and that was the war’s end, lah.” Owadi’s head bobbed in ritual acknowledgment as he spoke. “For that we grateful, though there be some might think still of glory in killing men.
    â€œTo many, George is good man to stop war, to write our stories for us, and to make our history in books for white people to see.” He stopped to cough, a long phlegm-filled rasp. He said, “For them to see we is real and forever—same as them, important as they is in life. But George has took many thing of us and sold them, told secret of us, and he is enemy in some people mind.” He looked up again and into Harry’s eyes. “You understand?”
    Harry was undone by such forthright words. He was more used to burrowing hard for meaning in the Indian’s usual indirection. He said, “Something is occurring?”
    â€œBut old George gone now. Flown. Gone.”
    â€œYes.”
    The night of the funeral, Harry and the women had returned through the rainstorm to the village. They had ducked toward the greathouse and his wife had made it clear that that was where they’d sleep the night. Many came to join them at dinner, but the talk was low and sparse. Harry spluttered down a little of the foul black oil of the eulachon fish they so favoured, with his salmon, and some bitter stew of berries. The sun fell and the rain ended. Eyes were kept lowered and there were none of the usual jokes and tales told around the fire. More than with ritual grief or with solemnity, the air felt pregnant that evening with reservation and with doubt.
    He walked out after dinner. Across the water, fires burned on the Island of Graves, where the men who had stayed on with George were still at whatever it was they were doing. But he knew no one would tell him what was happening there. So he shrugged and spat and smoked, and went to his bed among the fifteen others who slept that night on the platforms about the greathouse’s inner walls.
    Late in the night he awoke. The cinders of the fire cast a wine-red glow across the timber ceiling. Soft voices muttered.