THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT
HARRY WHITEHEAD
HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA
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Copyright © Harry Whitehead, 2011
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Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Whitehead, Harry, 1967-
The cannibal spirit / Harry Whitehead.
ISBN 978-0-670-06580-6
1. Hunt, George, 1854-1933Fiction. I. Title.
PR6123.H578C36 2011 823'.92 C2011-903927-3
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FOR ANITA SIVAKUMARAN
CONTENTS
Part I Gravebox
Part II The Wilderness
Part III White Men
Part IV New York
Acknowledgments
NEW YORK CITY
AND
BRITISH COLUMBIA
SPRING OF THE YEAR 1900
PART I
GRAVEBOX
AND I AM GUILTY. Disgusting Orgies? I am guilty of it all. Blood dripping off my godless fangs, black in the flame-light roaring in the centre of the greathouse. Cavorting heathens. Me: legs kicking up, naked member swinging, masks of bear and wolf and raven turning all about, carved wood mouths clack-clacking. My fingers clutching at some poor waif, his blue eyes wideopen-terrified, fed on blood and liver till he was fattened up sufficient for the pot. A blow from a blade, and the fair-haired little wretchs organs spill out on the ground for my appreciation. Mewith all them naked savages about me, screeching and holleringheres me scrabbling in the dirt to raise up a steaming kidney, a liver, a heart.
My name is George Hunt: Indian Man-Eater, Mutilator of Corpses, Cannibaland Man of Reason. Theres the rub.
Ten days have passed now, since the trial finished back in Vancouver, and I am come here to the city of New York. A whole continent traversed in a week! And after all those days on the train, I arrived late last night, creeping in like some errant husband whats been out rousting longer than he ought. The wind slapped rain at the window of my hotel room as if it were the middle of winter instead of April. I saw long avenues of stone, lights winking on and off in windows, the odd lone soul rushing between
the street lamps to be somewhere, the passing of a carriage, hood drawn up tight against the weather. I thought it strange to see this city near to sleeping, as if such a placethe very heart of the world!could ever sleep.
Now I am here in the American Museum of Natural History, amidst the dusty beams of sunlight what break the shadows to sharp angles. A long gallery stretches off to either side of me, filled up with rows of glass cases. I stand before this mannequin, with its eyes glassy balls of black, a fat mop of what looks a horses mane perched up on its crown as hair, a moustache to match, and its face painted in the deepest browna face what might seem a demons, if the sheen of its skin was not so matte, so completely barren of all life.
It has been dressed in an antique suit of body armour, arduously carven out of cedarwood and painted black. This suit of armour what is the cause of all my troubles these past weeks. It has come on ahead across this land. And now it is here.
I reach out and run my fingers along the body of the Sisiutl, the double-headed snake carved on its chest, the two mouths joining tongues at the sternum. The Sisiutl, whats coils lie twined beneath the earth. The world, and all there is in it, rests upon those coils and is subject to their movements. I see again the chieftain, Big Mountain, standing proud above the carcass of the deer, saluting the initiation of his son into the society of the cannibal dancers, and wearing this suit his ancestors had also worn for all the long generations before him.