The Cannibal Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page B

“You don’t worry. I tell people.” He stepped back inside, his oversize head retreating into darkness.
    Harry breathed relief. Charley Seaweed might be a cripple and a buffoon, but he would let the village know, and spare Harry his blunders. Fat Harrythe American. Kwagiulth by marriage only and, if he understood it right, even then never more than a guardian of the crests and chiefly seats for his future sons, if they should come. And he’d never manage the language, so longwinded was it. He couldn’t even separate the words from the throaty, singsong gibberish they spouted. If he spoke some of the Chinook jargon of exchange, still that made him but a trader in their eyes. And as to their propriety, it was a treacherous maze: he’d been scorned more times than he could think on for some paltry blunder of convention.
    It was all inside out and back to front. “Fat” Harry for being so scrawny, when he was master of the Hesperus and ran the store with all its riches. Slim like a wolverine, so Grace would say. More like a weasel, he thought, if he caught sight of himself in a mirror: the sharp angles of his cheeks behind his moustache, the black wells of his eyes. Eyes like an Indian’s, Grace said.
    The first shoots were showing on the trees at the edge of the forest. Yes, spring was on them. Fixing to leave … And now David, the brother-in-law he’d never met, was to be buried in the pagan style, heathens whooping and leaping and him caught up in all their depravations. He’d have to delay his departure a few days yet. He couldn’t hardly duck out at such a time. It would be, well, unseemly, however George had riled him with his accusations. It didn’t make a pile of difference, anyhow, when all was said and done. He’d be away on a spring tide and that was that. A few days here or there made no difference.
    He thought on the first day he’d come to Rupert. Late October last. He’d borne in with a nor’wester chewing at his cracked face, barely conscious with exhaustion from days spent tacking, without a chart, in waters he’d never sailed, his fuel long finished.
    He tied off and, hardly able to lift his legs, climbed up onto the jetty. He had learned from previous stops along the coast that ignoring the newcomer was the peoples’ way, at least until he’d shown the reason for his visit, or if he might have some usefulness to them.
    â€œJust fool be on sea in storm,” a voice said; and there, slouched on the planking, bundled up crooked in a blanket, so that Harry had mistakenhim for some shapeless stack of trade goods left forgotten at the jetty’s end, was Charley.
    â€œYou got that right,” said Harry.
    â€œHave baccy?” Charley said, and “Mmm!” his lips wobbling, “Nice box!” when Harry handed across his ornate tobacco tin. Charley rolled and lit, passed back the tin, not without reluctance, and then directed Harry toward the trading store at the far end of the village.
    He stumbled along past the buildings. There was no one to be seen on that cold day. Outside the store, his future wife was perched in an ancient rocking chair, smoking a long reed pipe. She wore a blue cotton dress that rode up, showing enough of her strong legs to draw his attention. She seemed insensible to the weather. On her head was a wide basket hat, her round face and sharp-slanting eyes imperious beneath.
    â€œYou need engine for you boat, Mr. Whiteman,” she said. “Then you face not look like dry halibut now.” She leaned far back in the rocker, until Harry thought she had to topple, and roared, beating her thigh with her palm. Harry laughed along with her.
    â€œI’ve an engine,” he said, which impressed her right enough, “just nothing to fuel it.”
    But there was no spare fuel to be had in Rupert. So he’d sent an order south with the next steamer, and waited.
    Now, outside the