The Cannibal Spirit Read Online Free Page A

The tamped earth was cold. My toes searched out my boots and slipped inside. The last embers from the fire threw up vague shadows from the beaks and maws of the masks of our ancestors on the walls. I thought on those ogres and other demons of the forest which such shadows did paint for me when I was still a child.
    I drew my ragged number four mark blanket about me. My joints creaked and cracked as I paced across the floor and through the heavy curtain outside.
    The black was just coming greyer off east. The air was clear enough so that I saw the silhouettes of the mainland mountains starting to show theirselves, if yet the breath streamed out of my mouth in foggy billows at the cold.
    I was up at an old man’s hour, early enough to even beat the others of the village. A dried-out stump I’d hacked into a stool was parked up by the painted timbers of our greathouse. I sat to watch the village rouse itself.
    There weren’t stars, so I knew the day would come grey and flat, but without rain, the clouds being higher than the mainland peaks. The air smelled of salt and rotting fish from the beach, the rank stench of the middens behind the houses blown off inland by the fair breeze coming from the sea.
    The tide was at ebb and, soon enough, the first of the women came out from the other greathouses what stretch off round the curving shore to either side of ours. Shona-ha, Chief Owadi’s wife, raised her old crowclaw hand, and I nodded back with respect enough to keep her happy. She stepped down the steep bank to the pebbles, waddled away with the others toward the ebb, their baskets like snail shells at their backs, and then they bent to the task of gathering cockles.
    Dawn was brighter in the air, and the high clouds raced over the sky, heavy from the east and north. After all there might be rain, if late in the day.
    The first curses, farts, and hawking started from the houses. Henry Omxid stepped out from the building next to mine—cousin, clan-relative, like almost all the people are to me what is left now—naked and wrinkled like an antique toad, his fat belly sagging down over his stick legs. He flapped his arms and beat his hands at his shoulders. He grunted toward me and I told him just how he looked.
    â€œYou can go bugger a walrus,” says he by way of reply, cheered no end at his own fine words. He looked to the sky. “Cold,” he says, in English to make it a curse. “Rain come slow. But come.” Then he turned back inside.
    Others were moving on the beach now. Two men—Pax’alu and his son—was working a net back into a ball where it had laid spread the night through, drying. A few fires was being kindled outside doorways, but mostly smoke belched out the smoke holes up top of the high-sloping timber roofs of the greathouses.
    I could hear Francine rustling about inside now. She’d be making up a cooking fire in the back with the last glowing coals from the night before, cursing me for taking my ease whilst she, unhappy woman, laboured at my coffee.
    Chief Owadi came down the plankboards toward me, stamping warmth into his old legs. The planks groaned as he stepped off their end onto the pressed earth, his black-bear fur hat sliding sideways down his long face, him pushing it back up, then hitching his best blanket tighter about hisself. He greeted me gravely enough as he passed by, though his eyes was elsewhere as he did so. Likes his promenade up and down the beach each morning, so he does, puffed old goose.
    A few of the children—and there is only a few left any more—was scuttling about, most of them naked now that it was March and spring, whatever the cold in the air. Two boys chased by, one with a stick of thin cedar by which he poked at the other, screeching out his triumph in spearing the great whale.
    Francine stepped through the curtain. I took the tin cup what steamed with the fine morning brew from her hands.
    Filled up with all those good