And so with a strangled cry he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, the cold floor clawing at him even through his woollen socks, the air working quickly to find its way to his skin through his undergarments. The embers were low, but some dry kindling and a few choice gusts from his lungs got the flames hopping again, and after adding a small log he ran to the corner and did his morning business, desperately happy to tuck things in when he was done and run back to the stove to put on a pot of two-day-old coffee and feel the tenuous curtain of heat reach slowly outward from the fire and find its way to the farthest corners of the cabin.
Once his fingers were warm enough and the jolt of tar-like coffee had re-ignited his brain, he gave the juvenile mammoth more thought. Obvious as it was to him, he knew he couldn’t rely on anyone else from town to do the right thing about the animal. He’d told Ed to go down and get a picture, but wasn’t sure if that would translate itself to an attempt to get the news out to the world at large. If anything, he feared that instead it would result in someone contacting some two-bit circus impresario, and there would go any chance for any true science to be done. Or worse, someone with magical powers, either real or imagined, would make some wild and bizarre claim about the creature that would lead to some freakish hoodoo rites being performed as its body was burned at a makeshift altar.
He had a quick breakfast and then got dressed, all the while working through his mind how he could word a telegram to make the most impact, convince people to come here at this time of year rather than them asking for the corpse to be packed in a railroad car full of blocks of ice and shipping it on to Skagway and then south by boat to California. An hour later he found himself at the telegraph office, pen and paper in hand, dashing off a note to his sister’s husband in Toronto. The fellow was a teacher and was smart enough to know whom to approach and how to do so.
Unfortunately, Fanny Alice’s words kept drifting back into his head every time he made to write his message, and several fits and starts were only able to produce sad attempts such as “Mystical find of great value, send help” and “Dead baby mammoth. Frozen. Of interest to someone warmer” and “Frozen mammoth body dug up nearby, how did it die?” This last was moderately conversational but not at all useful in getting across the main point, which was of course that someone with a modicum of expertise needed to come north forthwith and be here to supervise any investigations into the former life of this extinct creature.
He shook his head to clear it of all of Fanny Alice’s nonsense about magic. Finally, he decided he needed to splurge for a few extra words, and soon enough the message was sent. “Frzn baby mammoth found whole. Get news out. None here qualified. Hurry.” Satisfied, he left the office and headed over to see what Ed had for photos and how he intended to run with the story, perhaps even talk him into allowing Samuel to write something about the beast and what he knew of its former life.
Ed was at his desk wearing his shit-eating grin when Samuel walked in. “You done good telling me to go out and get a picture of that beast, Samuel!” He jumped up and ran to the darkroom and hurried out with a handful of pictures he’d taken of the mammoth, all but one with Mick and Temple, the miners who’d found the creature, posing beside the body. The exception was a picture of the baby mammoth with Pete Marliss, doing his best to look important. Even in a moderately out-of-focus photograph he managed to look like a stuffed-shirt blowhard.
“Glad it worked out for you,” said Samuel. “Bet you one of these pictures ends up in a big paper down south somewhere.”
Ed grinned again. “Just about guaranteed, I’d say. I sent a telegram first thing when I got back from taking the pictures yesterday. Pretty sure there’ll be some newsmen coming up from Edmonton, or maybe across from Alaska. And my pictures’ll be the only ones they can use!” He sounded positively gleeful at this.
Samuel scratched his head but couldn’t help smiling in response to Ed’s infectious good humour. “Hell, Ed,” he responded, “there’s no guarantee that they won’t bring along their own photographer or at least send along someone who’s capable of using a camera.”
“Yeah, but the body won’t be here by the time anybody arrives. Just bones by then, I expect.”
This bit of news brought Samuel up short. “How’s that again?”
“Jesus, Samuel, what’ve you been doin’ all morning? It’s practically all anyone in town has been talkin’ about. You even walked right by it when you came through the door.” He smiled again and puffed out his chest. “My printing press, and I did the layout for it, too.”
Samuel blinked away his momentary rush of confusion and looked over to the door where Ed had waved his finger. On it was tacked a small poster with the words at top big enough, all in capitals and bold type, that he could read them from across the room: Special Townwide Prehistoric Feast!!!
“Holy shit, Ed, no,” said Samuel in a low and worried voice, and he rushed over the read the rest of the poster.
Come celebrate the amazing mammoth discovery this Saturday night, 7pm, at the Klondiker Hall. $5/head gets you a THREE course meal INCLUDING STEW made of choice cuts from 6 THOUSAND YEAR OLD baby MAMMOTH. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity! Tickets from Pete Marliss.
Without another word to Ed, Samuel ran out the door and down the road to the Klondiker, blood rushing in rage through his head, keen to find Pete and give him a piece of his mind. At the very least.
“Marliss!” shouted Samuel as he slammed through the doors into the hotel lobby. His target looked up from whatever he was working on at the front counter and smiled, but before he could say anything Samuel proceeded to tear into him. “What the blue blazes do you think you’re doing, offering up that fossil for a fuckin’ banquet?”
“I bought the body from Mick and Temple,” replied Pete. “It’s mine now, and I get to do with it what I like. And since it cost me money, I aim to make back that investment and then some.”
Samuel was beside himself with rage, and for a moment he had trouble finding any words. This was a travesty, a crime against science and reason and humanity. Finally, unable to think of anything else but needing to say something in response to the smirk that had formed on Marliss’s face, he said, “But you can’t! The body should be preserved for the scientists to study.”
“I’m sure they’ll be happy with a complete skeleton, don’t you think? I expect there will be plenty of museums willing to pay for one. And maybe a different one to pay for the hide, too.”
Samuel’s hands bunched into fists, but before he could take a step toward Marliss the man had calmly placed a shotgun on the counter. Still smiling, he said, “Now, Samuel, you stay calm with me, and I just might have a present to give you.” Seeing where Samuel’s eyes were looking, he chuckled and said, “No, not a rear full of buckshot.”
“Then what? What the hell do you have that I could possibly want?”
Marliss reached under the counter and came up with something small that he tossed across the room to Samuel. It looked like a stone, but just before he caught it he saw that it was a spear point. As his hand closed over it the sharp edge bit into his palm, and for a brief second he could feel his blood spill over the artefact.
And then everything faded away.
There are precisely a hand of them able to hunt, not enough to hold off starvation much longer. This will be their last attempt before they again have to run from the ice and snow, and the shaman knows that the magic for this hunt has to be especially strong.
He starts with a dance that represents their prey, one of the hairy long noses that are still in the valley, eating the last of the green before they also escape the oncoming wall of ice. The five hunters sway in time to his chants, skins and furs dangling loose from scrawny bodies. Outside of the small circle, the women and children and elders watch and wait for him to finish, only the oldest of them able to conceal the desperation and hunger
that crosses the faces of the others.
Or the anger. He knows that a ruined hunt this time might indeed do worse than damage his reputation as the holder of the magic, that failure would, at best, result in banishment from the tribe, at worst bring about a demand for his sacrifice, either to feed the tribe through the strong magic that would come from his death or by a more direct and hideous route.
Once done with the dance, but still chanting, he grabs the spear from their strongest hunter and slashes his palm, then takes the hand of each hunter in turn and does the same, intermingling the blood of each of them. He then takes the spear to the outer circle and cuts in turn the palm of each tribe member, until that one spear is imbued with the power of the blood of the shaman’s entire tribe, now truly glowing with the strength of their unity of purpose and desire. His words grow stronger, calling down all the magic he knows and much more than that, magic he can sense and see but magic whose full capabilities he is unaware of. Everything in or nothing out. He repeats this ritual with four other spears, although only with his own blood and that of the other hunters, and then presses his bloody hand to the ground beneath his feet, feeds some of his life to the life that surrounds them, an offering in return for the life that he and his tribe plan to take.
It is all he can do. All five spears stand high above the heads of the hunters, sharpened edges crusted over with their blood, power shining from each and every one of them. After a short nod to his young assistant, he shouts the finality of the ritual to the tribe and to the sun and the earth, and they go. The hunters casually wave aside all the calls of goodbye and the imprecations and pleadings, stern and strong and anxious to prove that they can still provide for the tribe, and yet cautious not to show any break in their masks, for fear that they might be seen as weak or afraid.
Normally the shaman would not go with them, but he needs to keep these five in sight and in earshot, make sure that they are not conspiring against him. Certainly these are lean times, but he has kept them all alive through worse than this, and he is not yet ready to hand it all over to his apprentice. He knows that his apprentice does not feel he is ready, either, and so the shaman feels safe leaving him behind with the weaker members of the tribe.
The walk to where the long noses are supposed to be is almost a half a day, leading them away from the running water and over fields and small hills, places mostly still green and alive but increasingly covered in white as snow falls and refuses to melt under the gaze of the weakened sun. As they approach the bottom of the hill that leads to the overlook where their prey should be, the shaman feels relief wash through him, powerful enough to weaken his knees for a moment, when he hears the sounds of the creatures in the distance.
He has the hunters lean their spears inward one last time, all of the points touching, and chants and prays some more, adding strength and luck at this final stage. Then he separates from them, goes to find a safe place from which he can watch the hunt.
The long noses have been tracked by the tribe as they walked their path over this plateau, finding their way through the green and away from the ice. But almost everywhere they’ve been it has been impossible for the hunters to get close enough to make a kill. So the hunters scouted ahead, and the shaman consulted his secrets, and together they came to an agreement that, on this day at this time, the long noses would be here, in a place where they could be more readily and more safely hunted.
He makes it to the top of the hill and settles in behind some rocks, watches as the hunters flow down the hill, almost invisible even to him. He sees even before they single it out that their target will be a young one, off grazing far from its mother and in the right direction as well.
The hunters jump as one then, screaming and slashing the air with their spears, the magic in the points amplifying everything, noise as well as numbers, and the long noses go wild with fear and scatter in all directions, the young one ever further separated from its mother and the rest of its family. It runs up the hill opposite the shaman — a mistake — as it stumbles on the loose rocks there, and it realizes this mistake and turns to come back down but instead sees what it thinks might be an opening and is running across the side of the hill, somehow managing the increased steepness.
All of the hunters still chase it, and two, including the strongest, raise their arms and hurl their spears. The shaman speaks words to the air to aid the flight of the spears. The words connect, and one spear flies true, stabbing into the side of the young long nose; it stumbles and bleats in agony. He is so sure of the kill to come that he doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t see the adult long nose rush up the hill until it is already in the midst of the hunters, throwing them angrily through the air with its tusks and crushing them with its huge stamping feet. He is then so intent on watching the future of his tribe die before him that he doesn’t see the young long nose lose its footing and fall.
All he can see is that none of the hunters are getting up, or even moving. As the snow begins to fall, heavier and heavier with each passing moment, he searches for and finds one last incantation of magic that he pulls deep from the earth and sends toward the animal that had so indiscriminately killed the hunters of his tribe, the adult long nose … and toward the rest of its herd. The magic is invoked in a fit of anger that the beasts probably do not deserve, but this act of vengeance makes him feel slightly better — for a brief moment. And then he picks his way back down the hill and tries to retrace his path back to his people, all the while worrying at the scab on the palm of his hand.
Samuel woke up on a chair in Smitty’s Barbershop, across the street from the Klondiker. Fanny Alice was there, leaning over him and looking with no small amount of concern into his eyes. “You still in there?” she asked.
He tried to talk, but his mouth was too dry. A moment taken to reinvigorate it with spit, and then Samuel croaked, “I’m fine. How…” He paused, found more spit. “What the hell am I doing here?”
“Ed was worried about you,” she replied. “Once he saw you running over to the ‘Diker, he came and found some folks who could get you out of there before you went and did somethin’ stupid.”
“Stupid.” Samuel looked down to his hand, saw that it was still balled into a fist, blood crusted underneath his nails and even down to his wrist. He opened it and stared at the spear point, stained with blood both ancient and new. “They tried to kill that mammoth, wanted to eat it.” He looked up, saw that Fanny Alice was not the only one in Smitty’s, that perhaps a dozen people were there, all watching him with worried eyes. But in Fanny Alice he could see something else, a spark of some sort of recognition.
Smitty himself stepped forward. “Hell, Samuel, ain’t nobody coulda killed that mammoth. It was deader than a doorknob when Mick and Temple found it. You know that.” He rubbed his hands anxiously, probably worried that with Samuel taking up a seat and everyone in here just standing around he had no chance of getting any business.
Samuel stood up and pocketed the spear point, then with a nod of encouragement from Smitty dipped his hand into a basin of ice-cold water. He spoke as he scrubbed away the dried blood. “It’s wrong what Marliss is doing, you know.” Nobody interrupted, nobody argued, so he continued on, now drying his hands on his jacket and looking around for a clean cloth he could wrap around the wound on his hand, which he had reopened. “That creature is an amazing find, a find that should be dedicated to science, not to some base desire to consume so precious a rarity.”
Looking somewhat aghast at the blood dripping onto the floor, something that shouldn’t have bothered him considering his reputation with a razor, Smitty tore off a strip from a relatively clean white towel and handed it to Samuel, then said, “He bought it fair and square, Pete did. I don’t see how anybody can stop him from doin’ this.”
“Besides,” interjected Loudon McRae, a trapper who had been one of Samuel’s students and had likely come into town to trade some pelts for
supplies, “there’s plenty of folks who’ve bought tickets already. I expect if he doesn’t watch how many he sells he may have trouble feeding everyone. Just about the whole damn town wants to go, although mostly only the business folk can afford it.”
Samuel tapped the pocket where the spear point rested, some small part of him aware that his behaviour was scaring the rest of them. And so instead of carrying on in front of them, with the slightest of nods to Smitty and to Fanny Alice and then the rest, he stalked out the door and headed back home.
The scent of defeat and loss followed along behind him, whether from the here and now or from his prehistoric hallucinations he couldn’t be sure. Certainly there was enough to go around.
As the night of the banquet approached, Samuel noticed more and more that the people of Dawson were avoiding him, giving him wide berth wherever he went, and not visiting him for lessons or company when he was home in his cabin. His one attempt to go out for drinks — not at the Klondiker, never again at the Klondiker — was a sour and shortened evening at the Northern Light, a bar poorly populated as most carousers that night were already off celebrating with Pete Marliss, even though the banquet was still a day away. Even the patrons at this bar, though, were unwilling to come near him, lest he harangue them about the atrocities being visited on science and knowledge and their complicity in them.
The day of the banquet he had been out for another unhappy walk, and when he returned to the cabin he saw that two pieces of paper were nailed to his door. The first was a telegram, from a fellow at the Museum of Natural History, all the way down in New York City: Sending team from Edmonton to preserve/ship mammoth. Pls keep frozen. Advise of any problems.
He crumpled the telegram into a tight little ball and stuffed it into his pocket as he leaned back against the doorframe. Even if some miracle brought the team into town today, he could be sure the bones had mostly been picked clean by now, what with the banquet only hours away. He thought for a moment about heading back to the telegraph office and sending off a message telling the museum director to recall his team, but then he thought that they could at least recover the skeleton. He left it for the time being, figuring he could spare at least a day before he had to make a hard and fast decision.
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction Page 2
