Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,84

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 it 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 at least slightly better—at least 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 excess 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,