The Devil's Making (6 page)

Sometimes I think Victoria, the new Garden of Eden, is in its own way the kind of Happy Land McLevy describes. Even Begbie's theatre is a bore. Several of the so-called lawyers in town have fake qualifications. The doctors and surgeons are incompetent and botch diagnosis and operations. I cannot get used to the ‘snake oil salesman' type of businessman. There is an advertisement at the Mechanics' Institute for two lectures, on ‘Phrenology: the Science of Character', and ‘Mesmerism: the Art of Magnetic Healing'. These are to be given by one ‘Dr Richard McCrory, notable San Francisco Alienist who has taken up residence in Victoria.'

What would phrenology make of the compressed skull of a Songhees Indian? Dickens is said to have dabbled in Mesmerism, and it used to attract the attention of distinguished London surgeons. In England both it and phrenology are past their zenith. But ‘alienist' is new-fangled. I'd use the more old fashioned term ‘Mad-doctor'.

*   *   *

At last I've found myself with some detective work, though of a minor nature. A fraud was perpetuated on the Bank of British Columbia by a ship chandler's clerk who forged cheques. I made various enquiries and finally traced the man to New Westminster, on the mainland, where with a young Canadian constable, Joe Harding, I went to apprehend him. He had installed himself, having shaved off his beard and disguised himself as a clergyman, in a respectable but small house with a not so young lady from the Windsor Rooms. After his capture, all four of us travelled together back to Victoria, morosely, on the paddle-steamer, dining aboard at my expense. I felt sorry for them. The lady broke into tears from time to time. The criminal was pale and looked as if he had suddenly aged ten years: he'll get at least three in jail.

4

18th May 1869

Spring in Victoria is something like England but the wind is colder and the sun hotter. Gardens recreate an English look, with daffodils crowding the flower-beds in March, tulips in April when domestic apple trees begin to come to blossom. Now it's May. In Beacon Hill Park, where people throng for their Sunday walks, the grassy slopes are covered with native ‘camas' – like bluebells. Groups of Indian women move among them rooting out the occasional plant which has white flowers and therefore poisonous bulbs. They will gather the bulbs now and eat them in Autumn when the flowers will be long gone. They come from all around Victoria – Sooke, Cowitchan, Saanich. Like the Songhees, they wear a mix of civilised and native clothing – trousers or petticoats under striped HBC blankets, conical hats made of fibre, or slouch hats or bonnets. Bands of Indians from further North have also appeared, camping in the forest in makeshift tents, to trade the artefacts they have been working on during winter, and to move from farm to farm begging (stealing, some people say) or doing odd jobs. Their presence excites fear. And they seem to have given me a real adventure to write about.

*   *   *

I arrived back at the court house from a routine inspection of licences at about noon to find the place in a flurry. Superintendent Parry was rushing around, first to the safe, then to the armoury, yelling to Harding that he should quickly hire two horses – ‘No, three!' he called when he saw me – and send a messenger for a cart to follow us ‘out the Cedar Hill road and over to Cormorant Point.'

The cause of the commotion was an Indian of a kind I had not seen before. He stood motionless to one side of the vestibule, his face impassive but his eyes flickering about as if he were frightened. His feet were solidly rooted and his stance erect but he looked dog tired. There were streaks of dried sweat and dust on his face, which was of a clear coppery hue – not pocked or blotched brown like those of most Songhees – with a drooping moustache and with a red painted wooden curved pin through the septum of his nose. He was hatless and his hair was thick but cut short in the back. He wore a blanket of reddish fibre with a huge design on it in darker red and black – eyes, zigzags, circles and squares – a pair of tan coloured deerskin leggings, and moccasins streaked with mud.

‘It's a body', Parry told me, more calmly, as if aware of being observed by the Indian. ‘An American.' He turned to the Indian. ‘Kahta mesika kumtuks man Boston?' he said loudly. (‘How you know man American?')

‘Tyee wawa.' (‘Chief says')

‘He ran all the way', Parry said. ‘All right, boys? Let's go.'

*   *   *

Men from the livery stable brought three horses to the square outside. We mounted and set off. The Indian followed us, padding behind. Indians don't ride. The horses were not much faster than walking while still in town. People stopped and watched as we plodded uphill along Fort Street, at first lined with stores and taverns, then gardens and paddocks, stables, shanties, and towards the top of the hill some wooden houses, including Pemberton's.

We turned left at a fork and headed North along Spring Ridge onto the Cedar Hill road. After a mile we entered woods where oaks grew among out-croppings of rock and grassy patches covered with blue camas and other small pink and yellow flowers. Below us to the right, visible through the wide gaps between the oaks, was a rolling valley with a mixture of evergreens and deciduous trees – cottonwoods, maple, alder. Cedar Plains. But most of the cedars have been cut for planks to build the houses of Victoria, and now only a few huge specimens remain whose girth has discouraged the axemen.

None of us are good horsemen, and we had to pay continual attention to our rather cranky mounts. Mine needed constant encouragement in the form of kicks to the flanks. We were making better time now, and the Indian had occasionally burst into a run. Sunlight slanted down through the sparse green oak foliage. All around was the continuous ecstatic trilling of huge red-breasted ‘robins' – really a form of blackbird, singing from low branches or scurrying on the grass pulling worms out with their beaks – and harsh caws from ravens, known locally as crows, which swooped down behind us to inspect the horse-droppings.

About three miles out of town we passed on the left a group of houses with a wooded cliff behind them but freshly dug gardens in front, looking down over the road towards the Plains. Then there was a newly built church of grey painted wood in a natural rockery of boulders, with cedars and oaks and a graveyard already containing several headstones.

We began to skirt around the grandly named Mount Douglas, originally Cedar Hill, on our left. We were now in a dense forest mainly of firs whose trunks were bare for the first forty feet or so, going up straight as masts to their gently swaying tops over a hundred feet above. There was a dense undergrowth of ferns and bushes. The air was suddenly cool and clammy. The sound of the horses' hooves scraping on rocks and pounding on the earth was muffled. There was no birdsong, not even the caw of a raven. One or two small colourless birds crept silently up and down the fir trunks. The shafts of sunlight were narrow and pale, like swords plunged down through the tree tops into the undergrowth. It reminded me of Salisbury Cathedral in its Gothic perpendicular lines, but there was no sense of God.

We crossed, on ramshackle bridges of cedar trunks laid over with planks, a number of ravines with streams gurgling steeply down among rocks and ferns. The road dipped into an extension of Cedar Plains where the ground was swampy, then rose into dense forest again, gloomy and sunless with boulders and crags covered with moss. We picked carefully across a washout. Then Parry, just in front of me, reined in his horse abruptly. An Indian, more squat and heavily muscled than the first but identically dressed, was standing in the middle of the road. From behind our cavalcade the first Indian came running, panting and exhausted, his face shining with sweat, and called something up to Parry. I caught the word ‘kiutan' – horse. Parry ordered us to dismount, then did so himself.

We had been in the saddle an hour and a half. I stood in the dust, swaying slightly. The two Indians were talking in their own language – the usual clicks of the tongue, swishes, and glottal stops. The messenger gestured that we were to tie up the horses, and pointed to a track through the forest. Parry reached for a moment into the large pocket of his tunic where he kept his revolver, but must have decided not to bring it out. He began tying up his horse to one of the narrower firs. Harding and I did the same.

The messenger led the way down the track, dry and dusty, with a thin carpet of fir needles, winding downhill among ferns. We had to climb over dead mossy trunks in tangles of laurel-like bushes with tiny white flowers. The track descended abruptly to a stream which ran across it on a bed of stones, with occasional boulders. The Indian stopped, looking downstream. He made no gesture, but the three of us turned our heads in the direction of his gaze.

A man was sprawled on his back over a large boulder, his boots in the stream. Above the boots his trousers of checked grey and brown were crumpled, the braces dangling in the water. From the knees up he was naked, white, and bloody. The hand nearest us was in the water. The head was pillowed on the boulder, the face looking straight up at the dark treetops, with blood around the mouth, clotted and darkening in a strong carrot red beard. The stream gurgled gently.

Parry spoke. ‘I know that man. McCrory. The doctor. The alienist.' He pronounced ‘alienist' as if French. He stepped along the stream bank. Harding and I followed. We formed a triangle about the dead man, perching on rocks with the water gently swirling around our boots.

The blood was drying in dark streaks, but was fresh and bright red near the wounds. The most obvious one was at the crotch. The member had been cut off at the root, leaving a bloody hole. The belly had been slashed across but shallowly, not ripped open. There was an obvious stab mark just under the ribs, and one between collarbone and neck, where the wound had been somewhat widened as if the knife had been worked back and forth. There was something wrong with the thick carroty hair. It looked like a bloody wig which had been pushed out of place. A gash followed the hairline above the forehead and the ears which were beginning to turn blue-black. The arms and shoulders had also been slashed or …

Parry said, ‘Notice, boys. Those are bite marks.' He squatted down and peered at the arm nearest him. ‘Almost torn out a chunk of flesh'.

I crouched down at the man's right side. There were indeed the marks of teeth, a blue-black ellipse in the pallid skin of the shoulder.

‘Indian work', Parry said, standing up again. ‘He's nearly scalped. The medicine men run amok and sink their teeth into living flesh. I've never heard of it done on a white man though.'

I remained crouching, looking dumbly into the water at the dead man's hand.

‘Look here, Sir', I said, standing upright very quickly.

Parry tried picking his way around the dead man's feet, but he splashed in the water. ‘God almighty', he said, looking down. His bulldog face, normally flushed and choleric, blanched suddenly. He had seen what I thought I had seen: the dead man's hand was clutching his severed member.

‘It's the Devil's making,' Parry muttered.

‘Clothes down here, Sir', said Harding from a few yards downstream.

Glad to turn away from the corpse, I followed Parry to look at where a charcoal grey frock coat was flung on a rock near the bank. A shirt, waistcoat, and an elegant dove-grey hat were on the bank nearby, and beside them a small closed basket, exquisitely woven from strips of bark, dyed or painted with red and black geometrical patterns. I turned instinctively to look at the Indian who was standing perfectly still, legs planted apart on two rocks, looking straight at me. I held up the articles one by one. Frock coat, shirt and waistcoat were covered in blood, and each had rents in the front left sides below the shoulder and at the waist. ‘Just these two rents', I said. ‘I presume he was stabbed, then stripped and mutilated after he fell. Look, there's dirt on the back of the coat, although when it was thrown over here it landed front down.'

‘It would not have sufficed to kill him', said Parry – the veteran of Inkerman. ‘Nor would any other single blow. The one beneath the ribs would miss the heart and the one at the shoulder missed the artery, otherwise there would be more blood there. It probably took all the blows to do it, and even then it would take a while, bleeding to death.'

I searched the coat pockets. There was a clean handkerchief and a wallet which contained American bills, silver dollars, and a few sovereigns, but no personal papers. There was also a large clasp knife which I opened. It was clean. I crouched down and unfastened the toggle of the basket. There was a herbal smell. Plants and roots, in neat bundles tied with bark twine. ‘I dare say I can have these identified by the pharmacist', I said.

‘We'll take it all into town on the cart. It should be coming up behind', Parry said. He looked around at the forest. ‘There won't be any tracks or footprints. Too dry, now we're down from the mountain. But we should take a look.'

For half an hour we sifted our way up and down the stream banks, and along the track in both directions. The only thing I found of interest was some fresh wood chippings on the path, near the stream, which looked as if they had been whittled off a stick. I looked for the stick but could not find it. I called Parry. ‘It looks as if someone was whittling a stick while waiting.'

‘Could have been the doctor himself', Parry said. ‘Or an Indian. They're always whittling and carving. This is Indian work, clear as day.' He turned to face the Indian messenger, who was now squatting on his haunches in the track, staring at the ground. ‘Mesika iskum nesika mesika Tyee' (‘You take us your Chief'), he ordered. ‘Harding, you stay here. Hobbes, you come with me.'

The Indian jumped to his feet and led the way. I followed Parry's broad back up the path. We reached the road, the horses, and the second Indian standing beneath a tree.